It is very difficult to be the captain of your own destiny, when you are always a passenger in somebody else's ship.

The simplest, and perhaps the best, career advice I have ever given is: worry about what your boss worries about.

In other words, align your priorities with your boss' priorities. If you can apply your energies and creatively contribute to reducing what your boss stresses about, you can't help but be considered as someone with a future in the organization.

High compensation and high happiness are not incompatible. It's not that we shouldn't seek money, and lots of it; many of our clients do. But we should first seek to love, or at least to like, what we're doing. That's the realization of our highest calling.

We talk a lot today about the importance of mentoring and coaching, and they can be vital in helping novices learn the rules of the game. But it is very important that men should not always be mentored by men and women by women. Mentoring based on interests, not gender, can help to change the culture because it can lead to greater understanding of the perspective of the “Other.” It can make a big difference when very able men mentor and guide young women, routinely and systematically, and vice versa. That said, it can sometimes be very helpful to have a mentor of the same gender; the important thing is to find the right fit rather than be doctrinaire about it.

For somebody with a valuable skill, it is possible to completely ignore the idea people strewn like beggars around the landscape, and have a good life just working on validated, low-risk mature ideas. The demand for good, big ideas isn't as high as people think, because of the simple constraint of execution bandwidth. One Einstein (a classic idea person) can occupy a couple of generations of more-skilled peers. This means a few idea people can basically meet the demand for interesting work from vast numbers of more talented and skilled virtuouso execution types.

Throughout history, the great majority of people never had to ask the question, what should I contribute? They were told what to contribute, and their tasks were dictated either by the work itself by a master or a mistress. Knowledge workers have to learn to ask that question based on an understanding and melding of their strengths and passions. And the question must be revisited periodically: If I were not in this career today, would I have gotten into it? If not, what am I going to do about it?

Russell Hochschild shows that for many professionals, "home" and "work" have reversed roles. Home is the source of stress and guilt, while work has become the "haven in a heartless world"--the place where successful professionals get strokes, admiration, and respect.

Bureaucracies tend to promote people who know how to do a job; infocracies will promote people who have a thirst for learning and are willing to let go of yesterday's "knowledge" in the fact of today's data.

One way to approach lifelong learning is to think about what's threatening your job or your company. Go find out about the thing that threatens you. Understand it. You might pick the wrong company, but what you will learn will always be valuable.

In the early stages of your career, you build advancement through your expertise, but as you get higher, more and more of what you do is managing. As that shift occurs, charisma becomes more important. The more your job requires an ability to motivate and inspire, an ability to bring about change, the more helpful it is to have charisma.

A lot of people are sort of living a lie, they're doing things they don't really believe in because they feel they have to, and that's very uncomfortable actuallyÂ… you sort of hate yourself for doing itÂ… and it's very bad for morale, very bad for productivity. I think that one of the talents of leadership is to make that happen as little as possible.

Here we are, we're supposed to be great, prosperous and successful countries and people are unhappy, not because they're badly treated, not because they're badly managed, but because they're actually not using their lives in the way that I think is fully productive. And I call this a sort of "corporate sin."

Someday your current job will be a line entry on your resume. Under the entry, you'll have two or three bullets to describe your major accomplishments. "Did a good job of doing what always was done" can't be one of them.

There is a lot of power in reflecting at the beginning of a new job on what you want the two or three bullets to be, and deliberately setting about building them over the course of your job tenure. Otherwise, you run the risk of having them simply be the incidental byproduct of what opportunities happened to come your way.

In 1969, in his book, The Peter Principle, Laurence Peter warned us that if we followed this path without question, we would wind up promoting each person to his level of incompetence. It was true then. It is true now. But, unfortunately, in the intervening years, we haven't succeeded in changing very much. We still think that the most creative way to reward excellence in a role is to promote the person out of it. We still tie pay, perks and titles to a rung on the ladder: the higher the rung, the greater the pay, the better the perks, the grander the title. Every signal we send tells the employee to look onward and upward. "Don't stay in your current role for too long," we advise. "It looks bad on the resume. Keep pressing, pushing, stretching to take that next step. It's the only way to get ahead. It's the only way to get respect."

These signals, although well intended, place every employee in an extremely precarious position. To earn respect, he knows he must climb. And as he takes each step, he sees that the company is burning the rungs behind him. He cannot retrace his steps, not without being tarred with the failure brush. So he continues his blind, breathless climb to the top, and, sooner or later, he overreaches. Sooner or later, he steps into the wrong role. And there he is trapped. Unwilling to go back, unable to climb up, he clings onto his rung until, finally, the company pushes him off.

