Your professional reputation is the source of many, if not most of your professional opportunities. What people know about you and expect from you can be a huge boon to your career advancement. Few would argue that point, but fewer still really understand how professional reputation works or how to improve it.

Your professional reputation comes in three levels. Your “Level One” reputation is your reputation among the people you work with directly every day. Your immediate team of co-workers and peers, plus any managers and/or direct reports. In other words, the people that interact with you very regularly, and have first-hand knowledge of your performance.

Your “Level Two” reputation is your reputation among your entire company. For a very small company, levels one and two may have 100% overlap, but most of the time they don’t. Most of the time, there are plenty of people in your organization that have never met you. Some might not even have heard of you.

Your “Level Three” reputation is your reputation among your entire industry, or even ecosystem of related industries. People outside your organization, whether they work for competitors, vendors, clients, etc.

Most people think that in order to have a good professional reputation, they need to do good work and not be a jerk. That’s true only of Level One. Your Level One reputation is easy to manage – do a good job and be nice, and your immediate peers will probably like you. But that circle is also the circle that’s the least helpful to you in terms of your career advancement. That circle won’t contain very many new opportunities for you, and if you do switch roles, exactly zero of that reputation will be relevant. The new Level One group won’t know you, and you’ve started over.

Your real “career security” comes from Levels Two & Three, but those take work! You still have to do a good job and be nice, but you also have to advertise. You have to talk to people, broadcast what you’re doing. This doesn’t have to be some slick marketing campaign. Essentially, you have to just extend the visibility and awareness of you “doing a good job and being nice” to a larger circle.

The easiest way to do that is to just… do it. Be nice to a larger group of people, and do good work that can benefit a larger group as well. Did you design a new system that helps your team save some time on their job? Awesome – share it a little wider. Give it to people you don’t work with. You don’t have to “sell” it. You don’t have to convince anyone it’s great. But just offering it is a wonderful way to improve your reputations in Levels Two & Three.

I do this all the time. Probably half or more of these blog entries came from conversations I had in my own “Level One.” Upon realizing that the conversation was helpful, I opt to share it a little wider. It’s not slavering self-aggrandizement. It’s just me taking the same niceness and diligence I used with one person and spreading it around to benefit others.

You can do it too – and you should.

Woke up today. Gold star.

Worked. Breathed. One step in front of the other. Gold star.

Moved something. Talked some. Gold star.

The mountain never gets taller. It’s as tall as it’s ever been, or will ever be. Only you can change. You can climb a lot or you can climb a little, but you still climbed.

Gold star.

Virtually no one has a single, unifying desire. Single-mindedness is rare in humans even in short bursts; it’s practically fictional as a permanent state of being. At any given time, you probably have a half-dozen conflicting desires, some louder than others. A few may be very fleeting, but a good number may be pretty permanent features of your psyche.

The thing is, most of your desires would be disastrous if you achieved them 100% to the exclusion of all your others. For instance, one of your desires (unless you are very strange, biologically speaking) is to Stay Safe From Harm. This is a deep desire for most people, fundamental to our existence. That desire, if achieved fully, would ruin your life.

Another desire you may have is Bury All Your Rivals. Sure, but you probably wouldn’t have a good life for very long if you actually did that directly. Those two desires counteract each other – one desire says “killing my rivals and taking their resources would benefit me!” Another says “if we do that, we will be much less safe, for our society will punish us.”

Think of yourself as the leader of a nation, and each strong desire as a general in your military. You have to listen to them. You need their input. They provide wisdom and motivation. But you have to constantly play them against one another, maintaining the balance so no single one of them takes over.

Very rarely can you win against one directly. Sadly, they are often stronger than pure reason. So if General Stay-Safe-From-Harm tells you not to do something, you probably won’t be able to convince him to let you on your own. You’ll have to employ General Desire-For-Resources, who is equally influential. You can tip the scales, break the tie.

And that’s what you have to do, day after day. Don’t lament the existence of these generals. They try to push and pull you, but only because they believe that their way is the best way for you to thrive. If you can keep them in check, they’re a formidable force. If you let them rule you, your empire will fall to ruin.

Humans, as a general rule, won’t take action on a single data point. A certain critical mass of influence has to build up in order to shake you from inaction. People who have spent any time in sales or marketing know this; people almost never buy from the first contact. The general rule is that you have to hear a positive mention of something six times before you’ll do anything.

