Career Lessons: On Saying "Thank You"

"If you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own... If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help" - Barack Obama

Even though Obama got hammered for it during his campaign, there's a lot of truth to this quote.

The reason it evoked such a knee-jerk reaction in people was probably that most of us overestimate our own contributions to success, and underestimate our environment's. There's a book I highly recommend called Chasing Stars by Boris Groysberg that talks more about this, but the gist is that it's tempting to think our success is purely a result of our own talent and hard work, and we discount our environment's effect at our own peril. Our environment is everything from the people around us that mentor and support us at work, to the processes that are setup to remove obstacles and allow us to do our best work, to the opportunities we are exposed to.

I've been fortunate to have worked with great people around me who believed in my potential, encouraged me to grow, let me make mistakes, and went in to bat for me (and put up with me).

From my first Computer Science Professor giving me the next class's homework when I finished mine, to my first boss taking a chance on someone without much experience to work on important pieces of code, to my managers always looking for opportunities for me to grow, to my team leads allowing a young engineer to work on critical projects and not blaming me when things went wrong... none of these people had to do these things for me, but they did anyway and they're awesome because of it.

It's important to recognize the impact these people had on not just your career, but your journey as a whole - not because it will do anything special for your career, but just because. You'll keep in touch with these people for years, have cookouts with some, and it will lead to more heartfelt and authentic interactions. Shoot them an email, a Slack message, a text, or let them know during a face-to-face interaction what you're thankful for and how much you appreciate it.