On Sustained Effort: What I've Learned Watching Long-Term Contributors
Over the course of my career — across Comcast, Capital One, and now AWS — I’ve worked alongside a lot of people for a long time. Long enough to watch careers arc in ways that aren’t visible in any single year, to see who stayed effective and who didn’t, and to notice that the pattern doesn’t follow the obvious script. The conventional theory is something like: the people who last are the ones who found a comfortable niche and settled in. Job security through indispensability, deep expertise in a specific domain, low enough ambition to avoid the burnout that comes from pushing too hard. The long-tenured person as someone who’s optimized for staying rather than for doing. ...