Get Unstuck in Your Career in 5 Steps | Ethan Evans (retired VP Amazon)

trust is built slowly through positive events and it's built more dramatically in negative events the most classic case of trust is the trust between people at War people in a foxhole it's because I end up seeing you as risking your life for me and I'm risking my life for you and so that builds a sense of trust well in work it's usually not life or death but in a crisis a service outage an angry boss incident a customer crisis that's where you have the chance to step up in a way that people like oh see I can rely on Peter Ethan so crisis is the place where trust is built most quickly because there's a cost to you friend of mine once said in Business Development A lot of it is deciding to jump off the cliff together you're up there deciding my company your company are we going to shake hands and jump off the cliff together well that's where trust is built guest today is Ethan Evans former VP at Amazon Ethan Rose to VP at Amazon over 15 years and then retired to make 700,000 a year teaching product leaders while only working 20 hours a week Ethan and I talked about the magic loop to level up at any company and how to get unstuck how to systematically build trust with your leadership team and how to build a $700,000 business while working part-time Ethan is an incredible career coach and product leader if you enjoy our conversation please like And subscribe to support the podcast all right well welcome Ethan it's great to see you again you know we briefly worked together at twitch and even back then I I feel like I learned a lot from you from your talks so it's great to learn from you again yeah well thank you Peter talking at twitch was kind of where I got started with the idea of teaching and coaching I was piloting the process that became what I do today internal so you really were there for the first version of what I do now yeah well the first version was already very good so but yeah thank you so you know you made some appearances on Lenny's podcast and other podcasts I'd like to

start by talking about the magic loop framework right that you've use to help hundreds of people level up their career maybe you can just quickly recap the framework for us yeah of course so I created an idea over the course of my Lifetime by thinking about how I approached growing my own career and how I helped people on my team grow and how I advised people and I ended up giving it the name the magic loop because the effect can be magical for someone's career and I think of it in five steps the first step is do your job well you're before you can move up you have to be seen as mastering what it is that you're doing today being good at it being collaborative meeting your goals being high performance and you do this by getting feedback from your manager and peers just asking am I doing well how am I doing what can I improve after you do that you then go to your manager usually could be other stakeholders and ask what else can I do how else can I contribute because managers rarely get asked this I verified this and they love being asked this and they always have something they need done and so you take on a task for them and this may mean temporarily you're doing more work but this earns trust and it builds a relationship and so step three is simply do what you're ask if step two is ask step three is do that thing you may have to do steps two and three a couple times but then step four is you talk to your manager and say I would like to grow change types of work I'm doing or I would like to join this other team or get on a new project or I would like to be promoted I would like a raise I've been helping you how can I help you in a way that is aligned with my goal that will help me achieve my goals and most good managers will help you because you've been helping them they'll say oh great you still want to help you want to contribute to what I'm doing I will help you with your goal here's a challenging project or something that will get you visibility that also helps our group the final stage uh is just repeat that's what makes it a loop so you keep asking and doing and sometimes you can suggest also you don't always have to ask you can say I see this thing that needs to be done or that seems to be valuable or that interests me could I work on that so that's the magic loop

and where do you think people usually I mean it sounds very simple but like where do you think people usually get stuck in this Loop is it just doing your job well or get stuck so one place people get stuck is fear they get stuck on the fear that they'll be exploited the fear that it will be too much work they come to me and say but my boss doesn't want to cooperate or I'll just end up working harder without getting any reward they have negative stereotypes and of course sometimes that is true you might have an exploitative boss who's like great you're going to do more work here's a bunch more work and they never do anything for you but someone has to take the risk first the key is if you want to build a relationship it is a little bit like dating somebody has to ask for the date it can be either person but you only control you and your manager may not be thinking of you as oh well I'll ask Peter to do more and see if he steps up and try and grow Peter's career that's not you don't want to wait around for that so just like if you want to meet someone in life you have to ask for the date I would say to those people go ask if then it doesn't work out you can go find a different manager the other place