Career advice nobody told you: You have to demonstrate excellence in everything you do. Your income scales proportional to the amount of excellence that you're able to demonstrate. Strategic incompetence is a lie. You don't get to pick and choose when to show up, because the world will ignore your best and judge you for your worst. Everything matters. Every single thing. Top performers show up with energy and enthusiasm for the little things just as much as they do for the big things. If you're in the top-10% of performers, there's no ceiling for what you can do. But the self-awareness to identify where you currently stack up, and adapt to the honest feedback on it, is very rare. If you're in the top-10%, you know it. If you're not, figure out why and fix it.