Some New Year’s resolutions are crazy. Things where you know right after writing them down “Yeah that will not happen, but let’s give it a shot, maybe maybe maybe”. For me, that was the resolution to learn something new every day for a whole year.

To take the thrill out of it right from the start, I failed fast. Learning something new every day requires a lot of planning. Otherwise you run out of resources or learning opportunities rather quickly. A hack for this are random knowledge bits, like “How old can lobsters be?”. But in the days of information overflow, are these actual learnings? Is there anything I can take away from knowing this and how many of these rather fun facts will I remember next year? Or even next month?

The logical move (instead of abandoning it) was to reshape the resolution. Learning something new every day was too easy to fail. Instead, I settled to keep track of all the things that I learned or found to be interesting thoughts through the year. This turned into a nice list. Honestly, most items feel like inspirational quotes that are printed on someones kitchen wall. But they have a deeper meaning to me. In total I got to 56 items, which means I managed to find something more than once per week. Here are my top 5 from that list!

Follow your vision

2023-03-01 It is easier to follow a vision if you create desired behaviours for this vision. These behaviours explains how you will act upon this vision

In tech companies it is common to have to have a bold vision, principles and values. While this is a good, valuable practice, it is hard for me to realize when a value can be applied in a situation.

I struggled with this until finding the instructions above. Figuring out a behaviour that aligns with a value makes it a lot easier to communicate the intention. You can add behaviours for your values on the spot, but I recommend using real situations as examples. Being open and writing down a situations when you apply a value will give you a great list over time. Again, the goal is not to find a single behaviour that replaces the value, it is to fill the value with life. And there should be a lot of behaviours for each value.

Since I am a huge fan of bringing examples to the table, let’s look at one of my personal values and behaviours for it: “Family comes first.”

• On weekends Slack goes into silent mode
• If there are three team events in a single week, I will attend at most 2 of them
• I work over hours if we are at risk to miss an important deadline. I will communicate to my manager that I will take the time back once the project is safe, to spend it with my family.
• If I can choose to go to the gym after work and thus not see my kid before bedtime or going home directly, I go home. I can try to do a workout later that night, making it a win-win, but I accept that this might not happen.
• If I notice that my stress level is high, I am likely to bring that stress to my family. In this case I will try to take some time alone to recover (e.g. walking alone for an hour).

These behaviours make clear that my value does not exist to make “Work versus private life” decision, but to help me set my priorities in general.

Gain advantage

2023-06-26 Many people don’t invest time into their engineering skills in their free time, which is fine. But they also need to understand that those that do sp will exceed them in terms of having been exposed to other ideas, best practices, and all the other goodies you can find in books.
- Michael De La Fontaine

I have to admit that until the middle of the year 2023 I wasn’t much into reading things about work outside of work. Yes, I had a couple of books, but I was reading 2-3 pages per week. So no real progress there.

Similarly, I did not follow any newsletters or other feeds around engineering. The things I need for my job I learn during the job, right? Right?

Michael’s comment during a group discussion was a hit in the stomach. How can I assume myself to become an amazing engineer, if I don’t challenge myself or expose myself to new ideas? It’s not that I did not realize that before, but sometimes you need another person to address the elephant in the room to see it properly.

As an outcome, there have been a few changes I made shortly afterwards. I now spent 10-15 min per day reading. Aiming for a number of pages did not work out because there are sometimes single sentences I think about quite long. I started writing a team-internal newsletter. And I subscribed to several engineering newsletters that I found interesting. Do I read all the articles there all the time? No. But it already did exactly what I hoped it would do for me - Showing me new things to think about.

As a side note, there also is a great quote from Phil Heath: “Hard work beats talent every day. But those guys that are talented and exercise hard work ethics and discipline can do some amazing things”. While (very likely) not the intention of him saying it, for me this means that you are either talented or you are not. But you can’t go wrong with putting in hard work.

Expand your comfort zone

2023-07-08 You don’t have to leave your comfort zone, if you can expand it.

We often hear motivational quotes and speeches, claiming that you need to leave your comfort zone to grow. I don’t disagree, but neither do I agree.

