I spend lots of time speaking with friends and other technology professionals about a wide variety of topics from career advice, technology hype cycles, how to lead people, and finding success in our personal endeavors. Over hundreds of these discussions, I find myself returning to some of the same tidbits of wisdom that I reference with a short phrase or label. These ideas have been passed down to me or created from bits of my learnings and experience and synthesized into a concise concept in my own words. I don't claim to be the first person to have come up with these concepts, and I won't be the last, but I have personally gleaned a lot of value in internalizing them and continue to find opportunities to share them with others in casual discussion or mentoring contexts. This post is my attempt to document these tidbits of wisdom in an easily shareable format. I hope that you might read something here that resonates with your experiences, or some of that wisdom might be passed on to you.
They Have to Feel the Burn Themselves
We've all likely experienced something that caused such an acute sense of fear and stress that our primal survival instincts forces us into behaviors that do everything to try and prevent that scenario from occurring again. In professional life, those events might seem mundane and are nowhere near the life threatening perils humans evolved to protect against. But the power of fear and stress as a learning tool sometimes cannot be outmatched.
The most common context I return back to this phrase for usually revolves around technology professionals not having the proper appreciation for the discipline required to run production systems that have wide and significant impacts. That could be understanding why proper testing of new features or components is by far a better use of time and energy compared to debugging under the stress of production impact. Its the difference in understanding why its not ok to leave the issue alone till tomorrow and risk irreparable harm to your product brand instead of hunkering down and grinding through till it's fixed now.
The people I speak with that are frustrated when others don't share their urgent perspective on an imminent bad scenario are usually also those who have been on the receiving end of that burn. They remember the fear and stress and want nothing more than to avoid for themselves and their peers. I do believe there's merit in trying to teach via anecdote rather than resolving to throw newbies into the deep end to let them sink or swim. Unfortunately, sometimes they have to feel the burn themselves to truly understand and internalize the lesson.
The Career Identity Crisis
The "career identity crisis" is the point at which one must decide to pursue a path deeper into their chosen discipline or fork into an adjacent one to make forward or upward progress. In my chosen career path when I had the title of Staff Software Engineer, the decision was one of Principal Engineer, which demanded further specialization into software and systems engineering, or Engineering Manager, which took a path focused on leading technology teams. This fork in career path could be extended to any industry that separates the roles grouped into what might be labeled "individual contributor" from those of "middle management" and above.
I received advice early in my career that it didn't serve my interests to simply accept that I would enjoy and find success in either role. A trusted mentor advised that I needed to form an opinion on which one to specifically pursue, and by extension which to not pursue. In fact, they made it clear that I had to pick. Without deciding, those supporting my career growth would not know how to provide me with corresponding opportunities for each respective discipline. I experienced a sort of identity crisis grappling with this decision. Fortunately, I came out of the dilemma resolved and very happy with my decision. My personal experience helped me form this piece of wisdom that I've been able to recognize in others and share with them.
For those that at this fork in the road, I give the same advice I received myself. You have to decide. For the leaders that are responsible for growing those individuals into these respective roles, I encourage them to take advantage of the reality of the situation. Be plain about the need to decide, but curate distinctly different opportunities aligned with the different paths past the fork and label them as such. Make it clear which "type" of project or challenge you're offering and encourage the individual to be open to enjoying or not liking the experience. For example, I would give a staff engineer unsure of moving up to a Manager or Principal role different projects that I label as more "Managery" or "Principaly". A "Managery" task might be coming up with a career growth plan for a junior engineer or helping mediate an interpersonal conflict. A "Principaly" task might be designing and getting architectural approval for a new system design or integration of a new technology into a product. Let the varied opportunities inform their opinion and your curated labeling determine which path yields the best fit for them. Embrace the fork in the road knowing you can take a tour down each path before committing to the route.
