The Fastest Way To Get Promoted (Career Cheat Codes)

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
Just to give you a sense of this, right? I'm 24 years old. I'm the youngest person in the company. I'm the newest hire in the company. And six months later, I got named CEO.
That's pretty good. Pretty good, right?
Welcome to a new segment that we're calling, it's like a Q&A, but we're not calling it a Q&A, we're calling it Questionable Advice.

**Sam Parr** (0:29)
Does that mean that someone shouldn't follow the advice or that we're just answering questions and giving advice?

**Shaan Puri** (0:35)
It means whatever people need it to mean. It's people asking questions, us giving advice. The advice is a little bit questionable as well, right? Because we're not telling you what necessarily you should do, we're saying what we've done that works for us, it may or may not work for you. It may not be the best way, it's just the only way we know.
And so today, the question we wanna answer is actually different than usual. Normally, we're always talking about starting company, starting business, being a CEO, being an owner, being an investor.
But today it's about what happens if you're not there yet? What happens if you're inside of a big company? So how do you stand out inside of a big company? How do you become a superstar employee? How do you become an employee that is just god tier and that opens up a whole bunch of doors for you inside of a company?

**Sam Parr** (1:21)
All right, everyone, we have a quick ad for HubSpot, but I wanna let you know, I actually use HubSpot and I use their sales tool, which is what this ad is for. HubSpot sales platform, it makes it just easier to sell stuff, to do it faster, to look at your pipeline, to see what sales are gonna happen. Just prospect to cold outreach and get more customers faster and easier. Plus it's easy to learn and free to start. So you guys can check it out, hubspot.com/sales.
How many employees have you had like that?

**Shaan Puri** (1:49)
Every company, there's always one or two. There's always one or two that are just like so clear. And what I did was I basically plucked, what are the things that they do? Like what are the things I remember that they did that stood out to me, as well as a couple of things I did after we got acquired and we went to Twitch. What are some things that I tried that actually I felt worked?
Because I had to spend two years inside of a bigger company for the first time in my life and I experimented. I tried a whole bunch of things.
I'm not going to talk about the ones that failed because those were embarrassing or not useful, but I will share the ones that worked.

**Sam Parr** (2:22)
Dude, what's crazy is, let me add two things, backstories to our perspective on this. One, you had someone who worked at Monkey Inferno and all the other companies that Monkey Inferno started.
Well, you actually had a few interesting people. The first interesting person was Steve Bartlett, who's famous for his agency and his podcast, diary of a CEO, I think. The second person who's even more interesting is Farcon, a guy who started a company that's worth tens of billions of dollars. I was shocked that that guy would consider you a coworker. That was an amazing get. The second point I want to add to this person, and you probably, you actually had a few other people that were, you know, Jason Hitchcock. You had a few other people that are wildly successful.
The second thing to add to this, one of the best compliments that I've received from you in the last probably 60 days is you texted me and you said, How on earth did you get Steph Trong? And I forget who else you named. How on earth did you brainwash them into working for you for as long as they did? And so we've each had a handful of superstars who, I don't ever use the word work for me because oftentimes it doesn't, I hate that. It's not that, we work together on something and I'm only gonna be able to have them for a short amount of time.

**Shaan Puri** (3:33)
That's principle number one.
You work with, you don't work for. And it's actually a pretty big mentality shift, which is working with somebody is a partnership, it's an agreement, it's a mutually beneficial thing versus I work for you is a, there's a dominant person and there's a person who just basically takes orders and does whatever they have to do based on the task list. And you never want to be the work for. The work for is a servant essentially, whereas working with is a partnership.