SaaS 102 #4 How to Grow Your Career with a Growth Mindset

How long has it been since you last looked at the moon?

A few days ago, when returning home, I took advantage of some good weather to look up at the moon and the stars. It was the first time I had done so in a while. The same day at work, a colleague decided to leave the company 😥, but there was also someone who had previously left who decided to return 🤩. All these things together made me think of this saying:

Shoot for the moon🌙. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars🌟.

It’s true. If you shoot for the moon, even if you do miss, you’ll land among the stars. But if you shoot for a bottle and miss, you’ll just hit thin air.

This made me want to write an article about how, over the past few years, I’ve seen members of our team think about things in ways that could perhaps be approached differently. How can we make better choices when setting goals in life or making career choices? And how can I myself make better business decisions?

The greedy algorithm

Simply put, a greedy algorithm is a decision-making process that, at each step, always selects the choice it judges will create the most immediate benefit.

Actually, we use the greedy algorithm regularly in our daily lives. For example, if we’re at a crossroads and we want to get to the street corner diagonally opposite us, we’ll take whichever crossing turns green first, and then make a 90-degree turn and take the next crossing. That’s the greedy algorithm.

Speaking of daily choices, it’s pretty natural for us to use the greedy algorithm when making choices. After all, it’s a comparatively simple method, and life is full of fast, confusing changes. So often we feel like the best we can do is make the choice we think is most beneficial at each step of the way.

But looking at it another way, the greedy algorithm is essentially a very short-sighted way of doing things. This is because it doesn’t guarantee the long-term result will be the most optimal. All it looks at are short-term results. This is illustrated below:

If our goal is to maximize the total value of all the nodes we pass through, then the figure above clearly shows the shortcomings of the greedy algorithm model. If we have no understanding of the bigger picture, but just do what provides the most immediate benefit at each stage, then we won’t take the route shown in green which leads us to the number 99. Understanding the bigger picture helps us move effectively towards our goals.

Using the greedy algorithm to consider career choices and decide the value of a company

When deciding which section of an intersection to cross first, the greedy algorithm actually does a pretty good job. It usually gives good results, and even if the greedy algorithm gets it wrong, at worst you’ll be waiting a few extra seconds.

But if the decision facing you is to do with your career path development, you might want to take a few steps back and think before using the greedy algorithm. In real life, if you really want to get the best overall results, you sometimes need to make decisions that don’t give you the best short-term benefits.

Sometimes you need to squat lower to give you more leverage to jump higher.

Looking at the examples below about career choices and stock market valuations, we can see clearly the limitations of the greedy algorithm:

1. Should a 20-year-old join a small team in a tough startup environment, or a stable, large company offering a high salary?

I love to read autobiographies because they all contain the story of someone’s life packed into a book. When successful people write about their first job and the effect it had on them, they very rarely write about the salary. They usually write about things other than money, such as opportunities to learn, relationship building, gaining technical understanding, or improving their business sense. And they write about how those things then influenced their later career direction, and how they used those early experiences to help them find their direction and aim for the moon.

So going back to the decision of whether to join a large or a small company, the decision is not just about differences in salary. There will also be differing benefits in terms of experience and opportunities to grow. The decision facing you shouldn’t be just about chasing material benefits. The most important thing to consider is where you want to be in the future.

Each job you have will belong to a certain profession and industry. People who know where they want to go won’t just focus on the job itself. They will set their sights further and wider, viewing multiple aspects of the job in the following order:

1. The job duties and responsibilities
2. The department they will work in
3. Other departments in the company
4. The company
5. Other companies
6. The industry

They will do this to increase their understanding and expand their related knowledge. Viewing a job this way will also help them develop their ability to view the whole playing field. They can then see themselves, and the choices they currently face, from a more macro, long-term perspective.

But when you ask young people, a lot of them only focus on the immediate salary. It’s like they’re huddled over an abacus, hurriedly calculating short-term benefits. So few people remember to take a break from looking down at the abacus and take a few moments to look up at the moon.

2. Fast, short-term growth vs. long-term value creation

If you were looking to invest in a company’s stock, which company would you want to choose after looking at the graph below?

Along with the experiences and challenges I’ve been through in the past few years, and through communicating with many people older than myself, my view of how we reach success has changed.

It’s not like I thought it was when I was younger; we don’t travel towards success in a linear fashion. We can progress a lot in short snaps of time, but before that happens, we need to build up our abilities. We need to make a lot of right decisions and a lot of wrong decisions.

We then need to come across the right opportunity. When that happens, we can use everything we’ve learned to progress quickly, and on those rare, one-off occasions, we can appear to others to have outstanding abilities.

When deciding which company to invest in, many people will only look at the past company history, and which company is bigger or better at the present point in time. Very few people will ask which company will be better in the future and why that is likely to be.

SaaS companies are excellent examples of long-term value business models. In the short term, SaaS companies certainly make less than traditional companies that sell software as a one-off purchase. For example, individuals can subscribe to the SaaS version of Adobe Photoshop for just under $21 USD per month. That’s much less than it would have cost in the past to make a one-time purchase of the Adobe Photoshop software.

Remember the graph from the start of this section? If we zoom out on that same graph, it looks like this:

The first graph we saw only showed the part in the green box on this second graph. Both companies started at the same time, and when they’d just started, the company shown in blue appeared to be doing better.

But the two companies differ strongly in their long-term plans. The company shown in red is more focused on creating long-term value.

A lot of people have difficulty understanding and believing this concept. That’s because they’ve never stopped to look up at the moon, instead just looking down at what’s right in front of them.

Summary

The main principles I hope readers can take away from this article are:

1. Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.
2. The greedy algorithm is a short-sighted way to make decisions. It doesn’t guarantee that long-term results will be optimal, and is only focused on short-term results.
3. The most important thing about your career choices before you turn 30 is that they help you decide the direction you will take to shoot for the moon.
4. Success doesn’t happen in a linear fashion. First, you have to accumulate ability over a period of time. Then when the opportunity strikes, that’s when you can use everything you’ve learned to speed towards success.
5. Get rid of one-dimensional ways of thinking that only look at single variables. Learn to step outside yourself and look at your life, and the decisions you face, from a long-term, macro perspective.

There’s actually no such thing as the best decision, only the most suitable one. At our company, we strongly believe creating long-term value is the most suitable path in the SaaS industry.

I hope that you are the same as me. You work hard but also remember to take time to look up at the moon.

Aim high, fly high! 🚀

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I'm Teddy, Co-Founder & CEO of AfterShip, SaaS 102 is a series of articles where I share my experience in SaaS startups.

We are looking for great SaaS sales talent and welcome you to join us at careers.aftership.com.

(Article translated by Joseph O'Neill)