Edward Lazear, an economist here at Stanford, came up with the [tournament model of careers]. If you think about a typical tennis or golf tournament, it begins with a bunch of people in the first round, whose winners then advance to the second round, etc. until you finally get to the end. In the initial rounds, you've got some people who are really good and some people who aren't. By the time you get to the higher echelons of the tournament, the people who aren't very skilled have been weeded out.

If you think about performance in organizations as being a function of motivation times ability - how smart you are and how hard you work - what makes a difference at the top level is effort; ability has been equilibrated. If somebody does 500 backhands a day and somebody else does only 100, then in the long-term, the person who does the more backhands is more likely to win.

In one of our studies, we found that effort and ability by themselves don't appear to explain much, but the combination really matters. In other words, people who work harder, who are smarter, are going to have greater success.

Most people focus on their weaknesses, not necessarily because they're puritanical, but really because they're optimistic. They are naively well-intentioned. I think the basic assumption that we're challenging...is that anyone can learn to be anything they want to be. What we can help people ...to know, is that you can't be anything you want to be. We can help people to know that there's a difference between talents, skills and knowledge. Skills and knowledge can and should be acquired, but talents -- your recurring patterns of thought or feeling or behavior -- are enduring, are resistant to change, are unique.

I think we can help educate the world that the most depressing thing to say to somebody is, "You can be anything you want to be." That's actually a depressing thought, because if you can be anything you want to be, then you're not unique, you're not different from me, you don't have unique hopes and dreams and talents, you're just a blank sheet of canvas.

Most people learn leadership skills by observing their current leaders, but this works only when they have competent leaders to observe. My advice is to seek out and find the very best leaders you can. Watch them, learn from them, get advice from them. Learn from the best because leadership skills will be a hot currency in the years ahead.

The work we do is supposed to reflect our talents, intelligence, and so on. Therefore, the meritocratic idea that you "make your own luck" is a very punishing one and explains many people's anxiety and depression over the work they do.

A society in which only extraordinary achievements are valued is setting most people up for a cruel fall. You're no more likely to become as wealthy as Bill Gates than a 17th-century peasant was to become as wealthy as Louis XIV of France. Give your employees realistic expectations and tell them you value what they do now -- not what they might become in the future.

When we can psychologically check out from our work, we call it a job; when we can't, we call it a career.

The famous concern for "legacy" among older execs often is little more than a tacit confession that the power and perks for which one clawed one's way to the top are no longer satisfying.

Experts generally agree that four traits are essential to predicting how a person will perform. Those traits are dominance, extroversion, pace (or patience), and conformity. If you understand which of those traits is most salient and how the other three factor in, you can identify the kinds of environments where a person will thrive. The logic works the other way too: If you can figure out which trait profile is right for a job and then hire people with that trait, you'll avoid a lot of frustration.

I think about fitting work in the same way we might think about other practices, often drawn from arts, games, or sports, like piano playing or baseball.

The first thing to ask is whether we have the right aptitudes. No aptitude, no fit. If you're tone deaf, music is probably not for you. This kind of fit is what society needs: from a social point of view, each person should do that job that his or her aptitude fits best. This way, tasks get done quickly and efficiently.

That's no small matter (how often do we wish to do what we are no good at!), but there is a second thing to ask about fit. There are lots of activities we might have an aptitude for, but cannot manage to identify with or enjoy. You might be very good at accounting.Yet you might not be able to think of yourself as an accountant, to take any enjoyment from the activity, to connect it in any deep way to who you are. Fitting work in the deepest sense means having an ability to realize and to enjoy the distinctive goods that your work offers. This kind of fit is what matters most on a personal level.

The image of perfect freedom neglects the fact that many attractive and enjoyable human goods require some discipline and practice. Our enjoyment of cooking or poker or baseball is amplified when we are good at them. It is hard to live a happy life if we develop no talent whatsoever. Becoming good at one thing precludes doing other things. The perfectly free life, with no roles, would not be a very happy one.

When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt.

The [work-life balance] problem...is that while success at work is largely rooted in achievement, success outside of work mostly isn't. The things most of us say we value in our nonwork lives -- simply caring and being there for others -- aren't a function of accomplishing anything per se. Contentedness in that realm is less a matter of doing more than of cutting back.

Obvious enough, isn't it? Life is about setting priorities and making trade-offs; that's what grown-ups do. But in our all-or-nothing culture, resorting to those sorts of decisions is too often seen as a kind of failure. Seeking balance, we strive for achievement everywhere, all the time -- and we feel guilty and stressed out when, inevitably, we fall short.

I don't know that if you follow your dreams, the money will follow.
I do know that if you follow your dreams, the money won't matter as much.
I don't know that if you serve others, you'll be rewarded financially.
I do know that if you serve others, you'll be a happier, more fulfilled person.