Your comfort zone has so many layers - Yes, there are some where you are not challenged. Where you can stay and nothing will change. On the other hand, leaving your comfort zone is stressful and not feasible over a longer time. You cannot constantly leave your comfort zone. What you can do is finding out where your zone ends and try to stay close to that border. Doing so will shift your center and things that have been hard (though not extremely hard) become… routine. Easy. And your border will shift, as your zone expands. Things that previously have been outside your comfort zone are now within it.

For me, being publicly exposed is out of my comfort zone. The thought of writing my thoughts and publishing it would have stressed me out a few months ago. But writing for a closed group, where I can play around and practice? That seemed fine. So I started writing an internal team newsletter, until I felt comfortable enough sharing my thoughts with others. In the beginning, this was also stressful - How would others react? Would they react? What if I write something I should not have written? What if somebody disagrees? Over time I realized that I was overthinking and this newsletter became very easy for me to write. Which resulted in the idea of having my own blog seeming way more realistic. And here we are.

Goals and identity

2023-08-31 There is a significant difference between what you want to achieve (goal) and who you want to become (identity). A goal is vulnerable to the endless changes in life. An identity is permanent and can weather any storm.
- from “You Can’t Screw This Up”

This made a huge change for me when thinking about my personal growth and how to get there. Applying this learning meant no longer asking “What do I need to do to become a successful leader”. Instead I needed to shifting my perspective: “I am a successful leader. How should I behave?”

When writing my growth plan I now ask myself: If my future self were to give me guidance, what would I tell me? How is the person I aspire to be doing things? What am I currently missing to be this person?

The answers were pretty obvious, but sometimes I struggle with seeing the simple things. My future self is curious and open-minded. He actively listens to others, trying to understand their point to improve his own view (even when disagreeing). It also showed me that I need to improve my communication. When people disagreed with me before, I had the tendancy to assume they didn’t understand my ideas. The more open-minded thought is that my explanations were no good enough to convey my idea. Or maybe I have been to proud to see the problems with it.

My future self also is good at organising their time. He is proactively asking if a meeting makes sense, but also realising when a thread on a chat is not helping clearing up a situation anymore.

And most important: My future self takes time to think about a decision. In our field we are rarely under so much pressure that seconds count. It is fine to take a deep breath (or a good night of sleep) before making a decision. Which does not mean the decision is on hold, a decision will be made. Maybe it is not the best decision, but it should be the best decision in that context.

Change things

2023-09-15 I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.
- Angela Davis

My perspective of things I can change and make better, the enthusiastic fire that burned in me to make the world a better place, changed quite a bit in recent years. When I started my professional career, the roof had no ceiling. Every process that I saw no working efficiently, every problem in the team I thought I had the power to improve. From doing better QA, convining everybody to document their work properly to changing the whole culture.

The more seniority I gained, the less I thought this to be true. The boundaries of my own actions became clearer, as well as the fact that a single person can not change an organisation. This sounds bitter and it is. It wasn’t easy realising that my mindset had shifted, since it happened over the course of years. Only when I saw the comment above I noticed how much I had been affected. I was following the stoic idea of “Accept the things you cannot change”. Which is a great idea, but I applied it to too many situations where I know see that I don’t necessarily miss the power to change them.

The key is that my perspective must change again, because something else changed with my growing seniority - my influence. I now have a lot more social capital than I used to have. Some changes cannot happen because a single person pushes them, but that does not mean they are not worth pushing. They must be pushed by a group of people. So the first step is using my social capital to gather these groups. And I also need to fight the cynism. Just because I tried something before and it did not work does not mean somebody else cannot achieve this. So if people approach me with their cool, new idea that I already had before, I will not stop them. I will support them, tell them what experience I have with this problem so that they can start from a better position than I did.

We have to accept the things we cannot change. But we can change a lot of things.

The Way Forward

Even though I did not reach my initial goal, I have been happy with the outcome of the resolution. Looking back at the things I wrote down after a year, remembering the situations and thinking whether I still apply the learning was insightful.

Looking forward to what I will learn in 2024!