SWLW #572: Experience costumes, Own it mentality, and more.

As every Friday, I share my best findings for the week.

 

This Week's Favorite

Things I Learned the Hard Way
5 minutes read.

Bryan Cantrill's insights and lessons learned are really powerful. My favorites: tooling investments on slide 7 and making technological choices on slide 11. It made me think about my learnings and the approach I've developed in the past 24 years dealing with software running in production. Which insights and learnings in your career it made you think of? Worth sharing with your teammates and having a discussion.

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Culture

Indie Hackers vs the Competition
1 minute read.

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

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Experience Costumes
4 minutes read.

Angela Jiang's post will get you to rethink the questions you ask candidates given the situation the team is dealing with and the outcomes you seek: "The fallacy of assuming that it is sufficient is equivalent to falling for an “experience costume”. By assuming experience of a problem set through indirect markers rather than testing it directly, you mistake the costume for the real thing."

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Nathan Barry, CEO of ConvertKit: Turning $1,000 in $320 Million (Video)
88 minutes read.

I've been following Nathan Barry's journey as a creator and company builder since 2012. He's a remarkable builder and maker, sharing numerous frameworks you can practice to level up your career, improve your business understanding, and figure out how to increase your influence to help your company.

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Mental Frameworks for Evaluating Technology Companies (As an Investor)
11 minutes read.

Understanding how companies are evaluated can give us a good context into areas worth investing in. For example, the section on "Incentivizing time speculation is the most powerful engine in value creation" can make you think about the narrative you use to help attract and retain the talent you need and "10x experience to a single, critical customer" to ask yourself who is that critical customer and how do you get to 10x better experience for them.

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Peopleware

Don't Fix Things. Write a New Story
4 minutes read.

"Companies slip into ruts and develop 'problems' when they lack a positive narrative (a goal, a strategy, a mission, etc.) that unites people despite their different narratives for what might be broken at that particular moment. Without that, they slip into a narrative stalemate, and the battle of the problem narrative becomes The Problem." -- John Cutler is spot on as always. Reaching an alignment is powerful to have a better understanding of where people are "stuck" (or disagree) in understanding the narrative, but learning where to stop and avoid the "narrative stalemate" is maybe one of the hardest challenges in our roles.

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My Notes From Anna Wintour’s Biography Turned Into Maxims (Thread)
4 minutes read.

What would you take from this list and delve deeper in the next 90 days? How would you learn more about it? Who can you observe to see how they apply it? Who can you talk with about it? For example: "Don’t try to handle stress. Learn to enjoy it" is a skill worth developing, and I highly recommend reading "The upside of stress" by Kelly McGonigal.

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Own It Mentality
5 minutes read.

David Perell has a brilliant framing: when you say yes but cannot contain the responsibility, you risk the downstream disappointment of not following through: "One core difference between low- and high-performing companies is that one wishes while the other promises. At high-performing companies, diligent follow-through is the norm. People do what they say they’re going to do, when they say they’re going to do it. Meanwhile, low-performing organizations are ruled by excuses. Tasks slip through the cracks. Timelines are outright ignored."

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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 unnecessarily hard on something that you haven't validated people want. Instead, run small experiments over & over again until you have a few strong outcomes. Then double down.

@AdamMGrant: The best way to open people's minds isn't to argue with them. It's to listen to them. When people feel understood, they become less defensive and more reflective—and develop less extreme, more nuanced views. Productive disagreements begin with curiosity, not persuasion.



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.