Recognition has an expiration date
Showing gratitude feels like a cheat code for people leaders. It doesn't cost anything, and if done correctly it might be the most effective way to motivate and bring forth happiness. Regardless of the form of gratitude, whether a simple "Thank you" and "good job", or something formal like the presentation of an award, I've found that the magnitude of effect is directly proportional to the length of time between the act and recognition. A simple "thank you" right after the action generally has a stronger impact that any gesture after enough time has passed. As time progresses, the memory starts to fade, many other events begin to supersede the original, and a sense of the gratitude starts to seem like a lazy afterthought. However, I also believe that "better late than never" is a valid perspective on this scenario as well.
Take both extremes into consideration: let the urgency of the impending expiration date prompt you to action, but don't use it as a reason to give up even if you feel like too much time has passed.
Starting with a ball of clay
My style of working on complex problems is like how I approach writing: I slap down a simple draft as quickly as possible and do multiple iterative revisions until the quality of work is satisfactory. The emergence of Generative AI tools and their ability to play the role of brainstorming or thought partnership is how this 'ism formed. GenAI is extremely good at authoring a first draft from a rough concept. I compare the result to slapping an unformed ball of clay onto the pottery wheel. It is nowhere near a finished product. In fact it is barely on the first step to being one. But sometimes getting the first draft down can feel like the most difficult part of the process. Once you have it in front of you as a boost to your mental momentum, you can rest assured that somewhere inside the unformed and unremarkable material, the finished product does exist. The thing bridging the gap is the human process of removing, adding, shaping, forming, and detailing it.
You might flip the analogy in the other direction and compare knowledge work as an additive process, where a small kernel is added on to and progressively built up into the final product. Either way, I use this 'ism as a way to encourage people to not be intimidated by the idea of perfection and just get started. Use the tools at your disposal to get that ball of clay in front of you as fast as possible, then spend most of your time and energy sculpting it into the final product.
Pressure release
The work I engage in most commonly in my day-to-day is a constant battle of priorities and context switching. I have to decide, up to multiple times within a single hour, what is the most valuable task is to put mental energy into. Moreover, my personal priorities are not always perfectly aligned with those of my peers, stakeholders, team, and leadership. Commonly, I feel a lingering sense that a specific thread I am accountable for is building in pressure, whether external or internal, and usually driven by a sense of ambiguity, perception of being stalled, or general lack of confidence. Irrespective of where this topic sits in priority or how complex the task is, the longer that the core issue is left unaddressed, the larger it seems to loom over everything else.
I use the analogy of a pressure vessel that requires a release, for no other reason than to remove the background anxiety of its existence and increasing danger of the inevitable explosion. Venting just a bit of steam from the chamber gives mental space for other things, even if the action was largely symbolic. Sometimes it's worth it in the short team to release some pressure for the sake of the bigger picture.
If any of these tidbits of wisdom resonate with you, I'd love to hear about it from you. If I gather enough new ones, I'll consider authoring a "part 2".
---
title: "'Isms - Tidbits of Wisdom I keep Returning To"
date: 2025-09-13
tags: ["career", "leadership"]
---
I spend lots of time speaking with friends and other technology professionals about a wide variety of topics from career advice, technology hype cycles, how to lead people, and finding success in our personal endeavors. Over hundreds of these discussions, I find myself returning to some of the same tidbits of wisdom that I reference with a short phrase or label. These ideas have been passed down to me or created from bits of my learnings and experience and synthesized into a concise concept in my own words. I don't claim to be the first person to have come up with these concepts, and I won't be the last, but I have personally gleaned a lot of value in internalizing them and continue to find opportunities to share them with others in casual discussion or mentoring contexts. This post is my attempt to document these tidbits of wisdom in an easily shareable format. I hope that you might read something here that resonates with your experiences, or some of that wisdom might be passed on to you.
## They Have to Feel the Burn Themselves
We've all likely experienced something that caused such an acute sense of fear and stress that our primal survival instincts forces us into behaviors that do everything to try and prevent that scenario from occurring again. In professional life, those events might seem mundane and are nowhere near the life threatening perils humans evolved to protect against. But the power of fear and stress as a learning tool sometimes cannot be outmatched.
