What’s the best career advice former president Barack Obama has for new graduates, entrepreneurs, and anyone looking to achieve extraordinary success? Just learn how to get stuff done.
Obama shared this advice during an interview with LinkedIn editor in chief Daniel Roth, in conjunction with the former president’s new Netflix limited series Working. Roth and Obama chatted about many aspects of working life, and how AI is about to upend that life for legions of knowledge workers. And then, late in the interview, he shared the career advice he gives to young people–that is also good advice for every entrepreneur or anyone looking to achieve success.
“I’ve seen at every level people who are very good at describing problems, people who are very sophisticated at explaining why something went wrong or why something can’t get fixed,” he explained. “But what I’m always looking for is, no matter how small the problem or how big it is, somebody who says, ‘Let me take care of that.'”
Let me take care of that. In most instances, your customer, or investor, or boss doesn’t need or want to know why a problem is challenging or how it came about. What they do want to know is that the problem will be solved, and that they can rely on you to solve it. If you project that attitude that whatever it is, you can handle it–and then you do handle it–that will make you stand out, he said. “People will notice, ‘That’s somebody who can get something done,'” he said.
Choose what you want to do, not what you want to be.
Obama shared a second excellent piece of advice: “Worry more about what you want to do than what you want to be.” He often encounters people who want to be a member of Congress by the age of 30, or have made a certain amount of money by a certain age, he said. Those are certainly good goals. But while it’s great to focus on your desired end result, it’s also important to ask yourself if you’ll enjoy doing the work to get there.
For example, an aspiring entrepreneur may dream of heading up a billion-dollar company someday, without thinking about the hours and years of working and scrambling it takes to start a company and build it to that level.
When my book Career Self-Care: Find Your Happiness, Success, and Fulfillment at Work came out, many people who had never written much of anything told me they wanted to write a book, too. What they really meant was that they wanted to have a book with their name on it, do book signings, and other things that go with having a book come out. I’m not sure they would enjoy spending hundreds of hours of sitting alone in a room researching and writing that it takes to create a book. They were focused on the results, not the process it took to get there.
But, whether you start a business or write a book or do something else entirely, the process is how you’ll spend most of your time. So, Obama says, it’s best if it’s something that really appeals to you. “The people I find that are most successful are the people who say, ‘I’m really interested in computers and figuring this stuff out.’ And then they end up being a Bill Gates,” Obama said. Or, he said, they’re really interested in curing some disease. They may or may not win the Nobel Prize, but they love their careers because they were interested in the thing itself.
If you choose work that you find absorbing, “you’re going to get really good at it,” he said. “And whether you’re recognized or rewarded, or you get the positions that you want or not, the journey will have been a good one.”
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