I’ll never forget that Thursday on October 23^rd, 2014 when I received a call from Bain & Company offering me a job. It was a 2-month period competing against 60,000 other candidates to earn an offer and I was honored to accept.

I would be joining a company called “The Best Place to Work”, earning a six-figure salary, and beginning my career at the same place as Mitt Romney, Adam Braun, CEO of MissionU, and Andy Dunn, CEO of Bonobos; it was truly a dream job.

I was joining as an Associate Consultant and from Day 1, was expected to make an impact on some of the largest, most respected companies in the world. Along the way, I would develop my business knowledge, my communication skills, and my leadership abilities. As one mentor mentioned, for the next two years, I would be “drinking knowledge from a fire hydrant” and he was right.

The two years I spent with Bain taught me much about myself as young professional, a businessman, and as a human being.

My two years at Bain came to an end a few months ago, but during that time, I kept a journal of the lessons I’ve learned – lessons that I now apply both to my professional life as well as my personal one.

I wanted to share 10 of my favorites –

1. Your enjoyment of work is more determined by who you work with than the work you are doing

As a management consultant, you work on a variety of projects for varying durations of time (some projects can last as little as one week while others could last years), varying tasks (some projects can be heavy on analytics where you are at your desk crunching numbers until midnight while others involve 6-hour meetings convincing people to make a decision), and varying teams (from small teams where everyone but you has a family to large teams where everyone decides to go to an Avcii Friday night concert together)

During my time at Bain, I worked on 12 different projects with 12 different teams varying from a two-month project helping a biotech company launch a life-saving drug to a two-week project helping a company decide if it should buy a protein powder manufacturer.

What I learned was that who I was working with was often a more accurate indicator of my enjoyment of the project than the actual work I was doing. One of my favorite projects was a 3-month cost cutting case with a tech company. While there is nothing inherently interesting about going through expense budgets and finding where spend was inefficient, I looked forward to each day of that case because of how much I enjoyed the people on my team and the client team. Working side-by-side with people you enjoy, who enjoy you, makes the time pass and gives you more meaning to your work.

2. People will change when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change

As a consultant, one of your responsibilities is to move your client to action, but as people quickly realize, moving people to action can be as hard as trying to tell a baby to stop crying (actually telling a baby to stop crying might be easier). Change is hard because it involves an active commitment to a new set of routines, habits, and ways of thinking.

The clients that were quickest to change were the ones who realized what would happen if they didn’t change. They were often the companies who were not too long ago the dominant brand in their space until smaller, but more innovative companies came along and over time took away their control of the market. They came to Bain because they felt the pain of keeping the status quo and when our recommendations came, were quick to act on them, but had they changed earlier, most of them would have continued to be market leaders instead of trying to play catch-up.

But businesses aren’t the only entities who follow this rule, individual people do as well. As a first-year, I was luckily given a desk near a central meeting spot in the office; so pretty much in the course of a week, I would see almost everyone in our 400-person office pass by my desk to get to the meeting room, thus catching up with old teammates and my friends was quite easy since they were usually out waiting for the meeting room to clear so we would start a conversation for 2-5 minutes. Well, these 2-5 minute conversations would happen every 30 minutes as new people passed by which added to about 2 hours a day of conversations. When my cases were in lighter periods it was easy to handle since I was usually waiting for my manager or client’s input on my work, but when my cases were in our peak periods (14-16 hour days) it meant I stayed even later to make up the time I was socializing.

I was afraid of offending others if I didn’t talk to them since it was only 2-5 minutes, but eventually, it became painful as those 2 hours a day meant 2 hours of less sleep I received so I finally had to make a change. During those peak periods, when someone would pass my desk and started a conversation I would say, “I’d love to talk, but I’m in crunch period right now, could I get back to you with a time for lunch? That way we can have more time and I’m not thinking about this report I am sending out?”

The solution worked, I got back my 2 hours of sleep and still made time to catch up with those I wanted to speak with, but it took the pain of losing 2 hours of sleep on already few hours of sleep to make me force that change. Similar to the companies I was helping, it took for the pain of doing nothing to exceed the pain of changing when I finally took action.

Thus I realized, people only change when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.

3. Shortcomings + Humility = Progress

One of my favorite aspects of Bain’s culture was the emphasis on growth and development. As a new college graduate, I knew I had much to learn from the seasoned business veterans I would be working with that each time I was staffed to a new project, I would schedule weekly 1:1 PD (professional development) chats with each member of my team.