The most common context I return back to this phrase for usually revolves around technology professionals not having the proper appreciation for the discipline required to run production systems that have wide and significant impacts. That could be understanding why proper testing of new features or components is by far a better use of time and energy compared to debugging under the stress of production impact. Its the difference in understanding why its not ok to leave the issue alone till tomorrow and risk irreparable harm to your product brand instead of hunkering down and grinding through till it's fixed now.
The people I speak with that are frustrated when others don't share their urgent perspective on an imminent bad scenario are usually also those who have been on the receiving end of that burn. They remember the fear and stress and want nothing more than to avoid for themselves and their peers. I do believe there's merit in trying to teach via anecdote rather than resolving to throw newbies into the deep end to let them sink or swim. Unfortunately, sometimes they have to feel the burn themselves to truly understand and internalize the lesson.
## The Career Identity Crisis
The "career identity crisis" is the point at which one must decide to pursue a path deeper into their chosen discipline or fork into an adjacent one to make forward or upward progress. In my chosen career path when I had the title of Staff Software Engineer, the decision was one of Principal Engineer, which demanded further specialization into software and systems engineering, or Engineering Manager, which took a path focused on leading technology teams. This fork in career path could be extended to any industry that separates the roles grouped into what might be labeled "individual contributor" from those of "middle management" and above.
I received advice early in my career that it didn't serve my interests to simply accept that I would enjoy and find success in either role. A trusted mentor advised that I needed to form an opinion on which one to specifically pursue, and by extension which to *not* pursue. In fact, they made it clear that I *had* to pick. Without deciding, those supporting my career growth would not know how to provide me with corresponding opportunities for each respective discipline. I experienced a sort of identity crisis grappling with this decision. Fortunately, I came out of the dilemma resolved and very happy with my decision. My personal experience helped me form this piece of wisdom that I've been able to recognize in others and share with them.
For those that at this fork in the road, I give the same advice I received myself. You *have* to decide. For the leaders that are responsible for growing those individuals into these respective roles, I encourage them to take advantage of the reality of the situation. Be plain about the need to decide, but curate distinctly different opportunities aligned with the different paths past the fork and label them as such. Make it clear which "type" of project or challenge you're offering and encourage the individual to be open to enjoying or not liking the experience. For example, I would give a staff engineer unsure of moving up to a Manager or Principal role different projects that I label as more "Managery" or "Principaly". A "Managery" task might be coming up with a career growth plan for a junior engineer or helping mediate an interpersonal conflict. A "Principaly" task might be designing and getting architectural approval for a new system design or integration of a new technology into a product. Let the varied opportunities inform their opinion and your curated labeling determine which path yields the best fit for them. Embrace the fork in the road knowing you can take a tour down each path before committing to the route.
## Recognition has an expiration date
Showing gratitude feels like a cheat code for people leaders. It doesn't cost anything, and if done correctly it might be the most effective way to motivate and bring forth happiness. Regardless of the form of gratitude, whether a simple "Thank you" and "good job", or something formal like the presentation of an award, I've found that the magnitude of effect is directly proportional to the length of time between the act and recognition. A simple "thank you" right after the action generally has a stronger impact that any gesture after enough time has passed. As time progresses, the memory starts to fade, many other events begin to supersede the original, and a sense of the gratitude starts to seem like a lazy afterthought. However, I also believe that "better late than never" is a valid perspective on this scenario as well.
Take both extremes into consideration: let the urgency of the impending expiration date prompt you to action, but don't use it as a reason to give up even if you feel like too much time has passed.
## Starting with a ball of clay
My style of working on complex problems is like how I approach writing: I slap down a simple draft as quickly as possible and do multiple iterative revisions until the quality of work is satisfactory. The emergence of Generative AI tools and their ability to play the role of brainstorming or thought partnership is how this 'ism formed. GenAI is extremely good at authoring a first draft from a rough concept. I compare the result to slapping an unformed ball of clay onto the pottery wheel. It is nowhere near a finished product. In fact it is barely on the first step to being one. But sometimes getting the first draft down can feel like the most difficult part of the process. Once you have it in front of you as a boost to your mental momentum, you can rest assured that somewhere inside the unformed and unremarkable material, the finished product does exist. The thing bridging the gap is the human process of removing, adding, shaping, forming, and detailing it.