That’s why billboards and TV commercials and stuff are important, even when they don’t seem to be selling anything directly. Lots of advertising is just meant to be funny or entertaining so that it gets shared widely and becomes “one of the six” for a large number of people. You don’t see a billboard and immediately order the product. But if you happen to see an appealing product in a store, you’re much more likely to buy it if you’ve had a positive encounter with the idea of that product at least five times prior.

The thing is, this is true of more than just advertisements to buy stuff. This is true of all sorts of concepts and ideas that may be very beneficial to you. Lots of study into evolutionary psychology can tell you why humans require this many touchpoints to move on a topic, but the important thing to remember is that you can choose to be different. And doing so – in certain circumstances – is to your tremendous benefit.

Many people, at various points in their lives, find themselves “in a rut.” They want to find a new place to live, they want to find a new job, they want to meet new people, they want to explore new hobbies. In other words, they want change. Well, the whole “six touchpoints” thing is absolutely insulation against change! It’s a defense mechanism designed to keep you safe and not do anything unless you’re sure enough of your peers have survived it and established that it’s a good idea. That might serve you well in some instances, but it’s really terrible friction when you’re deliberately trying to explore new things. And in the modern world, those things probably won’t kill you, harm you, or make you a pariah. They’re probably just interesting!

So lower your defenses. When you’re in “exploring mode,” make it a point to take suggestions. If someone says, “you should listen to this podcast, it’s really cool” – don’t wait for 5 other people to say the same thing to you before you do it. Do it right away! What have you got to lose, 20 minutes? You’re not about to be the first person in history to eat a particular berry; the risk is low.

Don’t be resistant to influence when you want to be influenced. Let the world open doors for you and explore a bit. When you find a new thing to care about, you can always pause for a while. But don’t let the pause be automatic while you yearn for movement.

I am very pro-children. I love mine, of course – I have three, and am often a little jealous of families with even more. But I am also what people call “good with kids” in general, which usually just means my patience level is much higher than the average. Truth be told, I love the antics and adventures of kids and pretty much never tire of them. Even the burdensome chores are mostly a source of quiet pride and simple joy for me.

Not everyone feels this way, and that’s just fine. I think children are the great gift you can give to the world, but there are many ways to give that gift. Here are a few:

1. If you want kids, have them. Have many. They are joyous. Many people have one kid and the change of becoming a parent sort of scares them off from having another, but I promise you – the first is absolutely the hardest. The change from 0 kids to 1 kid is the single biggest change you will ever experience. The change from 1 kids to 2 is nothing in comparison, and the change from 2 kids to 3 is barely noticable in terms of lifestyle adjustment. I had my third child less than two years after my second – in terms of “total time” as a parent, that means I added less than 2 years total before all of my kids are adults, yet I got to add an entire extra wonderful person’s worth of joy to my life. That’s a great deal.
2. If you’re not sure if you want kids – or more accurately, you do want them but you’re nervous about the costs or responsibilities – have them. Kids are great, the costs are overblown, and the benefits are massively understated. Most of what people think are the “costs” of having kids are actually the costs of posting on social media and keeping up with the joneses. You don’t have to do that stuff. The actual cost of rearing children is much less than you imagine, once you realize how unimportant many things are. They need food, but even nutritious food is very cheap if you don’t care about name brands and stuff like that. They need clothes, but they don’t need new clothes (and buying new anything for people who change size every six months is really foolish). There are a few pieces of safety equipment that you’ll need (like car seats) that are not very expensive nor frequent. Beyond that, they just need a ton of your love.
3. If you don’t want kids – don’t have them. Don’t! I will never be one of those people who tries to change folks’ minds about having kids if they actually don’t want them. But if you don’t want kids, you can still absolutely help create a world that embraces them. Be the awesome crazy aunt that steals away your sibling’s kids for a day for adventures. Be the incredible friend that remembers their friends’ kids’ birthdays and gives them a small trinket. When you go somewhere with a parking lot, deliberately park farther away than you need to if you’re a childless, able-bodied adult. Don’t roll your eyes and complain when you hear a kid making noise in a restaurant. Smile at kids when you see them. Smile at their parents. Help build communities where children are welcome additions, whether you want to have them yourself or not.

Someday, when you are old, there will only be two possible categories of people to take care of you: your children, or other people’s children. Either way, the kid crying on the airplane now is the kid that will give you your meds someday. The world will turn on the next generation, so invest a little kindness in them now, no matter how you choose to be related to them.

My father is gone.