And each week, I would ask the same three questions:

• What were my strengths/what do you enjoy about working with me?
• What is frustrating about working with me/What should I change?
• Where could I have “wow”ed you with my work quality this week?

My favorite questions were the last two because they allowed me to identify my weaknesses and ways I could improve myself. While it might be hard to allow yourself to be open to criticism, I found it as the best way to grow. Much of the growth I experienced at Bain came from these candid conversations. They allowed me to see myself from the viewpoints of others as well as to cover blind spots I have. I still have blind spots, but I have less than when I started because I cared more about discovering my blindspots than protecting my ego.

During one PD chat, a teammate, whom I looked up, remarked how my strength was realizing and praising the good work of others, but how uncomfortable it made her feel each time I had remarked about something she had done to our team and would purposely not tell me about her work to avoid the public praise. This was a shock to me because I always appreciate when other compliment me in public, but for her, she preferred to have it done privately.

I took that feedback and asked some past team members how it felt when I did the same public praising, and it came back that they also felt uncomfortable because often the work they did was the result of multiple people and not just the person I was praising. So they felt embarrassed, not wanting to stop me but realizing other people in the room should have been praised too, I was just ignorant about that fact. Upon hearing the feedback, I was embarrassed at myself for having done what I did for so long, but those candid conversations were the only reason I learned about how I was doing was making others uncomfortable. Today, I do praise, but mainly in private or only when I know of all the people involved.

I still have many blind spots, over time I want to address them as I grow.

4. Make decisions based on long-term benefits, not short-term consequences

I find that for every decision we make, there are short-term consequences as well as long-term ones, but we often only consider the short-term consequences.

In management consulting, when you are up to be staffed on your next project you usually have more than one choice for the project. You will do your research on each project and then rank the ones you would like to be staffed on. Consultants usually rank projects based on the quality of the team, history of the client, anticipated hours, and location. While all of these are great metrics, they are all short-term considerations. While you might have less working hours and a better client situation you become less prepared when you have to deal with long hours and tough client relationships versus if you took a case that had a tough client situation and higher hours; you will learn a lot more early on which would allow you to view future cases as easier to manage versus starting off easy and being faced with a tougher situation later on when you are more senior and more is expected of you.

During my time at Bain, there was one particular client that my class would avoid at all costs – the hours were among the highest of all projects, the client was tough, and unless you were a manager or partner, you would not get any time with the client (to the client you didn’t exist). So each time a slot opened up on the team and an Associate from my class would be staffed, they would go to our staffing manager with all sorts of reasons why they couldn’t – “didn’t like that industry”, “want to avoid that type of work”, “didn’t like the team.” but in reality it was simply to avoid the situation. But eventually, no matter what, someone had to be staffed to that project.

What I’ve found were the Associates who were staffed to that project after finishing their “tour of duty” had developed skillsets far beyond the average Associate. Because the case demanded much as high expectations from the client on a short time frame, the Associates on those projects I found learned to prioritize better, developed faster analytical skills, and were better at pattern recognition so it was no surprise how many of them would go on to be fast-tracked to promotions and be offer business school sponsorships. Their willingness to accept the short-term consequences, allowed them to gain greater long-term benefits.

When making a decision, consider the long-term benefits and not just the short-term consequences.

5. One hour today could save eight in three months

As an Associate, I built more excel models than I could count. When I built my first financial model, I was just excited to get to the answer that I built the model as quickly as I could to calculate the key numbers the client wanted. Instead of building in reference points and citing where my numbers came from, I just added numbers I pulled into the model and thought “I could come back and cite the sources if needed.” Three months later, when the case wrapped up, the client who was impressed with the model asked if they could give the model to their data team. When their data analyst opened the model, he asked, “Where can I find the sources for these numbers? The numbers look good, but I want to make sure I update them with the same sources when the numbers change.” I told him, I’d get it to him – the problem was at this point the model was 3 months old with over 27 tabs and over 50 data sources; I couldn’t remember where each source was and which PowerPoint slide it updated in our 500 slide presentation.

I ended up spending Friday night and that weekend tracking all the numbers. What would have been a 2-minute task at the beginning for each source (a simple copy and paste) when I had them in front of me took an entire weekend because I was trying to save 2 hours in the beginning and ended up costing me about 16 hours, three months later. I learned my lesson the hard way.

