The Top 1% Mindset: How High Performers Think, Lead, and Thrive

This ad is not shown to multipass and full ticket holders
JSNation US
JSNation US 2025
November 17 - 20, 2025
New York, US & Online
See JS stars in the US biggest planetarium
Learn More
In partnership with Focus Reactive
Upcoming event
JSNation US 2025
JSNation US 2025
November 17 - 20, 2025. New York, US & Online
Learn more
Bookmark
Rate this content

What separates the top 1% of performers in tech from the rest? It’s not just talent or long hours – it’s how they think, lead, and operate daily. In this talk, I’ll break down the mindset shifts, micro-habits, and decision-making frameworks that set world-class engineers and leaders apart.

Whether you’re an engineer aiming for staff level or a manager growing into executive leadership, you’ll learn:

  • The 3 core philosophies top performers live by (with real-world examples)
  • How to create leverage instead of just working harder
  • Why clarity beats hustle – and how to gain it
  • How to build your personal operating system for consistent growth
  • The surprising truth about confidence, visibility, and influence

Backed by coaching 100+ engineers and leading teams across LinkedIn, Netflix, and Salesforce, this session is packed with actionable insights for anyone ready to play at the next level.

This talk has been presented at JSNation 2025, check out the latest edition of this JavaScript Conference.

FAQ

Clarity is more important than hustle because it ensures that your efforts are aligned with strategic goals. It helps in avoiding burnout and focusing on tasks that contribute to personal and professional growth.

Engineers can use systems to create predictability in their work by setting up recurring actions and automating tasks. This reduces reliance on willpower and ensures consistent results even on low energy days.

The concept of 'leverage is bigger than effort' means that hard work has diminishing returns, while leverage can multiply your results. This involves creating systems or processes that save time and effort for yourself and others.

Building a personal operating system involves treating yourself like a product, organizing inputs and outputs, and reflecting on weekly progress. It includes setting clear goals, protecting time for deep work, and using prompts to guide daily and weekly actions.

Visibility and influence are crucial because they ensure that your contributions are recognized and valued. This can be achieved by documenting work, sharing knowledge, and consistently building trust and communication within the team.

Engineers can shift their mindset by focusing on leverage, building systems, seeking clarity, and treating themselves as products. This involves choosing intentional actions over mere effort and consistently aligning work with strategic goals.

Engineers who get promoted quickly often focus on building a mindset of clarity, leverage, and systems rather than just working harder. They align their tasks with strategic growth, increase their visibility, and create systems that multiply their impact.

Confidence is built through consistent action and visibility. It is a result of taking initiative, sharing achievements, and receiving recognition, ultimately leading to greater influence and career opportunities.

The leverage flywheel is a concept where actions taken once provide ongoing benefits. It includes code leverage, people leverage, and platform leverage, allowing engineers to create sustainable impact and efficiency in their work.

Naz Delam
Naz Delam
12 min
16 Jun, 2025

Comments

Sign in or register to post your comment.
Video Summary and Transcription
Top 1% talent in tech focuses on mindset, performance over hustle. Clarity, systems, leverage key for career growth. Systems create predictability, leverage compounds impact, leverage flywheel for long-term success. Build personal operating system, treat yourself like a product, focus on clarity for success. Build confidence, visibility, influence for success. Think leverage, not effort. Optimize career intention. Drive work with purpose.

1. Key Strategies for Tech Career Success

Short description:

Top 1% talent in tech focuses on mindset, performance over hustle. Clarity, systems, leverage key for career growth.

Why do some engineers in tech get promoted super fast into leadership or technical roles while others stay stuck, even though they're technically brilliant? My name is Naz Dalam and today I'm here to share with you the one big lesson I've learned in my career, which is how does the people on top 1% talent in tech perform, lead, and execute on a daily basis? In this talk, you will learn about the framework to build that mindset in yourself.

I've reviewed hundreds of resumes and coached engineers from Microsoft, to Meta, to Netflix, and I can tell you this, the biggest leaps in people's careers don't come from grinding harder, it comes from thinking differently. Quick show of hands, how many of you feel like you've been working harder than ever but it's not getting where you're getting that you're noticed or you're promoted? This talk isn't about hustle, it's about performance. You will learn today that is how it is to shift this mindset, install micro systems and lead with leverage, just like the top 1% in tech.

