Five Rules for Not Getting Stuck in Your Career
November 18, 2025
I’ve recently been going through old advice columns that I wrote for The Athletic once upon a time. As I mentioned last week, I am not at all sure why people sought out advice from a fake football coach on the internet, but it was fun while it lasted.
I found an exchange I had with a guy named Shane who was dealing with some career stagnation. I thought I’d share that Q&A again in hopes that it might reach a new generation of Shanes, particularly those of us who work remotely.
I hope Shane was able to turn things around, or at least maintain his sanity. Shane, if you’re out there, drop me a note and let me know how it’s going (hopefully from your fancy new office).
The following appeared in The Athletic on October 27, 2017.
Dear Faux Pelini,
I’m hoping for some career advice as I write to you from my small cubicle. I’ve been stuck at the same job for over eight years now and can’t get a promotion. Do you have any advice to those of us stuck on the bottom of the organizational chart?
Signed sincerely,
Shane H.
Dear Shane,
It’s time you learned the Five Rules for Not Getting Stuck in the Same Cubicle for Eight Years:
Rule #1: Make a plan. If you hate the job you have, you need to make a plan for not doing it anymore. It’s OK to hate your job. It’s also OK to keep a job you hate for a little while. What’s not OK is to hate your job without a plan to not have it.
Rule #2: Be indispensable but not irreplaceable. You need to be good at your job in order to get the next one, but make sure you are NOT the only guy in the building who can do your job. If you are the only guy who knows how to keep the financial books or organize the fruit section, then your boss won’t want to move you on to bigger and better things — it will be a pain in his ass to replace you. If you’re a grad assistant in charge of cutting up game film, be the best Film Cutter-Upper in the building, but don’t be the only guy who knows how to work the machine.
Rule #3: Don’t complain about your job, ever. In fact, don’t complain about anything you choose to keep in your life. If your shirt is itchy or your girlfriend is a liar or your job sucks, either get a new one or shut up about it. Word gets around, and nobody wants to promote a guy who complains about things he could fix if he wanted to.
Rule #4: Don’t become great at something you hate. If you do something enough times you will become good at it, even by accident. But just because you are good at something doesn’t mean you will like it. Just ask Nick Saban – he may be the best college football coach in America, yet he hates himself and the media and probably you. So be very careful what you get good at. Choose your skills; don’t let them happen by accident. It is a wise 12-year-old who sucks at unloading the dishwasher.
Rule #5: Don’t forget why they hired you. Until they promote you or you quit, do the actual job they hired you to do, and do it well. If it becomes boring, too bad. If it’s hard, too bad. You don’t have to do your current job forever, but you do have to do it until you have a new one. It’s what you signed up for. You’re not getting promoted if you become lazy at your current job.
Good luck, Shane. Post these five rules on the wall of your tiny cubicle and go make your plan.
Each week in Squirreled I’ll drop links to four stories. Each one should be (1) useful, relevant, weird or otherwise interesting, (2) off the beaten path of the internet, and (3) free to read. The longer the story, the more captivating it needs to be to make the cut. We all have attention spans to manage.
This Week’s Links (click the headings; excerpts in italics)
Aliens might have different rules than us. Physics courses may look totally different in alien schools, but because we’re selfish jerks we assume all creatures in the universe do things the homo sapiens way.
From a physicist’s point of view, it might seem like arriving at the presently known laws of physics is an inevitability for any alien civilization that becomes at least as advanced as we are. But is this necessarily true, or could it be another example of our human-centric bias: where we take what we’ve accomplished on Earth and view it as an inevitability for any similarly-advanced species that might exist elsewhere in the Universe? It’s worth considering that realizations, epiphanies, and breakthroughs that we consider as “inevitable” might not have necessarily occurred in the same way for other intelligent civilizations.
Mr. Pibb is coming back. It’s about time — America’s most underrated soft drink is returning from the dead, just in time for the holidays. I had no idea it had such a rich and controversial history.
The revived Mr. Pibb will include 30% more caffeine than Pibb Xtra. Mr. Pibb was first introduced as a competitor to Dr. Pepper in 1972. At this time, the soft drink was called Peppo. But that same year, Coca-Cola rebranded to Mr. Pibb after Dr. Pepper sued the parent company for trademark infringement. In 2001, Coca-Cola discontinued the Mr. Pibb brand, replacing it with Pibb Xtra. The revamped soft drink was marketed as having stronger cinnamon and cherry flavors than its predecessor.
Honestly I think we need a new crutch word. You aren’t imagining it — everyone really does say “honestly” all the time. Frankly, I am sick of it. We need to do better than this.
The use of “honestly” has boomed since about 2000, according to a database tracking the evolution of English. The more information — and disinformation — that flies through the World Wide Web, the greater people feel the need to express authenticity. “Phrases like ‘not going to lie’, ‘to be honest,’ ‘if I’m being honest,’ ‘let’s be honest’ — all of these figurative phrases have become part of our speech,” Brennan says. “And I think that’s in parallel with everything that is happening in the world, [the] conversation about credibility.”
The last penny may be worth $5 million. America’s final pennies were minted last week, and you will soon be able to buy the last one for around $5 million. This would be the worst return on investment in the history of finance but at least you’d never be completely broke.
It turns out that the five final pennies made in Philadelphia were minted with a special omega mark on them. They’ll remain uncirculated and go up for auction by the government at some unspecified time in the future. Some estimates out there put the auction value of each of the five pennies at anywhere from $2 million to $5 million, with the very last of the last pennies possibly hitting that $5 million mark.
OK, back to work.