Bet on Yourself

Recognize, Own, and Implement Breakthrough Opportunities

Ann Hiatt

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781400220304
• Topic: Développement personnel
• Subtopic: Réussite personnelle

Take charge of your career and create a life full of learning, adventure, joy, and success utilizing these never-before-shared leadership principles Ann Hiatt learned working alongside the world's top tech CEOs—Google's Eric Schmidt, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and Yahoo!'s Marissa Mayer.

Whether you're stuck in your current job, starting your first job and wondering how you can use it as a steppingstone towards your dream career, or mid-career and wanting to finally be recognized for promotion or a leadership role, this book is for you.

For the first time, Ann Hiatt shares both the daily habits and long-game strategies she learned working side-by-side for decades with the giants of technology at Amazon and Google.

Through clear guidance and incredible stories, Bet on Yourself will teach you:

• How to define your abilities and speak up so that you can be recognized for the work that you do and the unique capabilities you bring to the table.
• How to create opportunities for yourself when options appear limited and build a purposeful career regardless of your seniority or industry.
• What it takes to build the confidence you need to build your dream career.
• How to exchange your frustration over not getting the recognition you deserve for an empowered, actionable plan for taking control of your professional identity and get promoted.

These tried-and-true methods to take ordinary opportunities and create something extraordinary, and the leadership principles that guide the work of these celebrity CEOs, are directly applicable to your goals.

With a few consistent, daily habits you can build a future that exceeds your wildest expectations. No matter the opportunities available to you in your particular community or career stage, there is a path for you.

CHAPTER 1

FOUNDATION BUILDING

I am a first-generation nonfarmer in my family. The fact that I have built a career in the most influential technology companies in the world, working side by side with the wealthiest and most powerful CEOs, is nothing short of shocking. I have always wanted to have a life and career of significance, but that dream has taken shape in unexpected ways.

The secret to happiness is learning to find joy in the process of doing hard things. I am lucky to have had this principle first modeled for me in my early childhood. My family history is full of stories of people who took very limited resources and, with a lot of hard work and creative allocation, created lives of joy and meaning. No one in my family has been significantly powerful or wealthy, but they consistently have exhibited a pattern of creating results that are greater than the sum of the parts.

I was taught early in life that there is exponential power in the combination of hard work and big dreams. When I look back at my upbringing, I see the ways in which I was prepared to survive and then thrive in my unexpected career.

These foundational principles can be applied to any life, goal, or growth stage to yield big results:

• Recognize the exponential power of hard work and big dreams.
• Create environments for growth.
• Embrace incremental growth.

No life is too small and no dream too big to be worthy of investment. Even if you’re at the beginning of your career and your current job in no way represents your dream job, this is the perfect moment to create a map for yourself so that you can recognize opportunities and seize moments for advancement that might pass you by if you aren’t watching and preparing for them. This is how you engineer serendipity!

In order to understand how my life could become successfully intertwined with the CEOs of Amazon and Google, it’s important to understand a bit about me and my background.

RECOGNIZE THE EXPONENTIAL POWER OF HARD WORK AND BIG DREAMS

I come from a long line of dreamers.

My early life shaped my future, of course, but I am only now coming to realize the ways and degrees to which that’s true. I am the firstborn in my family of seven children. My parents both grew up on potato farms in Idaho, where they also herded sheep. My great-grandparents emigrated from Scandinavia and Switzerland, dreaming of better opportunities in America and fully believing in their abilities to create a life of limitless possibilities in the New World.

Similarly, my dad, Glade, is also a man of big dreams. He saw the toll that the hard farming life took on his father and decided that the stress and heart attacks that awaited him in that life were not what he wanted. He and his three brothers are all incredibly smart. My dad studied accounting as an undergraduate, figuring that was a sure way of providing for a family in the future, but his heart wasn’t in it. He wanted to fly, but not just in any plane: he wanted to be a fighter pilot.

The chances of not washing out of pilot training and then being chosen as a member of the elite graduates who got to be fighter pilots were astronomically small, but my dad was determined and confident that he would beat the odds. His journey was an example of boldness, purpose, and bravery. He had to let go of everything familiar and make a big bet on himself—and it paid off.

I was born on MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, just after my father had finished pilot training and was chosen to fly the F-4 Phantom fighter jet. Being born into a military family forged something in me. My siblings and I grew up feeling we had no choice but to adapt to circumstance and to be self-reliant and brave in the face of unpredictable schedules, assignments, and events.

