Bill Hoogterp has spent decades advising celebrities, CEOs, and rising stars inside some of America’s most powerful boardrooms. Through his coaching firm, LifeHikes, he’s helped more than 700,000 professionals level up their communication and leadership skills and personally worked one-on-one with “thousands” of executives, many of whom appear on Fortune’s lists of the most powerful people in business.
And there’s one habit that Meta’s former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, and Hoogterp’s other top power-player clients share.
“I had this chat with Sheryl Sandberg, and we were joking around that we all need to be the CEO of our own potential,” Hoogterp tells Fortune.
The problem? “Almost none of us seems to want the job. We’re constantly kind of deferring to what the world wants and just reacting to everybody else.”
But what the top 1% do well, Hoogterp says, is they invest in themselves—and it’s something he says everyone should be doing if they want to elevate their careers. Especially Gen Zers, who are early in their working lives and stand to gain the most by consistently backing their own growth.