Know that elite performance don't follow the fame playbook, they rewrite it. But they all tend to live by a few universal philosophies that I would want to walk you through these core philosophies that the top 1% follow. Number one, clarity is bigger than hustle. Hustle culture is overrated, movement isn't progress. At Netflix, a mentee of mine was working 60 hours a week and was on the verge of burnout. We introduced a system to audit his goals every Friday. Within six months, he got promoted, not because he worked harder but because he worked smarter with more focus.

Remember, weekly focus filter, it can help you build a mental triage system. You can use it every Friday, Sunday evening to evaluate whether your time and effort are aligned with a strategic growth. Ask yourself three questions, is the task or project helping me grow new skills? Is this increasing my visibility and influence in the team and organization? Is this for creating leverage, which is automating, multiplying value or saving time and cost? If the answer is no to all the three, you either delegate it, defer it or deprioritize it. This filter helps you redirect your energy from being busy to being impactful. Over time, this practice becomes a compass guiding your weekly execution toward long-term career acceleration.

2. Strategies for Career Growth in Tech

Short description:

Systems create predictability, leverage compounds impact, leverage flywheel for long-term success.

Number two, systems are bigger than willpower. Talent is unpredictable. And as a leader, I've learned systems create predictability. I had another client use a one-person barrier system, log one career or skill win daily. It revived their mindset from an imposter syndrome to quiet confidence. System habit loop, what is that? Build systems for recurring actions. Create a weekly learning goal and block one hour, only one hour to focus on it. Set up a Friday weekly wins, review where you track your highlights. Automate daily habits with tools like Notion, calendar, Trello or things even chatbots nowadays to help you. Why it works? Willpower is a finite resource. Systems automate success.

Number three, leverage is bigger than effort. Hard work has diminishing returns. Leverage compounds. At LinkedIn, I had a staff engineer who I was mentoring stop coding 70% of the time. Instead, he built an infrastructure others could use. That single shift doubled his impact. Build this leverage lens. At the start of each week, identify one task that will either, one, save your team a repeated effort, two, allow others to do their work better or three, multiply the results with minimum recurring input. Examples could be documenting tribal knowledge, automating manual QA, mentoring a junior teammate or building something effective for repetitive tasks within your team. Top performer asks, what's the one thing I can do that makes everyone else easier or unnecessarily things for the team goes away?

Let's look at the part two. You built that core philosophy. You learned about the three core philosophies that is, number one, was clarity is over hustle. Seconds are bigger than willpower and leverage is more than a fourth. Now let's learn about the leverage flywheel. Imagine doing something once and it pays you back for months. That's leverage. Three spokens. These flywheels basically have three spokes.

3. Personal Development Strategies for Engineers

Short description:

Build personal operating system, treat yourself like a product, focus on clarity for success.

These flywheels basically have three spokes. It can have code leverage. It could be reusable code, automated code, abstractions. It could have people leverage, mentorship, delegations or team enablement or platform leverage like AI, tools, systems that will scale you. A mentee of mine created an onboarding docs and loom videos. He spent four hours creating them and saved the team 20 hours of repeating this for every new hire. Mackenzie found top performing teams spent 65% more time building automation and enablement systems rather than doing the repetitive work.

Part three, build your personal operating system. And this is the most important part of this talk because you can't scale yourself until you treat yourself like a system. Your personal operating systems has things like inputs, like meetings, slacks, tasks. Processing is weekly reflections and energy and output like quality work and visibility and energy that you like to have. Treat yourself like a product. What's the roadmap for me? How do I know what's working with me? Things like a daily prompt can be super helpful. What are the three things must I done or must I get done today?

You can have a weekly debug prompt. What drained me last week? What energizes me the most? Block 90 minutes per day for deep work and learn to protect your time like your reputation depends on it because it does. Your time is your most valuable asset. Let's look at part four. Clarity as a competitive advantage. Clarity is one of the other most important things that you need to drive as an engineer. And engineers who are the most successful are the ones who are most clear and drive the most clarity in the roadmap and strategic work. Because clarity drives action. Unclear people over things. Top performance decide faster, recover faster, and execute better because they have clarity. So how do you build that? There's some tools to find clarity. You can have weekly one sentence goals. What's the most important thing on your plate this week? What's your area of focus? You can have an Eisenhower matrix around your task and have personal OKRs that identify your focus areas. That way you can accept the work that comes your way and learn how to say no to the things that doesn't really matter to your focus right now. Most engineers don't lack the skill. They lack the focus. Top performance also do everything.

