Tomek Onyszko

Social networks and information delta

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 12:05:40 GMT

Social networks are not social anymore - mostly. What started from a need (or idea about it) of interactions between people in digital form, has drifted away from it, towards more tangible outcome - ads/sales driven revenue.

My personal usage of social networks has evolved over a time, and now I’m settled mostly on one. The one unlikely for many people - X (former Twitter).

Why?

That’s probably something in my personality, being an introvert, raised behind the iron curtain… but since I got access to the Internet I was kind of “social media” person, even if it didn’t existed.

It started with access to Usenet and local chats at the university, going through technical (mostly) forums, playing and managing MUD (on-line, text based RPG worlds), having blog in different incarnations since 1999 and heavy usage of instant messaging.

I haven’t analyzed it, but once on-line, I was always drawn towards some kind of the community.

With social media explosion I was “IN”. And “IN” big time - I’ve used Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, Google Plus (that one was interesting) and many others (also some local sites from Poland).

That was probably where “social” part of my introversion has kicked in.

It lasted for a while, until you realized that it all started to turn into one, giant use grinding machine, to be packaged and sold for advertisements.

Then I’ve started the process of cutting it off one by one and changing my social media usage patterns, that evolves to this day.

… you are selling something. That’s hard truth a lot of people will deny, citing number of reasons. And these reasons will be probably true, but those, that makes sense, are coming down to selling something.

Selling doesn’t mean selling a thing. It might be idea, your job profile, your service, network, expertise. You name it. Places like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and others changed into one giant marketplaces.

The biggest thing people sell on those marketplace is the idea of their life, self and what they have, that they want others to belief. Or they believe in it by themselves.

Any social element is mostly gone, and it will be gone even faster with AI being used for content creation.

If you are not selling something and you are still using these sites, you are being sold or sold to. Nothing wrong, just be aware of it.

BTW - to be completely frank, I was and sometimes I’m still there to sell something. It isn’t that I’m somehow immune from it or higher social media being.

Information delta

So why I’m still there and what I’m looking for. The answer was named, during one of recent coffee meetings with one of friends.

INFORMATION DELTA

What I know about the world and things that interests me is what I can find in my bubble. My bubble, as every bubble, has a limit of what I can find, what I can learn, what people around me can tell me from their expertise.

Breaking out of this bubble is hard.

So besides everything else, what I’m looking for is information delta - what is out there, that might be helpful or interesting, that I’m missing and I will not stumble upon, unless I will somehow “find it.”

It might be something as trivial as source of new books or movies, an idea someone will throw around with a link, an article or YT link to an interesting video or… some concepts and research around health or investing ideas and research.

Social network site, can act as a sensing machine, that delivers this “information delta”. Why?

It is grouping various individuals, with them acting in their best, self-interest. It might the “selling” mentioned above, but sometimes it is also just sharing what they’ve found, what they do, what they are interested in.

It has a scale (or at least it has to have a scale to be useful), that exposes you to the variety of these ideas in a quantity.

And it has to have variety of these views, ideas and different angles that you are interested in.

Please note, that I’m not ringing the bell of “freedom of speech” here, that many raises. It is hard problem and nuanced and my co-host on a podcast, Sebastian, did a great job writing about it on his No-Kill Switch blog: Why freedom of speech is a wicked problem.

I’m searching for information delta, but what I’m not looking for from social networks is their social side.

Yes, I like to interact with people. Yes, I have my “guilty pleasure” in getting sometimes into heated and opinionated discussions under posts or in threads. Guilty as charged, I even sometimes start such threads.

Social aspect is not what I’m looking for. I’m not there to make friends (however it might happen) or to maintain relationship with people or to share “updates on my life”.

Even if I still maintain all of above in the digital form, I don’t look for social networks for it. I’ve created over a time my own version of social media and it is where it happens (separate write up about it might come in the future)

X/Twitter… (un)likely winner

Through the evolution of my approach and needs towards the social network, I now settled on one. The one that was doomed to go into extinction, collapse and become irrelevant.

