💡 My Assistant Resigned: Smart vs. Down-to-Earth People, The Four Years Newcomers Most Easily Miss in Their Careers
The company hired a group of fresh graduates with an average age of 25. Among them, the new assistant was a girl I personally recruited. She graduated from a prestigious university, was smart, lively, and had beautiful handwriting. She quickly learned everything from work procedures to interpersonal skills; she picked it up instantly.
I slowly started giving her tasks involving coordinating communications between various departments and branch offices.
💬 First Confusion: Why Always Trivial Matters?
She started making frequent mistakes. She was very nervous and came to talk to me. I encouraged her: “It’s okay to make mistakes; just do it your way. If you encounter problems, come ask me.”
Despite this, she came to me with deeper confusion, asking: Why was she always given these trivial tasks?
Her view at the time was: “I always feel that my abilities are not just for these tasks; I can do something more important.” I knew that she didn’t really listen to much of what I said then. I could only tell her: first, do your current work well, avoid making elementary mistakes, and then progress step by step.
📄 First Resignation: Six Months Lacking a Sense of Achievement
Six months later, she resigned for the first time. The reason was blunt: she had excellent grades for four years in university but found herself dealing with trivial matters daily after graduation, which gave her no sense of achievement.
I asked her: “Among all your current tasks, what is the most meaningless, most time- and energy-wasting task?”
She immediately replied: “Helping you paste invoices, then submitting them for reimbursement, then going through the process at finance, and then bringing the cash back to you.”
I smiled and asked her: “You’ve been helping me paste invoices for reimbursement for half a year now, right? What information have you gathered from this?”
She paused for a long time, then replied: “Pasting invoices is just pasting invoices. As long as there are no financial errors, what other information could there be?”
🌟 General Manager’s Experience: From “Pasting Invoices” to “Grasping Patterns”
I shared my experience with her: In 1998, when I was the General Manager’s assistant, one of my tasks was to reimburse the General Manager’s expenses. I didn’t just see it as a trivial matter; I realized: invoices are data records that reflect the expenses related to the General Manager’s and the entire company’s operations.
So I created a spreadsheet, recording all the data from the General Manager’s reimbursements with me, categorized by time, amount, place of consumption, contact person, phone number, etc.
Through this data analysis, I gradually discovered patterns in my superior’s business activities: for example, what type of business activity, what kind of occasions it often occurred, and what the budget usually was; the General Manager’s routine and non-routine public relations handling, and so on.
When my superior realized that the tasks I was assigned were handled meticulously, and even some information he hadn’t told me, I could process promptly and accurately, trust and rapport naturally developed. Based on this positive impression, he assigned me more and more important tasks.
I told the girl frankly: “I think your biggest problem is that you didn’t put your heart into it. In work that seemed simple and didn’t require much thought, you didn’t immerse yourself, which is why after six months, you feel you haven’t progressed.”
🔄 Subsequent Development: A Cycle of Changing Jobs
She withdrew her resignation letter and stayed for another three months, but eventually resigned. This time, I didn’t try to keep her.
Later, she often contacted me; she changed three jobs in a year, couldn’t stick with any for long, and each time said the new job wasn’t what she wanted.
After another resignation, she came to have dinner with me and suddenly said: “I think I understand what you meant before.”
🔑 The Golden Four Years of Career: Cultivate Habits, Not Immediate Achievement
In a so-called career, it’s hard to predict what job you will truly do in the future, or even if it will be related to your major.
Between graduating from university at 23 and turning 26, what’s important in these four years is not what you did, but rather:
- What good work habits you developed.
- Whether you adopted a serious, down-to-earth work style.
- How quickly you learned to accept new things, discover their inherent patterns, and master and handle them in less time than others.
With the above elements, you will grow into a trustworthy person. When you have established a foundation of trustworthiness and gradually demonstrate your diligence, intelligence, and meticulousness in your daily work, more and more job opportunities will come your way.
The reason is simple: who would want to spend three sentences or even half an hour explaining to someone who never understands, rather than choosing someone who can be clearly instructed in one sentence and successfully completes the task? Communication is also a cost, and this is something managers know best.
⚖️ Conclusion: The Choice Between Smart and Down-to-Earth
Most newcomers don’t show much difference in these four years. But the experience of these four years lays a crucial foundation for future career development. Many people don’t care about taking detours when they’re young, and many think that everyday tasks are nothing special that anyone can do well.
However, it is these simple tasks that gradually and subtly become the watershed for future development. The biggest loss of carelessly treating entry-level work is transforming seemingly simple administrative tasks into a long-term capability issue.
Smart people always don’t think their abilities are problematic. Over time, they will complain about bad luck, complain that ordinary people always get lucky breaks, and gradually affect their mindset. What is called unrecognized talent sometimes describes this situation.
Work needs a smart person, but work actually needs a down-to-earth person even more.
Between smart and down-to-earth, I would rather choose the latter. Being down-to-earth is something everyone can achieve, and it has little to do with innate conditions.
— Ren Huichuan, General Manager of Ping An Financial Group of China