10 things I learned in the first decade of my career

The year 2024 was, by my standards, a big milestone: I’ve worked ten years full-time, non-stop. I’m lucky to have dodged three layoffs since the pandemic, and even luckier that, at the beginning of 2025, I could quit my job to take some time off.

It’s not lost on me that career breaks are unpopular, especially when many of my peers are involuntarily out of work. But at the risk of sounding insensitive, I have a productive decade to look back on, with four promotions total and my last full-time role managing the SEO program of a $12-billion startup. Fortunately, this all afforded me the time to pull up and reflect on what I’ve learned so far.

More important than any new bullet on my résumé are the several higher-altitude lessons ex-colleagues have taught me, albeit not always on purpose, but have been demonstrably reliable paths to seniority, productive relationships, executive recognition, and the energy to keep going even when these things elude you. Thus, this journal entry was born.

Here are ten things I think most full-time employees should know, particularly those who are in the first ten years of their career.

1. Seniority doesn’t equal talent

It’s taboo to say we’d outperform our higher-ranking coworkers if we were in their shoes. But inevitably you’ll think this, and it comes from some truth: You’ll have senior teammates or managers who are obviously in over their heads — or, just cut you in line for a promotion. Hopefully it’s rare, and just annoying versus actively slowing you down.

Now, with that said:

Sometimes it’s by design.

Agencies often promote client-facing employees on a need basis when their accounts suddenly require new levels of seniority, but threaten continuity. For instance: If a senior account manager leaves the company, it’s theoretically a better customer experience to promote the junior-level account manager — whom they’re already familiar with — to backfill the departing employee, instead of promoting the one who’s overdue for advancement but would be new to the account. The latter is fine occasionally, but long-term, it can look bad.

Yes, you could absolutely argue that promoting meritocratically, and being honest about that with the client, demonstrates internal values they’d ultimately admire more despite having someone new running their program. But you can’t deny that it depends on each client, and sometimes you’ll just have to wait your turn.

Good managers come in two forms, and they might be the wrong one.

Early in my career, I was passed over for a promotion because — according to the grapevine, to be fair — everything I did “came out really clean” and “we just like him where he is right now.”

At the time, my indignant reaction to this was I was simply too good at my job. But there is some validity to this excuse: Being a good {X} doesn’t necessarily make you a good manager of {X}.

This isn’t to say my former employer was right or wrong to withhold advancement based on role-specific performance. The point is a manager is considered good for one of two reasons: Either they know a lot about the craft, or they know a lot about people. All good managers have a mix of both, but which way you should lean depends on the organization — the department, even — and it’s easy for leadership teams to choose wrong. I’ve worked for folks at different companies and liked them for opposite reasons; what made one of them great would’ve made the other one terrible.

So, how do you decide where you’ll grow fastest? Again, it depends. Sometimes it’s a function of size; startups typically need more doers than delegators, and that gradually changes as headcount increases. Ultimately, you might just ask during the interview: “Who are some of your best senior-level staff and what do you like about them?”

Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.

I’m loving the rise in high-ranking individual contributor (IC) roles — often called “principals,” which I’ve been — but people management is still a big part of company growth, and it is hard. Have you ever had to terminate someone, or even just a temporary contract? It’s brutal. “It ruins my whole week,” someone told me recently. Even if personnel dismissal doesn’t factor into your job, most companies don’t have a prebuilt track to help you transition from being an IC to managing an IC.

So, think twice before judging someone you think isn’t cut out for a position you’ve never had. You could wind up being the same target for criticism when you get there.

2. Volume doesn’t equal intellect, but it still leads to advancement

It isn’t novel anymore to say society has a habit of mistaking loud people for intelligent people. But it’s true, a confident idea is a good idea (even if it’s actually a bad one), because conviction sells. The same goes for business; your more outspoken coworker is more likely to see opportunities come their way. You can’t independently change that, but if you’re nervous to speak up at work, you can do two things:

Practice public speaking.

Talking to hundreds of people at once does not sound like the easiest path to feeling comfortable talking in a meeting of eight or nine. But coming from experience, it actually is. Here’s my hot take: You’re not afraid of talking to people; you’re afraid of talking to people who know you. Coworkers give your manager feedback about you, can affect your future, and worst of all, know enough to know when you’re wrong.

Conversely, speaking at industry events is generally of low consequence to your current job, and thus (in my experience, at least) pretty unintimidating: You don’t know most people, you don’t have to see anyone again, and most of your audience doesn’t know as much as you do about the subject — that’s why they came to your talk. It’s a low-risk environment to find your voice. And let me tell you, seeing 1,000 people hold up their phones to take a photo of your slides is just as empowering as the one marketing professor who approaches you later to say how helpful your session was for his semester prep. You’ll walk away from these things with more confidence than you came in with, I promise.

Stick up for the other quiet ones.