Doing something right today at the cost of an additional hour is worth doing, else you will pay for it later on.

6. Given a choice between working out or sleeping in an extra hour, always choose the workout

The hours at Bain can be long, but one thing I noticed was how alert I felt if I had a workout that day. On projects where I started the day at 6 am and went to bed at 2 am, I felt more alert after a 5 am workout than on cases where I started the day at 9 am, went to bed at 10 pm, but went to work without my workout.

I made my health my priority even if it meant a midnight workout or a 4 am run. When I was traveling for casework, if it came down to the decision between two hotels both nearby, I would pick the one with the better gym and on cases where I didn’t have time to go to my local gym, I kept a set of workout equipment in my apartment.

So given a choice between sleeping in an extra hour or going to the gym, always choose the gym.

7. A 50% solution, implemented at 100% is better than a 100% solution not implemented

During the first week of Bain training, you are taught to value results for your clients over everything else. If you come up with the perfect answer, but no one acts on it, it is as if the answer didn’t exist because it didn’t create any results.

I found this to be true even in my first case at Bain where we were helping a local low-income school district improve their teacher retention. The school system had been facing high teacher turnover rate, and as a result, students had less access to experienced teachers. After three months of working with the school district, interviewing educators from across the country, and benchmarking our program against those at other similar school systems, our team came up with a recommendation for a program that would improve teacher retention. Out of the 42 schools in that system, we recommended implementing at 29 of those schools the following school year to see the maximum effect of the program but beginning at 2 schools.

The school district leadership agreed that implementing at 2 schools would be ideal, but given the politics of the district, it would at best be able to implement at 1, to begin with. A year later, the program was implemented at 1 school and saw the desired effects of improving teacher retention – though it was half of our suggested optimal, having the program implemented at all was better than to have it not.

8. Worry about what is on the back of your shirt

At Bain, we had a saying to always consider what is “on the back of your shirt” which is to say, what others think of you when you are not present – your reputation. Once a reputation is formed it is hard to undo so every decision you make, everything you say has longer-term impacts so be careful with both.

9. Prioritize achieving results to being right

Promotion cycles happen twice a year at Bain, but before the official list of people is sent out, I could have a sense of who would get promoted from those I’ve worked with. There was one common trait among those who were promoted and those who weren’t. That trait I observed was that the ones receiving promotions cared more about having the right answer than their own answer being right.

The future managers and partners at Bain had this interesting trait. When they were consultants or senior managers, they would go into our meetings with an answer they thought was right, but if evidence proved they were would be wrong, they were willing to switch their viewpoint. When the facts changed, they changed. They were more concerned about getting to the right answer than being personally right and defending their ego. While they were often right, I imagine that frequency of being right developed over time from a history of being willing to be wrong.

This was such a valuable lesson for me and each time I find myself defending my belief, I pause and ask myself, “am I trying to get to the right answer or am I just wanting to be right?” If it is the latter, I slow down and consider that I might (and quite often) be wrong. As I learned, ego is the enemy of progress.

10. The gift of time is more valuable than the gift of money

From the time I was a kid until the time I graduated from college, I had very little money, so when it came to Christmas and birthdays, I often handmade gifts and cards since I had the time to do so and little money to spend otherwise. These weren’t fancy or artful, but they were made with 100% care and good intentions.

But when it came to the part of Christmas or birthdays when gifts were unwrapped, I would always envy those in my family who made money and could afford my grandma cruise tickets while I built a makeshift box for her earrings in my school’s woodshop. My grandma will use those cruise tickets, but will she even open my box? I thought money and what it bought was the greatest gift you could give.

After working at Bain, I became money rich but time poor. I realize now how much my time was worth. When I was in high school, I would drive two hours just to see a friend or grab really good food, now I ask if we can just Skype or eat somewhere halfway, because a two-hour drive is a large chunk of time I barely have.

Now every Christmas when I fly back from California to Georgia with my newly bought gifts, I can’t help but envy my little cousins who handmade their cards or knitted a scarf for our grandma.

The gifts that money buy are nice, but they can’t replace the gift of giving your time. Money can be earned back and you can make more, but there is no ATM for time, once you withdraw, that is it.

The management consultants I respected most at Bain were those who with their limited time still made a commitment to have dinner with their partners, made time to have lunch with the Associates, and rescheduled a client meeting so they could be there for their kids during school breaks.