He was mythic. He was larger than life. To say he died before his time would be true, but a more accurate way of putting it would be to say that no time would have been enough, no world enough to contain him. I could make these entries entirely about the stories and legends of his life and I would never run out.

He did more, felt more, knew more. He simply was more than other humans; I’m not sure he was ever the same species as the rest of us. He was this great hub of all the best things in life – knowledge, laughter, music, and creation flowed both to and from him in volumes an order of magnitude more than what most people experience.

His personal library of music had over 100,000 songs. He could play any instrument. He could fix any machine, operate any vehicle. He would go to rummage sales at libraries and buy a box of a hundred books for a few dollars, and by the next month’s sale, he’d have read them all. He had visited every state, had lived in a dozen or more. He had lived for months simply on the road. He didn’t just adventure; he was adventure.

He was smart, and he was noble, and he valued honor and compassion. Friends asked him to be the best man at their wedding or the godfather of their children more than a dozen times each. People valued his wisdom and his counsel. You definitely wanted him on your side, no matter what you were facing. And he would gladly face it with you.

I could not have asked for more in a father. He taught me so much, cared about me so much. He took pride in me, guided me, shielded me when it was necessary and shoved me into danger and adventure all the rest of the time. He cared deeply about everything I did, showed me love and affection, and treated me as an equal – though not in ten lifetimes of trying could I become one to him. If I accomplish enough to measure his shadow I will be a great man. And if I do, it will be because of the wonderful father I had. There are a great many advantages that one can be born with, but none could compare to having him as my dad.

They don’t make ’em like Bill Roccia anymore. To be honest, I don’t think they ever did. He was a fluke, a miracle, a once-per-universe sort of deal. We shall not meet his kind again in this world, but when you reach the next, he’ll be easy to find. Just look for the life of the party.

I’ve read lots and lots of “productivity hacks” and methods supposedly designed to help you get more done. Some are okay and a lot are terrible, but I’ve noticed that most seem to be focused on the space between you and your work. Most of these methods assume that given the clear space to work, you are simply having trouble executing – maybe you can’t concentrate, maybe you aren’t working effectively, etc.

But in my experience where the rubber meets the road, that’s not actually where most threats to productivity come from. They mostly tend to come from external forces, due to the fact that the majority of those who care about these kinds of methods have to work with other people, usually to a large degree.

Whether they’re your clients, co-workers, bosses, or direct reports, people demand your attention. A lot. They’re not deliberately trying to undermine you, but here is a weird thing that happens in the brain of all people: when you can’t see someone, you sort of accidentally default to assuming they’re not doing anything. Sure, you wouldn’t say that and you wouldn’t even think it if asked directly, but when you haven’t actively thought about it, your awareness of other people is usually static. Your brain isn’t constantly holding a dynamic universe containing the movements and activities of everyone you know; it’s just keeping their identities in a mental file folder.

So when you need something from Jill in accounting, you ask her. You never even stop to think that she might be busy trying to be productive. The thought might even annoy you! Heck, “productive?” Her job is to help you, isn’t it?

And of course, other people think that about you. Not consciously, but when they reach out to ask you a question or a favor, they’re doing it because their mental inventory told them that you were the right person based on what you could do – never mind what you might actually be doing.

So here’s the best productivity hack I know: every day, tell everyone what you’re doing and when. Just put a little notice up (in the world of remote work this is actually a little easier than in an office setting, but even in an office you can do it) that tells everyone your basic itinerary for the day. It doesn’t have to be deeply detailed, just something like “I’m going dark from 9 to 11 on this project, then I’ll be available from 11 to 12, then lunch until 1, then dark again from 1 to 4 on this other project, then available to respond to things from 4 to 5.”

This very simple action builds both walls and bridges – like a toll bridge. It builds walls around your time, and it builds bridges in terms of your rapport and role as a team player. It gives people a viable way to connect with you, while simultaneously imposing a reasonable cost to do so. When people get these informal daily notices about your work, their impression of you subtly shifts to one where they view you as dynamic. As productive. And this, in turn, helps make it so – because no one wants to interrupt a busy bee.

This is a 5-minute task that can save you hours of lost time to friction and interruptions. Plus, it helps give YOU a little reminder and motivation to stay on task – after all, you said you were doing something. You made a public commitment to be doing it, so you take away your own ability to put it off or procrastinate without also making yourself a liar.

What happens between you and your work is on you – but at least you can impose some order on what happens between you and everyone else.

…sometimes.

Today I got a morning routine started that I’d been struggling with for a while. I went about it a little differently, and got different – positive! – results.

