When you’re starting off in the workforce, your boss can make or break your experience. But sometimes, you get something from your boss you didn’t expect – good advice.
Here, people share the most memorable thing their boss ever said to them.
My Masters supervisor told me this:
You say yes a lot, start saying no once in a while. Go home and play your video game.
I have a bad habit of trying to impressing people. I would go to such great lengths to impress people that it often impacted my mental and physical health.Whenever I was given a task, my intrinsic and immediate response would be, Yes, I will get it done in two days.There were times when I couldn’t complete that task in two days. Although the task-giver wouldn’t worry about it much, but I would feel guilty for not completing it.
What will he think of me? What if he is angry that I couldn’t do it? I shouldn’t have given him a time span. STUPID. STUPID. STUPID.
I would spiral into overthinking, so much that it would upset my stomach.My supervisor gave me a similar difficult yet important task. I wanted to impress him with my skills.The harder I tried, the more the model failed. I tried and tried, praying for it to work, but it never did. Supervisor comes to me and says,You say yes a lot, start saying no once in a while. Go home and play your video game.
Mandeep Singh
If people arent ready to listen, wait until they realize they have a problem and step in with the solution.
This is particularly useful advice for people who can see farther into the future than those leading them can.
The VP that told me this is a brilliant business mind (with repeated industry recognition). I learned a lot from this person.
Dawn Mitchell
One of the most important lessons ever.
After I watched him teach a high school math class my soon-to-be boss asked if I thought I could do that and I said yes.
He handed me the chalk there and then and said, Good, the group coming in needs to have the same lesson. Show me. I must have turned white (I was 20, never having gone to teachers college) because he said, Dont worry, with long pants on, they wont see your knees shaking.
That was the beginning of my teaching career, which led to running a union, heading HR management and ultimately public speaking – in other words, the first step to overcoming debilitating shyness that Id felt all my life till then.
Dave Crisp
He said Yes, yes, doc, I understand. People die, I feel their pain, but they have to pay the balance of 50,000 naira
The incident: While working as a young doctor with a senior colleague in 1999, we had a patient brought in the night. She was an elderly woman, about 75, in diabetic ketoacidosis, a potentially fatal and difficult to manage condition. Anyway my boss asked for a deposit of 100,000 naira, about 1,000 USD. In todays economy, should be about 5,000 USD. The family and relatives deposited 50,000 that night and we admitted her and commenced treatment. I left after about two hours, since I stay far away, while my boss stays on the premises…
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When I came in the next day, the lady had died. I felt bad and expressed my sad feelings to my boss. The statement above was his response. I was shocked at the audacity to ask the grieving family to pay another 50,000 naira. I felt he was greedy. I left soon thereafter to join the Air Force medical services.
Taught me that private medical practice is first about profit and the business side. Secondly, to practice medicine dispassionately.
Ayodeji Alfred Ogbonda
My boss once told me, Make a decision and stick by it. Later whatever happens, we will face it together. But you are so hesitant to take a call. It should either be a yes or a no, I won’t take maybe for an answer. That is what you need to do in every aspect of life. First, make a decision. Don’t be confused about making it. Never be in the maybe zone.”That is when I realized what makes leaders different from team members; their ability to make a decision and stick by it.
I realized, we are only more afraid of making a decision than implementing it. We want to make the best decision possible, thereby, delaying the decision altogether.
We dont realize that the decision has to be made and then, made best. You cant take the best decision at all. The emphasis should be on making any decision, either right or wrong and then facing the consequences without any fear…
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For example, you want to call that guy/girl but are afraid of what that person might end up telling so you postpone calling that person and eventually as days pass by, you end up not calling. We end up putting ourselves in the maybe zone. We are so confused with making the call that the decision takes so much time.
Just a simple call takes so much effort and planning; imagine the confusion about other things right from job, career, marriage to food, ice cream and even deciding clothes to wear, the mundane life itself has many maybe zones…
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One should therefore take conscious efforts to make a decision and stick by it. Dont delay the decision on the whole just for the outcome. Ponder over something only for a while and then make it happen; good or bad, just stand by it and it will do wonders.
It will eventually help you understand what matter the most to you and you will end up learning a quite a bit from the wrong decisions. Just be prepared enough to face the worst, it makes you mentally strong.