Now when a friend offers to drive an hour to meet me, my best friend offers to drive me from the airport, or my little cousin knits me a pair of mittens, I come to see how valuable their gifts are.

Last week marked a full year since I started my first full-time job. To celebrate, I took time to reflect on the biggest lessons I’ve learned the past 12 months.

1. Your lowest moments drive your highest learnings

Life after college is the first time many of us are truly on our own and sometimes life deals you with difficult circumstances. Having these low moments teaches you about how tough you can be and how much you can grow.

2. It is okay to say no to things that don’t bring you energy

I don’t enjoy going to bars. There is something about them that leaves me more drained than energized even when I’m with friends. When I started work, it seem part of the work culture was hanging out together at a local bar on Fridays. In the beginning I would go because I didn’t know many people in San Francisco, but I would leave after just an hour or two feeling drained. At some point I decided I’d much rather spend my Friday on a quiet dinner or reading a book – these activities brought me much energy. I am much happier as a result.

3. Your first year is an investment

You’re not going to be a rock star when you start. You’re going to be asked to do work that make you sense how junior or new you are. It is part of the learning opportunity.

4. No one will protect your non-negotiable except you

If you don’t know what is important to you, work and those around you will dictate what those things are.

5. Making new friends takes effort

It was so easy to make friends in college. Between classes, events, and dorms, I saw other students every moment of the day. Post-college, I’ve had to go out of my way to make new friends.

6. Keeping in touch with your existing friends also takes effort

People become busy, even your friends. If no one is willing to organize time together, they don’t naturally just happen.

7. Begin with the end in mind

There is always more work to do, but there are only 24 hours in a day. To avoid doing work that adds little value, beginning with the end in mind helps you stay focused on what is most important. What is the end product you are building towards, what is the key answer you are answering, what is the result you want to achieve?

8. You’re going to make mistakes on the job, that is okay

It is your first job, you’re not going to be perfect at it. Mistakes are okay, repeating them is not.

9. Being time poor changes your view of money

In college, I went out of my way to save money – spending an hour to find a find a PDF of a book instead of just spending $7 dollar to buy it. I was money poor and time rich. Now, for the first time in my life, I am finding myself money rich, but time poor. I could cook dinner, clean up, and save $7 dollars, but when I’m coming home so late. I’ll gladly just pay $10 for a healthy meal so I can have an hour more to sleep and rest.

10. Your spending creeps up if you don’t watch it

In college, a $30 dinner would make me cringe. That was a lot of money to spend on just one dinner. When I started earning money, $30 dinners still made me cringe, but as time passed the effect wore-off and $30 meals became normal. It wasn’t until the end of each month when I’m paying bills that I see the accumulative effect of the $30 meals. Stopping the spending creep will help you avoid spending more than you have and forcing you to invest in the things and experiences that are most worthwhile.

11. Your health will slip away if you don’t watch it

While your spending will slowly creep on you if you don’t watch it, your health slowly slips away. As time becomes scarcer after college you started to give up activities you once enjoyed to stay healthy. I’ve seen this happen to so many of my friends who used to be so active in college. If you don’t watch your health, don’t expect anyone else to.

12. What makes work enjoyable is a feeling of growth and support

The type of work you’re asked to do day in and out will change. Some days will make you feel so lucky to be where you are; other (many) days will make you want to quit. But what drives happiness is feeling as though you are being challenged without being too stretched and having people who care about you. The work can be tough, the hours can be long, but with supportive people the experience is more enjoyable.

I gave this speech to begin a meeting at Rhino Business Toastmasters in SF

I keep this photo on my desk at work.

The woman in the middle is named Zer-Zer. She is a member of black Hmong tribe in Sapa, a mountainous region between China and Vietnam. Zer-Zer is married with four kids and has lived in Sapa her entire life just as her ancestors have for over 300 years. I took this photo the first day I met Zer-Zer without understanding the influence this photo would have on me after I left Sapa.

For the time my friends and I shared with Zer-Zer, her schedule became ours. A normal day for Zer-Zer and her family begins at 5:00 am. She and her three daughters spend 3 hours hiking from their home in the mountains down to the town center where the first load of tourists arrives at 8:00 am. There, Zer-Zer and her daughters sell homemade Hmong clothing among other souvenirs. On a good day, they sell all or most of everything and begin their hike back up the mountain, another 3-hour feat. On a bad day, they sell almost nothing and have the same hike but with all the clothing and items they didn’t sell. When they arrive home they build a fire and begin cooking dinner with Zer-Zer’s husband who is returning from a day of mountain mining. The family is racing to beat the sunset for once it sets; the only light source is the fire. This is what life for Zer-Zer and her family is like 7 days out of the week, 12 months out of the year, yet I never once saw anything but a smile on her face – the same one fixed in the photo.