Whether or not you’re an authority figure, you can still operate by your own personal values at work. In this case, be a platform for the people you wish got more attention. For instance, in a team meeting: “Actually, *Wynnie, you and I were Slacking about this yesterday and I loved your take, can you share it with everyone?” Push your quiet but brilliant coworkers into the spotlight when you know it’ll benefit them. This kind of support is contagious, and it comes back around.

*Wynnie is my dog and has absolutely no trouble speaking up.

3. Improvisers get ahead faster

Here’s a less-popular career accelerant, but one I’ve found useful more than once: If you don’t know the solution to a problem, but you’re at least 1% sure of what it looks like, take that 1% and just start working it out. Don’t bother someone else, don’t book a meeting yet — just start mining possibilities on your own. Leadership teams love improvisers. They aren’t the only ones who didn’t know the answer, but they were first to go looking for it. And you’d be surprised how fast that 1% grows as you keep researching, writing, coding, and tinkering your way through it. I talked a little about this a few years ago in this LinkedIn post.

Over time, this earns you high-profile assignments because managers know they can depend on you. Having been on both sides of this, I’m willing to wait longer for a finished result if I don’t have to hold your hand throughout the project.

4. Being easy to work with > being right all the time

My wife is a neuroscientist at a university, and spends a lot of her time presenting her research to others, both in and outside of her lab. She says there are two types of questions you get in academia: those that genuinely help you, and those that are just meant to showcase the asker’s knowledge.

I’ve found this happens in the private sector too, especially in high-performance environments. Believe it or not, it is possible for a business to have too much brain power in it. When everyone on your team is an overachiever, everyone worries their talent will go unnoticed, and so everyone competes to look smarter. Often this takes the form of asking trivial questions that expose flaws in their teammates’ thinking, but miss the big picture. Ironically, this can make companies less innovative because too many people need to have their say on the product before it ships. And this forces compromise that strips out all the creativity it started with.

I’ve seen this cut across levels of an org chart, and although it’s not done maliciously — or consciously — it can cripple your productivity.

Career growth doesn’t come from making good points; it comes from getting stuff done. And to get stuff done, you need people to want to work with you — not dread every conversation with you. Instead of trying to dunk on your colleagues all week, be the one everyone looks forward to collaborating with. Know when ego is gridlocking a project and defer to somebody else so you can all move forward. Your peers’ performance reviews of you will start sounding nicer, which is what you really want.

5. There isn’t one right way to do anything

I haven’t used any images yet, and this post is halfway done, so let’s start #5 with this:

Good *memes don’t need explaining, but I have to tell you why I like this one: It reminds me why my specialty can be a full-time job. It’s why SEO pros constantly debate one another. It’s why Google Search Central exists. And it’s why you’re paid to do your job, discuss strategy, execute that strategy, and then update that strategy 40+ hours a week. If there’s a universal formula your department can follow to do all of that correctly, every time, what do they need you for?

Getting good at something is fun because after being so careful around it, you finally have some rhythm. You’ve reached a cruising altitude, and people even start coming to you with questions. But this can cause one-size-fits-all thinking that stifles continued learning. (This includes callow headlines like “SEO is dead.”)

The cruel thing about expertise is the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know. And the only universal knowledge you have as an expert is how vast and situation-dependent your work really is. I’ve had consultants tell me to avoid — at all costs — things that proved to be perfectly valid for the website I was working on. I’ve also green-lit stuff that traditionally make for huge wins but ended up being complete wastes of my team’s time. Expertise is frustrating, but you take solace in understanding why you saw the result you did, and bringing that perspective to your next project.

*I created that meme with AI. 🙊

6. Perfect is the enemy of good

I started my career as a copy editor, and I swear, I was hung up on every word of every assignment. I demanded perfection, even if it wasn’t my own writing. It wasn’t until I took a job creating my own content, tied to measurable performance goals, that speed of execution was obviously more important than an incremental difference in quality.

If you’re the same way, but you don’t have specific goals to control your priorities, here are a few other ways to look at it:

• Writing is an artform, and art is subjective. In a subjective line of work, there’s no such thing as perfect. Moreover, you’ll exhaust yourself getting something exactly the way you want it when your boss is just going to mark it up with revisions anyway — some of which you’ll agree with.
• You care, but does your customer? My youngest coworkers have seriously struggled with this, and it doesn’t end well.
• It’s easy to sneak perfection into the equation when you’re the only one working on something. But as soon as you get business partners, personal bias goes out the window. Your team doesn’t have time for perfect.

7. Learn how to say no

This lesson covers two types of noes, the latter perhaps more controversial than the former:

To favors

One of the first pieces of feedback I received from a new employer during a performance review was “don’t be too helpful.” Even though I was years overdue hearing that, it was just as hard to address as it was helpful to me down the road. Once you own a program responsible for more than 10% of all customer spend, success comes from how many things you deprioritize to protect it, not how many nice things you agree to do for people.

When you’re new to the team, the temptation to make a good impression can easily pressure you into obliging your coworkers’ every favor. And to an extent, this is a good impulse in the interest of looking like a team player. But the more senior you get, the more focused your time needs to be. In short, get used to saying no (politely).