Facebook and Instagram are nothing else than constant stream of ads, content that are selling things or selling people for me. Nothing interesting there. Especially being on Instagram if you are not a content producer or selling there is pointless. You are just a target.

LinkedIn has become a self-reinforcing circle of cringe forms of providing insights and feeding the funnels. It has become more cringe over time but in a wrong way. People trying to fake things, just to provide some insights, that leads to them providing a remedy for it in form of their company, expertise or course.

There are still some single voices there that says something interesting. Otherwise it is a constant stream of predictable “takes” on something that had happened.

And that leaves us with X.

X is providing what I’m looking for. A variety of ideas and voices, in the different forms (short, long, blog posts, articles, takes, videos, spaces), that are exchanging the ideas.

X was doomed by people when Elon took it over, as he has played on his “freedom of speech” card and it went sideways. In the end, Elon (with all my views on his actions) is good thing that had happened to X.

Even when people started to abandon Twitter on masses and flock to different alternatives (I was cheering for BlueSky but in the end I think it had failed), I made a point, that Twitter/X will not fall and will be better over time.

Why?

Bubbles

When people were looking for alternatives they were forming new bubbles. Some people went for the Mastodon, some for BlueSky and other sites.

It wasn’t the appeal of these platform that brought them there. It wasn’t a vote “for” these platform. It was vote “against” that made them make the switch.

It wasn’t even vote against the platform or how it works. It was mostly vote against Elon and his view and/or actions.

That’s fine - I’m not huge fan of Elon’s myself in his political/activist persona (still you have to give him a credit as a builder). But you know what … just mute this dude and you will not see him ever again.

New platforms or people moving towards existing platforms, were creating new division lines across views. They were forming bubbles of convictions and ideas.

I wasn’t looking for new bubbles to be in or new social circle that will look at X and Elon and bitch about it. I was looking for information delta. So I stick with X.

Side note: I had a lot of hopes for BlueSky, and I still think that technically what it is built upon is a good direction. Yet, after initial try, now I’m seldom there as the bubble it formed was a bit too strong for me :).

X/Twitter can be chaotic, full of erratic people, hard content and opinions on a borders of what is accepted. (BTW - like any of those sites)

Yet, it delivers fast and diverse source of information, whitepapers, news ideas and concepts. If you are staying on other sites, like Facebook or LinkedIn you are reading chewed and spitted version of these same news and ideas, just a week later. Even for a news or what is happening in the world, it can be much faster than other sites, not to mention the traditional media.

How can I stay there and use it? The answer is simple.

Pick your interest, block and mute at will… and then block and mute even more

Block and mute are two best functions of X. I use them all the time and I use it often. I think all the platforms should implement it, in the same way (they won’t).

You want to get your information delta on X? Here’s a short recipe.

Pick who you follow and curate this list. You don’t follow friends etc. - you follow complete strangers who says something interesting. If they don’t - unfollow them. It isn’t personal action in any form.
Put people in the lists and use them to read what is interesting for you. I have all kind of lists on X. If I feel like I want to go into specific topic or social circle, I just open one of them. If I just want to kill time, see something completely out of my circles or I’m in the mood for some social brawl - I will just open algorithmic feed”.
Block and mute all people and topics that are not in your interest. New drama related to some personality… mute the name of this personality and it disappears form your feed. Someone bitching on politics - block the dude. Someone is jerk in the comments without merit - block him. It does wonder to the quality of what you are seeing.

And… that’s it. I mean, that’s literally it.

It is like reinforced learning - amplify and curate what works for you. Block/mute what is a distraction or noise.

Facebook/Instagram and LinkedIn will not let you, or at least not in that easy way to block or mute with ease. Why? Because it goes against their business model and algorithms.

Imagine that you would block “B2B sales” on LinkedIn and “AI insights from McKinsey report” and think what would left there?

Do you see this empty wall? I can see it clearly.

It is a tool, not a life

Yet, useful as it is, X is a tool. Not perfect, plagued with AI as all other sites and sources.

For now, for me it is best tool to search for “information delta”. If I would have to name the second or third tool, it would probably go towards Substack and YouTube.