Goose’s Daughter

When I was a year old, my family was transferred from Florida to Anchorage, Alaska. It was the tail end of the détente period of the Cold War, and my father’s squadron was tasked with patrolling and protecting the airspace between Alaska and the easternmost part of the Soviet Union. Among my earliest memories is one of looking up into the sky from our backyard with my sister LaDawn watching the fighter planes overhead, and trying to guess which one was Dad.

While we were stationed in Alaska, a movie studio had commissioned a script about fighter pilots, and they asked the US Air Force if they could listen to cockpit recordings so that they could better re-create the way fighter pilots talk to each other. The Air Force gave permission and provided them with transcripts from my father’s flight squadron, the Hornets.

A few years later, when the movie was ready to be released, the Air Force had second thoughts: they grew nervous about the way pilots were portrayed, so they withdrew their permission previously granted to the movie producers to refer to their characters as Air Force pilots. The Navy, it turns out, didn’t have the same reservations, so the script was slightly changed. While the Air Force references were removed, they kept the original lingo and the call sign names of the pilots that were heard in the cockpit recordings.

That movie was Top Gun. My father’s military call sign was Goose, and I spent my childhood with Maverick, Ice Man, and others who are now minor legends because of that movie. I didn’t see Top Gun until I was in college because my dad didn’t like that they made his namesake a navigator rather than a pilot, or that they killed off his character. He did like that they emphasized that he was a good family man, which he is.

Something happens to you when you are Goose’s daughter. You learn to go after bold dreams even when everyone around you (you, too, sometimes) thinks they’re crazy. I learned to be purposeful and to work hard every day for a goal that might not be attainable but that was worth the risk to try. Most of all, I learned to be brave. My dad lost close colleagues in his squadron, men killed in training accidents while we were living in officers’ quarters on base. My mom told us of the terror she felt watching officers in full dress uniforms arrive in our neighborhood, and of all the wives opening their doors in growing horror, hoping that it wasn’t their turn, that the officers would not stop in front of their houses.

The experience instilled in me a drive to appreciate fully the value of every day and to be intentional in how I chose to spend my time. No day is to be wasted—not one. Every good morning kiss and hug—each and every one—is to be savored.

Creative Resilience

While my dad was fulfilling his childhood dreams flying multimillion-dollar jets and becoming a movie legend, my mom, Tammy, was at home, thousands of miles from her parents, siblings, family, friends, and comfort zone she’d grown up with in Idaho. But my mother has never been one to shy away from a challenge. She took after her parents, who were tireless farmers, active community members, and talented artists who enjoyed painting landscapes in their free time.

She planted these lessons learned on her Idaho family farm—of hard work, creativity, and community—deep into my childhood home in Alaska. She created a preschool program for our neighborhood to help us make friends and build a support system. She took ceramics classes and painted oil paintings inspired by the magnificent wilderness around us. She took us fishing and berry picking in the mountains with bells tied to our little shoes so we wouldn’t surprise any bears.

In those early years, I learned to take the initiative to create inspiring, enriching environments where others might see only limitations. My mom taught me to create extraordinary things from the ordinary.

There were unparalleled adventures as well as big challenges that came with my childhood. Both the nature and nurture sides of my early years cultivated important personality traits. Growing up as an Air Force brat shaped my personality and instincts. I learned to be resourceful in unknown environments, and with limited resources. Moving frequently taught me to be adaptable and (ideally) unflappable.

While shy by nature, I learned a love of adventure, exploring the unknown rather than being intimidated by it. In school I was never the one to raise my hand, though I very often knew the answer; over time I have learned to overcome my instinct to never say anything aloud until I had a fully formed, perfected idea. I’m definitely still a work in progress! Some of my natural qualities are my greatest strengths. Some I actively fight to this day.

My childhood is an example of learning to bet on yourself. My dad took a purposeful, calculated risk to leave his familiar farm life and submit himself to the judgment, failures, and challenges inherent in pilot training. My mother’s challenges came from the life circumstances of a military spouse. They both successfully used these challenges to fulfil their dreams, where others around them had been too afraid to even make an attempt.

Sacrifice and growth are inseparably linked. We have to be brave enough to let go of something we have now in hopes of something greater taking its place in the future.

