I have now been on a break from work for over 2 months. I am lucky and grateful to be in a position to do so, especially in the midst of all the craziness this year. Now, more than ever before, I understand why Vienna has been named the most liveable city in the world for the tenth time. It’s been such a joy to be able to go out cycling almost every day in the beautiful Danube Island, which has done wonders for both my physical and mental health. As I’m bound to soon return to Berlin and drop the anchor there, I’m trying to make every minute in this beautiful place count.
A few weeks ago I mentioned my intention of switching into more of a coaching and consulting career. This has actually led me to have very fruitful 1:1 sessions with some incredible people who reached out, and I confirmed how much I love doing this. I will continue to do so, for as long as my time and bandwidth allow.
But being off for a while now led me to both recharge and reflect. As the dark cloud of exhaustion lifted, I have grown more curious of what I could add in another full-time gig while leveraging my latest experience. I also realized there’s no sense in closing myself off to good opportunities. In other words, it’s in my best interest to preserve optionality.
In order to present my best self to any future opportunities, I felt this is now the time to work on Engineering leadership aspects that I’m weakest at. Looking back, I never had the chance to develop outstanding practitioner, hands-on skills. I not only had incredibly competent people in my teams, but more often than not circumstances pulled me into having to address organizational and people type issues.
So, over the last couple of weeks, I have started to dig again into the heavy lifting, technical topics of our trade. This has been an enlightening experience, which I have been enjoying. But every time you get out of your comfort zone, it’s not exactly smooth sailing. Growth is, after all, not comfortable.
With this in mind, I wanted to share three principles I have been doing my best to adopt throughout this:
Stay with the discomfort of temporary incompetence. When I go for a hard ride on my bike, it’s painful in my legs and lungs. But I signed up for it, and the only way out is through. Temporary incompetence in an intellectual topic is a form of pain (especially for ambitious people like me). There are no shortcuts. Learning always works the same way — slowly, until a tipping point is reached. Click. You have to stick around long enough to hear it.
Fall in love with the process, not the outcome. Going through the pain and discomfort is more palatable if you learn to appreciate the ride. On the bike, the harder you go the less oxygen you have in your brain, so you can’t think very elaborate thoughts or muse on the meaning of life. But it also makes it easier to still your mind, be present and find some enjoyment at a deeper level. Every hard ride is a collection of small wins — another km, another milestone. Just like with learning and doing big things.
Become antifragile. Repeatedly going through the above builds character. If you apply Ray Dalio’s principle of Pain + Reflection = Progress, every pain has the potential to make you better. In his book Antifragile, Nassim Taleb describes “antifragility” in much the same way: a property of systems that increase in capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. Note this is not the opposite of being fragile — it’s about thriving under stress.
Temporary incompetence is not only about learning hard topics. It’s also about joining a new company or leading a new team. It’s when you have a big, hard problem to tackle without a clear solution. When giving difficult feedback to someone you care about. Or having to deal with a sudden shift in your life.
The ideas above are time-tested wisdom and I certainly didn’t invent them. But I hope you allow them to give you perspective in those moments where you feel kind of lost and doubting your own capabilities.
Disclaimer: Based on some great feedback from readers (thank you!) on mixing it up within the newsletter 3-2-1 format, this week I’m experimenting with sharing two short talks on video instead of two podcasts. Let me know what you think of the change, and if you *really* want podcasts this week, just hit me up — I have a few dozen ready for you. 😅
3 Articles
✍️ On Being a Team Lead: Welcome to Our Team
When it comes to clear thinking and deliberate intent, it's hard to beat this post by Colin Breck. Written back in 2016 as he was about to become a team lead (after many years of honing his software craft), it lays down his whole leadership philosophy. And it doubles as the perfect "manager README" for any new joiner to understand the team's identity, what's most valued and how to have impact. Masterpiece of both writing and engineering leadership that I keep coming back to.
✍️ Candidates, Companies, and the Matchmaking Problem
People want jobs and companies want people, so it's easy to fall into the "catch-all" trap: presenting ourselves (and our companies) as having almost every desirable trait. Julie Zhuo pushes back on this approach and does so suggesting a super useful framework designed to bring out what's truly unique about ourselves. She's also an incredibly gifted writer, as this post demonstrates.