You should not mistake it with a life. Life is not lived there. It is lived outside of it.

Check-out, touch the grass how they say. If you see that you are getting too emotional about it, you spend too much time there - just drop it.

Uninstall the app, block the site and forget about it.

Now, I go for a run in this gorgeous, fall weather that had happened here, where I’ve happened to be at the moment.

There always was NO FUTURE

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 13:56:56 GMT

I see a lot of, mostly younger (being younger then myself becomes easier task every day) succumbing to dark outlook, that the world is hopeless.

The thing is, that looking back at my 50 years, it was always a case, and it was always a false narrative (minus the outlier situations).

There is no cure for it, other than going through this period and living to see the other day yourself. That’s the hard part of this experience.

Whatever myself or others will tell you about it, can be brushed with “You don’t know how it is, at your time it was different.”

Yup. The point is, that it was different, and it is different for every person who lives through it. You (as a part of this experience) are no special in it. Yet, you are special - as a person.

It was easier “back then”

That’s the common fallacy - it was easier back then. You had it easier, time was different.
Yup, it was. Yup, maybe some things financially were in a different place.

But… we thought the same about our parents or their generations. That’s part of the life and going through it.

People are going through a change and they look at people who were there before and that already are somewhere with their life. It looks bad, they got it. You haven’t.

You are are looking from starting line, at a people who is running for 10 years. Actually this person is going out of energy (or close to it). You see it and you are like “Oh, they got easier, I will never make it.”

Sure, you will not if you will not start to run (don’t mistake it with rat race or something, put your own analogy here is you like).

You are looking at people in some point in time, with the result they got after years of doing stuff, without a knowledge what it took, to get there, what they’ve gained or lost and what was their starting point.

Also what you are missing, is their perspective at their starting line. I’m assure you - it also was close to what you see right now, and it was mostly bleak.

My version of “NO FUTURE”

From current world perspective, I’ve got no future. And actually I was “NO FUTURE”, part of heavy-metal and punk subculture, it was something a lot of us, carried on a poster (more likely jacket) every day.

I was born during the communist time, behind Iron Curtain. I couldn’t travel outside of Poland and have passport. Oh, I was able to travel once, to Hungary, but then I had to return my passport to police station.

There was actually no future ahead of us, no role models (other than our parents), no phone, no internet, TV, we were poor … and then it all fell apart.

The system crashed and yeah, maybe we got more open as a country, but my parents lost jobs and had to become entrepreneur within a single day, we become even poorer, the unemployment was 20+ percent.

All the jobs options… has changed. My education from high school become irrelevant.

We haven’t got a future. Literally. That was our point of view. We saw our parents loosing their past, people who were in their primes become rich or getting new kind of jobs, and we were just looking how it was passing by for us.

When I got out of the university, the unemployment was still high, I wasn’t exactly sure what I would do (had some job, had some skills). No plan, no future.

People who started mere 5 years before me, were successful in international corporations businesses, they got already careers, houses/flats, cars.

I was at my “starting line”.

But it was easier, now it is so fast.. so much things to learn

That’s the line I’ve heard recently as well. That right now it is faster, there’s so much to learn, it is overwhelming.

Yup. I feel you. I had to (among many other things):

learn how the phone works and how to use it (literally)
what computer is and how to use it
what is this damn Internet and how to connect to it
what is the mobile phone and how to use it
how to send damn fax to Microsoft to start my business with them
how to create document, spreadsheet and type all the formulas
how to book a hotel and ticket, without booking sites on-line
how to board the plane (I was almost 30 years old when I first traveled on a plain)

Not to mention that I had to thought myself a language, that wasn’t officially thought in my country (English). All of it without access to internet, books, videos etc. or people who could show me how to do it.

During my time:

We got land line phones and they went away
We got mobile phones, and they have changed into mobile computers
I typed on a mechanical typewriter and learned how do to computations on mechanical calculator (not a small electronic one, but literally mechanical thing) and it all went away into dust (thank you for two years of typing classes).
We switched from computers being standalone computers, to networked one, to connected to Internet all the time
We got couple of market busts, dot com bubble, housing crisis etc.