4. Building Personal Influence and Confidence

Short description:

Build confidence, visibility, influence for success.

You think so? No. Top performance don't do everything. They choose what matters the most and they do that perfectly.

Step number five, how do we build that one person mindset? Confidence, visibility, and influence. Confidence isn't something you wait for. It's something you earn and you build. And I had a mentee who published a technical blog series. The first post scared her. She was hesitant to even post it and asked me 10 times if I should put this out in public. The third made her proud and the fifth got her noticed by senior leadership, and the 10th gave her a keynote speech in a conference.

Visibility is not bragging. It's contribution at a scale. Document what you do. Post a brown bag. Post a talk. Answer questions in Slack. Influence is built in consistency plus trust. So ask yourself this every day. Am I raising bars in these rooms or blending in? Which one are you doing at work? So really, confidence is a lagging indicator of action that comes from evidence. As I mentioned, consistency in action builds trust and builds confidence in you. Visibility, if they don't see it, it didn't happen. Make sure the things that you're doing is visible to people. And as I say, document, share it, share it in Slack, share it in lunch, share it in retros, have a weekly email go out on your updates in your areas of ownership. Influence, influence, it comes from consistency, trust, and communication. Ask, am I raising the bar in the room or am I blending in?

5. Strategic Career Optimization

Short description:

Think leverage, not effort. Optimize career intention. Drive work with purpose.

The recap is really thinking leverage, not effort. Build systems, do not hustle. Seek clarity, not chaos. Treat yourself like a product, not an employee. Share, teach, and elevate others. Being in the top 1% isn't about working harder. It's about thinking, deciding, and operating at a different level.

So the real question is, are you optimizing your career like a high performer or just surviving the day? A lot of people are just surviving nowadays. Because the top performers, the top 1%, they choose intention. And that choice is available to everybody.

And I want you, after this talk, think about one question. Are you actually driving your work or your work is driving you? Are you going to work with intention or you're just blending in? And if your answer to these questions is the second one, come see me. If you have any further questions into these frameworks, I'm available on LinkedIn. Shoot me a message and I would love to talk to you more. Thank you for listening to me.

Check out more articles and videos

We constantly think of articles and videos that might spark Git people interest / skill us up or help building a stellar career

