#nofilter

• intrinsic

• good at it

• make others happy

Reasons to not enjoy

• ego

• defensiveness

UChicago: pedantic and thinks they’re smarter than everyone else. Why. Insecure?

I don’t feel like myself since having a baby, since pregnancy even. Is this the new normal? Who I am? If so, I don’t like her.

Identity is knowing which aspects of yourself you like and choosing to do things by those characteristics.

Or is identity just who you are naturally when you’re just sitting around, going with the flow?

The older you get in a corporate career, the more you realize how political everything is.

Success is about who you know and influence more than the work you actually do.

A good manager is someone that without them, you would feel like it would make a difference on your work quality or outputs

1. Finds the right questions

2. Frames the question until it’s do-able for you, e.g. if it’s ambiguous getting down to even the data table and exact question

3. Feedback on communication deck, teaching you how to write a strong deck

- when your learning is seeing diminishing returns

- when you feel your career growth is slowing due to the company size (ie large companies good for learning early on in career, less so later)

- when no one is left to advocate for you and grow you

- when there’s no people left you admire or respect to work with

- when there’s no team you’re interested in joining or excited about contributing to

- when you believe you’re being under paid for your skillset

It might just be ok to be…

1. Lacking self confidence

2. Seeking to prove yourself / be discontent

3. Idealistic: discontent with the world and believing you in change, ambitious and dreamer of impossible dreams

4. Questioning of authority / rebellious

Why? Explanations for each:

1. Confidence is built on having experienced doing things successfully even when it was hard. If you’ve never experienced true challenges in life, it’s hard to have any confidence that you’ll achieve them

2. I think if I was too content, too comfortable early on, I would still be on my couch, not in my current job. Maybe to some extent, we can only afford to be content once we’ve made it somewhere, else we aren’t reaching our potential, like the man who wasted the talents his master gave him. The call to be content is often given wisely to people who are just not grateful, and will never be satisfied.

3. The world tells you when things don’t work. The world makes us jaded and cynical enough with experience. There’s no need to bring someone young and naive down. They might just be the one to prove they can do something crazy. Every few in a million do.

4. There are a few types of mathematical proofs, which can also be applied to how young people develop a philosophy about life, values, beliefs, and personality. Since all these philosophies you develop when you’re young are extremely personal, it all requires trial and error, a part of “discovering yourself” or “coming to age.”

- direct proofs: knowing characteristics that you know about yourself or about your beliefs, and then combining them to arrive at a new conclusion

- contradiction: trying out new characteristics or beliefs, believing those things to be true, and seeing where life takes you given those new personalities and beliefs

To really discover yourself, one requires some proof by contradiction because you don’t know what you don’t know about yourself. That proof by contradiction might look like rebellion, or questioning of authority.

- enjoyment: people you don’t mind being work friends with

- impact: teams that have a lot of hanging fruit and have been shipping a lot of impact makes it easier for you to show impact from product shipping on your performance review

- manager: managers who are invested in growth give you opportunities to step up, know how the system works, and are not overly stringent in where they set the bar

- ideas: having ideas on how it can improve or see clear gaps in the team that you can bring a fresh perspective on

- people to learn from: respect the work coming out of it

Picking optimal projects that’ll lead to impact

- internal support: are there PMs and engineers already bullish on a project, but just need someone with expertise to flesh it out?

- leadership importance: is leadership interested in the metric that the project is likely to move, or interested in the goals of the project?

- impact potential: do you believe there is impact potential due to sizing estimation?

The more you sprint, the harder it is to do long distance running.

The more in the weeds and technical details you are, the harder it is to communicate high level topics.

The more work you have to do, the harder it is to be creative.

The more risk averse you are, the harder it is to be innovative.

The younger you are, the more adventurous you are, with a desire to try more new things.

The more adventurous you are, the harder it is to be committed to a single passion.

The more productivity / superficial achievements oriented you are, the harder it is to accomplish anything real.

The more bored you are, the easier it is to become inspired by your own introspections and reflections. This is why you are most inspired at 1 am.

The more execution oriented you are, the harder it is to be a visionary.