I think people get stuck is how to get rid of some of their old work in other words if they start doing more high value work they may become overloaded and that's where you have a conversation with your manager where you say I'm really loving doing this for you and this with you but I'm struggling to do it all plus do and you pick the least valuable thing you do it's still on my plate to write the weekly report you ask is there anyone else that I could have write the weekly report or that you and you basically get their help in delegating away your least valuable tasks and so that way you have time to do more things that they put high value on and you give away doing some of the low value stuff got it and what are some like you know I've had many Mages in the past I find awkward maybe it's like human nature if they're giving you a lot of really good feedback and like you know seeing you're doing a good job I find it awkward to actually ask like okay but what am I not doing well or

like hey can you tell me where I came prooving like do you have some like words that people can use both to ask your manager and to people that you work with to get this information out of them yeah one thing you can do is you can turn it to your positives as a start and you can say of the things I do well you told me I do several things well which is most valuable or which do you think is a superpower I should lean into because people do get promoted not for having no weaknesses but for having some skill at which they're great and so you can just ask which thing that I do is most valuable that you wish you saw even more of that's a different way to phrase the question the other way that might help is you can just ask are there any I appreciate all your good feedback is there anything holding me back from The Next Level are there any remaining gaps in other words you can let them say no you don't have to force them to come up with a weakness but that are there any remaining gaps is good because if they say no your followup is well that's fantastic then if I don't have remaining gaps when am I getting promoted I mean You' be a little more subtle than that but that's where that question goes what about you mentioned like you know dedicating the work or asking your mentor to help dedicate the work that's like least impactful right I'm curious about your philosophy as a leader on like how much should you dive deep and how do you decide what to dive deep on and how do you increase your scope without having Things fall through rails you know what me yeah so philosophically I didn't dive deep as much as some other leaders and I'm not saying that's a strength sometimes that got me burnt so diving deep auditing diving deep is a word for auditing it's a word for checking in and because you can't be deep all the time right why are you diving deep it literally is a phrase that comes from the fact that we're normally on the surface of the water and to dive takes effort and we can't do it everywhere all the time so it's this balance of picking when to do that because if you're deep all the time you're back to being like an individual contributor or an architect or something so I number one I got better in my career at asking questions is your first way to detect problems asking people what are you worried about what's keeping you up at night what should I be worried about is this and then digging if you need to you dig more deeply on tell me exactly the plan or and you develop this sick sense for is this person because leading people is a six sense kind of emotional relationship you develop this ability to look at someone or to listen to someone and tell are they really confident or not right are and so I always thought of it as where there's smoke there's usually fire if things start to look fuzzy and feel squishy and I see a few signs of things are a little bit late or not quite then I took the perspective that said okay now I need to go dive in and dig in because something's not right and I don't know what but that was my sign of when to go dig got it okay got it but it's also the case where someone could be doing a really great job but they might not just like Express they want to do more right like it's like you know helping the people who need help versus the people who like your a players on your team so I guess there's like a balance between the two yeah so I view much I mean not surprisingly given now that I've Chang my career essentially to online teacher career teacher I view the role of a

leader as to always be teaching and developing their team and I not only view it that way because philosophically I like to teach it's also that was the best way to scale my team and so I would try with everyone who reported to me and even down a level if I could so a skip level to understand what did those people want to do and where were they willing to step up and in some cases to push them I tend to think in forceful words you could say simply encourage or elicit or Inspire if someone has the ability and the willingness but maybe not the confidence then I'm trying to pull that out of them push can have the negative connotation that maybe you have someone on your team who's reached a level where they have their work life in balance and they don't want more right now and I didn't try to go to them and say like no you should destroy your home life to produce more for me that like that isn't what I mean but I did try to push people in terms of know your goals explain your goals and let's have a plan for your goals if your goal is stay where you are and