 The first is a mindset. I want you to begin to see your employer as a client. Even if you have the stability of a contract and you have the regularity of payroll, I want you to imagine yourself as a freelancer. What would a freelancer be doing? They'd be pitching projects to their employer. If stuff leads to stuff, where do you want more stuff? Where can you be going and doing different things? Now, when people present their ideas to employers and people they work with, managers, supervisors, they tend to do so in a bit of a throwaway sense, even if they have the best idea in the world. They kind of quickly draft an email and send it over, or they'll mention it at the very end of a meeting. This might sound a bit extreme, but I want to encourage you to begin to see all of your internal communication of this sort as a copywriting exercise, your copywriting. You have to make what you're doing persuasive. You're having to really sell them on this vision. Now, in my first talk at the 21 Convention, I offered an email formula, a three-step email formula that you could use to construct emails to someone that you admire and want to work with. And it just so happens that the three steps work very well in this scenario, so I'll recap them here. The three steps are dream problem solution. What is the dream that this person has? Why are they getting up out of bed in the morning? And if you're working with someone, I would hope that you're intimately familiar with what that is and you know they're a big driver. The next problem, this can otherwise be said as opportunity. What is the opportunity that you've spotted? And then solution. How can you present yourself as the solution based on past work that you've done as the best candidate for taking this project forward? The second tactic is to study the history of your industry. Most people don't read. And if you become a reader and you become a voracious reader, you'll give yourself a tremendous advantage in everything you do. Now, this is something that self-improvement writers and speakers have been saying for centuries. So I'll just quickly read from the 1910 book or essay How to Live on 24 Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett. He writes, you are a bank clerk and you have not read that breathless romance disguised as a scientific study. Walter Badger's Lombards Treat. Ah, my dear sir, if you had begun with that and followed it up for 90 minutes every other evening, how enthralling your business would be to you and how much more clearly you would see human nature. So become a reader and study the history of your industry, not just the ancient history many centuries ago, but the recent history, what have competitors been doing in the last weeks and months? But number three, don't just confine yourself to books. How can you go out and speak and perhaps even interview experts of industry and professionals? Going back to our role model of Sheryl Sandberg in a 2011 New Yorker profile, it's noted, in January of 1991, Larry Summers became the chief economist at the World Bank. And that spring, he recruited Sandberg as a research assistant. At the time, the World Bank was deciding whether to bail out Russia. Someone asked, Summers recalls, whether a bailout in 1917 could have saved the country from 70 years of communism. He posed the question to Sandberg. What most students would have done, Summers' notes, is gone off to the library, skimmed some books on Russian history, and said they weren't sure it was possible. What Sheryl did was call Richard Pipes, who is a leading historian of the Russian Revolution and a professor at Harvard. She engaged him for over an hour and took detailed notes. The next day, she reported back to Summers. This is the kind of thing you ought to be doing in your career. The obvious question that arises is, don't have that many Harvard professors on speed dial. What do I do? And to that I say, we live in a truly phenomenal time right now, where you could, if you wanted, look up just about any Harvard professor or any other university, for that matter's email address, in just a few clicks. If you wanted to find the email address for the editor of the New Yorker, you could do so. If you wanted to write to Jeff Bezos, you can find an email address that he personally reads. So we live in this quite remarkable time. The first step is just having the nerve to ask and to capitalize on that. But to separate yourself and really give yourself a shot at getting a worthwhile and meaningful response, it's important to convey and imply the research you've done on somebody. Most inboxes of people are filled with unconsidered, atrocious, long, rambling emails. If you can stand out by writing something that's concise and asks incisive questions, you will give yourself a shot at standing out. And if you make this a regular habit, you'll be pleasantly surprised at how often people get back to you. The fourth tactic is to work hard. This sounds a bit obvious. It's a bit like, eat your greens. But I want to read a few more quotes that will hopefully inspire it and really bring the point home. From Ashley Vance's biography on Elon Musk, if you're at Tesla, you're choosing to be at the equivalents of the special forces. There's the regular army, and that's fine. But if you're working at Tesla, you're choosing to step up your game. From Brad Stone's The Everything Store, a book on Jeff Bezos and Amazon, it's not easy to work here. When I interview people, I tell them, you can work long, hard, or smart, but at amazon.com, you can't choose two out of the three. I'm going back to Elon Musk. An employee could be telling Musk that there's no way to get the cost on something down to where he wants it, or that there's simply not enough time to build apart by Musk's deadline. Elon will say, fine, you're off the project, and I am now CEO of the project. I will do your job and be CEO of two companies at the same time, and I will deliver it. Kevin Brogan, who was an early SpaceX engineer, says, what's crazy is that Elon actually does it. Every time he's fired someone and taken their job, he's delivered on what the project was. Now, to conclude on this point, initiative really is a muscle. It's something that you develop over time, so don't feel intimidated that you have to go and immediately start pitching 90 different projects. Instead of turning to that person next to you, could you just have the restraint or the self-reliance to go and see if you can figure it out yourself? Now, I'm not saying never ask anybody for help, but just don't make that your default. Allow that to plant the seed and go on and become somebody who really embodies a tremendous level of initiative.