Krithika Ruparelia
When you get a chance for a management role supervising people, take it, even if the work youll supervise is not your favorite thing to do.
My boss, the first experienced guy from the pharmaceutical industry at the startup where I worked. He gave me this perspective when I was resisting. I was from a research background in earlier companies and had never followed a product all the way through to the market.
I was a scattered guy. Good science scores, good language skills, intellectually competitive, etc. My boss wanted me to tuck in from being such a smartbutt and do something important by bringing some new pharma products into reality. The best thing I could do to help the project was to apply everything I had to inventing and improving a manufacturing process that needed to be highly reliable…
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I had been in tech and individual support roles, hanging out with highly educated types and enjoying people whose science knowledge was beyond mine and inspired. Still, I thought of my work life as narrow.
When I got a fairly unstructured new situation where lots of methods had to be created and lots of processes had to be monitored and improved, I suddenly had…task variety!
It was a revelation. My distracted personality was suddenly an asset. I began to realize that I could manage a team of people with expertise greater than mine and help them make better decisions for the project than they might have made on their own, because of the information and perspectives that I had and they didnt.
Harold Fethe
My boss said it to our oil company client: You told me you wanted the best people on your project. That would be her (points to me). If you want a male, it will have to be our second best.
It was in the early ’80s. I was assigned to a several hundred million dollar refinery project. The client had just yelled at my boss that he want THE BEST people in our engineering office assigned to his project, but when he heard it was going to be me his response was I dont want a darn woman on my job.
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To which my boss replied You told me you wanted the best people on your project. That would be her (points to me). If you want a male, it will have to be our second best.
Ive subsequently written about this event in several published articles. We women have to work twice as hard to prove ourselves than our male counterparts. It felt good to be supported by my boss in this way. It ended in my getting the job. But sadly, the oil company executive subsequently harassed me for two years trying to ask me out when he had a wife and children at home. Disgusting! Sadly this is still going on.
Deborah Fisher
Its their emergency, not yours. This was the advice given to me by my platoon Sgt. before deploying to Afghanistan. I was a combat medic. Keeping calm under pressure was absolutely necessary. Ill never forget that statement. Simple, pure, real.
P. Ryan Chester
My boss (in a large company with about 100,000 employees) once told me to watch all the people higher up in the chain of command. If you dont like them they will probably be gone before long, and if you do like them they will probably also be gone before long. He observed that the higher up you are, the more likely you are to be removed from your job and either sent to another one or asked to resign. And if you are sent to another job, theres a good chance it will be a sideways move or demotion rather than an promotion. In other words, the higher up you are, the riskier your job and the greater the chances of being sacked.
I found this to be very good advice. Although there were exceptions, the advice was generally right. In the corporate hierarchy there are only a few top level positions and there is plenty of competition for those positions, so its a bit like playing king of the hill.
Dennis J Frailey
“There are things in life which you know, and there are things in life which you don’t know. But there are things in life which you don’t know that you know.”
It never occurred to me the gravity of this quote, he simply meant always expect the unexpected, and never assume that you know everything!
Avinash Seth
After my first project at my first paid job as a management consultant (until then I had been a scientist in academia), my boss said to me,What I am about to say might seem counterintuitive but heed my advice.
“You are naturally gifted when it comes to numbers. Which is why you should NOT focus on working on such projects. Do the ones where you need to develop your other skills like evaluating industry research and preparing client presentations.
“Because if you get boxed in as a guy who specializes at numbers and financial modelling – the firm partners will keep staffing you only on such projects and you wont advance until you have all skill boxes ticked off.
I did not heed his advice…
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And I paid the price by getting branded as one of the modeling monkeys at the firm. I mean I enjoyed every bit of it, but it didnt help that at every annual review it was the same story Youre great with numbers and financial models, not so good with presentations and other qualitative stuff. Sorry, no promotion.
This boss finally told me that I didnt have much of a future at the firm (I was one lousy management consultant, to be honest) and that I would be better off going into finance and banking.
I still am a modeling monkey today to the point where I even write down all my notes in Excel when meeting other executives…
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But at least in the world of finance that isn’t considered to be an insult, and is rewarded very handsomely in monetary terms, to put it somewhat mildly.
The irony is that the first time my boss suggested that I work in either corporate finance or investment banking, I exclaimed Oh come on now! I’m smarter than that.