✍️ 8 Tips I use to More Effectively Learn from Podcasts
Before podcasts existed, I loved to listen to radio talk shows while driving. When the format was invented, I was hooked to this day. I get more brain nutrition (and enjoyment) per hour from podcasts than from most books or blogs, getting the best bang for my buck during my bike rides. In this post, my friend Curtis Stanier gives excellent guidance on how to make the most out of your listening time.
2 Videos
📺 Des Traynor (Intercom) on What happens after product market fit
If there’s one thing I learned from my own experiences in startups is that developing a product beyond the initial stages is incredibly hard. And it’s easy to get caught up in what other companies say they do, while pretending they have it all figured out. This talk by Des Traynor, co-founder of Intercom, struck me as enlightening, pragmatic, often funny, and chockfull of great tactical advice.
📺 How to Manage Remote Engineering Teams for Scale - Andreas Klinger
While the dust is still to settle on how businesses will ultimately address distributed and remote work long term, the reality is that everyone is already a remote worker to some degree — the question is how much and that increased very rapidly with the latest events. I wrote before that companies who don’t take this seriously in terms of practices and truly understanding the principles behind distributed work will be on the wrong side of history. This talk from last year by Andreas Klinger struck me as excellent guidance in that sense.
1 Book 📚
I am a sucker for biographies. Not only of interesting individuals, but also the making (and sometimes the undoing) of companies. One thing I try to be mindful of, though, is how easy it is to over-focus on the ones that survived and not learn enough from the failures. The so-called survivorship bias is a term coined by the mathematician Abraham Wald during WWII, who realized that analyzing the bullet holes in the military airplanes that came back to base wasn’t very useful in improving their resilience — it was the ones that didn’t come back that held the real insights.
Put another way, we are tempted to copy what we see works, and don’t do enough avoiding doing what didn’t work.
We can be mesmerized and wide-eyed at the recent success of a company like Slack, but there’s a perhaps lot more to learn from how Steward Butterfield pivoted away from being a failed games company. And did you know that PayPal was originally a product to transfer IOUs from PalmPilot to PalmPilot?
This week’s book is one such story.
Throughout these pages, co-founder and original CEO Marc Randolph candidly describes the journey of Netflix, all the way back to the multiple silly ideas he threw at Reed Hastings, the more well known and current CEO.
Three traits stood out to me while reading this:
Focus and iterate. This is where the sub-title “the amazing life of an idea” comes in. Through multiple tough spots growing the company, a common trait was discarding existing things in favour of a radical focus in something — sometimes to the point of letting go of what accounted then for 99% of the revenue because it wasn’t the right long term bet. And then iterating until the right sauce materialized.
Tell people what the goals are, not what to do. The process of getting to the right ideas and how to iterate on them was based on a lot of healthy disagreement. The pattern seems to be that every time the team agreed on the importance of something, everyone was trusted to go and do the best they could to bring it alive.
Not taking no for an answer. Dogged, bullheaded persistence seems to be another trait of successful stories preceded by a lot of failures and pivots. Randolph tells an incredible story of him interviewing for a job as an account executive role in an advertising agency in New York. He didn’t get it, and sent a long letter to the agency asking what he could do improve, because he would absolutely go for it again the year after. It turns out no one was offered the job because the agency knew that an account executive role was a selling job. So they said no to everyone, and Randolph was the only one who wouldn’t take it. So, lo and behold, he got the job.
Again, it’s important to point out that all these takeaways aren’t about marvelling at success. They are tools that let us learn from and leverage the inevitable failures along the way. So don’t copy your successful competitors features — and Netflix had a huge battle with Blockbuster — but rather find and copy the mindset of those that had the grit and the poise to acknowledge what sucked in themselves, and worked to make it better.
If you’re curious about the early Netflix story and don’t want to make the investment in reading this book right now, I would recommend this documentary which walks through the same timeline, from idea to IPO.
🙌🏽 Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed it, and until next week.
👉 You can follow me on Twitter @prla