[Frameworks] 99 Frameworks for your career

(Last updated: 11 Oct 2022)

Important frameworks/models/ideas I learned in the last few years which have helped me in my professional life:

The orange juice test, designed to sort through candidates based on how they can handle difficult situations and tasks.
The Pyramid Principle for structured thinking and communication.
Mind the Gap Analysis to help you get Promoted.
The “new girlfriend” fixation in start-ups; relevant for startup founders as well as employees.
The Myth of Upper Middle-Class Security
Strike When The Iron Is Hot - AVC
The 20% Rule: Some Success Porn From Theo Epstein That’s Actually Pretty Good.
Invest in Lines, Not Dots
Introductions and the “forward intro email”
Stretching, Executing, Coasting - and Pacing Yourself to Avoid Burnout and why you need a balance of all 3.
Most people won’t
Keep earning your title, or it expires.
Is it Time for You to Earn or to Learn?; you need to match your talents, age, skills, ambition and economic situation with your current reality.
Don’t climb the wrong hill; meander some in your walk (especially early on), randomly drop yourself into new parts of the terrain, and when you find the highest hill, don’t waste any more time on the current hill no matter how much better the next step up might appear.
Always choose growth - part of the reason why Google staff are so easy to work with is because the company is growing.
A forty year career; Not four IPOs, not fourteen two-year stints, but forty years.
Punch above your weight class; Chris Sacca invited himself to meetings and offered to take notes.
Optimise for Rate-of-learning early in your career; it can be the most valuable compensation for working at a startup.
Work on the most important problems; only way to create a big impact.
Create your own operating system; this is Rabois’. I created mine here.
Work on what matters; Energized over Impactful.
7 things to look while picking your next job; Find a company which is growing little faster than you are.
Stay as long as you are growing at a similar rate as the company; When do you know it’s time to leave your job?
Bring the juice; If you’re juiceless you’re useless.
Small Slope Mentorship; Look for the person who is 4-5 years ahead of you professionally.
Familiarize yourself with the dozen senior people; Learn how to get those people to say Yes to things.
Ask how you can fail in the next 12 months; Understanding expectations is key during an interview and after you get the job.
Take radical responsibility; Never let anyone outflank you with criticism.
Don’t expect others to do your best; Figure out everyone’s unique skills and channel them to achieve team success.
Unbounded pursuit; Work on unbounded problem statements.
Table Selection; Choose your opponents carefully.
Supply Capture and Skills Combinations; Two career-building strategies from Andy John.
Impact = Environment x Skills; How to make career decisions
Structured and Unstructured Games; What game are you playing?
Signal to noise ratio; Why did the Wave founder leave Google?
Surround yourself with the smartest people; Surround yourself with the people you can learn from at the fastest pace.
Working on the wrong thing; What made Julian Shapiro decided decide to not startup again.
Focus on meta skills; The most important skills for winning in poker are not about playing poker.
Ask who your backers are; David Hoang reflects on the people in his corner.
Beware of tight feedback loops; The problem with fast, accurate data.
Your product is your garden; Treat it like one.
Forget Passion, Focus on Surfing; Chase Big Waves.
World Building; Everyone’s job is world-building, even if they don’t realize it.
Spotting Pivotal Jobs; Use the Pivotal Growth Model to identify key career opportunities.
From Listening Tour to State of the Union; Lessons in onboarding to a new job.
Learn or earn; Both is best. But if it’s neither, quit.
Cut the Cord That Holds You Back; Letting yourself let go so you can soar.
High-Speed Career Sampling; Try out a bunch of different kinds of work till you find one that keeps pulling you along.
PM Your Career Like You PM Your Product; Do for your career what you already do for your product.
Build a Personal Monopoly; You want to be the only person who does what you do.
Vet your next company like a VC; Advice for when people ask about joining a startup.
5 things to look if you want to have a great career; Sector is hot, Startup is defining that sector, Founders & leadership is A+, Your manager & team members are awesome, You are doing things that matter.
8 ideas around job search; Should you leave your well-paid FAMG job? Should you join Stripe, Facebook or Airbnb? how to evaluate this offer?
Complacency is cancer; How to waste your career, one comfortable year at a time.
Be a star or a janitor; How to prioritize at work early in your career.
Ask yourself why you are not working at the company you are most excited about; Life is too short to not work on the thing / at the company that compels you the most.
Take the Shot; Open doors by asking.
Your network is your net worth; Build a world-class network.
You Probably Shouldn’t Work at a Startup; It’s overrated—both financially and emotionally.
