Secrets to Success

Six Principles for a Successful Career

I recently had the chance to interact with three grad students from Iowa State University. The enthusiasm in their voices, the inquisitiveness of their questions, it reminded me of where I started. At the end of our conversation, I felt like I owed them something more than crop quality data. So I shared the six principles that shaped my career. Maybe they will be useful to you too.

I did not start with an impressive title, a big city address, or a blue chip degree. I started where a lot of people in this business start, simple beginnings in a small rural community. Long days, weather and dust, a job that did not look like much from the outside.

Over time I found myself responsible for storing and moving billions of bushels of grain, thousands of employees, hundreds of facilities, in multiple countries around the globe. That did not happen because of one lucky break. It happened because of a handful of habits and decisions, repeated over and over, that quietly compounded.

My world was operations and logistics. That is where I grew up, built my craft, and kept most of my attention. I was never a commercial desk trader and I never pretended to be. But I learned enough about the commercial side to understand how it affected my job and how my decisions in operations affected the commercial book.

These are not theories pulled from a leadership book. They are things that worked for me in feed mills, pet food plants, grain handling facilities, processing plants, and on crisis calls at 2 a.m. Take them, adapt them, and make them your own.

1. Read and Stay Current

In a world of headlines, summaries, and social media post, deep reading has become a real competitive advantage. I still try to read at least two hours a day.

My core reading was always operations and logistics, things like facility performance, throughput constraints, safety, transportation, and keeping grain moving safely and efficiently. But I also did enough commercial reading, markets, spreads, export flows, key customer dynamics, to understand how those forces impacted my job. I did not need to out trade the trading floor. I just needed enough context to run assets and logistics in a way that supported the commercial group instead of accidentally working against it.

The best ideas rarely come from staying in your lane. Some of the most important decisions I have been involved in were shaped by something that technically was not about grain at all. An energy policy shift, a port congestion article, a currency move that changed freight economics. You also have to stay aware of what is going on in the world. Elections, conflicts, sanctions, trade policy, energy disruptions, none of these sit neatly in a grain silo but all of them move flows, risk, and opportunity.

One more thing. Do not let social media absorb your time and define who you are. It is very easy to let an endless scroll of other people's lives and opinions soak up your attention, your energy, and eventually your sense of self. Your value is not measured in likes or followers. It is measured in what you build, who you help, and the kind of person you become. Protect your time, your talent, and your mental capacity like they are scarce resources because they are.

Deep reading does two things for you. It keeps you from being surprised by things you should have seen coming, and it gives you the language and context to speak credibly with executives, customers, regulators, and lenders. Make it part of your job, not a luxury you squeeze in when everything else is done.

2. Stay Inquisitive

You will not be defined by how many answers you know. You will be defined by the quality of the questions you ask.

The grain business is not kind to people who stop asking why. They can be simple inquiries such as: Why is this line always slow on certain days? Why does this bin keep giving us quality issues? Why does this supply chain lane never perform the way the model says it should? Why is this origin always tight on cars while others seem fine?

Curiosity is not just a personality trait. It is a professional skill. You can sharpen it or you can let it dull.

One practice has served me well for decades. Learn at least one new thing every day. It does not have to be dramatic. A small operational detail from the night crew. A nuance in a contract clause you finally ask someone to explain. A new acronym in a freight note you decide to look up. If I get to the end of the day and cannot point to one concrete thing I learned, I treat that as a missed opportunity. Over years that habit quietly compounds into judgment and pattern recognition you just cannot fake.

Pair inquisitiveness with active listening. For a period of my career I sat in the middle of an open trading floor, phones ringing, people talking across rows, prices moving, news hitting the screen. It felt like chaos. But if you paid attention that noise contained information of value to me. The offhand comment that hinted at a developing problem. The remark from an trader that revealed a risk no one had considered yet. The passing conversation that told you something about customer sentiment no report would capture.

Sorting what is important and urgent from what is just loud is a skill worth developing. If you want a career of consequence, work on how you listen just as hard as you work on what you say.

3. Say Yes, Especially When It Is Uncomfortable

Careers do not accelerate because you master your comfort zone. They accelerate because you step into spaces where you are not quite ready and then you deliver anyway.

From an operations perspective that often looks like taking on a troubled facility others quietly avoided, moving into a role with broader geographic responsibility, owning a rail or barge or export corridor with a lot of eyes on it, or saying yes to a cross functional project that ties operations, logistics, and commercial together.

For most of my career the moments that really mattered came when somebody looked at me and said, "Can you take this on?" and my first thought was, I am not sure I am ready for that. The instinct to protect yourself and stay where you feel competent is strong. But over and over, saying yes to the right uncomfortable opportunity is what put me in rooms I never would have reached otherwise.