have a good work life balance then great but let's at least have that discussion got it okay that makes sense just understand everybody wants different things right so just understand what they want and help them different stages of Life different career aspirations so find out what those are but I saw my role as a leader and a need as a leader to grow people and there was a part of that was purely selfish the good news is sometimes you can be selfish and selfless at the same time by growing other people I made my own job easier so it was when the more capable my team remember your draining boring challenge is someone else's amazing new work because they've never done it you've done it 50 times this isn't perfectly true there is work that kind of just isn't rewarding for anyone but that isn't very common usually for a leader anyway some things that you've done 50 times there's still somebody on your team who's like wow I could write the annual report and you're like yes please but for them it's new it's opportunity yeah got it that makes sense yeah I guess the last question I have for the magic loop is like the fourth step right is to ask your manager if you can help you know way that also grows your skills but what happens if like you want to grow your skills in area that's not necessarily in your manager's purview like for example um I think you made a choice to move from Amazon to Twitch to move from managing like hundreds of people to just being a start starting again as I so how do you have that conversation with your manager yeah well that is a good example because my manager didn't want me to move he very much because I was highly valuable in the role I was in he very much wanted me to stay and in fact he controlled my access to the other role and he said no you can't have it and in that case I actually had to explain you seem to be it took me a while to figure out the problem but I was able to explain by example you seem to be thinking that you have a choice manager between me staying in this role and me going to Twitch what you don't understand is your actual choice is me going to Twitch and still being a part of your org or me leaving your org entirely for a new challenge and once I reframe it as you don't the thing you want isn't a thing you get to have it's these other choices he moved me to the new role the next day like once he understood the choice he actually had which was keep me or lose me then he his whole attitude changed in 24 hours because he realized oh the thing I want which is keep you in this role is actually not available to me I see because I had other offers within the company to go to third groups and I said look if I go tell this person I had offers from other senior vice presidents and I said you know once I tell that person yes you know I can't back down for it so like today is the last day you can let me have this role I want because tomorrow I'm telling them I'm taking that role got it so coming back to your question short of this forcefulness the discussion you want to have is look everyone leaves teams the discussion with the manager of I can be a feather in your cap if I migrate to this org where I can do the work I want but they will know you mentored me I was your disciple you create great talent is it what you want which is I stay on your team no but it's still positive for you because I will go reflect well on you and so that's part of that discussion the other question normally it's not as black and white as what you've said in other words how can I spend the next six months doing the things in our team that prepare me for this role and yes eventually I will have to leave but I can still be a star for you while you feed me tasks the other thing you can do is you can brainstorm with them of can we create a role that neither of us sees right now how do we get a new project in our team that meets my needs in other words these things aren't always fixed or closed you create new rols yeah it sounds like to have that kind of discussion with your man you really have to be like have a really strong relationship like they basically have to love you the work you do and they willing to just like make it happen right so yeah but here's the key

every manager has these people almost I'm sure there are t tyranical terrible managers who truly have no friends and treat everyone under them like I don't know very poorly but if you look around a piece of advice I give more and more often is study your manager and see who's doing really well with them because there's almost some there's almost always someone who's an intimate or that they are investing in now the next thing I hear on that is yeah that person's a suck up you know be careful with that person gets along really well with your manager because they've figured out how to fit with the manager but you can figure that out too because managers they don't wake up and say like H I want my whole team to hate me and I want to keep them at a distance right it's a management is a lonely job and so they want friends and allies so sure you do need to be a friend and an ally but you can count on the fact that most humans don't want to come to work every day and be hated yeah makes sense it's kind of human psychology at the end of the day right just like which is human psychology is a huge part of leadership and careers people believe over and over again it's about their personal technical prowess whether it's their prowess as a software coder or as a product manager or as an artist or a lawyer but it's just not it's we know that emotional intelligence