Do you feel valued? Needed? Like things actually depend on you? If not, do you want to?
I'm going to talk about how I got to a place where I feel universally valued at every place I start working for in a matter of a month or two. This isn't per se about salary or any other metric, purely about how you (or rather, in this case, I) feel. You might not have the same priorities, but for me, it's important: it's one of the things helping me avoid burnout.
Importantly, parts of this also apply outside of work, but things get more complicated there. Want to feel like your friends truly appreciate you? Some of the same principles apply. Chances are though, if you have a need for such a feeling, it's often not a problem with your friends or your actions, but your perspective. Regardless, I'll talk about that more near the end.
Okay, now let's go.
Step One: Fundamentals #
The first step towards feeling valued is to not feel resented. If people resent you, they can't value you, they can only tolerate you, it's that simple!
Let's then go around why people might resent you. Actually, it's really simple. It's all about expectations. People will have optimistic and pessimistic expectations for you. If you meet the optimistic expectations most of the time, you won't be resented.
Let's go through an example.
Your manager pessimistically expects you to follow direct instructions, and optimistically to be able to interpret what they meant by those instructions and to complete between the lines. If you can't meet the pessimistic expectations, you get fired. If you merely meet those, you're resented. If you meet the optimistic expectations, you're not resented, and there's some semblance of a positive sentiment.
It's that simple.
Oftentimes, only the pessimistic expectations are made public. When the optimistic expectations are made public, it's done in a "fill in the lines kind of way".
For example, if you work as a sysadmin or a devops engineer, an example of an optimistic expectation being mentioned might be "I expect you to manage the infrastructure". If you read between the lines, this is talking about more than simply being present, but taking proactive steps to keep it functioning as per the expectations of the thing you're responsible for.
As such, to avoid people resenting you, you must learn to identify what others expect of you, even when they won't necessarily be willing to communicate those things. If you do not learn to do this, you will never be able to consistently meet their optimistic expectations (not knowing what those are). If you can only achieve something by chance, you will eventually fumble.
If you're struggling with this step, you're going to struggle a lot more with the future ones, so here's something you can try to do (only to be applied if you're struggling; if you've got a working system, go ahead with it):
Every time someone asks you for something, look at their reaction once it's done. Do they seem happy? Ecstatic? Do they seem merely content? Are they complaining? Are they thanking you? Is it enthusiastic?
Write down what the thing was, what you did, and what their reaction was. Then, over time (you have as long as you need, you're training skills that will last your whole life), look at common factors. You'll eventually identify things that consistently make them react positively. Now you can try to identify the commonalities between the things you've done in those instances. And now you've identified what they want! (This ability will become even more useful later.)
Step Two: Improve or Leave #
Step two is to leave. Well, not always, but sometimes. Now that you've figured out what people expect of you, are you happy doing those things? If that stuff makes you miserable, you should leave. There's no saving this situation. You will either be resented by others, or you will resent yourself and what you're doing. So leave. Keep cycling until you find something you don't hate. There is no other way. You might end up being a goat farmer, who knows, it's certainly possible, but at least you won't hate yourself.
On the converse, if you find that you do like what you're doing, well, then do it. I don't just mean at work. If you actually like what you're doing, you should have no problems doing it outside of work hours too. If you're doing the same kind of thing outside of work hours (not necessarily all the time, of course), then you get way better at it way faster than everyone else. Of course, you're putting in way more hours, and in way more varied circumstances (rather than just whatever is needed for your job, which is likely fairly static).
Knowing more about the general subject matter, being able to do more varied things, having more hours put into the general activity will have a funny side-effect, in that what you do/make will become better as a result. Kind of obvious if you think about it. If people were already content with what you were doing, they are more likely to like it if it's actually good.
You might say "well that's not universal", and this is where I give up the lede. You can't make everyone happy. However, there's something funny to mention in respect to this. You'd rather make happy people that are decent, because if you're doing something you like, you both end up less miserable; OR make happy people that have power over you, which is still easier to do if you're good at what you're doing.