You might flip the analogy in the other direction and compare knowledge work as an additive process, where a small kernel is added on to and progressively built up into the final product. Either way, I use this 'ism as a way to encourage people to not be intimidated by the idea of perfection and just get started. Use the tools at your disposal to get that ball of clay in front of you as fast as possible, *then* spend most of your time and energy sculpting it into the final product.
## Pressure release
The work I engage in most commonly in my day-to-day is a constant battle of priorities and context switching. I have to decide, up to multiple times within a single hour, what is the most valuable task is to put mental energy into. Moreover, my personal priorities are not always perfectly aligned with those of my peers, stakeholders, team, and leadership. Commonly, I feel a lingering sense that a specific thread I am accountable for is building in pressure, whether external or internal, and usually driven by a sense of ambiguity, perception of being stalled, or general lack of confidence. Irrespective of where this topic sits in priority or how complex the task is, the longer that the core issue is left unaddressed, the larger it seems to loom over everything else.
I use the analogy of a pressure vessel that requires a release, for no other reason than to remove the background anxiety of its existence and increasing danger of the inevitable explosion. Venting just a bit of steam from the chamber gives mental space for other things, even if the action was largely symbolic. Sometimes it's worth it in the short team to release some pressure for the sake of the bigger picture.
> If any of these tidbits of wisdom resonate with you, I'd love to hear about it from you. If I gather enough new ones, I'll consider authoring a "part 2".
I spend lots of time speaking with friends and other technology professionals about a wide variety of topics from career advice, technology hype cycles, how to lead people, and finding success in our personal endeavors. Over hundreds of these discussions, I find myself returning to some of the same tidbits of wisdom that I reference with a short phrase or label. These ideas have been passed down to me or created from bits of my learnings and experience and synthesized into a concise concept in my own words. I don't claim to be the first person to have come up with these concepts, and I won't be the last, but I have personally gleaned a lot of value in internalizing them and continue to find opportunities to share them with others in casual discussion or mentoring contexts. This post is my attempt to document these tidbits of wisdom in an easily shareable format. I hope that you might read something here that resonates with your experiences, or some of that wisdom might be passed on to you. They Have to Feel the Burn Themselves We've all likely experienced something that caused such an acute sense of fear and stress that our primal survival instincts forces us into behaviors that do everything to try and prevent that scenario from occurring again. In professional life, those events might seem mundane and are nowhere near the life threatening perils humans evolved to protect against. But the power of fear and stress as a learning tool sometimes cannot be outmatched. The most common context I return back to this phrase for usually revolves around technology professionals not having the proper appreciation for the discipline required to run production systems that have wide and significant impacts. That could be understanding why proper testing of new features or components is by far a better use of time and energy compared to debugging under the stress of production impact. Its the difference in understanding why its not ok to leave the issue alone till tomorrow and risk irreparable harm to your product brand instead of hunkering down and grinding through till it's fixed now. The people I speak with that are frustrated when others don't share their urgent perspective on an imminent bad scenario are usually also those who have been on the receiving end of that burn. They remember the fear and stress and want nothing more than to avoid for themselves and their peers. I do believe there's merit in trying to teach via anecdote rather than resolving to throw newbies into the deep end to let them sink or swim. Unfortunately, sometimes they have to feel the burn themselves to truly understand and internalize the lesson. The Career Identity Crisis The "career identity crisis" is the point at which one must decide to pursue a path deeper into their chosen discipline or fork into an adjacent one to make forward or upward progress. In my chosen career path when I had the title of Staff Software Engineer, the decision was one of Principal Engineer, which demanded further specialization into software and systems engineering, or Engineering Manager, which took a path focused on leading technology teams. This fork in career path could be extended to any industry that separates the roles grouped into what might be labeled "individual contributor" from those of "middle management" and above. I received advice early in my career that it didn't serve my interests to simply accept that I would enjoy and find success in either role. A trusted mentor advised that I needed to form an opinion on which one to specifically pursue, and by extension which to not pursue. In fact, they made it clear that I had to pick. Without deciding, those supporting