I heard Lea Hickman, a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group and former product lead for Adobe’s Creative Cloud, give the keynote at the Technology Association of Iowa’s 10th annual Women of Innovation Awards at Prairie Meadows on Nov. 13.

Hickman said she was going to give a list of 10 things to keep in mind while navigating a career, but she cut it to eight because “I’m not done learning. And I probably wouldn’t have listened at the beginning of my career if someone had told me 10 things I should know. So let’s keep it at eight.”

Here they are: 

Never stop learning about everything. 
“I’ve worked with a lot of very smart, successful people. There has always been this common thread — the fact that they are intellectually curious. They are constantly learning about the world around them. They have this insatiable need to learn.” 

Hard work always wins.
“Growing up in a big, Catholic, Italian family ? I had three older brothers ? we kind of got labeled. One of us was the smart one, one of us was the talented one, one of us was the good-looking one. I was always the hard worker. If you don’t think you are smart enough, work smarter.” 

Don’t say anything that you wouldn’t want recorded.
“I don’t know if this is more for my three daughters or for this audience. I think this is especially true if you are an innovator in a larger organization. Sure, it’s fun to be snarky and sarcastic from time to time, but just make sure you are doing it about yourself and not about other people. Ultimately, it’s just going to hurt you. That is something, by the way, I learned the hard way.” 

Everyone faces obstacles; don’t let yours define you.
“Everyone has some obstacles to face. Don’t let those disadvantages or challenges define you. It’s just a waste of time.”

Be honest with yourself and others.
“I had to learn this the hard way. This is no big deal. Take time to do an accurate assessment of who you are, what you know, what your skills and what your doubts are, and then overcome them. It’s important to take stock of those things. And it’s OK to say, ‘I don’t know.’ ”

Learn how to take a compliment.
“This is something I struggle with. Say thank you. Be grateful. Someone took time out of the day to compliment your work, your accomplishment, to compliment you. This is especially important when you are a leader in a management team, because they aren’t generally only complimenting you, they are complimenting the work of your organization. It’s your responsibility to distribute credit. Don’t undermine yourself.”

Listen.
“Listen to the people around you. I listened to customer needs and translated this to my own life. This is where you really need to understand the problem you are trying to solve and not jump to a conclusion about what the solution is. This is actually stopping and pausing and listening.” 

It’s OK to make mistakes.
“You will learn more from your mistakes than from your successes. I feel like the first half of my career I was always touting my successes. The second half of my career, I have been touting my failures. The reason for that is that I have learned so much more from the failures. As a culture and as technologists and especially as innovators, we tend to take a very close and critical eye to deconstruct and take a postmortem on our failures, so we can understand what went wrong. I just think there is nothing more powerful than learning through those failures. Celebrate successes, too.”