At my current job, I work as a management consultant where I deal with demanding clients, strict deadlines, and late nights more often than I would like. There are nights I just want to go home and sleep in my own bed. Nights that make me question, “Did I really go to college for this life?”

Every time I get this feeling and I feel the mental frustration, I turn to look at this photo and I remember how Zer-Zer and her daughters never complained about having to wake up early, never complained about their 6-hour commute, and never complained about never leaving Sapa. I’m not riding a private jet from meetings to meetings, but no matter how late I stay, I’ll always be able to call an Uber or hail a taxi; Zer-Zer has a three-hour hike ahead of her. No matter where I need to fly, I’ll have a hotel room with running water waiting for me; Zer-Zer’s only access to running water is hiking to the village waterfall 20 minutes away.

In all of our lives, life can be overwhelming that we immediately focus on how we are being inconvenienced. We focus on what is wrong in our lives – what we don’t have, what we haven’t done – that we quickly forget how fortunate we already are – what we do have, what we have already accomplished. Someone somewhere in the world would look at our lives and if given a choice, choose to be us. We often forget this.

This week, when you experience an inconvenience in your own life such as a last minute request that keeps you at work or missing a bus, remember how lucky you are to have a job and to have access to transit. Remember about all the problems you don’t have to deal with that others have do day-in and day-out. Remember the Zer-Zers in your life, those who might not have been born as lucky as you, but takes what they are given, makes the most out of it, and do so with a smile.

“Creating opportunities means looking where others are not” – Mark Cuban

When my grandma and grandfather escaped to the United States they wanted to create a new life for themselves and their children. They hoped that America would be the land of opportunity they had dreamt about 8000 miles away in war-torn Vietnam.

When my grandparents landed on the shores of the U.S., they indeed saw that America was the land of opportunities but never once expected anything to be given to them; they knew they had to earn it – working 16-hour factory shifts, saving every nickel they made by cooking all our meals at home, and not letting racially-driven hate crimes intimidate them.

My grandparents became my first role models, and as I grew older I was lucky to stumble upon other role models who also taught me what it took to create opportunities for myself.

1. Play your garbage minutes as if they mattered

I loved watching basketball growing up. The most exciting games were the ones that would come down to the final seconds, where the final shot would decide the fate of the game. Watching these games, I could imagine how many of the players on the court dreamt about rebounding the ball and making the winning shot for their team. But not every game comes down to the last shot. Sometimes games are decided long before the final minutes – one team has such a large lead that it is impossible for the other team to win, the coaches have substituted out their best players, and many of the fans have left. The minutes left on the clock are known as “garbage minutes.” During these minutes, the players on the basketball court aren’t household names. It doesn’t matter how good (or bad) they play. The game is already over, all is left is waiting for the game clock to hit zero before both teams  can go home.

DeMarre Carroll joined the NBA in 2009. For the first four years of his career, most of DeMarre’s playing time came exclusively from garbage minutes. But watching DeMarre play you wouldn’t know the game was over unless you looked at the score box. DeMarre was given an average of 6 minutes once every 7 weeks to play. Instead of viewing his limited playing time as if they didn’t matter, he played as if the game were still on the line, bringing his energy and competitiveness. As a result, his coaches saw his potential and would give him more and more minutes each season until his seventh year (and on his fifth team) he was moved from the back of the bench and to the starting lineup. But even in the main lineup, DeMarre was the lowest paid of this five starters – the next lowest paid player made nearly three-times as much. But again DeMarre didn’t view his placement as a limit; he viewed it as an opportunity. He played as if he were the star player.

Last year, after nearly taking his team to the championship round, DeMarre ended the year by signing a 4-year, $60 million contract to be a star player for his current team. Not bad for someone who was once the lowest paid player on his teams playing “garbage minutes”. DeMarre created an opportunity where others didn’t see one. Can you imagine if DeMarre hadn’t viewed those 6 minutes as opportunities to showcase his talent, but instead viewed those as a chore and did just enough to earn his paycheck for the day? Do you think he would have the $60 million contract he has today?

