The Amazon “secret” of controllable inputs for your career

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May 25, 2023

When Jeff Bezos and his team figured out how to make Amazon grow quickly, one of their key ideas was to focus on what they called the “controllable inputs.”

Applying this same idea to your career can help you have more success with much less frustration.

What Jeff realized is that many companies and their leaders focus on the final outputs of the business. They obsess about the total amount of sales they make or the profit they realize. These are the things that are easy to measure and that get reported in the newspapers.

The problem with outputs is that they are hard for you to control on a daily basis. It is not easy to decide exactly what you would do to “be more profitable.” The same is true for the outputs of our careers, such as salary and title. It is not easy to change our salary on a given day, nor to get a new title. It is not directly in our control.

For Amazon, Jeff realized there were three inputs to high sales and profits that he could control — price, selection, and convenience. He could seek to provide the widest range of goods at low prices and with the easiest ordering and delivery. These were things his team could work on directly and he had faith that if they did this, sales and profit would follow.

You can do the same thing with your career.

So what are the inputs of a career? Of successful job performance?

High impact work is probably the most important key input you can focus on. It is very easy to be “busy” 8 or even 14 hours a day but to accomplish very little of lasting value. By taking the time to think about “what actually makes a difference” and then making time to do those things, we can change how much impact we have each day. Do this for long enough and salary and title are almost sure to follow. I have spent whole days “catching up on email” and thinking that I was doing something important. Do not fall into this trap. Leave the email work and do the one thing that is actually most important each day.
The second thing we certainly control is our network. How many people we get to know, how we relate to them, and what value we provide to those people before we need them. A network is something that cannot be built in a rush once you discover you need it. Instead, relationships are something you cultivate over time, meeting people, getting to know them, and helping them with their own goals. Many people struggle to make this investment because on any given day there is no apparent cost to skipping networking. But when you need help or a new job opportunity, the value of a network is unparalleled.

There are many other inputs you control. Ongoing learning to stay current or to gain new skills. What projects you seek or prioritize. The quality of your work (your expertise at your craft). Your relationships with others. How much you work versus surf social media or otherwise kill time on the job.

You have very little daily control over the typical measures of career, like pay and title. You have enormous control over the inputs listed here and long term, they determine pay and title.

Focus on building the right habits (what Amazon would call the right mechanisms) to excel in those inputs, and success will follow.

Audience Insights

I have consolidated additional ideas worth considering from my LinkedIn audience, including:

Working on the right inputs is a patience game. When I was 25 years old, I wish someone could have helped me understand that I was playing a 30 year game because I felt I was playing a 1 or 2 year game.
It is difficult to differential the urgent from the important in the moment, but you do not need to do this perfectly to be successful.
“Earn your pay by lunch” - do the important, hard thing first.
I find the following matrix helpful:
Important and Urgent = do it.
Important and Not Urgent = schedule it.
Not Important and Urgent = delegate it.
Not Important and Not Urgent = eliminate it.
For responding to emails, two things:
If your stakeholders waited 2 days when you were out of the office, they can probably wait while you put a couple of hours into something more certainly pressing.
Time box. Give yourself 10 minutes to get rid of 40 emails (read subject, probably delete) and then 20 more to get rid of 15 more. Half an hour from now you will have 5 that really need attention.
The key is to focus on your controllable inputs. With that said, support from your manager helps. If you feel unsupported at work, I shared my advice in response to a reader’s question, Straight Truth: My Boss Isn’t Supporting Me.
Do the things everyone does well, but do a few unique things to set yourself apart. This means, focusing on differentiating inputs can help fast track your learning, skills, and thus career.
When networking, employ the “51/49” framework, where you bring 51% of the value. Building quality relationships starts with giving, not taking.
If you mistake low impact work for progess, you fall into a reactive trap. As one reader quoted "Busywork is the avoidance of daunting intellectual challenges which drive real value creation."
Observe how you react to situations. Take note of the Stoic principle on focusing your energy on what you control and ignore the rest.

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