What people see

Two events, which has the greater potential to significantly impact my career?

The first has been months in the making. I've been working with another scientist to develop a model that we can use to quickly assess the amount of drug in a new product. We finally got the model to work this week. There was no guarantee that our approach would work when we started the project. There were periods where I thought we were going to fail, but I had a sense that it had to work so we kept trying different tricks until we found one that worked.

The second event spontaneously emerged during a meeting to discuss our impressions of a candidate for an open position. Near the end of the meeting, I noticed that people were working hard to convince themselves that this guy was right for the job. He was probably going to get offered the position until it was my turn to give my rating. I decided to condense my thinking down to a single sentence. "We're working hard to rationalize that this guy is a good fit." The tone of the room shifted dramatically. Everybody felt the truth of what I had said. We liked him, but something about him just wasn't right.

I want figuring out how to get the model to work to be the event that defines me to the organization, but I sense that my comment will have more of a long term impact. My internal dialogue usually downplays the social/political aspect of my work life in favor of technical accomplishments. That's the wrong way to look at these things. The technical accomplishments merely offer evidence that you're competent. The social stuff determines how high you will rise. People see the social. They only hear about the technical.