More Career Advice That Survives the Plant Floor
A couple of weeks ago I ran the first nine of Ryan Holiday's "37 Pieces of Career Advice I Wish I'd Known Earlier" through 25 years of capital projects, plant floors, and turnarounds. The verdict then: more translated than I expected, some needed reframing, one I argued with directly.
This is part two — points 10 through 19. Same test. Holiday's examples come from talent agencies, marketing for a publicly traded apparel company, and building a publishing business. Mine come from shutdowns in Fort Saskatchewan and ops reviews in Red Deer. The examples don't match. The operating principles do.
Here are ten more, with one I'd tell you to ignore.
10. Work, family, scene. Pick two.
Holiday got this from the writer Austin Kleon over lunch in Austin: your creative output, your personal relationships, and your social life — balancing all three is impossible. Pick two, or you'll have none.
The industrial version is brutal in its honesty. During a turnaround, "scene" is the first thing gone — and it should be. The owner-operators who try to run the plant, coach the kid's hockey team, and keep up every business-association dinner during a four-week shutdown don't do any of the three well. They just get tired and resentful. Pick two for the season you're in. Then pick differently next season.
11. Lengthen your timeline. It always takes longer than you think.
Holiday opened a bookstore and learned what every operator already knows: it always takes longer than you expect. He calls it Hofstadter's law — even when you account for the law, you're still surprised.
I don't need to sell this one to anyone who has scheduled a tie-in. We pad the timeline, then blow through the padding. The lesson isn't "estimate better" — you'll still be wrong. The lesson is to build a business that survives the overrun: cash reserves that outlast the delay, client relationships that tolerate it, a team that doesn't fold when week six becomes week nine.
12. All success is a lagging indicator.
This is the one that should be tattooed on every plant manager's office wall. The good stuff and the bad stuff are both downstream of choices made long before. The margin you book this quarter was decided when you bid the job, hired the crew, and set the schedule months ago.
This is most of what I do for a living, so I'll keep it short: if you only watch the result, you're watching the wrong number. The result already happened. Find the upstream input — the leading indicator — and manage that. By the time the lagging indicator moves, the decision that moved it is cold.
13. Get close to those at the center of things.
Holiday quotes Lyndon Johnson: the way to get things done is to get close to the people at the centre of power.
Here's my push-back — the one I'd stop a foreman from following without a hard caveat. On a plant floor, "get close to power" curdles into politics faster than almost any advice on this list. I've watched capable people spend their energy managing up to the site manager instead of fixing the line, and it works right up until the day it doesn't — a reorg, a new boss, a sale. Then the whole strategy was sitting on one relationship.
Johnson's instinct isn't wrong: proximity to decisions matters. But in industrial operations, the durable version is proximity to the work, not to a person. Be close to where the real problems get solved and the right people will find you. Make yourself a courtier and you've built a career that one personnel change can erase. (Hold that thought — point 19 is the honest version of this.)
14. Get on the inside of your craft.
Robert Greene's metaphor for mastery is moving from the outside of something to the inside. New job, new field, new sport — you start as an outsider. You put in the reps, you learn every component, and eventually you're inside it, working on intuition.
Every great operator I know is inside their process. They can hear when a pump is about to go. They know which weld will fail inspection before the inspector does. That isn't talent — it's years of refusing to stay an outsider on their own plant. If you're still reading the equipment off the manual after five years, you've been present but not paying attention. Get inside it.
15. Focus on effort, not outcomes. Just make contact with the ball.
Give your best effort, make contact with the ball, let the rest take care of itself. Holiday borrows the baseball framing: you control the swing, not the result.
Operators feel this one in their gut during a bad stretch. You can run a clean shutdown — every procedure followed, every check made — and still get burned by a casting flaw nobody could see. If you tie your sanity to outcomes you don't fully control, the variance will break you by year ten. Tie it to the quality of the swing. Process you control. Outcomes you influence. Know the difference or burn out learning it.
16. Learn whose judgement to trust.
Holiday's hardest-earned regret: going into a business his wife warned him against, explaining to her why her gut was wrong, and watching it become a nightmare. The thread through most of his mistakes — not listening to the person who knew him better than he knew himself.
Every operator has that person. A spouse, an old partner, a foreman who's been on the floor longer than you've owned the place. The skill isn't being right yourself — it's knowing whose "I've got a bad feeling about this contractor" to take seriously even when you can't see what they see yet. The expensive mistakes in my career all have the same shape: someone whose judgment I'd earned the right to trust told me, and I explained why they were wrong.
17. A job is a trust fund you've earned.
Holiday kills the trope that a day job steals from your real ambition. He wrote three and a half books while running marketing for American Apparel. A job, for someone coming up, is a trust fund you've earned — it funds the thing you're building.
For the you this cuts two ways, and the second one matters more. Yes, the steady contract or the anchor client funds the bet you actually want to make. But also: stop apologising for the boring core business. The bread-and-butter fabrication work that pays the bills isn't beneath the exciting new product line — it's what buys you the runway to try it. Respect the trust fund. Don't resent it.
18. Learning is priceless. Take the access over the money.
Greene used to nag Holiday to submit his hours, because to Holiday the paycheck was an afterthought — the real return was access: watching a real pro work, getting his questions answered.
This is the single best piece of advice on this list for a young person on your crew, and most owners get it backwards. The 24-year-old should sometimes take the role with the operator they'll learn the most from over the one that pays a few thousand more. And you, as the owner, should know that the mentorship you offer is worth more than a raise you can't afford — so offer it deliberately, not by accident. The access compounds. The extra few thousand gets spent.
19. Build redundancy into your relationships.
Holiday's Hollywood career ended when one manager took a dislike to him. The fix Greene gave him: you had one patron, one ally. You need several. Don't be dependent on a single thread or a single vote of confidence. Build redundancies.
This is the honest version of point 13 — and where I'd land instead of "get close to power." You wouldn't run a critical line on a single point of failure with no backup. Don't run your career on one either. If your whole position at the company rests on one champion — one site manager, one owner, one client contact — you're one reorg away from starting over. Spread the load. Cultivate trust across the operation, not up a single chain. Redundancy is just as much an operating principle for relationships as it is for equipment.
You're probably thinking: this is a lot of soft stuff for a guy who builds margin.
Maybe. But every one of these points is about how decisions actually get made and how careers actually survive contact with reality — which is the same thing I get paid to fix when a plant's results stop matching its effort. The soft stuff is the upstream input. See point 12.
Nineteen down. Eighteen to go.
One next step: Look at your own position this week and find the single thread — the one relationship, one client, one champion your career or your business is quietly resting on. Then start building the second one. (Point 19. The one that saves people.)
Further reading:
- Mastery — Robert Greene (Viking, 2012). The "outside to inside" framing in point 14 and the apprenticeship logic in point 18 both come from here. The most useful book on the list for someone still learning their craft.
- Steal Like an Artist — Austin Kleon (Workman, 2012). Short, sharp, and the source of the "work, family, scene" tradeoff in point 10. Read it in an afternoon.
- Gödel, Escher, Bach — Douglas Hofstadter (Basic Books, 1979). Where Hofstadter's law in point 11 lives. Dense, but the law alone has saved more project schedules than any planning software.