On most days, when I want to accomplish something I rely on a combination of two methods. The first is to focus on the benefits of that thing; why I want it done, what it will do for me, etc. The second is to focus on the positive personality traits that I want to associate with that thing and remind myself that I have them. In other words, I’ll say things to myself like “an ambitious and resourceful person would get this done, and you’re an ambitious and resourceful person, so you’ll get this done!”

Those two methods – focusing on what I want to gain and who I want to be – generally work for me, and I find them to be positive mindsets. However, I am emphatically not a morning person. I wake up early, but often those early hours are spent basically auto-piloting through the required morning tasks until mid-morning when my higher creative brain kicks into gear. My new morning routine is designed to help combat this, but the problem is that the two self-motivating factors I usually employ were designed by my normal brain, for use on my normal brain. They were failing spectacularly at motivating my morning brain, which might as well be a different person.

So here’s what I did instead: last night, I did a really thorough and realistic inventory of morning brain’s normal excuses. I listed out all the reasons why I would probably not do the things I wanted to do in the morning. And then I argued. I pitted morning brain against normal brain, but on normal brain’s home turf in the quiet hours of the late evening. I anticipated everything morning brain would think and want, and sort of built a mental bridge across that gap back to normal brain.

It worked. I woke up this morning with all the normal morning brain emotions and excuses. But none of them were original, and normal brain’s strategy was still clear in my mind. Normal brain planned everything out, from the playlist of music that would energize me to the ingredients for the healthy breakfast already laid out. All the prep work was done, so morning brain’s auto-pilot just had to follow the path.

I never once thought about my normal motivating factors. I knew morning brain would be unmoved by long-term benefits (morning brain is a notoriously short-term thinker) and morning brain doesn’t really care what kind of person I am at the core and so aspirational calls to personal betterment fall on deaf ears. But morning brain can be pushed and prodded along paths of least resistance and can be browbeaten into giving up weak excuses, so that’s what I did.

Accepting the world as it is sometimes means accepting ourselves as we are – but not because we want to stay that way. But because we have to acknowledge the true starting conditions. I would love to be able to accurately claim that I’m awesome 24/7. But the reality is that the version of me that exists between the hours of 6 AM and about 10 AM is usually a real piece of shit. That started to change today though, and this is actually the last step in that planned routine – putting it down here to cement it into my brain that it worked and I feel wonderful.

And it’s just a little after nine.

I think many people – probably myself included – don’t appreciate the difference an improved toolset can make in the performance of tasks you truly care about.

While “it’s a poor craftsman that blames his tools” is true to a degree, it’s undeniably a union. All hammers aren’t the same. Every time I’ve made a small but reasonable investment into a better tool for something I do frequently, it’s made enormous improvements.

I camp regularly; getting a good pair of boots was worth many times the price. The same ended up being true when I upgraded my cold-weather gear in general. For household projects, my “suburban dad” toolset is extremely decent and works great. Even things like a better chair can improve your writing.

I think you should only ever buy two kinds of tools for any given task. Type 1: the absolute cheapest available. Buy that when you aren’t even sure if you want to do the task yet – you want to learn it, have a low-risk way to make mistakes, and get a sense for what improvements you’d like to see. Type 2: The very best available. Buy that once you know that you’ll be doing the task many more times for an extended portion of your life – buy the best once.

Skip everything in between.

Let’s say that from your current location, you know that the destination you want is north of you. So you say “I’ve got to go north,” and you start walking. Except, you don’t have any idea which way is north so you basically just picked a random direction.

Not only aren’t you going to reach your destination, but you also aren’t likely to discover that you’re going the wrong way for a long time. By the time you realize your mistake, you might just decide that wherever you’re headed is where you wanted to be all along and just settle there.

This is often how people treat their own motivations. They want happiness, so they say “I’ll do this thing,” but like the traveler with no compass they have no idea if that thing will make them happy. They might eventually realize that it doesn’t, but have invested so much into it that they sort of reverse course and say “this was what I wanted anyway.”

A lot of the process of discovering what makes you happy is just that: discovery. You have to try different things to a degree. But some analysis is warranted! You should at least try to think about what “happiness” would even look like, manifest as. What does a day of your life feel like if you’re happy? What things would disrupt that? This is sort of like looking at the sunrise to get your bearings; at least have some sense of direction.

And don’t be afraid to turn back early. If a little of something didn’t make you happy, a lot of it isn’t likely to do so.