SWLW #512: Most people won’t, Cultivating hospitality, and more.

Heya,

As always, below you can read my best findings for the week. If you want to support my work or join our SWLW community in Slack - scroll down to the bottom of the email to see how.
 

This Week's Favorite

​​Most People Won’t
3 minutes read.

Inspiring writing by Bryce Roberts which I absolutely enjoyed reading this week: "But every once in a while someone puts themselves out there. Makes the leap. Faces rejection or failure or worse. And comes out the other side. Better. Changed. Bolder."

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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Culture

The Story of a Startup in 10 Memes
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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Cultivating Hospitality
3 minutes read.

The one key factor to consider when you grow your team: "The extent to which you welcome someone — especially those who look or act differently than you — is a measure of your hospitality. [...] Treat every new hire like they've been there the whole time. Explain old jokes. Create new jokes. Build new rituals. Make them the new veteran."

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In 2021, Spotify Reached Out to Buy ConvertKit for Hundreds of Millions. I Said No. Here’s What We Did Instead (Thread)
4 minutes read.

I love and tremendously respect Nathan Barry's thinking about building a company his way. He did so many things differently over the years, opposite to how many companies operate. This is hard to compete with, so I know ConvertKit will continue to do amazing things in the future.

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When Second Life Goes Offline, Someone Wears Shrek Ears. Behind the Scenes at Linden Lab With Honeycomb CTO Charity Majors
5 minutes read.

Finding fun (and funny) rituals to celebrate outages or other failures can make people feel "you're one of ours now!" rather than guilty or worried.

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Peopleware

Excuse Me but Why Are You Eating So Many Frogs
12 minutes read.

"These were students who had eaten enough frogs to get into Princeton and Harvard. Their reward was––surprise!––more frogs. So they ate those frogs too. And now they’re staring down a whole lifetime of frog-eating and starting to feel like maybe something, somewhere has gone wrong." -- Wonderful writing that made me laugh while nodding my head on every paragraph. Go easy on yourself, and seek to have more fun. Life is not linear, play.

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The Steve Jobs Archive
5 minutes read.

"I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with. I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being." -- Apple released an archive with speeches and writing by Steve Jobs. I enjoyed jumping between different years and decades and appreciate his philosophy and vision.

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Solitude and Leadership
14 minutes read.

"Thinking for yourself means finding yourself, finding your own reality." -- William Deresiewicz writes it well. Learning to be alone with our monkey minds will become more challenging as our brains get bombarded with low-quality content. Information diet is real, and so does learning to become comfortable alone with our thoughts.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@evanlapointe: If roadmaps are paved from the future back to the present, they show us the systems and sequences of dependencies needed to bring a future to life. If they are paved from the present into the future, they are usually scattered vectors based on requests and impulse.

@APompliano: Don't get distracted by the things that you can not control.



p.s. if you're interested in joining SWLW's Slack channel, simply reply to this email and let me know. If you're leading a team, consider writing your Manager README (it's free) or getting my e-book and interviews Leading Snowflakes: The New Engineering Manager's Handbook. You can also support me by becoming a SWLW Patron. Thank you ❤️




Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.