Know When To Say No – internal external
It’s not always easy to say no, especially if someone is asking for help. I think it’s human nature to want to help, to feel needed, to provide assistance. It’s also a really good way to over extend and negatively impact the quality of your work if you aren’t able to balance it correctly. I’ll be the first to admit that this is something I am still mastering and still often times fail at. It is however something I am much more cognizant of now and have been working to improve.

Let’s also be clear in that I’m not talking about everything you are or will be asked to do at work. You have a job that you are responsible for doing in exchange for being employed and receiving a salary – duh. I’m talking about taking on the extra assignment that will put you behind your other projects or require you to spend so much extra time working on, you become burned out.

Your time is valuable and important – and not just to you. Being able to say no in the right way will also demonstrate the fact that you value your time, which will make it that much more meaningful when you give it out in the future.

Be humble
Not the easiest thing to do, whether you want to admit it or not. In order to get the job you have, you had to beat out hundreds if not thousands of other candidates. Some of those candidates, believe it or not, would probably have been better at your job, or at least aspects of it. We’re all great in our own ways, but we’re not as great as we think we are either. Lose sight of that, and it shines through pretty clearly in your personality, and no one wants to be around or work with someone that clearly thinks they’re better or smarter than everyone else – regardless of whether or not that is truth!

Two years down.

-Alex