Someone said recently in X convo: “But it was easier to win the market in the past.” Fuck, I didn’t even knew what the market it and first time I probably heard about it when I was twenty+.

The point here isn’t to tell you, that we had it hard. The point is to show, that the change is always there and we all had to learn new tricks along the way. Most, like 80% of my knowledge from high school and university time, is irrelevant now.

It will not change and it wasn’t easier in the past. It was the same.

The Choice

Some people I knew or friends succumbed to this “NO FUTURE” thing. That there’s no point in trying or doing stuff as the world is already “set”.

Some of them did fine, some of them deteriorate into bad habits.

What I can see in a hindsight, is that those who didn’t and had “Let’s fu..k it and try to do something” attitude did better.

And it doesn’t mean that people had grand plans to conquered the world. I didn’t.

If you would ask me if I had a plan, the truth is, I didn’t. Oh, I didn’t big time. I just showed up, put hours in and tired things.

Probably I was lucky, that I also met some people who were trying things and we were doing some experiments together (like PC parts/assembly company).

Luck, but not blind luck, is a big part of our lives, we just don’t like to admit it.

So yeah, I feel you. You feel that there is no future, world isn’t fair anymore, there is no equal chances etc., and in many areas you might be right.

But you are not special in it. Your generation is not special. We all were there before. In our own version of “NO FUTURE.”

In the end, it comes down to THE CHOICE: will you succumb to this feeling, see the world as not fair (it isn’t fair and it wasn’t) and rigged (it is and it was), and decide to sit and do nothing, or you will try to carve your own space in it.

How?

I have no fu…king clue about it. I didn’t had any idea for myself, so even after doing it for last 35yrs on the market, I don’t feel competent enough to advice you on that. Hell, you probably know more about the world out there.

The real choice, cliche how it sounds, is in how you see it and what you are going to decide to do about it.

Ignore the noise and people out there

A lot of what you gather now, is the noise. Noise is dragging you down. It is a feature of our algorithmic driven tools.

What you get from this noise is either negativity or inflated expectations. It is topic for separate write-up so for now only two pieces:

take active approach in removing noise from your life
don’t set your expectations looking at people who are earning money from building those expectations for you

Ignore people (also me, if you choose so) who tells you what you should do. What you can get from them are hints, learnings. Process it for yourself.

But in the end, as Naval says, “life is being lived in the arena.” Go out and try things. The situation works in your favor, if you decide to ignore the noise and do stuff.

From some perspectives, the bar was never set lower. You may think, that world has change, but in the end, people still are valuing simple stuff:

show up
do things
be reliable
deliver value (where value might be defined in many different ways).

World is more positive sum game than people think. I wasn’t always thinking like that, but I see the difference since I’ve started to think about it this way.

Earlier you will shake off your version of “NO FUTURE” than better.

Have fun 🖖

PS. You may want to read “Lessons learned so far” I wrote some time ago, but in case you wouldn’t I just quote first four points from it:

1. It is a long haul game

2. There are no shortcuts - you will have to work to earn it

3. Take care of yourself; you will need it for the long haul

4. Don’t compare yourself to others. You observe them long in their version of a game.

There is extended version of all of these points plus 26 more, so feel free to read through it if you like.

Habits

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 18:55:13 GMT

I’ve installed an app for habits on the phone. HabitKit if you are curious which one.
I can’t recommend it or say it is bad. Why?

I’ve never used it.

It sits on my screen and yesterday I opened it and tapped ”+” to add something. Then hesitated and canceled. And then removed the app from the phone.

It made me think about my attempts to form or remove habits.

You’ve probably read book(s) on habits forming and keeping. One notable and well known is “Atomic habits”. I’ve read it to (it is good one BTW)

All those books focus on some routines and approaches that can be summarized:

Start small and make it easy for you to follow the habit
Keep track of it in some way, best in the way that boost this habit
Keep it going for long enough for it to become a habit.

