Why Most People Get Stuck in Their Careers

It requires two important factors:

• The ability to do your work well. This requires knowledge.
• Meta-knowledge. Meta-knowledge is knowledge not on how to do your job, but knowledge about how your career works. That means you need to know which skills are the ones to invest in and which ones you should ignore.

You can get meta-knowledge by doing good research. This kind of research comes from the interactions with other people and rarely from school or books.

Talking to people who are ahead of you in your career and comparing them to people who aren’t is often a very successful strategy to isolate which skills and assets you need to develop.

When you ask for advice, you’ll often get vague, unhelpful answers.

Try instead observing what the top performers in your field are actually doing differently, to learn what really matters to move forward.