FIRST: Don’t wait for people to tell you what to do!

Most new employees assume that their manager is the source of truth in all things related to the company and their career — that somehow by simply following their instructions they will achieve upward momentum. Although this is generally a really good starting point, it is isn't the best approach. Doing only what your manager tells you to do limits your options to the set of things your manager a) knows about and b) wants you to work on. The trick to fast advancement is in aggressively expanding your available options.

But how? Story time.

I vividly remember my first day on the job. My manager was out on vacation and had totally forgotten about my arrival. By day two I’d run out of onboarding documents to read. And my manager was still out, probably laying on the beach somewhere. On day three I decided I’d had enough waiting around.

I scheduled meetings with my peers, all the line managers in the organization, the general manager, and the highest ranked team members I could find in the employee address book that would talk to me. If you’re ever new to an organization, make sure you do this early. There is a narrow window in which people will give you “new guy” meeting access and a free pass for dumb questions.

During each of these meetings I always asked, “what would you do if you had an extra person to help out?” I guarantee that if you ever need ideas to get ahead, at any point in your career, a 5-minute conversation with your peers or manager starting with this question will pay off because of how quickly it surfaces unmet needs. Ask it to yourself right now and you’ll come up three ideas in the next minute.

By the end of that first week I’d collected a list of requests longer than my arm: bug fixes, internal tools, cool project ideas, documentation tasks, etc. One guy named Kevin had an extremely good idea: “Rewrite the Word spell checker so that it works in more languages than English.” With Kevin’s encouragement and approval from my manager (of course!) I jumped at the opportunity.

Let’s just be honest.

If you ever see a red spellchecker squiggle in a Microsoft product, that’s probably me helping you out. The code I wrote ended up shipping in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, SharePoint, Exchange, and a bunch of other Microsoft apps. As a result, it’s used by a billion people around the world in more than 100 languages. Even better, the spellchecker provided me with a network and a personal brand. Anyone from around the company that wanted proofing tools in their app eventually found their way to my office.

Real talk: this project landed me about 3 promotions and it all started with that simple question. Now, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea — I’m skipping over all the late nights of coding, long meetings, cans of Mountain Dew, pouring through MSDN articles with broken sample code, scrambling to fix build breaks. Getting all those promos took years of effort and you will need to put the hours in no matter what. But my point is that I didn’t sit around waiting for the opportunity, I got out and found it myself.

Every day we are surrounded by endless opportunities to get ahead, if we’re only willing to stop, ask, and maybe learn something new.