Career advice from Barack Obama - "Learn how how to get stuff done"

For years Joel Spolsky has been saying the best people to hire are the ones who are smart and get stuff done. Steve Martin is quoted as saying the secret to becoming successful is to “be so good they can’t ignore you”. Cal Newport took that line and used it in his book that talks about building “career capital” by being reliable and getting stuff done.

The other day I came across a clip of Barack Obama talking about exactly the same thing:

I could not agree with the advice more.

By the way, the clip comes from a longer interview on the LinkedIn series This Is Working which is different to Obama’s Working docuseries on Netflix.