I know brilliant people who are miserable and "average" people who are deeply fulfilled. This contradiction has me questioning everything about how we define success. In today's Mentor's Corner, I want to challenge how we think about success and suggest a different way to measure whether you're "winning" at life.
This is Coached Weekly, my career notes where I share the tiny % of ideas that actually work in real careers. It takes 5 minutes to read, but could speed up your career by years. I write this myself (no AI) and I read your replies. —Rohan Mahtani (LinkedIn)
Want to log in to Coached or see your personality assessments? Login.
The 20-second Career tactic
I've coached people for a decade. Here's one idea that moves the needle. I teach it in 20 seconds.
Ask: "What does done look like?"
Before starting any task or project, ask: "What does done look like?"
The obvious reason is so you don't build the wrong thing. But the deeper reason is that a lot of work — especially in corporate jobs — has no defined finish line. It just keeps going.
And if nothing ever finishes, you have nothing to show. When promo time comes around, a list of things you completed is way more compelling than a list of things you're "still working on." Define done before you start, hit it, move on.
Heads up:
Working on your resume or know someone who is?
Don’t forget that you can get a free resume review here.
It’ll speed up your job search (or your friend’s).
Mentor's Corner
Insights put together by me. One practical lesson a week that will make a measurable impact on your career, delivered right to you — for $0.
If you're so smart, why aren't you happy?
What does it actually mean to be smart?
We usually measure it by achievement — degrees, job titles, income, how early you "made it." But Naval Ravikant has a definition I think about a lot:
"The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life."
By that measure, a lot of people who look smart from the outside are failing the test.
🧠 Smart at climbing, dumb at choosing what to climb
Most of us are optimizing for things we never actually chose. We absorb our goals from the world around us — parents, peers, culture — and rarely stop to check if they're actually ours.
Success has a scoreboard: money, titles, promotions. Fulfillment doesn't. You can check your bank balance anytime. There's no number for whether you're spending your life on the right things.
So we default to optimizing what we can measure. And if you're smart — meaning good at optimizing — you can spend a decade climbing before it occurs to you to ask whether you picked the right wall.
So — what would you actually go after if you stopped chasing what you absorbed?
🎛️ What are you actually optimizing for?
Passing Naval's test means getting conscious about what you're aiming at. Most people have never done this — they've just followed the loudest scoreboard.
Think of your life as having a set of dials. Money is one, and it matters — obviously. But there are others:
How much autonomy do you have over your time?
Are you learning and getting better at things you care about?
Do you do any creative or meaningful work — even on the side?
Are you around interesting people who challenge you?
How's your health and energy?
Do you have time for the people who matter to you?
Everyone's mix is different. The point isn't that any particular dial is wrong. It's that most people have never consciously looked at all of them and decided where they want each one set. They've got one dial at 10 and every other dial at 2, and they've never questioned it.
The actually “smart” move — in the Naval sense — is deciding what your mix should be, on purpose.
🔧 Adjust, don't reinvent
I run Coached and Resume Worded. My role has become mostly operations — hiring, strategy, meetings, writing these emails. But I make time to code every week, because coding/building things is what I actually love and doesn't feel like work. I didn't restructure my life. I adjusted one dial.
The practical version: pick one dial that's too low and move it this month. Just one.
If you want more creative work, find a way to incorporate it into your current role — or start something small outside it. You don't need to wait for your role to change.
If you want more learning, carve out a few hours a week for exploration + interests.
Something draining you? Figure out exactly what it is — it's usually one or two specific things, not everything — and start working on reducing it. Delegate it, automate it, or have the conversation you've been avoiding about it.
The key thing: schedule it. The default is always to keep doing what you're already doing — you have to actively protect the stuff that matters to you.
Small adjustments compound. A few dials moved a few points each can change how your whole life feels without changing your job, your salary, or your address.
🔎 Are you passing the test?
Three things I keep checking:
Interesting people. Am I around people who challenge me and make me think differently? The quality of the people in your orbit is one of the strongest predictors of both happiness and growth.
N.B: These don't need to be people IRL. Podcasts and books can serve as interesting "people" too.
Learning velocity. Am I getting better at things I genuinely care about? Not professional development for the sake of it. When you stop growing in directions that actually pull you, something goes flat, even if everything else looks fine. And AI makes learning very fun for me.
Energy. Am I energized or drained by how I spend my time? If the stuff you spend most of your day on consistently leaves you drained, you're pointed in the wrong direction.
🧠 Figure out your wiring
One of the hardest things about adjusting your dials is knowing where they actually are right now. We all have patterns in how we make career decisions — things we gravitate toward, things we avoid, choices we keep repeating — and most of it runs on autopilot.
Our research lab built a free tool called the Career Deep Read that tries to surface your patterns. You give it your LinkedIn URL and in a few seconds it breaks down your career wiring.
People have found it very useful — just a heads up, it can cut deep.
And if you want to go deeper from there, the rest of Coached has tools for working through a lot of what we've talked about today — figuring out direction, understanding your strengths, getting clearer on what fulfillment actually looks like for you specifically.
Enjoy!
Hopefully that’s a piece of advice you haven’t heard before. If you enjoyed this:
Forward it to a friend, family member or colleague. It does truly make a difference.
If someone you know is on a job search, tell them to check out Resume Worded. It’ll make their job search a lot shorter.
Speak soon,
Rohan Mahtani
Founder at Coached & Resume Worded
Btw, I like reviews. They motivate me to keep the quality high. Like this one:
You can leave one here. I’d appreciate it. Thank you so much.
🤭 In all unseriousness
A few laughs to keep you smiling until next week
🤣 Important: it’s 2026. You shouldn’t be writing your cover letter from scratch anymore. This AI cover letter tool writes cover letters for you. And no one can tell it’s AI (unlike ChatGPT).
Try it just once for a job you actually want — see how good it is for yourself. Takes two seconds to get a great cover letter (instead of the usual 6 hours!).
⚡ Try our career tools
How strong is your resume?
Find out your resume's score based on millions of real data points
Is your LinkedIn profile getting you rejected?
Our AI tool will fix yours in a couple of minutes.
a classic haha
If you’re working on your resume, get your resume score here. The tool will write you hiring manager-approved bullet points (unlike ChatGPT).
If you’re new here, join at Coached.com to get the next one.