And you know what? I’ve realized it didn’t work for me. Every single time I’ve tried to use this technique to form some habit or encourage some behavior, I’ve failed.

I’ve tried all of it (I think): paper notes, using to-do tasks to remind me about it (I use Todoist and they have this functionality), reminders.

It always kept going for some time and then I dropped it anyway. It might be my lack of strong will and commitment, or something else. If something else, then “what?”

So, then I did a different exercise - what caused the habits to stay? I have some, I do them, I don’t need a tracking to do it.

So what was it?

It come down to this list:

Things I simply enjoy doing, or I feel better after doing it.
Things that doesn’t require additional, special equipment.
Things I can do on my own and I don’t need anyone for it
Things that are good for me in a long run.

And to be perfectly honest - I haven’t thought about those things upfront. It is a bit of retrospective.

Same with removing bad habits but in opposite:

Things that are not good form me in a long run
Things, that I don’t enjoy (mostly after)

What also helped in forming and keeping some habits:

Guilt free, I don’t fuse around skipped day or even longer period. I pick it up and do it again.
Not looking what others are doing and do not comparing myself with others.

The last one is interesting, as it applies to those things, that might be competitive, like running, sports of simply doing a number of steps.

(Note, I’m not the most competitive person around)

In those areas, it is easy to fall into a trap of comparing ourselves to others, and then to the conclusion “I suck on it so why bother” and dropping out.

Another thing is “plateau” trap. Whatever is your goal that you want to drive with given habit, it will reach plateau at some point.

You lose weight and it stops. Or you run and you run faster and faster, and then you are stuck at some point. Go figure what it might be in this case.

It is easy to get discouraged at this point and drop whatever you are doing, because it isn’t working.

My strategy - just keep doing it, maybe try different pattern or approach, but keep doing it. Ask friend, coach or LLM what you can change about it.

“Plateau” trap mostly is perceived by negative by you (if) because you compare it to something. Your previous result, your top results, other people result.

Don’t. The goal is the effort not being on the top in it or winning some prize.

What are my habits? Simpler than you might think:

Drinking coffee in the morning, after I’m done with family routine
Stepping on the scale when I wake-up
Running, keeping the schedule of it, even if I don’t have a specific goal for it.
Some measurements around health, like checking my blood pressure, even if I don’t have immediate problem with it.
Reading every evening (and during the day)
Taking walk instead of driving for short distances around (short - everything that is 30min walk if I’m not in the hurry)
Short exercise routine every morning

(and a bit more :) )

There are some habits that are not that positive, but as I don’t see them hurting me in long term, I’ve decided not to fight it.

Checking some social media on the phone
Drinking too much coffee :)

So, when I thought about it, my habits forming failed, when it was something I haven’t perceived as beneficial on my own or I’ve tried to copy something from others. Artificial boosts or tools wasn’t much help.

Habits stick when it was something I was internally convinced is worth doing and I enjoyed it (during or after doing it).

As usual, intrinsic motivation is the only one that lasts. And not beating yourself about keeping it or dropping it. Not everything has to be a win or failure, sometimes just doing stuff and picking it up when it will fail, is enough.

🖖

Photo by Prophsee Journals on Unsplash

Status game: quit it!

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 11:43:37 GMT

Stop playing a status game!

You can stop here if you know what to do with this statement or read further.

The quicker you learn to recognize it, see yourself doing it and then to know how to stop it, the better will be your life, career, and almost everything.

Status Game!

People often play the status game. If you think about it, it is one of the worst thing you can do to yourself. Recognizing it and learn how to avoid it is the most critical skill for you in your development in life, work, or any other capacity.

What is the status game? How people play it? How can you fall into it?

Let’s dive in.

Is status a bad thing?

Before diving in, let’s unpack one hard ball - Is status a wrong thing?

Nope! Status is how we are being recognized and for what we are being recognized.

People are being seen/are assigned status in multiple ways. By merit, age, wealth, look, popularity.

In one way or another you have your status and you will be assigned/judged by it.

Problem starts, when you are starting to play status game with other people, motivated by external factors.