You might say that last bit isn't true, in which case you'll like what's coming later.
Step Three: Add Context #
Remember when I said you were going to get good at what you do? I lied. You just think you're good. The problem is that what you've (most likely, you specifically could be an exception) been doing is that you've been approaching what you've been doing "directly", in a void, without wider context. If you have a problem with me lying, stop reading now, I'm gonna do it a lot.
Anyway, let's take an example with writing. Let's say you're a programmer. You've figured out that your coworkers and superior like it when your code is well-tested, takes into account what the problem statement is, easy to read, and is elegantly constructed.
You take this knowledge, learn a bunch of programming things on your own time, get back to your Java job, and start writing everything in Clojure. What you will notice is that suddenly they are not so happy.
The problem is the context. The context being that the whole codebase is in Java, not in Clojure. That the additional build step requires changes to the CI. That your other coworkers indeed did not learn this other language, so it's harder for them to read than what they're used to. That the final results are delivered to a client that has things set up for Java, like vulnerability detection, which don't work with Clojure codebases. Suddenly, they are no longer happy.
Your new job is to add context. You need to not only understand the direct subject of what you do (which was the output of step 2), but also of the context in which you do. This is done through two parts.
Firstly, you have to become attentive. You need to notice things. Remember how you learned to figure out what people expect out of you? You did this by becoming attentive to certain things. All you need to do for this part is to become attentive to more things. You need to notice the decisions (hundreds, thousands of them a day) the people around you make. You need to figure out why they make them. Who they speak to that influence said decisions and what do they decide on and how. You need to essentially build a database of priorities, motivations, approaches.
Secondly, you have to learn that which surrounds what you do, in the context that you do it in. Sure, you're a developer (in this example). What do you develop? Why? Are you making web applications or devices that can save or kill a person? How will the things you make be used, and what are the limits? Let's have a quick example.
Let's say you're working in the medical field, and you're writing software that operates a surgery assisting robot. In a void, if you decide what happens in the case of a crash, what would you have it do? In a void, making the robot reset to a "default position" might make sense. You get it back to a known good state, rather than the state that caused the crash. That would be a terrible idea here though. Indeed, the path there might be through a patient's flesh. The very fact of moving in a way that the surgeon didn't intend could kill someone. A better approach might be (for example) to try and recalibrate the position without moving in case of a crash, complexity be damned.
Suddenly though, that means you need to understand how surgeries tend to go. You need to know what circumstances your creation (twice removed) might end up being in. You essentially need to learn, at least the basics, of the "field" in which you operate. That's what this second part is about.
You will without a doubt find that most of the people you work with will not think about most of these things. However each of them will likely have at least one such effect in mind. Your manager might get yelled at if the robot does something wrong during a demo, even if they hadn't thought of this specific case. By thinking about these things, you can avoid problems before they ever occur. By knowing the priorities of the people around you, you can closer align to those priorities.
One way to reformulate this is again in the expectation sense. You are now surpassing their most optimistic expectations. Isn't that a joy? You might even be surprassing what they might have believed to have been possible expectations. They will certainly appreciate this.
Step Four: Sales #
I lied again. How can they appreciate something they don't know was a problem? Something they don't know happened? I've skipped over a bunch of steps, so it's unlikely you even make it here (this isn't a guide, really), but if you do, you'll run into the problem that basically no one around you will have actually done this. People cannot appreciate something they don't understand, or know they should be thinking about or valuing. So the next step is to make them understand.
It's really not that hard. You already have the theory of mind necessary to know what they care about, what they do think about, what they worry about. You don't have to tell them about those things. Now all the things they aren't thinking of, you need to learn to make them think of. Telling them about why they matter, and how it's in their best interest. This is what sales are (well, the "good" part of sales practices, rather than the "create demand by just sounding really convincing" part).