ultimately has more to do with Career Success than intellectual intelligence those other things are important and they form a minority of your ability but you know you ask where people get stuck where so many people get stuck is well but I do good work why should I have to do any of this well you don't if you don't want to move up quickly you don't you know like you will move up at some pace for doing good work but I call that strategy work hard and hope to be noticed and it's like a low-level strategy but people get mad about it which is like well I shouldn't have to promote myself or talk about my work like that's my manager's job or that's not fair okay it's not fair I'm not here Peter you know me well enough other people may not I'm not here about what's fair I'm here about what works kind of a interesting parallel to our creator lives right like you can have the best course on something but if you don't post on LinkedIn every day no one's going to know about it you going have to promote yourself in some way yeah that's right I'm sure you know both you and I have courses that we offer probably there is someone out there who's way better than we are and no one knows about because they don't share that in an effective way yeah this is a good segue to our second topic like building trust internally maybe you can Define what it means like what does build trust mean exactly like what is the currency of trust this is such a hard question trust is a really hard word to actually Define in terms of actions things you can do but trust literally seems to mean from a practical Viewpoint that I have faith or I believe in what you will do without having heard it from you or yet seen it that I believe that I can rely on you in certain ways that your actions will follow a pattern that I can predict so trust is this combination of predictability and consistency and so on so I've seen it defined as trust is consistency over time got it and what about so this is more like a I guess so A lot of times like you mentioned people just do really great work they do really good execution a lot of the feedback that I hear PMs and product managers get is you know they need to communicate and think more strategically and I think you wrote about like how you wish you made more bets in your career or something right so maybe you can give an example of making like a bet that actually worked out like what it means to think strategically of course yeah so one thing I want to say about trust before we go into what you ask is trust is built slowly through positive events and it's built more dramatically in negative events and what I mean there is when times are good you and I may interact but we're not really relying on people the most classic case of trust is the trust between people at War people in a foxhole and why it's because I end up seeing you as risking your life for me and I'm risking my life for you and so that builds a sense of trust well in work it's usually not life or death but in a crisis a service outage an angry boss incident a customer crisis that's where you have the chance to step up in a way that people are like oh see I can rely on Peter I can rely on Ethan so crisis is the place where trust is built most quickly because there's a cost to you see if we just work together and you're doing good work and I'm doing good work I may think you normally do good work but I'm not sure how much I can trust you because so far you haven't had to sacrifice trust is normally built when you have to sacrif ACF or when I think you are so then you ask about taking risks and I have said I wish I had taken more risk these things go together right risk leads to crisis or challenge which leads to trust because when I take a risk you have to decide if you're the boss for example am I okay because if I'm your boss and you take a risk and it goes wrong I may end up owning that problem so that's where we make a decision together to jump you know a friend of mine once said in Business Development A lot of it is deciding to jump off the cliff together you're up there deciding you know my company your company are we going to shake hands and jump off the cliff together well that's where trust is built hopefully there's water at the bottom right so taking risk I have taken risks the classic story of risk I tell

is one where I was working on the early version of Prime video and a project proposal came up to work with too the DVR company and our management team was very split on it and in the end our senior vice president a guy named Steve kessle came into the room and said well I wouldn't do this deal because I think it distracts us from working on our own focusing only on our own service but I see it's a reasonable deal and so I'm going to leave it to the team now my manager the vice president had said Ethan I want you to take more ownership of the product he had been I was a pure engineering manager and he was encouraging me to think more like a product manager and so I wanted to do this project and I had studied what resources it would take and I said the specific words I said is well um this is only going to take 7% of my team's resources a small amount and a specific amount and unless you order me not to I'm going to do it so I stood up and countered to him said unless you tell me point blank no I'm going to do it nobody told me no we did the project it worked and customers loved it so not only did I deliver it in time but it had an unusually positive customer reception that was the Gamble and then what happened after that was other Smart TV