How to gain career confidence? Strategies and Mindsets for Being the Best.
A route female can take
In Trust Yourself More, I mentioned I used manifestation to boost my confidence, especially for my career. This window is what I’m started with.
To be honest, I wasn’t even confident about considering AI engineering because I didn’t feel qualified for it. I came from a background in data science and, due to the poor state of the US economy, I couldn’t even find a job in that field that I was good at. So the idea of becoming an AI engineer, which I didn’t know much about, seemed even more daunting.
However, after working intensely for the past month, a miracle happened.
“Congrats! What is the position of your internship!” my friend texted me.
“AI/LLM engineer intern!” I responded.
“What?! Really?”
“Yes! I crafted the job myself!”
“WTF?!” My friend was mindblown.
In short, some startup founders asked me to do some LLM optimization work, and I proposed my job description, title, and the projects I want to build with them. However, my ambition doesn’t stop there. My job position gave me some recognition, but in reality, I’m still held back by the immense confidence of my housemates. What really unblocks me is (1) strategic thinking and (2) having a “be the best” mindset, as outlined in Paul Graham’s latest post, “How to do great work.”
(1) Strategy Thinking
When faced with a big life problem, I default to strategy thinking. I find it useful because it reminds me that life, including my career, can be seen as a game. Being smart or confident is less important than understanding the rules of the game and being skillful at planning. Here are some conclusions I have reached after studying strategy thinking.
Strategy
Principles
The advantage is rooted in differences — in the asymmetries among rivals.
The conundrum disappears when you carefully distinguish between competitive advantage and financial gain — many have assumed that they are the same thing, but they are not.
These two principles taught me two lessons. (1) Confidence is a significant advantage for alpha males around me, but it is based on their unique traits and is not necessarily an advantage for me. Instead of trying to replicate their confidence, I should focus on identifying and developing my own advantages to make them shine. (2) I should not feel limited by short-term financial gain but rather should focus on honing my competitive advantages to maximize my potential for long-term financial success.
Strategy on competitive advantages development
Deepening advantages: Deepening an advantage means widening this gap by either increasing value to buyers, reducing costs, or both. One must reexamine each aspect of the product and process, casting aside the comfortable assumption that everyone knows what they are doing. Today, this approach to information flows and business processes is sometimes called “reengineering” or “business-process transformation.”
Extending advantages: Extending a competitive advantage requires looking away from products, buyers, and competitors and looking instead at the special skills and resources that underlie a competitive advantage. In other words, “Build on your strengths.” Extensions based on proprietary know-how benefit from the fact that knowledge is not “used up” when it is applied; it may even be enhanced.
I believe that my pragmatism is one of my greatest strengths in engineering. Here are my strongest advantages when working on engineering projects:
Identifying the right MVP
Recognizing user needs
In addition to my technical skills, I possess strong soft skills. As a woman, I’m good at:
Collaborating with others, showing empathy, and emotional intelligence
Building genuine relationships
Let’s start with (1) Deeping your advantages. While I have primarily used my engineering skills to help my housemates build their projects, my consulting friends have given me valuable insights on how to further develop these skills. One suggested building an MVP, then using observations to generate insights, form hypotheses, and ultimately build a product based on those hypotheses.
As for (2) Extending advantages can be applied to my soft skills. It can be difficult to recognize soft skills during a job interview or at the beginning of the work. Confident alpha males who can sell their work well still have a clear advantage. To further leverage my soft skills, my female consulting friends suggest that I develop my skills in storytelling and emotional persuasion. By creating compelling narratives that showcase my engineering skills, I can feel more comfortable promoting myself. This approach can help me build genuine connections with others too.
In addition, my consulting friend sends me a template we can follow. Her template showcases a mixture of hard and soft skills that interplay with each other.
1. Start letting others feel our strength in soft skills — in the meantime, people will like us because communicating with us is comfortable)
2. Proof our hard skills from time to time — people trust you more because you also have hard skills
3. Receive teammates’ recognition and boost the confidence level
After analyzing my strategy, I feel much more confident, not because I learned how to speak louder, but because I now truly understand which parts I excel at and how to showcase them.
(2) Be the best mindset
Paul Graham’s latest post, How to do great work, includes a section about the mindset of “being the best.” He wrote:
And that is what you’re aiming for, because if you don’t try to be the best, you won’t even be good. This observation has been made by so many people in so many different fields that it might be worth thinking about why it’s true. It could be because ambition is a phenomenon where almost all the error is in one direction — where almost all the shells that miss the target miss by falling short. Or it could be because ambition to be the best is a qualitatively different thing from ambition to be good. Or maybe being good is simply too vague a standard. Probably all three are true — Paul Graham
After reading it, I felt liberated. I began telling people that I want to become the best AI/LLM engineer. I no longer see this as a deceitful ambition because striving to be the best ultimately leads to being good. In fact, I wholeheartedly agree with the statement, “Maybe being good is simply too vague a standard.” To track my progress, aiming to be the best remains a much more effective metric.
Now, my window looks like this.
With a strategy analysis and “I am the best” mindset, I find myself searching for ways to gain confidence in my own style. Now, I don’t just want to be an AI engineer; I want to be the best AI engineer.