Before the title

There’s a line I keep coming back to, loosely attributed to Alex Karp, that I think about more than most business advice: be useful before you have a title.

It sounds simple. It isn’t. Because the entire architecture of modern ambition is built in the opposite direction. Get the title. Get the credential. Get the position. Then be useful. We optimize for legibility first and value second. We want the role before we’ve done the work that makes the role inevitable.

But the most indispensable people I’ve worked with operated differently. They didn’t wait for permission to solve the problem. They just solved it. They didn’t ask whose job it was. They noticed the gap and they filled it. And then one day someone looked up and realized the org couldn’t function without them, and the title was just a formality. A receipt for a transaction that had already occurred.

That’s the Karp posture. Don’t pitch yourself. Be so embedded in the outcome that removing you would cost more than promoting you.

This works because of a principle most people understand intellectually but rarely practice: value precedes recognition. Always. In every domain. The person who gets promoted isn’t the one who asked for the promotion. It’s the one whose absence would create a visible hole. The question isn’t do they know my name. The question is would they feel my disappearance.

Paul Graham wrote once that the best way to get startup ideas is to notice problems you personally have. The same logic applies to careers. The best way to become essential is to notice what’s broken and fix it without being asked. Not because you’re angling. Because it’s broken and you can see it and it bothers you and you have the ability to make it better. The motivation matters. People can tell the difference between someone who’s building leverage and someone who’s genuinely bothered by inefficiency. One gets promoted. The other gets managed.

But here’s where this gets interesting. And where Karp’s principle extends beyond the office.

The same dynamic runs through every meaningful relationship you’ll ever have.

Think about the people you trust most. Not the ones who announced their loyalty. The ones who demonstrated it before you asked. The friend who showed up at the hospital without being called. The partner who noticed you’d gone quiet and didn’t demand an explanation but just sat closer. The mentor who made an introduction you didn’t know you needed because they’d been paying attention to your work when you thought no one was.

None of them had a title. No one appointed them to the role of person who shows up. They just did. And over time, their presence became structural. Removing them would leave a hole you couldn’t fill with a job posting or a swipe or a networking event.

That’s love, by the way. Not the romantic comedy version. The operational version. Love as usefulness. Love as the consistent, unglamorous act of noticing what someone needs and providing it before they have to ask. It’s not exciting. It doesn’t make for good content. But it’s the thing that actually holds.

I think about this in the context of relationships that failed. Not just mine specifically. Everyone’s. The pattern is almost always the same. Two people meet. Chemistry is immediate. Titles are assigned quickly. Boyfriend. Girlfriend. Partner. The label arrives before the infrastructure. And then, three months or six months or a year in, someone realizes the title is load-bearing but the foundation isn’t there. The name existed before the work did. And the whole thing collapses not because the love wasn’t real but because it was declared before it was built.

The relationships that last are the ones where both people were friends with each other before they had a name for what they were. Where the care preceded the commitment. Where someone was already showing up, already paying attention, already filling gaps, long before anyone said I love you. The I love you, when it came, was just a title for a job they’d already been doing.

I never understood the rush to label it. Because by the time someone asks me what are we, I've already answered. I answered when I picked up the phone. When I stayed on it for three hours listening to something I could have ended in twenty minutes but didn't because they needed to finish the sentence and I needed them to know they could. I answered when I learned their order without asking. When I remembered the thing they said about their father and never brought it up until the night they needed me to. The title was paperwork. And I've never understood why people need the paperwork before they'll believe the work.

Be useful before you have a title.

In business this means: solve the problem before you’re asked. Build the thing before you’re hired. Demonstrate the value before you negotiate the comp. Not because you should work for free. Because the leverage of having already proven yourself is worth more than any negotiation tactic. You’re not asking for a seat at the table. You built a chair and carried it in and everyone saw you sit down and thought of course.

In relationships this means: don’t declare love. Demonstrate it. Don’t announce loyalty. Just be there on the Tuesday when it matters and the Sunday when it doesn’t and the Thursday when nothing is wrong and your presence is just a quiet, unremarkable fact of someone’s life. The most romantic thing you can do is become someone’s infrastructure so gradually that they don’t notice until you’re gone.

And in life more broadly it means: stop waiting for permission. Stop waiting for the credential, the approval, the title, the invitation. The invitation doesn’t come to people who are waiting for it. It comes to people who are already in the room, already working, already useful, and the host walks over and says how long have you been here? and the answer is long enough.

There’s an unglamorous truth underneath all of this. Being useful is boring. It doesn’t scale virally. No one makes content about the person who quietly fixed the spreadsheet, or noticed the client was unhappy before the data showed it, or remembered to ask about someone’s mother. Usefulness is invisible labor. It’s the operational backbone of every company that works and every relationship that lasts and every friendship that survives the decade.

And it requires something that most ambitious people resist: the willingness to work without recognition. To add value in a room that may not applaud. To show up before the title and keep showing up after.

Karp built Palantir into one of the most consequential companies of its generation not by optimizing for optics but by solving problems that were genuinely hard in ways that were genuinely useful to people who genuinely needed them. You can debate the politics. You can’t debate the posture. He was useful. The title followed.

I think most of us know this intuitively. We just don’t like it. Because being useful before you have a title means tolerating the gap between what you’re contributing and what you’re being credited for. And that gap can feel like injustice. It can feel like being overlooked. It can feel like doing someone else’s job while they get the applause.

But the gap is the job. The gap is where trust gets built. Not declared. Built. Brick by brick, by showing up when no one’s counting and doing the work that no one assigned and being the person who, when they finally get the title, makes everyone in the room think: what took so long?

That’s the goal. Not to ask for the title. To make the title feel late.