He replied, That’s irrelevant. What matters is what you love doing. You are a natural with numbers and calculations in a way that isn’t common. I should know since I studied at MIT. Now go into finance. You will thank me someday for it…”
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Both pieces of advice which that man gave me at the start and at the end of my tenure with that firm were bang on the money. I ignored the first one but paid attention to the other.
We still keep in touch because he is both one of the wisest as well as kindest men that I have known in my professional life.
Allen Lobo
This is an excerpt from a conversation I had with my Associate Director at my first job back in 2014:
Me: “Im putting down my papers sir. Things have not been as Id expected. My manager didn’t stand up for me when he was supposed to and when I’d wanted him to. Everything’s going wrong and I don’t know what to do about it.”
Boss: “Do you have a girlfriend?”
Me: “Not really. But yes, I am close to someone.”
Boss: “Can you say that everything is absolutely perfect in your relation with her, just like you had imagined it to be?”
Me: “Well, I don’t think that any relation can be 100% perfect. There are always a few hiccups here n there, but we both try and work on these kind of issues…”
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Boss: “And what about your job? Do you see where I’m going with this?”
I was speechless for a few moments. Though I was so stuck on my decision at that time, there is a part of me that still wishes I’d understood what he wanted to make me understand back then.
Your job is no different than your relations. If things are not working, youd have to make an effort to make em better. You just can’t expect everything from the other side and not put an effort from yours. Not in your relation and not in your job.
Anuj Narang,
During the first project I handled as project manager few years back, I screwed up something that may cost the company’s reputation. I was so stressed but my boss helped me and said
What’s the worst can happen? At the end of the day, its just a job. Nobody died. Of course accompanied with how we can do better next time.
But those words keep echoing even now whenever I’m afraid to do something. Whats the worst can happen?
M. Rendy Haruman
Im sorry, I put you in charge of this project, and I promise I will never second-guess you again. It was 1989, and I was 21 years old. The company I worked for was providing a service at a trade show that has since become standard in the business, but we were the underdogs and at the time we were the first ones to try it.
We had a semi truck that would be packed with goods to be driven to this trade show; we were in Colorado Springs, and the show was a major annual event that still occurs, changing cities every year. In 1989, the designated city was Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My job was fairly straightforward: put everything that our department would need to successfully handle any business that we got for the new service wed be providing (which was grading/authentication/certification/encapsulation of rare coins on site) in one corner of a specific room. The people loading and driving the truck would deliver it to where wed be doing our work at the convention center. Pretty easy, right?…
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Enter a production manager. The guys driving the truck had seen the quantity of stuff I was piling up in the room, and they complained to her. Wed never done this before, and surely I was grossly overestimating what would be needed, and they didnt want to spend hours loading, unloading, and then repeating the same to bring unused material back home. My boss was relatively new at his job, and so was I, and they had been doing this for years, and never had seen anything like this from our department.
My boss asked me to go look at what our production manager was complaining about with him. There! she pointed. And your boy apparently isnt done yet! Its too much stuff. My boss turned to me, and asked why I planned to bring all this stuff the the show…
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As politely as I could, I replied, in front of our production manager, You asked me to do the job so we could service whatever business we get. I think this service will be very popular, and its easy to bring this stuff now compared to trying to get it when we need it 2,000 miles away with only two days of show left. If its a problem, Ill come in myself at night and load it in the damned truck, and Ill do the same with whatever is left over in Pittsburgh when were done.
My boss turned to me and said, Im sorry. I put you in charge of this project, and I promise I will never second-guess you again. Then he pointed to my accumulated pile and told our production manager, I expect that this and whatever else he puts there will be delivered to our work area at the convention center, and I dont want to hear anything more about this…
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We got far more business than anyone had anticipated at the show; it felt great to say that every time my boss came to me and asked me how much longer we could hold out I was able to say go get more business and well get it done. We blew whatever pre-show projections that management had made out of the water, and serviced every last single customer on time, right there on site. And the guys that loaded the truck had very little to load up to bring back home.
My boss quit a couple of years later after the company was sold and the new owners moved us from Colorado Springs to Columbus, Ohio, and I quit a couple of years after that and have worked for myself for the past 25 years. My old boss from that job is still one of my very best friends, and Id do anything for him.
Don Bonser
Comments have been edited for length and clarity.