manufacturers said hey will you do that for us and so the thing I didn't anticipate is it actually expanded our business and the reason I talk about this risk is on the one hand it had this dramatic moment of declaring I was going to do it against the advice of my senior vice president and on the other hand it showed up then in my promotion document to director where the main reason given for my promotion was well if we didn't have Ethan we wouldn't have had too because they could see very clearly that I was the one who made it happen and it turned out to be a great decision and so that built their trust enough to say see he should be a director he leads at that level which goes to your strategic thinking now luckily for me they were like back fitting a curve assuming that I had all these thoughts maybe part of it was just I saw the potential of the project as a project and then it got a bigger impact for me but I did have the Strategic at least enough strategic Vision to say well we can expand got it did you in the beginning when you made his decision to just go for it did you have to kind of explain to the SVP why you want to go for it or you just did it I think we had covered that in the meeting no to that point the specific reasoning was at that point Amazon's video service was only on to PCS it was tied to Windows Media Player and people don't watch movies on their PCS particularly not 15 years ago when there were fewer laptops and they were like big boxes in an office so it was a very Niche service and getting first on DVRs and then as it turned out on Smart TVs was a way to move the service to the living room where people wanted to be and so the strategic reason was how do we get out of the office and into the living room and that worked I find that sometimes if a CEO or SVP tells you to do something and you do it and then it doesn't work a lot of times they're not going to blame themselves they're going to blame you so that's for sure true but they may still own the mess clean up so that in other words if I take a risk let's say for example in that too case it would have gone very badly and I don't know too would have sued us for example well then I might have been fired right they may have blamed me and halted my career or dismissed me but the SVP still owns the problem and so that's where by allowing me the space to make that decision yeah he was still involved in the risk I took he couldn't fully distance himself from it got it but I guess he's trusted you and your manager enough to make the right decision and then he just kind of empowered you guys to go do it yeah you know I built a huge amount of trust from that because again to your point it was or to the point we discussed it was a crucible moment with a very clear choice and you know it also creates ownership of course which you worked at twitch Amazon loves ownership clearly once I said I'm going to do this unless you tell me no from their Viewpoint I was clearly going to view myself as responsible because I knew I had signed up for it on my own right that so this was a common this is a relatively common way that some leaders make decisions Jeff Bezos apparently said I say apparently because I've heard this but I wasn't there that he would not give up on a project until the last High judgment person on his team gave up on it because his Viewpoint was if there was a high judgment person someone whose judgment trusted who still believed in it then he felt that their sense of ownership had a good chance of carrying it through even if it wasn't a perfect idea because it's not only good ideas that win it's also sort of mediocre ideas pushed really hard you know you'll probably want an example of that I bet a case I don't want to insult anyone who's ever worked on it but a case I would say of like a mediocre idea eventually becoming good the first one I can call to mind is Amazon's Music Services Amazon music was begun the same time as Prime Video in 2005 and it really went nowhere for over 10 years it was very small it was very lightly used and then finally Alexa came out and suddenly there was a speaker that could put it in everybody's home and that moved it up a whole level and kind of brought it gave it more clout and Hollywood and so on and now it's a more credible service it may still not be Spotify but it's moved up and that's really I would say at some level the first 10 years were a mediocre service that no one quit on and that finally positioned it in a place to take off and there's probably other examples of the same idea yeah like a lot of those a lot of successful companies and founder stories are all about like going at it for 5 years 10 years and then it works out right it's kind of yeah in fact since you and I were talking right before we started recording I think we may have been talking about

Nvidia and I know you've posted today about Jensen Nvidia right now is the hottest thing out there but they're not a new company and so they've been somewhat quietly doing what they do for decades and then AI brought the world to their door ML and in a sense and so they're seeing because I can tell I'm sure you know five years ago no one was interviewing Jensen and you know the so-called magnificent s was Fang and fanga and there wasn't an Nvidia in the letters so but they existed they're not a new company that's why I think they made a bu of really good strategic choices I'm sure but part of it is just they just survived to fight another day right just didn't run out of money yeah so that's like really important yeah and this is important to remember which is sometimes the path to Victory is still being on the field when the opportunity opens up it is a longevity strategy and that's really hard to take it's actually good advice for people right now I have a lot of people like Co that are feeling frustrated because they can't get any new headcount they're seeing layoffs around them promotions are frozen careers are long you're going to work 25 30 35 years yes 2024 and 2023 are not great years but a little bit there is a survival piece of am I building my core capabilities trust am I honing my skills so that when the opportunity is there again I'm able to seize it that that's awesome yeah I