Get a CS degree and work at 3 breakout series B/C startups for 3 years each as an engineer/PM; How to retire by 31 while working fun jobs.
Hitching your wagon to an influential fast rising star; A lightly discussed but important thing to diligence is how influential your potential manager is and how well they are regarded within the company.
Provide clarity, Generate energy, and Drive success; Satya Nadella’s Leadership Trinity.
Caliber of team, Company priority, Manager compatibility, Your likely singular impact, and Alignment with career goals; When evaluating internal roles consider these 5 factors.
How to Have an Early Adopter Mindset; Shaan Puri talks about what an early adopter mindset is and how to adopt it.
Specialize, Don’t live in big cities, Go full-remote; How Amaca got wealthy without working too hard.
Ask why an idea is good for THEM; To counteract your default “me”-centric viewpoint, you have to actively practice and consciously choose to see things from the other person’s point of view.
Optimize for equity; Your cash comp will often be corrected over time as the company grows and brings people ops/comp people in-house.
Startups are a career time machine; Why you should an early startup.
Early tech career advice; Intern or work 6-12 mo at a big name company, join a Seed-Series B startup, repeat previous or start your own company.
Don’t fall for the promotion trap; Don’t lose the courage to try new things.
Career is not a ladder, it’s a game; Those who treat it like a game will collect the resources, find the people, and build the skills that compound — and have fun doing it.
How to choose which startup to join; What company you select matters far more than any other factor (title, scope of role, salary, etc.)
Concentric Circles of Impact; If you bet on increasing your learning potential, your earning potential compounds over time.
Do something they’ll always remember; Show your expertise during the interview process by creating a S.T.A.R moment.
Unbundle your full time job; Unbundle everything you might get (or want) from a full-time job (purpose, camaraderie, structure, learning, status, cash flow, equity, etc) and consider how you might arrange your life to find them elsewhere.
Learn about yourself and address your blind spots; An outside perspective can change your life.
What’s your time horizon?; If it’s the next 2-3 years, you’re certainly better off working at FAANG. If it’s the next 10+ years, you’ll do well to consider career currency.
The Art of the Handoff; Leaving well is as important as starting well.
Ask yourself “Why not me?”; A lot of people are filled with doubt about themselves and their aspirations, always asking, “Why me?”; If you are one of those people, I want you to start asking yourself, “Why not me?”
Careers are like exclusive night clubs; There’s a backdoor entrance.
X Bezos; What would Bezos build in X if he were starting out today?
Old or new; You can spend 10 years becoming an expert in an old industry or 1 year becoming an expert in a new industry.
Make your managers life easier; Managing up (aka managing your manager) will help you get promoted without working longer hours.
Becoming aware of how power operates; How to cross the culture gap between lower and upper middle class.
Evaluating startups you want to join like a VC; Know the right questions to ask.
Be good at your work, be good at picking the right companies to join, be good at getting recognized & promoted at a given company; Do atleast 2/3.
Ovethinking is for midwits; There aren’t a ton of consequences for being wrong.
Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept; Forget about the y-intercept; slope is the only thing that matters in the long run.
No Such Thing as a ‘Startup Within a Big Company; You will never be able to take the brand risks, the legal risks, or the partnerships risks that a true startup can.
Apply the same degree of rigorous thinking to your own career decisions as you do to your product decisions; Understanding what the user needs (in this case, that’s you) & not getting fooled by what the user says.
How to pick a winning startup; Avoid dumpster fires, find gems.
Be explicit about the bets you are making at every stage of your career; Optimise on cash, team, or autonomy based on what you want to bet on.
A Product Manager’s Guide to Growing Scope; How to grow your responsibilities and career at the same time.
There’s no such thing as being “underpaid.”; The money you make = value you deliver + how replaceable you are + negotiation ability.
Make the table bigger; Wherever you are, your job is to make the table bigger.
Launch, Promo, Abandon; Why you probably need to launch more things to get promoted.
0 to 1 operator; Pick a problem area, and build 0 to 1 yourself, after it gets going, start recruiting for an experienced leader for the area, onboard the leader well, nuke yourself out and attack next problem.
See if this company can become the number one player in its segment, generally join mid-stage companies; Join a series B company that can become a winner in its segment.
Promos are arbitrary; Manager should make sure you get credit.

Note: I will keep expanding this list.