my career growth would not know how to provide me with corresponding opportunities for each respective discipline. I experienced a sort of identity crisis grappling with this decision. Fortunately, I came out of the dilemma resolved and very happy with my decision. My personal experience helped me form this piece of wisdom that I've been able to recognize in others and share with them. For those that at this fork in the road, I give the same advice I received myself. You have to decide. For the leaders that are responsible for growing those individuals into these respective roles, I encourage them to take advantage of the reality of the situation. Be plain about the need to decide, but curate distinctly different opportunities aligned with the different paths past the fork and label them as such. Make it clear which "type" of project or challenge you're offering and encourage the individual to be open to enjoying or not liking the experience. For example, I would give a staff engineer unsure of moving up to a Manager or Principal role different projects that I label as more "Managery" or "Principaly". A "Managery" task might be coming up with a career growth plan for a junior engineer or helping mediate an interpersonal conflict. A "Principaly" task might be designing and getting architectural approval for a new system design or integration of a new technology into a product. Let the varied opportunities inform their opinion and your curated labeling determine which path yields the best fit for them. Embrace the fork in the road knowing you can take a tour down each path before committing to the route. Recognition has an expiration date Showing gratitude feels like a cheat code for people leaders. It doesn't cost anything, and if done correctly it might be the most effective way to motivate and bring forth happiness. Regardless of the form of gratitude, whether a simple "Thank you" and "good job", or something formal like the presentation of an award, I've found that the magnitude of effect is directly proportional to the length of time between the act and recognition. A simple "thank you" right after the action generally has a stronger impact that any gesture after enough time has passed. As time progresses, the memory starts to fade, many other events begin to supersede the original, and a sense of the gratitude starts to seem like a lazy afterthought. However, I also believe that "better late than never" is a valid perspective on this scenario as well. Take both extremes into consideration: let the urgency of the impending expiration date prompt you to action, but don't use it as a reason to give up even if you feel like too much time has passed. Starting with a ball of clay My style of working on complex problems is like how I approach writing: I slap down a simple draft as quickly as possible and do multiple iterative revisions until the quality of work is satisfactory. The emergence of Generative AI tools and their ability to play the role of brainstorming or thought partnership is how this 'ism formed. GenAI is extremely good at authoring a first draft from a rough concept. I compare the result to slapping an unformed ball of clay onto the pottery wheel. It is nowhere near a finished product. In fact it is barely on the first step to being one. But sometimes getting the first draft down can feel like the most difficult part of the process. Once you have it in front of you as a boost to your mental momentum, you can rest assured that somewhere inside the unformed and unremarkable material, the finished product does exist. The thing bridging the gap is the human process of removing, adding, shaping, forming, and detailing it. You might flip the analogy in the other direction and compare knowledge work as an additive process, where a small kernel is added on to and progressively built up into the final product. Either way, I use this 'ism as a way to encourage people to not be intimidated by the idea of perfection and just get started. Use the tools at your disposal to get that ball of clay in front of you as fast as possible, then spend most of your time and energy sculpting it into the final product. Pressure release The work I engage in most commonly in my day-to-day is a constant battle of priorities and context switching. I have to decide, up to multiple times within a single hour, what is the most valuable task is to put mental energy into. Moreover, my personal priorities are not always perfectly aligned with those of my peers, stakeholders, team, and leadership. Commonly, I feel a lingering sense that a specific thread I am accountable for is building in pressure, whether external or internal, and usually driven by a sense of ambiguity, perception of being stalled, or general lack of confidence. Irrespective of where this topic sits in priority or how complex the task is, the longer that the core issue is left unaddressed, the larger it seems to loom over everything else. I use the analogy of a pressure vessel that requires a release, for no other reason than to remove the background anxiety of its existence and increasing danger of the inevitable explosion. Venting just a bit of steam from the chamber gives mental space for other things, even if the action was largely symbolic. Sometimes it's worth it in the short team to release some pressure for the sake of the bigger picture. If any of these tidbits of wisdom resonate with you, I'd love to hear about it from you. If I gather enough new ones, I'll consider authoring a "part 2".
