Build your career on dirty work

https://staysaasy.com/career/2022/09/11/Dirty-Work.html

The Dirty Work Theory: The lamentable work that many people avoid are great places to look for high impact, low hanging fruit.

Whenever people ask me for advice on career growth, I share what has worked reasonably well for me: find a growth company, one that really needs you to get work done, and then tackle the unpleasant work that everyone avoids. I think this is a broadly applicable path:

• High-growth matters because at an exponentially growing company you’re first in line for exponentially more (and larger) opportunities. When growth is high you also win by doing, rather than winning by getting ahead politically.
• Being at a place that needs you to get work done is essential - the more they need you, the more you’ll have a whole community of people trying to help you crush it.
• The final bit is often the most surprising - look for the nasty things people avoid.

The first reason that you should be looking for lamentable challenges is that the less people trying to do something, the more low hanging fruit there is. … However, it’s important to not only find low hanging fruit, that fruit must also be worth picking.

The second reason you should look for this kind of work, is that any work that is bad enough that it’s got a reputation, or that it’s the topic of commiseration, is something that is high impact if you can fix it. Making a whole bunch of people’s problems go away is a big win no matter where you work and no matter what the thing is. Much like the classic movie Field of Dreams, imagine there’s a little voice whispering to you: Ease Their Pain.

The final thought: becoming an expert in dirty work is wildly differentiating. The more you learn to navigate the messy, human, frustrating problems that everyone else avoids, the more you see the forest for the trees, the more that ability shines a light on a whole host of issues that seem totally broken and wildly tractable.