For networking with someone much ‘higher up’ than you:

• Never apologize for not being or having done something. Don’t focus on the negatives (or what you perceive to be negatives). You’re already very accomplished, serious, motivated, and obviously smart and highly educated and highly skilled

• Look for where your interests overlap (in my case: maybe entrepreneurship, biotech, clinical trials) so you can steer the conversation to common ground (usually they’ll steer the conversation, but it’s good to have a Plan B if they don’t take the lead)

• Review their bio and make a list of a few open-ended questions, but don’t worry if you never get to ask them. The goal is to just get them talking

• Last but not least: the easiest and best tip for any conversation is to get them talking about themselves and their work. People love talking about themselves and they perceive people who let them talk about themselves as most likeable

• Send a BRIEF follow-up email to thank them for their time and to remind them of anything they offered to follow-up with you about (such as people they offered to introduce you to or information they offered to find and send). Do this as soon as possible after you talk and always within 24 hours

• Respond first to introductions that someone makes on your behald rather than letting the other person do it. Keep it brief and focused on scheduling a call/zoom/meeting— just suggest 2 or 3 dates you can do instead of leaving it open-ended, which risks losing their attention and creates extra work for them to figure it out.

Career Advice

•In his fantastic book The War of Art, Steven Pressfield discusses “shadow careers.” People pursue these shadow careers to avoid embracing their true calling. For example, people become lawyers in the entertainment industry to work closely with those who they wish they could be—writers, directors, producers, actors, and so on. They choose careers adjacent to what they really want. Many academics and journalists wish they could have been creative writers or novelists (including the renowned behaviorist B.F. Skinner), but chose their conventional paths for fear of failure.

Presentations

•Clear table of contents with logical flow of the presentation’s ideas

•Don’t just list limitations or unsolved problems, broach ideas on how to address the limitations & map out potential future projects that build upon your presentation

Other kinds of outputs

•Harvard resume templates [link]

•Value statement: 3-6 page document with - market context and business opportunity, defined problem, specific customer user and distributing segment you are solving for, leading/lagging KPI’s, revenue opportunity analysis

•Amazon 6-pager: no PPT's in meetings (laptops are frowned upon), print copies for the meeting, read during first 20 minutes then challenge positions and dig through data rest of the time. Anybody can read it and get caught up on topic without extensive background knowledge, narrative over bullet-points. Structure: Introduction > goals (metrics) > tenets (your North Star) > state of business > lessons learned > strategic priorities and how to execute, end on positive forward-facing sentence but avoid conclusion fluff.

•Reviewer response: for every complaint you need to also say ‘in response to the critique, we have added… to the manuscript… and here’s where to find it’

Islam

•going on umrah tips (link)

Islam and Business