Book Summary: “Work With the Best”
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Book: Work With the Best by Jay Yang
Reviewer: Bobby Powers
My 3 Biggest Takeaways
To find your next job, use the permissionless approach
- All of Jay's jobs have come from the same approach: "I didn't apply through a job portal. I didn't wait for someone to post an opening. I didn't send my resume into a pile of thousands and hope for the best (in fact, I didn't even have a resume). I identified the person I wanted to work with, figured out what they needed, did the work before anyone asked me to, and put it in front of them."
- Example: Jay spent 40-50 hours analyzing Noah Kagan's business, then sent him a pitch deck with what he needed to start doing differently with his social media. Kagan hired him.
Studying others is a cheat code—in life and work
- "The most successful people I know didn't figure it out on their own. They studied the people who came before them."
- "The fastest way to accelerate your career is to get into environments where your dream life is someone else's reality. They've already mapped out the terrain and can point out all the poisonous berries and where the fresh water is."
Find your unique skill and leverage it like crazy
- "There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities." -Ursula K. Le Guin
- Great question to find your superpower: What do people ask you for help with, even though you've never marketed yourself as someone who does that thing?
"Everyone knows that it's not what you know; it's who you know. What no one teaches is the how." -Jay Yang
Selected Quotes & Ideas from the Book
- "If a person knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable." -Seneca
- "A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance." -Hunter S. Thompson
- "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." -Edward Abbey
- "How do you beat Bobby Fischer? You play him in any game, but chess." -Warren Buffett
- "If hard work was the only answer, then the donkey would own the farm." -Anonymous
- "I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
- "To each, there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour." -Winston Churchill
- "Action produces information. If you're unsure of what to do, just do anything, even if it's the wrong thing. This will give you information about what you should actually be doing." -Brian Armstrong
- "To get what you want, you have to deserve what you want. The world is not yet a crazy enough place to reward a whole bunch of undeserving people." -Charlie Munger
- "Interested people watch obsessed people change the world." -Tim Grover
- "People say your 9 to 5 is for your current job and your 5 to 9 is for your future career, and I couldn't agree more."
- "One of the only true shortcuts in life is finding an expert and apprenticing under them." -James Clear
- "Where you live—what city, what country—has more impact on your well being than any other factor. Where you live is one of the few things in your life you can choose and change." -Kevin Kelly
- Kidlin's Law = If you write a problem down clearly and specifically, you have solved half of it
- "There's a lot of alpha in doing more than other people are willing to do." -Andrew Fine and Jimmy Johnson
- 3 Parts of any piece of content: Hook, Body, CTA
- "The hook is the first thing people see, hear, or read—and its only job is to stop the scroll."
- "For storytelling content, the best hooks drop the reader straight into the middle of the action. This is called in media res (Latin for 'in the midst of things'), screenwriters use this all the time and it works because it creates an immediate question in the reader's mind that they need answered."
- "Content that earns attention says obvious things in an unobvious way."
- "One CTA at a time...Pick ONE thing you want them to do and make that the only thing you ask for."
- For CTAs: "Be specific. Tell them who it's for, what to do, when to do it, and how to do it."
- NO: "Subscribe to my newsletter."
- YES: "If you're a marketer who wants to get better at cold outreach, I break down one example every Friday in my newsletter. Link in bio"
- 4 Aspects that lead to viral content
- Benefit = Why someone should care
- Relevance = Who it applies to
- Credibility = Why they should listen to you
- Perceived Effort = How easy it feels to consume or implement
- "Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any." -Orson Scott Card
- “In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.” -Benjamin Graham
- "The people who do remarkable things are almost always willing to be misunderstood for long stretches of time. Let the news headlines be wrong as long as the history books are right."
- "He who asks a question is a fool for a minute; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever." -Chinese Proverb
- "If you need a tool and haven't bought it, you're already paying for it." -Charlie Munger
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