totally agree do you mind just like closing the trust discussion sharing example where like you like personally screwed up somewhere and then you had to like as you mentioned sometimes a screw up is actually a really great way to build trust right so you have example that yeah yes so my biggest example of screwing up is I was trying to launch Amazon's App Store and there was a key feature that Jeff Bezos really liked and thought was cool and wanted to be the centerpiece of the launch so it came time to launch that and my team worked all night to launch it on the appointed date and in the morning Jeff woke up and we had problems and so the announcement wasn't out his letter that he had written that would take over the Amazon homepage wasn't there and so he emailed me copi to all my leadership above me and said Hey where's the announcement and I had to write him back and say there are some problems working on it I'm thinking in my head like at 6: a. m. get in the shower because as an engineer you always believe you almost have it solved now it turns out we didn't but we thought we did well anyway he writes me right back and starts asking questions and it all unravels and he gets quite mad so now we talk about how I handled this because I was a director and I had a vice president above me a senior vice president and then Jeff Bezos and Jeff Bezos is kind of personally mad at me that his feature isn't launching so it's kind of as bad as you can get how did I rearn trust the steps I took are number one I started communicating very clearly what we were doing on an hourly basis so I would write him an email that said here's where we're at here's what we're doing here's what we're going to do in the next hour and you will get your next report at 8: am and then I would do this at 8: am you'll get next report at 9:00 am and so I'm only asking for trust I've lost trust so I'm asking for the smallest unit of trust which is you're reading this at 8:05 give me 55 minutes and from his Viewpoint I believe I haven't been able to interview him on this he's like okay he's got a good plan and there's other people like watching this for me now his manager and his manager are watching I can wait 55 minutes because he's doing the right things and then I'm in the next hour so that was thing one thing two is then we worked really hard to fix it like we worked Around the Clock and thing three was we humbly accepted help so one thing that was great about Amazon is the principal engineering community got alerted that we were having a disaster when they all woke up and you know a launch failure and the email went out like who are the right principal Engineers to help this team immediately and these people dropped their days and came and fixed our problem now ironically the way they fixed it we had a database problem I won't go into they basically came and said Ethan your database design is terrible but we don't have time to rewrite it today so we're just going to put enough AWS Hardware behind it that your terrible design will scale for one day and you know they just fixed it by like massive machine power but I didn't care like at that moment I'll take you know whatever they could have fixed it by killing chickens I so the problem got fixed then what I did that I think is critical is got everything fixed communicated it all dealt with my management being upset at me but I had a meeting with Jeff like five days later in a conference room that was very small and I was optional for this meeting so I thought to myself maybe I shouldn't go like this guy's mad it's been a bad week we blew his launch shouldn't go and then I had the second thought if I can't face him I better pack my desk like if I can't go to meetings with a CEO I'm admitting defeat so I chose to go and I sat he always sat in the same chair so I sat right next to where he would be sitting and he came in and it did seem to me like he was kind of giving me the cold shoulder but I wonder how much of this is just in my mind because again I wasn't the key person in the meeting but what happened was I sat right next to him and while he had been flaming me an email it's a lot harder to Flame people right next to you and so at the end of the meeting he turned towards me for whatever his reasons were and said so how are you doing it must have been a long week right a like supportive empathetic comment and that number one told me that he was over being mad he wasn't yelling at me or anything and number two it gave me a chance to re-engage the relationship so this is a story of where things went really wrong how I handled it in the short term and then there is a long-term piece the long-term piece is just because he forgave didn't mean he forgot I had to do a couple years of pretty diligent work on showing that I was operationally sound and reliable before the whole chain of management above me was willing to promote me to vice president but in the end it is