Guilty as charged

I spoke with my business partner about the cars. It doesn’t happen very often; I’m not a car guy.

I wasn’t driving anything fancy but on a bit fancier side. I remember saying: “It drives well, and it is worth it.”

My business partner said: “Let’s face it, other cheaper cars drive as well. You bought it for status.” Boy, on the second thought, he was right. I used this lesson last year when choosing a new car after almost 10yrs.

Status. You, me, we all get a hit of whatever gets our brain spins with pleasure if someone recognizes our status. It is our wiring from deep in our past.

It was needed not to get killed by some animal abandoned by our tribe. Displaying a status plays a social role, and in some situations, you need it.

Problem and status game begins when the need for status is your driving force and it is a need for external confirmation that drives it. You do things to get and confirm your status. It is a losing game from the beginning.

There always will be someone with more wealth.

There always will be someone earning more money.

There always will be someone with a more fancy car.

There always will be someone with a better-sounding title in the footer.

There always will be someone with more followers on Instagram.

There always … put your ending here.

The moment you entered a status game, you’ve already lost. It becomes your distraction; you devote time and energy to pursue the status with no end in sight for this process. You will always be one step behind, and you will always see the next level in your position, which you can get.

One more, and you will be done.

Sounds like an addict?

Status game drains you, your resources, and attention - it is a distraction

If you look around, you will recognize people who play status games. They might look successful in the metrics of status - followers, position, wealth. Yet, they are always looking and planning the next level of it.

When they meet with someone, they don’t meet to learn something but be within the next circle of people with higher status to elevate their own.

When they talk about someone, they always highlight the other person’s title, achievements, and status elements (wealth, company revenue, size, what they accomplished). You don’t need to know all of it to have an interesting conversation with someone who has something interesting to say.

Pursuing the company of people with higher status for the sake of elevating your own (by association) is one of the most common projections of the status game at a personal level.

To maintain your status and always think about its next level, you need to sacrifice something. It is time and attention to focus on things that matter.

You are learning a new skill, improving on leveraging your strengths. Network with people who has some ideas to exchange can coach you on your professional progress.

People who are accomplished and don’t play a status game are quiet.

You would be surprised how many intelligent, accomplished people who built companies and businesses or created a breakthrough in their field are out there. The fact that they are not flashy isn’t a disadvantage for them. They are not interested in it, as it is a distraction.

They are professionals; they are accomplished, very often; they are very well off if you think in financial terms. They leave the status game for others.

Be a pro! Status and happiness will follow

There are two ways to get your status.

You can build it by playing the status game of associating yourself with others with higher status.

The other way is a way to be professional. To build your expertise, which is always a hard currency.

To deliver things on time and deliver if promised - this is a sign of a pro. Take tasks even if those are hard and solve them. Do all it in a repeatable, consistent way over a long period, not caring about being flashy, known, and have a fancy title.

By no means I’m not saying that you should sit and never show-up. Part of being a professional is about you having a voice. You need to have your opinion and express it. Have a saying in your industry when asked. Let people know you by presenting your work and results.

A good example is building a personal brand. You need your brand, and you should create it over time. Yet, when I see a person stating that they are building a personal brand as their primary task, I know they are in a status game. They lost already.

Become a professional with a voice! Happiness and status will follow.

You will gain your status because of people valuing your expertise and work ethic.

Go for a shortcut of getting a job with a fancy title to put it on your resume before the “next big move,” and you will never be satisfied again. There always be the following status to gain.

How to recognize you are playing this game?

First, you need to develop a habit of asking simple questions:

Why am I doing it?

Whatever you plan to do, ask yourself this question and give yourself an honest answer.

Are you doing it for yourself? Will it add to you being a professional and successful? Are you doing it because you want to elevate your status, impress someone or please your need to match someone?

It is an intrinsic vs. external motivation question.

Do you want to get promoted because you can create better leverage for you and your team in a new position? Are you doing it because your peers are already team leads or managers?

Are you discussing this new job because it will let you develop new skills and work with interesting people, or think this job is tedious? Still, is it the right step in the career before going for the next level?

