SWLW #565: Memorized Rules: How to give your life direction, How to engineer kindness, and more

Heya,

As always, below you can read my best findings for the week.
 

This Week's Favorite

Memorized Rules: How to Give Your Life Direction
7 minutes read.

"I call this type of advice a Memorized Rule: a shortcode lodged in my brain for making decisions on a daily basis. After playing around with this idea, my friends and I found a limit to the number of rules we could easily memorize and recall throughout the day: six. This aligns with Miller's Law: The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory. By committing six Memorized Rules to memory, something critical happens: You remove the friction that makes advice unlikely to be acted on. You no longer have to look at your notes. " -- Julian Shapiro's Memorized Rules is something I'm going to... remember. Now, I need to figure out which 6-7 rules will be in my working memory. Which rules would you pick?

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Culture

Product Managers Using Their $6000 Laptop to Open Jira
1 minute read.

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

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The Failure Points From $5m to $100m in ARR, Part 2
6 minutes read.

Tracy Young shares great insights and lessons learned from her challenges, failures, and successes while leading an organization from 0 to 450 employees and $100M in ARR. Some of my favorite takeaways: "Be creative on how you’re solving problems for your customer — don’t be creative about org structures." and "Another good indicator of how execs will be to work with is what their former colleagues, bosses and direct reports say about them. After hiring and firing several wrong VPs, I tripled the number of reference calls on any serious candidate. With over 10 references across the board — people who they have reported to, people who reported to them and their peers — you start to see a good picture of who they are and what it would be like to work with them."

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Kind Engineering: How to Engineer Kindness
18 minutes read.

You can read the "blog post" (a fantastic landing page) or watch the talk by Evan Smith embedded at the beginning. "White lies aren’t evil but they don’t help people grow." is a powerful reminder that if we genuinely care about someone, we should see when they're emotionally available for feedback and share it directly with them.

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Reconsider
7 minutes read.

David Heinemeier Hansson (aka DHH) with an evergreen post that has been relevant for more than 20 years and will be relevant for the next 100+ years. There are many ways to build companies. Neither way is good or bad, as it's mostly a matter of attracting and retaining people who see its value emotionally, professionally, and financially. Aiming for Wealth in the broader sense (not only money) and working with people you love and respect is a fantastic outcome.

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Peopleware

What Does a CTO Actually Do?
8 minutes read.

Vadmin Kravcenko covers well the different responsibilities and challenges of the CTO in various stages of companies' size and product(s) maturity. Given the skills and challenges, It can be challenging to scale yourself between these stages, and sometimes, a new CTO will need to come in and take the company to the next level.

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Some Honest Reflections on 3 Years Into Maven, My 3rd Startup (Thread)
3 minutes read.

"Customer is always right. Every time I try to force my vision onto the customer, they throw it in my face. Every time we listen to our customers, we're heavily rewarded. Listening requires interpretation, though! [..] Building a startup is like building a movement" -- Gagan Biyani might inspire you to try to build a company or stay away from it as the emotional rollercoaster is real. Either way, I appreciate the honesty and perspective.

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How to Hire
7 minutes read.

Sam Altman is one of my favorite thinkers and writers: "If you don’t hire very well, you will not be successful—companies are a product of the team the founders build. There is no way you can build an important company by yourself. It’s easy to delude yourself into thinking that you can manage a mediocre hire into doing good work. [...] Talk to the candidates about what they’ve done. Ask them about their most impressive projects and biggest wins. Specifically, ask them about how they spend their time during an average day, and what they got done in the last month. Go deep in a specific area and ask about what the candidate actually did—it’s easy to take credit for a successful project. Ask them how they would solve a problem you are having related to the role they are interviewing for."

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@thejustinwelsh: You aren't rewarded for hard work. You're rewarded for creating something of value. So don't work extra hard on something you're not sure anyone even wants.

@hnshah: First to scale is more valuable than first to market.



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.