a success story in that I failed I was the primary technical leader on a major public launch that failed at launch and I was promoted to vice president anyway so it is it shows that this is possible yeah sounds like us to kind of you took ownership right off the bat you communicate on super regular frequent basis and you had the gut to just like show up and like talk to him directly afterwards yeah I'm glad you brought in the word ownership because usually when I tell that story I emphasize that I made myself the face of the problem I was the main by being the communicator putting out the plan I didn't hide from the fact that this is my team we're going to fix it here's what we're doing and always being the visible leader for better or worse at the moment it felt quite worse but you know it worked out yeah that makes sense all right well you

know remain time let's chat about your new career so you being I think you retired for three years now three years that's right and you posted that you're making you know like 7 700k a year and only working 20 hours a week sounds like a pretty good life and I'm sure as a VP at Amazon you're making you know more but you know hindsight how what are your Reflections on these two careers like do you kind of wish that you started this new past sooner or what are what's your reflection yeah you know I've talked about taking risk I was very risk averse to step away from my nice role as a vice president at Amazon so I waited until I felt very confident that I could do that you know I'm making money today technically I don't need to in other words I do have enough that I feel I could live out my life quite comfortably without making more moneyy so the money in a sense is a side effect of what I do people value it and are willing to give me money quite happily so I accept it but what I can say is as much as I was happy at Amazon I love what I do today because the benefit of running your own business if people value what you do is you can sculpt your business to doing kind of only what you want to do and in a corporate world you're still doing what other people want at the end of the day you may propose it you may design it to some degree but you're doing what Amazon needs and in Amazon's way whereas now I'm doing what Ethan needs an Ethan's way and that's better got it yeah so even as a VP at Amazon you didn't you couldn't just do the work that you love right you had to send like email updates and stuff or whatever you like to do yeah and you know Amazon and I think not just Amazon most high performance companies even if you're doing the work you love they're very high pressure because they're they sort are designed to ask can you do more with less is there a way to go faster better because that's just they have people paid to look at efficiency and to ask those questions and so you will always have some of those pressures and then it's also very rare extremely rare that what you're being asked to do for a company is exactly what you would do with your own life I'm sure a few people find that whatever they're I don't know they have perfect alignment with the company Direction but most people they're working in an area they find interesting hopefully and challenging but it's not what they would do if they were billionaires and could go do whatever they wanted it's just not yeah and so if you can build your own business though you may be able to get closer to that and in my case I'm lucky enough to be doing what I would choose because my other option is don't do it like I don't have to yeah you can just be playing golf or something yeah I'm well I'm a skier yeah so I could be skiing I could be hiking I could be traveling you know but the thing about it's worth covering those things are super pleasurable but they don't have much impact or meaning and in the end there's plenty of stories of people with lots of money seeking lots of pleasure and ending up very unhappy because there's no depth to it and so yeah I say I don't have to do this work it financially I feel like I do have to do it to have self-respect to believe that I'm contributing to the world what were some like key growth leevers or moments in your three-year journey to 700k like what were some things that really drove the growth yeah there were several one of them clearly was I have a partner an operating partner Jason Yung who found me he was attracted by my content and he reached out and said I think you're really underere exploiting this content some other people have great newsletters and I think your content would make a great newsletter can I work with you to create a newsletter so we talked and built trust because I was in trusting him with my brand and that he would follow through but we built that trust and that was a huge lever because suddenly there was a second smart brain in the room and in this case it was someone that has nearly perfect alignment with me because he looked there are thousands of creators and he looked and said your content is what I believe it's the content I want to work with and so of all the creators he found someone that he was highly aligned with and so that was that's probably the single biggest lever because he helped me both make a newsletter and he also was part of figuring out that live courses would resonate with my audience as well as recorded courses and so it sort of created both of those opportunities the second big pillar was then as I just kept posting consistently LinkedIn noticed me and so they reached out and invited me to a workshop on how to write better on the platform how