Grow the Pie Over Slicing the Pie

As I progressed in my career, I fixated on increasing money - my salary, total compensation, etc.

This strategy of focusing on the dollar amount of your contribution works in the short term and in situations where I had direct link between my contribution and the result.

Many Hands in the Pie

Working at larger and larger organizations - the result may be tangible in terms of dollar amounts, the question of who is the ‘key contributor’ gets hazy. There are multiple teams, departments, functionalities, skills, specializations, etc. that make a product or feature.

Sure, without my part, that wouldn’t exist. Any one that contributed can say the same thing - everyone’s parts are important.

This attitude is a limiting belief - because that assumes the pie is a specific size and there’s only so much to go around.

You try to take a bigger cut of the pie when it’s a fixed size.

Grow the Pie

The better way of thinking is focusing less on the contribution of your dollar amount to the final result.

Focus on increasing the value of the interactions of those that you work with to get the result.

You can be the smartest person and have the secret sauce to the project, if others do not like working with you, they will find a way to work around you - even with sub-par results.

Deliver “value” - focus on improving the interaction and the collaboration with everyone involved and the result will become 10x better and the pie grows.

When the pie grows, everyone wins: they can all have a larger slice because the pie is growing bigger.

Sure, your contribution may not be “great” or “core” to the feature - I’ll still take a growing pie any day of the week over fighting for a larger slice of a fixed size pie.

Today, the slice may be “small” - grow the pie a little and next time, even the same slice, it will be bigger.