Navigating the individual contributor career path

Internet
Joined January 2021
"Money is good, but don’t let it be your main motivation. Remember the sacrifices you make as you climb the ladder. It all takes a little bit of you." — @karlamickens staff.design/karla-mickens-c…
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"When someone at a company with direct personal influence over its success or failure asks me for advice, I know that I’ve been able to build trust and do a good job as a designer." — @rsms staff.design/rasmus-andersso…
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"There’s nothing more dangerous for an organization than a person with terrible ideas whom everyone admires professionally." — @rsms staff.design/rasmus-andersso…
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"I enjoy solving hard problems and coming up with elegant solutions. And the more that I work as a designer...the more I feel those moments. The problems get harder, and it gets more satisfying when you solve them." — @anitalillie staff.design/anita-lillie
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"If I’m in the right state of mind, and I’m fed and slept, I can do a week’s worth of work in three hours. And I think that should be okay." — @anitalillie staff.design/anita-lillie
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"As a Staff, people’s expectation of what you can do and should do grows a lot...You have to be pretty explicit about drawing your boundaries." — @yitong staff.design/yitong-zhang
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"You don’t have any formal power. You don’t manage people. You can’t reward or ding people for doing things. So most of what you do is use soft power to convince people that you are doing the right thing." — @yitong staff.design/yitong-zhang
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On writing: "I don’t always feel like I have my shit together. And I try to share the times when I learned something or I grew from something. I just wish that I’d been able to read stuff like that too, when I was younger." — @harllee staff.design/jessica-harllee
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"I can’t be a good IC without also having a good relationship with my manager, and also demanding a lot from my manager. Because I need them and they need me." – @harllee staff.design/jessica-harllee
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"The thing that gets you the titles and the money and the recognition is the love and commitment to the craft and the work itself...the total dedication to it." – @TheRealSalih staff.design/salih-abdul-kar…
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"I’m not thinking about what I can do in three months, I’m thinking about what I can do in three years. Pushing hard and burning out on a single project doesn’t make sense to me." – @TheRealSalih staff.design/salih-abdul-kar…
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"It takes years for a behavior to form or for your work to have a bigger impact. That’s hard to do when you’re always thinking about what’s next." – Vivian Wang staff.design/vivian-wang
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"Building up confidence is just spending a lot of days and nights sweating through something. There’s something about just putting in the hours." – Vivian Wang ⚡️ New interview: staff.design/vivian-wang
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"At what point do you recognize, and then internalize, that these external markers of progression and success have been artificial all along?" - @wilsonminer staff.design/wilson-miner
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