This principle is illustrated well in Robert Pirsig’s philosophical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, where he describes the concept of the Monkey Trap. The trap is simply a hollowed-out coconut shell, filled with tempting rice, with a hole just big enough for a monkey’s hand to slip through. A monkey reaches in and fills his hand with rice, but his clenched fist is too big to pull back out. The monkey is effectively trapped by his own choice because he will not let go of the rice in order to free himself from the shell, which is chained to the ground.

Human nature is very similar. Often we are unwilling to let go of our unfulfilling jobs, relationships, or responsibilities because they’re familiar and seem less risky than letting them go in hopes that the sacrificed safety will be rewarded with something greater. Too often we find ourselves clutching a handful of symbolic rice and not realizing that we’re trading in our freedom for something that we cannot even enjoy.

Years later, when my dad made the hard decision to leave the military with the goal of spending more time with our family, we were three daughters with a fourth on the way. Dad would need to make a living, of course, so he enrolled in law school, also working part-time as a janitor to make ends meet. That was quite a comedown from his previous standing as an elite fighter pilot, but he was willing to make that sacrifice for the benefit of the future of our family.

This was another impactful example of the humility and wisdom required to let go of the seeming grandeur of an accomplished dream in order to open yourself up to a new aspiration. Joy and opportunity diminish if you hang on to old laurels too long. Your kinetic energy is drained when you are stagnant.

CREATE ENVIRONMENTS FOR GROWTH

My ambitions have always exceeded my natural abilities, and it wasn’t until recently that I discovered that this has been my greatest advantage all along. This imbalance forced me to fight for everything I really wanted, which made me accustomed to pursuing things that were difficult to achieve. I think if I had been born with any naturally great abilities, I would have rested on those gifts and not pushed myself to the extent necessary to go beyond them.

The comfort of the good can rob us of the drive for the exceptional.

My family’s next move halfway across the country changed the course of my life. After completing a judicial clerkship, my dad accepted a job offer with a law firm in Seattle—but my parents didn’t want to live in the “big city,” so they bought a house in Redmond, Washington, on Education Hill, where our elementary, junior high, and high schools were all within a short walk from our home. We had a big yard and a garden, which were very important to my parents.

Unintentionally that decision meant that I grew up in the epicenter of the new digital era, surrounded by the pioneer entrepreneurs and moonshot thinkers in the local tech scene during the eighties and nineties. My parents didn’t give a thought to the fact that the headquarters of what would become arguably the most successful companies in the world were just a short drive from our front door.

My role as the oldest sibling of seven has followed me into my adult life and even my career. I have always had to be very organized, a self-starter, and a peacekeeper. It was—and is—the only way to be heard in crowded, fast-paced environments.

My parents instilled in me their farm-raised work ethic and drive to aim for perfection and big dreams. From my dad I inherited my left-brained analytical skills and boldness in goal setting. From my mom I got my emotional intelligence, creative problem-solving, and compassion for others in times of struggle.

Overcoming Perfectionist Paralysis

I was a serious kid from the start and was self-critical from an early age. My standards for myself often exceeded those of my parents. I wanted top grades, to always be the lead in the school play, to be the perfect ballerina, and eventually to attend a top university, which would naturally lead me to a job with global impact.

At first the difference between my dreams and my natural abilities paralyzed me. It always felt like I had to work twice as hard as my peers just to keep up, and that made me self-conscious, doubtful, and willing to shrink into the background. Maybe that’s how everyone feels during their teenage years, but it was crippling for me. I had an internal drive to make up for a lack of standout talent by outworking everyone, but at first I lacked the confidence that it would make a difference. My mom used to set an alarm for 1:00 a.m.—not to see if I had snuck out with friends, but to be sure I had put away my homework and actually went to bed.

I had absorbed the lesson—too deeply, at times, I admit—of being purposeful in everything I did. I have always felt a burning for something more, and I imagine this is even more true for those who begin with few advantages and resources. I was like my dad, who started out by milking cows before daybreak and dreaming of flying fighter jets before he had ever laid eyes on one in person.

This crippling anxiety of never doing anything truly special or important might have been my fate if it weren’t for a very special teacher. My junior high choir conductor, Ron Mahan, was very influential in my life. He saw this fear in me and encouraged me to overcome it. He helped me move into a growth mindset, believing that my talents weren’t fixed and that with effort I could improve over time. At the end of eighth grade, which had been a particularly traumatic year of social anxiety for me, when I asked him to sign my yearbook, he instead pulled out a prewritten card and placed it inside.

The note encouraged me to approach every challenge with confidence rather than preconceived failure. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that I was doing that—self-sabotaging—and in effect sealing ...