to be more effective and reach more people and so these were small tweaks it wasn't changing my core content but it was sort of changing what I'll call the packaging or the window dressing and that was very effective because it caused me to reach more people which has always been my goal so those are probably two really big levers that's something the first one is something I really need help with man like my problem is I don't have any time to do a lot of this stuff so and for some reason the people who reach out to me are I don't know they're like scammers or people they're not Jason yeah well I bet though you have a big following there is someone out there waiting for an invitation Jason didn't wait for an invitation but I actually a lot of the support of my content comes from volunteers and I do take chances on volunteers that some others wouldn't and I have had a couple of situations where that definitely hasn't worked out and I've had to end volunteer relationships that were if not scammers at least let's just say incompatible so I inched into these relationships of Let's test this let's test that but that has generally found me help and there is someone in your audience I'm sure who remember we talked earlier about what you don't have time for is still a huge opportunity for them um there's something you need done that for them would be a great growth opportunity to showcase their ability and build their skill and align with what they love to do and so hopefully you can find a couple of those people and not get burnt too often yeah exactly yeah cool I guess

the last question is you know now that you had these two career path you teach a lot about advanc your career in a company right and like I'm curious like but what about advancing your career publicly or like you know having more optionality so that you don't just get burned by a layoff or some something you know like do you have to be like an Amazon VP to do this stuff that we're doing or like how do people get started with this how do Tech professionals stuff yeah so I've become a huge advocate if there's like one message I wish I could pound through people's brains it's go build your network by sharing something you love and I learned this at twitch you and I share twitch what twitch taught me was there is a niche audience for every single person and yet that Niche audience because the internet now is several billion people on it can be quite large and Powerful so the example I talk about theoretically is if you think Wookies from Star Trek are the coolest thing on earth there's several thousand other people who love Wookies and Wookie culture just as much as you do and you can find them and become their voice or talk to them and when you need them your fellow wook lovers they still have jobs they still have other connections they can come through for you now if you think this is absurd you know go to Twitch and see all the different Niche communities and realize that whatever your passion is share that and you can collect other people who share it and if you're giving to them and creating value for them and being their friends or enthusing with them or talking with them or somehow adding to that Community those people will line up behind you and support you when you need them and I think every single person should be doing this and I also think it's relatively easy because you don't hey you don't have to use LinkedIn you can use Lots of different networks and be it doesn't have to be your work it can be something else you love yeah it's just a matter of choosing to build a network of people that share your passion yeah the keyword is like something you love right and like from my experience I this stuff does take a couple years to get off the ground so I think the earlier you kind of start doing it the better yeah and the reason love is important is because it will take a couple years you have to love it enough to do it for the long term it has to be something that if you just calculate in your head and say oh I too should talk about gen AI because it's hot I don't really care about it but like I'm gonna be another gen AI voice and try that you won't sustain you won't see instant results and you'll get tired and lazy because that's human I happen to love leadership Theory and careers and so talking about them every day you know I have hundreds of posts heartly written that like I'll never get around to finishing them all because I can't post them fast enough people can't read all of that yeah but the love is boiling out of me faster than the opportunities to share it are there right yeah same thing for a company man like you gotta love climbing the ladder or you gota love going to the next level otherwise it's hard to do it if you don't want it someone else wants it more than you and they'll put in the effort because it's a role they can see themselves in and you just have a wish not a true desire everyone wishes whether they should or not almost everyone wishes to be rich for example yeah but like some people wish to be rich and then they flip on cable and some people wish to be rich and they go start a company and those are different people yeah exactly that okay I think that's a great know to close on all right well thanks so much for the conversation yeah can find yeah sorry go ahead oh you were saying where can people find me of course they can find me in LinkedIn I'm Ethan Evans VP I think I'm you know the sort of easiest search result there my website's Ethan evans. com and I'm on substack as well awesome all right thanks so much yeah my pleasure