Anyway the good news for you is that selling people on things that are truly in their best interest, with all of their priorities and needs under consideration, is a lot easier than selling them on something that is not that. The bad news is that (if you're still reading this), you probably have not done anything in this direction in your entire life.
Honestly I don't have any good advice on how to improve at this. The way that I ended up doing it is not particularly repeatable, and trying to mimic it is a bad idea. However, if you're truly, earnestly, made it this far, you should have a good amount of "learning things on the go" behind your belt now. Generally speaking just try doing it and act upon the feedback to get better.
The true superpower this progression gets you is the ability to learn things quite efficiently, which is also something you should be optimizing for. If you don't feel like you've learned a whole shitload of things, you've actually failed at steps 2 and 3. I didn't explicitly mention this, but you shouldn't exactly stop at the things immediately relevant to what you're doing (same as in step 1), so you should eventually (say, in 10 years) get to the point where you're learning woodworking as a pharmacist's apprentince or whatever.
Applicability #
Ok now forget about work, let's talk about why this stuff applies elsewhere.
If your friends are struggling, you want to help them. For this to happen, you must be able to identify when they're struggling, what they're struggling with, and what you can do to help. They could simply communicate all of these things to you, but this essentially puts the onus on them. Having to explain your troubles to people repeatedly is actually unpleasant (imagine that). The skills you would have practiced above help you at each of the requirements here. The only requirement left is that, indeed, you do actually want to help your friends when they're struggling, which if you don't, I cannot help you (translation: you should leave, you're not actually friends).
Similarly, when you're at a social event, being able to identify what the expectations (pessimistic and optimistic) are placed upon you, which will allow you to navigate even completely new and complex social situations in a way that doesn't suck.
Sometimes, your partner might be upset and struggle identifying what it is that's making them upset. Being observant and good at conversation (skills you train above) allow you to resolve this situation as well.
One common point across all of these you might have noticed is this: at no point do you bring problems or observations of problems to others. It's borderline a meme at this point, but if you present a problem, you also present the solution, or better yet, you bring solutions. And your solutions are rooted in understanding of not only the subject matter, but also the context of the subject matter and of the people you're trying to help.
Applying the same principles of observation and iterative analysis can also help you discover what your own desires and priorities and feelings about things are. You might think "I'm me, of course I know what I want", but you would be surprised by how often people have no idea what they're actually feeling or wanting!
Two quick examples on this. A famous example on the subject of what you want is coffee. People (and especially men, in studies) tend to answer that they prefer a darker roast, but when they participate in blind taste tests, they converge on the milder tasting medium roasts. As for feelings, it's common to see reinterpretation of feelings in psychology, where one believes they're experiencing what is socially "expected" of them. For instance, men that have not done too much introspection so far will often believe themselves to be very angry very often, while they're actually experiencing a wide range of emotions; they're simply failing to identify what they're actually feeling. Consequently, a common (if perhaps suboptimal) strategy in therapy is to focus on interpreting the emotional input in a different way: choosing to believe that you're feeling one emotion over another (which can be an improvement over a misinterpretation that is damaging, though often not over correctly identifying one's feelings).
Ultimately, what it takes to make yourself valuable, at work, to society, but also to your friends, your partner, yourself, isn't complicated. Learn to learn. Be observant. Make conclusions. And most importantly, adapt your actions and attitudes on the basis of those things. Know when to leave and when to say no. These are universal skills that I have tricked you into at the very least considering.
I lied even at the very start of the article, because I don't expect anyone to actually follow the above "steps". Instead, they're closer to the path that I have (coincidentally) ended up taking over the last decade+, presented the way it is because it's more engaging than otherwise. What truly matters is this previous paragraph. Training your theory of mind and continually increasing your horizon and set of what you consider. With that context in mind, one might be able to understand what I mean when I try to shortly explain my life philosophy: "Everything Matters".