In your life, you will be given your share of “garbage minutes”, task that can be done without much thought and often quickly forgotten. You can view these chores as wastes of time…or you can view them as opportunities to show people you are ready for bigger, better opportunities. 

2. Help Make Others Successful

I’ve been fortunate to work for many of my role models and later mentors. Before I worked at Bain, I spent two years working at a startup called Quiet. During my two years at Quiet, I worked with Susan Cain, author of the best-seller Quiet which has sold over 2 million copies worldwide and whose TED talk has over 13 million views and her co-founder Paul Scibetta. From age 20 to 22, I managed product development, brainstormed partnership ideas, and created content. The best part about this experience was how it started.

When I was a sophomore in college, I read Quiet: The Power of Introvert and had the desire to spread the message of Quiet and serving Susan’s Quiet Revolution in any way I could. A few months later, I read an article on Fast Company that Susan was working on an online public speaking course for introverts. I found Susan’s email on her website and offered to create the course for her all for free. I meant what I said about helping spread the Quiet Revolution even if it meant working for free. Susan took me up on that offer and I spent the following summer working for Susan creating the course. Though I signed up to work for free, I worked on the project as if I was getting paid a million salary. I pour my time and energy into it when I had the chance.

I would constantly think about how the product (our course) could be better. I wanted to create a product I would be proud of even if I didn’t believe my name nor future income would be coming from it. Three months from the day I first contacted Susan, the course was completed. When Paul and Susan created Quiet, they brought me on as an intern and the first team member outside of the founders to join the company. It was an opportunity of a lifetime that was available because I was willing to help others. Instead of asking, what can someone do for you, always ask “what can I do for this person.” Once your mindset shifts from serving yourself to serving others, opportunities will present themselves.

3. Start knocking on doors

On a delayed flight last summer I had a chance to read Gillian Zoe Segal‘s Getting There where she tries to discover the traits that successful people seemed to have in common. One of the commonalities she found was a relentless drive to overcome rejection. Everyone from Spanx founder Sara Blakely to Warren Buffett dealt with rejection early on in their careers – Blakely from all the manufactures who thought her idea would never sell and Buffett from Harvard Business School. But instead of using their early rejection as a reason to stop, they used it as  fuel to continue onwards.

This lesson was most clear in Segal’s interview of John Paul DeJoria, co-founder of the Patrón Spirits Company and Paul Mitchell. Before becoming an entrepreneur, DeJoria spent three years going door-to-door selling Encyclopedias. DeJoria called this 3-year period of his life one of the most transformative and if the job were still available today, he would make his kids do it to teach them the valuable lesson that he learned.

“After you’ve had 15 doors slammed in your face,” he explained, “you need to be as enthusiastic at door number 16 as you were at the first door, if you want to make a sale.”  When DeJoria launched John Paul Mitchell Systems, he relied on the same skills, going from beauty salon to beauty salon getting people to buy his hair care products. John Paul Mitchell products are a household name today, but in the early days, DeJoria was lucky to even get 1 out of 5 salons to try his product. He thanked his perseverance for not losing faith and continue to push forward with every salon that rejected him. Had DeJoria stopped knocking on doors, the dual multi-million empires of Patrón Spirits Company and John Paul Mitchell wouldn’t exist today.

To get opportunity to open itself, you have to overcome the sea of “no”s. If you’re not willing to risk having the door slammed in your face, than you won’t be ready when opportunity opens its door.

4. Deliver more than others expect of you 

When Noah Kagan started okdork.com, a blog about online marketing, he wanted to become an influencer in this space, but with hundreds of other bloggers and thousands of articles already on the subject it was a challenge even figuring out how to start. Instead of writing and repeating what others were already doing in the marketing space, Noah would study what was working and reverse engineered the recipe for success analyzing over 1 million internet articles to find what tended to go viral.

What Noah learned about the difference between bloggers who get over 100,000 visitors and those who get less than 100 was the quality of their content. Average bloggers wrote about the same topics. Because they wrote the same low quality content, people didn’t stick around. In the blogs that stood out, Noah found the bloggers spent more time crafting their messages and doing research. Instead of putting something together just to hit publish, these bloggers went beyond what was expected of a free online article. Noah wanted to be in the latter camp and he succeed. If you read Noah’s articles you’ll notice a few things different from your usual online marketing article. His articles have more depth than others (2000 words is his personal minimum), he backs his claims with data (personal anecdotes don’t cut it), and he doesn’t recommend anything he hasn’t done himself. Going beyond what others expected, within a year, Noah grew his site to over 100,000 visitors.