If you’re a softy like me, here’s the good news: As soon as you start declining work that doesn’t overlap with yours, feedback from your peers improves. Folks appreciate knowing your time is valuable, and eventually you’ll see these requests throttle back on their own.

To new opportunities

Here’s a juicier story: Six months into my first role in growth, I was offered a position I didn’t apply for as Head of SEO somewhere else. I would’ve led a team of four, reported directly to the CEO, and managed a marketing channel I had just started specializing in. I said no. A year later they were acquired by a company you’ve heard of, exposing whomever took the job to the scrutiny of a far more experienced growth team.

Nine times out of ten, you should accept new opportunities even if they’re intimidating. It’s a good way to break into leadership, and you don’t know when the chance will come around again. Then there are times when you need to be able to distinguish between an opportunity and an opportunity cost: Do you take a job in an industry you’ve always wanted to work in, but relocates you to a city you’ve never wanted to live in? Do you say yes to a title you eventually saw yourself holding, but only after doing things you saw yourself doing first?

In my opinion, we have such a strong bias for embracing the shiny new thing that we gloss over its compatibility with our larger goals. Maybe you want to work in content marketing, but you also want to live close to family. And ultimately you want to be a director, but you also want to be a good one. Just like saying no to important tasks to protect a higher priority, it is perfectly alright to say no to flashy offers to protect your broader trajectory.

8. No job (or employer) is perfect

In the U.S. last year, the median tenure of a salaried or waged employee was 3.9 years (BLS, first paragraph) — the lowest since 2002. My average over the last decade was even lower than that.

Far be it from me to tell you how long you should stay at your current employer. But what I can tell you is job-hopping usually just trades one headache for another. Eventually you will have had all the available headaches of working in-house, and there are still 30 years left to go. This isn’t some rebellious claim that freelance is the future, or you should go be a founder and work for yourself — either of which may well be your calling. Rather, it’s a warning to make this the very next thing you learn: adaptability.

Your dream job will disappoint you. And I don’t say that to dissuade you from chasing it. I say it to prepare you for the fact that no job or company will meet all your expectations. At some, you’ll feel like royalty in an unchallenging role. At others, you’ll thanklessly solve the most interesting problems of your career. *Most of the time, your best defense is to adapt; figure out what’s disappointing you, if it’s fixable (maybe that fix is somewhere in this post), and if not, rebrand it as a “necessary cost” for all the things you love about working there. After a while, you’ll realize it’s not even that big of a deal.

And if you do eventually leave, let it be because you want something new your employer can’t give you — not because you’ve finally had enough.

*Mental health is important too. All other times, just get out.

9. Job loss is usually not about you

To quote a good movie:

This doesn’t just speak to layoffs, which, while painful, are more plainly financial decisions. I was close to a number of performance-related terminations as well, and for over half of them, I personally faulted the company more than the employee.  

Sometimes it’s just the wrong fit; you were misled by flawed job criteria, and it’s a lesson learned for the hiring team. What I’ve seen most often, though, is poor communication and lack of support. There’s a reason performance improvement plans — sometimes called “PIPs” — stress you out just seeing the words written down. They’re supposed to be a contract between you and your manager to regain traction within your role, with your manager responsible for charting a path, creating a sequence of goals, and facilitating your progress against those goals. The problem is management has no incentive to accept that responsibility because their job isn’t the one at stake, it creates more work for them, and if you fail, it means they did too. As a result, you get a program that’s simply preparing for your departure and leaving the required paper trail. And sometimes you don’t get one at all.

If you were recently let go for performance reasons, remember: Your employer doesn’t take partial credit for your wins without also taking partial blame for your losses. And over the long haul, you’ll be putting your name on some career-defining successes that teach you something I’ve always found comfort in: You’re not going to thrive in every job you’re hired for. No one is naturally compatible with every company, and it can take time to find the ones that foster your best work.

10. Full-time employees are underrated

I didn’t just write this blog post to reflect on the first ten years of my career. I also did it to give overdue credit to in-house, full-time employees (FTEs): Working 40+ hours a week is unappreciatively hard, but the skills you get out of it are precious.

If all you read is LinkedIn, you might assume the best in any industry are independents: contractors, freelancers, and the like — the most prolific users of this platform for the purpose of marketing themselves to future clients. But while folks in these roles may be successful, the best ones I’ve ever personally hired are those who had the full-time experience to back it up. There’s no shortcut to expertise; the fastest way there is by doing the work. And nobody has logged more hours, met more deadlines, or developed more strategy than the FTE.

If you’ve read this far, and you didn’t get here through my homepage, let me introduce myself: My name is Braden Becker, and I’ve spent more than a decade as a full-time marketer, with seven of those years in SEO. If you or someone you know wants to build awareness, expertise, or even pipeline via search engines like Google, or LLMs like ChatGPT, I’d love to chat.