It’s not necessarily your merit to accomplish something; it’s your merit to make something insignificant seem like an achievement.

Actually achieving something isn't necessarily your accomplishment. Your real merit is turning something that wasn't an accomplishment into one.

What's the most valuable thing to do? Something the market needs, that no one else can do, with time running out, where nobody can pick it up — go make it happen.

If it's for your own promotion or development, don't rush into action. Observe more. You need to judge whether this thing can actually be done. If you think it's difficult, and you see a colleague grabbing it — only to watch them heading in the wrong direction — the best approach right then is silence. But start preparing your hands to intervene. When your colleague is about to fall into the pit, stay quiet, yet begin mobilizing to take over the work. In secret, you're already doing it yourself. By the time they fail to deliver and the company runs out of time, you've already completed most of it. Then you wait — wait for the boss to panic, for market pressure to mount, for them to call everyone and find no one can clean up the mess. Only then do you reluctantly accept, and deliver a miracle. The impression you build is that of a savior. Something no one could finish in 100% of the time, you complete in 30%, even 20%. But that's not the truth — it's a performed effect, a designed perception.

It's not that you never paid attention to this project. You weren't thrown in at the last moment as a emergency fix. You've been watching all along, preparing all along. Look at generals of old — that's how they fought. They silently observed others' battlefields, others' maneuvers. Always ready, always judging when the right moment to intervene would come.

Without even a fraction of this cunning, how could promotion ever come your way?