It is easy to give people the minimum because it doesn’t require any additional work. If you want to be average, then do the minimum. If you want to create opportunities, learn to exceed people’s expectations.

5. Raise your hand for the hard jobs

During my junior year of college, I was grateful to attend a talk by PepsiCo CEO, Indra Nooyi, one of only 23 women to be CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Her talk covered her journey from growing up in India to becoming one of the most powerful women in the world. When asked what the best advice she has ever been given, she quoted her father who taught her to “raise your hand for the hard jobs.”

Her father’s reasoning was that 1) people are scared of volunteering for the hard tasks – they hard for a reason – and volunteering makes you stand out 2) having to deal with hard problems forces you to grow so you can take on when harder challenges next time. Nooyi followed her father’s advice from the time she was in primary school, “I volunteered to work with the kids no one else wanted to work with” and well into her professional career “I would raise my hand for the jobs others were afraid to fail at.” Nooyi confessed she didn’t always know going in that she would be successful, but she was devoted to growing herself and making sure more bigger, better opportunities were available for her  in the future. And as she volunteered for the hard job and did them successfully, the people around her started to take notice and she was given more and more opportunities, eventually taking over the role of CEO of PepsiCo in 2006.

Nooyi ended the session by reminding us, “Volunteer for the hard jobs because no one remembers the people who did the easy jobs.”

6. Make plans, not excuses

MJ DeMarco graduated college with two degrees, neither in computer science. Despite graduating without any programing knowledge, he made his wealth on the Internet and retired before 35. A former limo driver, MJ founded Limo.com in 1997 before selling his company (and later buying it back). How did someone without a tech background make his money on the Internet? MJ credits his success to one mindset: making plans, not excuses.

As a limo driver in Chicago, MJ noticed how many of his clients would ask for limo company recommendations when he took them to the airport. In the 90’s the internet was still growing and MJ saw the opportunity to create a market place for local limo companies and traveling businessmen. To turn his vision into a concrete idea, MJ read books on HTML and on running an internet business. MJ could have easily quit because he didn’t know how to code a Web site, how to design graphics, or how to manage a server, but instead of he asked, “I don’t know how to do this today, but how could I?”

Even after retiring early, MJ never stopped learning. In his book Millionaire Fastlane, MJ shares how the “make plans, not excuses” can apply to your personal life as well as your professional life. When MJ was remodeling his house, he wanted to paint the walls in a certain style. Since he was retired and had the time, he challenged himself to learn this skill. He went online and watched hours of video tutorials, went to Home Depot to buy the supplies he needed, and spent the next week practicing on cardboard boxes. When the week was over, he became proficient enough to complete the remodeling himself.

When you run into an obstacle, it is easy to come up with an excuse to quit. The opportunity lies in coming up with a plan to overcome your obstacle.

7. Come up with solutions not just problems

Life after college is a scary time. It is the first time most people have been on their own – paying their own bill, handling office politics, and dealing with the uncertainties of adulthood. No one is immune with their first contact with the real world – Jenny Blake was no exception. After graduating from UCLA and starting at Google, Jenny chronicled her journey on a blog fittingly named Life After College. She talked about problems that almost all recent graduates faced from being single in a new town to having a single digit bank account.

Jenny’s problems resonated with readers who were also recent graduates, but what made Jenny different was instead of just listing her problems, she came up with solutions. Instead of just talking about her problems with managing a budget, she shared a budget sheet; instead of talking about being single in a big city, she wrote about why being single rocks. As a result, Jenny was able to turn Life After College from just a blog into a place where recent grads could go to find solutions to their problems.  Since 2007, millions of readers have passed through Life After College, found it so helpful, that Jenny was offered a book deal.

In your life, when you encounter a problem, don’t just mention the problem, come up with a solution. Anyone can come up with a list of problems, it takes extra thought to come up with a solution. At work instead of presenting your manager with the problem, come up with a recommendation of how you would solve it. Instead of saying to yourself, “I don’t have this” or “I don’t know how to do that” come up with one way you could “have this” or “know that.” In the same way people are pushed away from problem starters, people are attracted to solution creators. Be a solution creator and opportunities will always present themselves.

As my grandparents and role models taught me, opportunity are abundant but people miss it because it isn’t dressed up in pretty clothes.