SWLW #590: Make intentional career choices, Handling objections, and more

Like always, sharing my best findings for the week. 

 

This Week's Favorite

The Most Important Career Lesson to Internalize After 10-15 Years in Tech Is to Make Very Intentional Career Choices
4 minutes read.

"You would think that folks with great titles who are managing massive orgs must be making very intentional career decisions. But you’d be surprised by the degree to which many folks’ career choices are just driven by the tendency to follow the most attractive career path that their peers are following, and then justifying taking that path with logic after the fact." -- An important benchmark to look at as you're building a non-linear life. Read the comments, as they will give you some more perspective on the journey you must take to discover (authentically) your preferences and insights. Learn enough about your biases to understand your decisions. Don't be tempted to think that once you understand your career path, everything else will come, along with wealth and happiness. Discovering ourselves is a journey, not a point in time. Seek how you can serve others (they need to confirm value) to figure out your superpowers and the type of work that sustainably energizes you.

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Culture

When Your Engineering Team Has to Give a Timeline on Remediating All the CVEs in Prod
1 minute read.

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

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How to Drive Meaningful Change - Handling Objections to Your Proposal
5 minutes read.

I love the framework given by Joseph Gefroh, which allows you to map out where the objections or disagreements are, categorize them, and have practical ways to address them. You can draw your conclusions and maybe add tactics once you are able to map out where to focus your attention. What I took from it is how to stay positive and enable the conversation to move forward by learning more, being curious, and figuring out a path to continue and be good partners to the people you work with (versus complete disengagement).

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Patrick Collison, Stripe CEO - Craft, Beauty, & the Future of Payments (Video)
115 minutes read.

If you listen to Patrick Collison's interviews, you'll feel the breadth and depth of interest that led him to build one of the best companies in the world. For example, notice how much attention he puts on speed and aesthetics (1:02h in): "People are on some level purchasing our architecture [to let them build what they need]."

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Why Software Projects Fail
6 minutes read.

Vadim Kravcenko covers 3 of the top reasons projects often fail to deliver value on time. My favorite insight was this: "The silent killer in this scenario [of mismanaged stakeholders] isn't just the project's failure to deliver value; it's the collective reluctance to acknowledge that failure. Fear of admitting defeat, of facing the repercussions of a project gone south, keeps the team from developing the product further."

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Peopleware

My Rules for Being a Founder After Selling 3 Companies
4 minutes read.

"Be a community billionaire. Meaning, create value with many micro-communities. Be proud or what you're doing or don't do it. The best ideas are capital light, defendable, have network effects & increased demand. You can take over your world not the world. Gotta start somewhere niche." -- Wonderful and powerful insights by Greg Isenberg that made me pause and think. Community Billionaire. Take over your world. Wonderful.

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Why I Blog
4 minutes read.

Reflection through writing is a skill very few practice to learn faster, develop interesting ideas, and look deeper into their craftsmanship: "I find that I need to have the intention about writing before I can find something worthy of writing. Sometimes to satisfy my one-post-per-week goal, I say 'OK, fine, this topic is not interesting, but I can attempt to write some thing about it'. And holy moly, am I surprised to find a fount of interesting things about that topic when I start to write. Many posts that I would not have written without this weekly goal turned out to be very insightful. I don't know what I think about something till I write about it: Writing is nature's way of telling you how sloppy your thinking is."

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Some Very Specific Advice for Founders, or Really Anyone Presenting an Idea in a Meeting
3 minutes read.

"Do exactly what has worked for you before, or do the thing that presents the idea in the best way. [...] The best storytellers are so practiced it doesn’t sound like a script. That’s a skill, not a gift. It can be learned." -- Katherine Boyle with a short and simple (not easy) reminder.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@garrytan: Surprising fact: To create something truly great you have to repeat a small number of powerful words over and over again

@AdamMGrant: Being in a bad mood is not a license to be unkind. Being sensitive is not an excuse for being abusive. Respect is a social responsibility. Treating it as optional reveals a lack of concern for others. A mark of character is maintaining civility when things don’t go your way.


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.