There is an important nuance here. Do not say yes indiscriminately. Say yes when the work gives you more exposure to volume, risk, or people. Say yes when you will be close to a real problem that actually matters to the business. Say yes when you can honestly commit to deliver, not just impress someone in the moment.

Your reputation gets built on a simple pattern. You raise your hand, you do what you said you would do, and things get better after you touch them. Do that consistently and you will not have to chase opportunities. They will come find you.

4. Be Willing to Go Where the Work Is

A generation ago the advice was simple. Be willing to relocate. If the company needed someone in a tough location or a turnaround facility, you packed up and went. That willingness put you on the short list for real responsibility.

Today more of us live in two income households. Partners have careers of their own. Kids are rooted in schools and activities. Uprooting all of that is not a small ask. I am not going to tell you to say yes to every move.

But if you want a career of consequence, stay open to relocating when a truly pivotal opportunity appears. Being willing to go where the work is hardest sends a clear signal. It says you are serious about taking on responsibility and that you can be counted on when the business truly needs someone to step in.

Have the conversation at home before the opportunity shows up. If a role comes along that genuinely changes our trajectory, are we at least willing to consider it? Advancement tends to follow the people who are there when and where the work truly needs them. Once the organization starts depending on you in those moments, the promotion discussions get a whole lot simpler.

5. Build a Network of Experts You Can Call

In the grain world that might include the maintenance lead who has seen every failure a leg or conveyor can throw at you, the barge or rail scheduler who knows how the system really runs, the port or terminal managers who can tell you what performance looks like from their side of the river, the OEM who is truly a SME, and the commercial folks who can explain how your asset decisions are helping or hurting the book.

This kind of network does not appear overnight. It requires genuine give and take. You help without keeping score, you stay in touch between favors, and you treat people's time as a gift and not a transaction.

Start building while you are still small. As a student, a trainee, a junior operator, people are surprisingly willing to help you if you show up with curiosity and respect. Later, when the stakes are higher and the problems are bigger, you will be glad you can reach for a real human being instead of a generic help line.

Note: One action I took early in my career that gave me an unmatched level of information and access was getting actively involved in my GEAPS. I attended local chapter meetings and eventually served on various committees, on the international board, and in officer roles. The contacts I made there were not just casual acquaintances. Many became lifelong friends who were genuine experts in their fields and who were always willing to share their thoughts and honest feedback with me. That network became a resource I leaned on throughout my entire career and one I still use every single week today.

6. Let Integrity Compound

Everything I have described, the reading, the curiosity, the stretch work, the relocation, the networks, all of it depends on one thing. People have to be able to trust you.

Integrity is not one principle among many. It is the foundation everything else is built on.

When I hired people I always stressed one thing clearly. People make mistakes and dishonesty is what kills careers. I can work with a bad decision, a missed step, or an honest oversight. If you tell me what happened we can usually fix it. What I cannot fix is a lie, a cover up, or a story that keeps changing. In this business that kind of dishonesty does not just take you down. It can take the whole team down with it.

Tell the truth quickly, especially when it is uncomfortable. That one choice will save you more times than you can count. Over the years I let people learn from some pretty expensive mistakes. I never kept someone who lied about them.

In the grain business integrity shows up in very practical ways. A farmer delivers to you in a tight market because you honored your word in a year when you could have squeezed them. A customer gives you another shot after a disappointment because they trust you told them the truth. The experts in your network call you back because they know you do not misuse their time or their name.

Integrity is not mainly tested in big dramatic moments. It is tested in the small decisions. How you handle a mistake on a ticket. What you do with information that is not widely known. How you talk about people when they are not in the room. Whether you quietly cut corners when you think no one is watching.

Let integrity, and specifically honesty, compound over years and doors open that you never even knew existed.

Where You Start Does Not Determine Where You Finish

If you remember nothing else from all of this, remember this. Where you start does not determine where you finish. How you show up every single day does.

You can start in a small town, in an entry level role, in a facility most people have never heard of. What matters is whether you read and stay ahead of the world you operate in, whether you stay inquisitive when others get complacent, whether you say yes to the right uncomfortable opportunities, whether you build a network of experts and show up for them as much as they show up for you, and whether you practice honesty and integrity in the small things so that trust and responsibility can compound over time. If you take care of those things, advancement has a way of taking care of itself.

These actions allowed a young man who grew up in a small rural community in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains of California to become the head of operations for one of the largest grain companies in the world. I remember sitting on a construction site for a new facility in Mato Grosso, Brazil. The closest town was hours away and the sky was filled with so many stars it almost looked white. No light pollution out there. My thoughts turned inward and I asked myself how I ever wound up with this opportunity. I must have been blessed.

In hindsight I was blessed. But I also did all the things required to make it happen!

Grain Guy Fifty invites’ readers to share their thoughts , experiences, knowledge, and insights after exploring the post. Together, we can learn and grow as an industry!

Best, 

Jim Voigt 

“Grain Guy Fifty”