Taking control of your career: Podcast with Lenny Rachitsky
Jeff Bezos failure, drafting an Amazon LP, The Magic Loop
Welcome to this week’s free article of Level Up: Your source for executive insights, high performance habits, and specific career growth actions.
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80 minutes of can't miss discussion with Lenny Rachitsky (author of the #1 business newsletter on Substack with 694,000+ subscribers) on his podcast.
If read my posts and wonder, what is the real story behind these posts or some of the deep details of how I succeeded and failed at Amazon, this episode is for you.
We cover:
The Magic Loop framework: a five-step process to grow your career.
Read my detailed writeup on The Magic Loop with advanced forms I used as an Amazon VP and with my direct reports.
Fun fact: my writeup is the 5th most popular article in Lenny’s Newsletter.
Why people get stuck in their career growth.
How to break out of a career plateau.
How to cultivate inventiveness in your work.
How to stand out in interviews.
My detailed story of how I failed Jeff Bezos and eventually got promoted to Amazon VP (you can also read the story).
The story of how I helped advocate for and draft the Amazon Leadership Principle (LP) “Ownership” — the words, “They never say ‘that’s not my job.’” are mine (you can also read the story).
Contrarian opinions on the return-to-office movement and doing business on a handshake.
And some fun facts :)
I hope this advice helps you plan ahead for your career. If you’re looking for help growing in your organization and leveling up your career, consider my course, Stuck at Senior Manager - How to Break Through to Executive.
If you’re already in executive roles (e.g. Director, Sr. Director, VP) and want to optimize performance or move up further, consider my course, Cracking the C-suite 'How to Get and Master Key Executive Roles' which I co-teach with Sue Bethanis (Executive Coach & CEO/Founder of Mariposa Leadership) who has coached 400+ tech executives.
If you want to go deeper on The Magic Loop, consider my course: The Growth and Promotion Recipe.
6 takeaways Lenny astutely captured:
Speed up your career growth by following the Magic Loop: do your current job well, ask your boss how you can help, do what they ask, suggest ways to help that align with your goals, and repeat.
Nail your interviews with a polished appearance and genuine enthusiasm. Emphasize the impact and results of your work instead of just listing tasks to stand out positively.
Recovering from failure is easier than you think. Own the mistake, learn from it, and work relentlessly to regain trust. Even after a failed public launch at Amazon, Ethan regained Jeff Bezos’s trust and got promoted.
Invention is the easy part. The expression and execution of an idea is much more difficult. What matters is bringing an idea to life and iterating it over and over again, so that its value to users increases over time.
Being right is good, but being quick is necessary. Amazon can ship fast and stay ahead of the competition by prioritizing speed—even if that means gambling on an outcome.
True leaders should actively work to challenge their assumptions. Keeping an open mind and demonstrating the ability to change your beliefs broadens your perspective, leading to faster and better decision-making.
Lenny and his team set the bar for producing great content.
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For me, working with Lenny and his team on this episode was a pleasure. Their attention to detail and quality is the bar I think about when improving my writing.
Please share your comments on the Podcast. I'd love to know what you think of the topics we cover.
Podcast comments:
"This is one of the best episodes of anything ever."
"This is already the single best podcast episode l've listened to on leadership and career growth. And I'm not even halfway through it yet."
"Absolute gold."
“Just a masterpiece.”
“Fenomenal episode! Impressed by the density of insights from Ethan. Took 19 snips on Snipd.”
“Ownership is one of my favorite Amazon leadership principles so it was fun hearing the origin!”
“Thank you for the podcast. The deep dive on the magic loop, the book recommendations, the life motto of paying it forward hit home for me.”
“Such a power pack of insight and exploration into career acceleration.”
“I have the feeling that this will be one of the best episodes of Lenny’s.”
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> Being right is good, but being quick is necessary.
This is a hard-earned lesson for me. Just after I graduated and started my first position as a software engineer, I was keen to bring in math (which was most of my studies) to solve problems. I got into academic discussions around speed and efficiency, only to realize that an okay-ish solution took a day to implement while my ideas were still on paper.
Sometimes speed and efficiency are essential, but for most apps most of us will build, whatever you have is probably OK.