Impact: Growing as an Engineer
React Summit 2022React Summit 2022
26 min
Impact: Growing as an Engineer
Top ContentPremium
This Talk explores the concepts of impact and growth in software engineering. It emphasizes the importance of finding ways to make the impossible possible and the role of mastery in expanding one's sphere of impact. The Talk also highlights the significance of understanding business problems and fostering a culture of collaboration and innovation. Effective communication, accountability, and decision-making are essential skills for engineers, and setting goals and finding sponsors can help drive career growth. Feedback, goal setting, and stepping outside of comfort zones are crucial for personal development and growth. Taking responsibility for one's own growth and finding opportunities for impact are key themes discussed in the Talk.
On Becoming a Tech Lead
TechLead Conference 2023TechLead Conference 2023
24 min
On Becoming a Tech Lead
Top ContentPremium
The role of a Tech Lead involves shaping the roadmap, helping the team be more effective, and working on important projects. Lessons learned include encouraging idea sharing, avoiding taking on all the work, and focusing on delegation. Tech Leads focus on the outcome, involve the team in decision-making, and make plans based on how different pieces will interact. The role of a Tech Lead is to focus on engineering and guide the team in figuring out how the whole system should fit together. Architecting can become problematic when it loses touch with the coding part, resulting in implementation issues.
Effective Communication for Engineers
TechLead Conference 2023TechLead Conference 2023
36 min
Effective Communication for Engineers
Top ContentPremium
Today's Talk covers the four building blocks of communication: people, message, context, and effective listening. It emphasizes the importance of considering the perspective of others and tailoring messages to the recipient. The Talk discusses different types and channels of communication, and the need to align them with the intended message. It also highlights the significance of soft skills in communication and provides techniques for effective communication and assessing soft skills in tech interviews. Cross-cultural communication and the impact of bluntness are explored as well.
Imposter Syndrome-Driven Development
TechLead Conference 2023TechLead Conference 2023
31 min
Imposter Syndrome-Driven Development
Top Content
Imposter syndrome is a common experience that can lead to self-doubt and feeling like a fraud. The speaker shares their personal journey with imposter syndrome in school and throughout their career in software development. They discuss the challenges and doubts they faced, as well as the strategies they used to overcome imposter syndrome. The importance of support from managers, celebrating achievements, and sharing experiences to help others are highlighted. The talk emphasizes the need to embrace imposter syndrome and use it as a motivator for personal growth.
Adapting to the Future of Work in Tech
C3 Dev Festival 2024C3 Dev Festival 2024
28 min
Adapting to the Future of Work in Tech
The Talk explores the AI-assisted programming paradigm shift and the evolution of software engineering. It discusses the limitations of large language models (LLMs) and highlights the importance of balancing forces in software engineering. The future of programming is seen as models solving problems based on datasets. The Talk emphasizes the responsibility of creating a better future and the need to strike a balance between utilizing tools and building problem-solving skills. It also touches on the human dependence on AI and recommends resources for further learning.
You Do Have Time to Build it Twice
React Summit 2022React Summit 2022
21 min
You Do Have Time to Build it Twice
Top Content
Today's Talk focuses on software rewrites, specifically the transition from jQuery to React. The speaker shares their experience of rewriting a jQuery app to React, highlighting the benefits of the rewrite in terms of improved user experience and increased conversions. Approaches to software rewrites are discussed, including the page-by-page approach which allows for product innovation. The speaker emphasizes the importance of prioritizing rewrites or refactors for startups. The Talk concludes with insights on testing, server-side functionality, and the overall value of the rewrite.

Workshops on related topic

How To Design A Sustainable Freelance/Contracting Career
Node Congress 2022Node Congress 2022
39 min
How To Design A Sustainable Freelance/Contracting Career
Workshop
Shane Ketterman
Alexander Weekes
2 authors
Ready to kickstart your freelance career or just getting started on your freelance journey? You’re in the right spot. Learn the tricks of the trade from the industry’s most experienced freelancers.
The independent talent movement is the future of work. If you’re considering leaving full-time employment for a career as a freelancer, now is the time to find your successful space in the independent talent workforce. More people are working freelance today than ever before, with the freelance marketplace now contributing $1.2 trillion to the US economy. Some of the most in-demand roles for freelancers right now are senior developers with professional experience in React, Python, Blockchain, QA, and Node.js.
This workshop will help you design a sustainable and profitable full-time (or part-time) freelancing/contracting career. We will give you tools, tips, best practices, and help you avoid common pitfalls.
Designing A Sustainable Freelance Career
React Advanced 2021React Advanced 2021
145 min
Designing A Sustainable Freelance Career
Workshop
Alexander Weekes
Rodrigo Donini
2 authors
Would you like to pursue your passions and have more control over your career? Would you like schedule and location flexibility and project variety? Would you like the stability of working full-time and getting paid consistently? Thousands of companies have embraced remote work and realize that they have access to a global talent pool. This is advantageous for anyone who has considered or is currently considering freelance work.>> Submit your interest on becoming a freelance engineer with Toptal and get a call with Talent Acquisition specialist <<

Freelancing is no longer an unstable career choice.

This workshop will help you design a sustainable and profitable full-time (or part-time) freelancing career. We will give you tools, tips, best practices, and help you avoid common pitfalls.
Table of contents

Module 1: Dispelling common myths about freelancing
Module 2: What does freelancing look like in 2021 and beyond
Module 3: Freelancing choices and what to look for (and what to avoid)
Module 4: Benefits of freelancing from a freelancer + case study
BREAK
Module 6: How to get started freelancing (experience, resume, preparation)
Module 7: Common paths to full-time freelancing
Module 8: Essentials: setting your rate and getting work
Module 9: Next steps: networking with peers, upskilling, changing the world
Module 10: Freelancer AMA