Are you buying this car (or anything else) because it will contribute to your life somehow (make it easier, feel better, solve a problem)? Are you doing it because you want to let people know that you can do it and impress them?

If you can’t give yourself an honest answer, you are doing it for your higher goal or personal happiness. It isn’t 100% intrinsic motivation: Warning! the status game might be in play.

Are you saying we all should wear the same clothes to hide our status?

Hell no!

Displaying a status is our social thing. We do it all the time.

In many ways, you need to express some level of status in your social interactions. So yes, you will wear fancy clothes, you will drive a good car or have a fancy watch. You will have successful social media profiles and thousands of followers.

The question is if it is an essence. If stripped with all it, would you still be a recognized professional and have something to say. Would people want to talk to you, and what kind of people would those be? People who you would like to hand around with or people who are building their status on yours?

Over the years, I’ve met a lot of people we would call “successful.” Those who accomplished a lot were quiet, and you would not recognize it about them. Yet when you spoke with them, you very realized their status. They were smart, they knew their game, and they knew it.

It gave them self-awareness and confidence!

They didn’t need an external status to make use of it. And pursuing it was a waste of time and resources for them.

I can’t stress it enough - stop playing the status game.

Become a professional. The status will follow. Looking back on my 20+ years of career, not playing this game helped me a lot. Yes, I missed many things:

Fancy dinners.
Invitations to meet well-known public figures.
Fancy parties.
Expensive resorts.
Meeting people with wealth and power.

In the long haul - all those things are not necessary. I also know now that every time I felt terrible and miserable, it was one of two things:

#1 - Trying to do something I’m not good at and what I don’t want to do

#2 - Trying to play a status game.

In a lot of cases, both of these reasons were present together.

Don’t do it!

As a supplement, here is a The Knowledge Project podcast episode with Seth Godin. In this episode, among other things, Seth talks about:

Status game and how it hurts you in a long haul
What does it mean to be a professional?

In this episode, you will find a lot about being a professional and playing your game to avoid playing a status game.

Your keys are not your SSO

Sun, 29 Jan 2023 18:34:36 GMT

Web3 is still looking for its prominent use case, but in the fever of the last two years, people in this area claimed that it solves a lot of existing problems.

One problem claimed to be solved by web3 tech is single sign-on and broader authentication on the Internet.

The enthusiastic point of view is that we can use web3 wallets and use them as a universal “identity” to access applications.

“Identity” is a much broader topic; I will not focus on it here. Still, I want to cover the usage of wallets as a solution to SSO/authentication problem.

My point of view is:

Crypto wallets do not bring anything new to the table in this area
web3 approach replicates the same issues and problems we had before
With the same problems, it seeks solutions, which were already provided, re-creating existing technology pieces.

The biggest thing is that in doing those things, the work done before on open authentication and identity-related standards was often ignored or rejected by not being “decentralized.”

In the last few months, the last piece has improved as with money heat being a bit cooled down, people started to focus on the tech, not the “floors.” Probably they found out that not only “blockchain” shines.

It isn’t an “anti web3” piece.

Over the years, my experience in the industry proved that the solutions are based on open, cross-platform protocols and primitives, which can then be re-used by the players in the tech.
It also showed that work on such is long, challenging, requires a lot of coordination, and doesn’t provide quick solutions which can be monetized in the short run.

Yet, it is rewarding.

In this area, we will also land on something like this.

Disclaimer
I might and likely be mistaken on many points. Writing it down here, to have a point of reference in discussions and revisit it and update it every time I learn something new in this area.

It is technical opinion piece. I don’t provide here deep technical discussion into those topics and I know, some people are “shortcuts.”

Meet the wallet

No. Not Metmask or Ledger. Let’s look at the underlying primitives.

web3 credentials are nothing else than asymmetric keys. You have the public and private keys, where the private key is what you need to protect.

This tech is well known, has worked for years, and is proven. Good that we are building on it.

Keys need to be stored somewhere and protected. That was always an issue with keys, even in a physical space.

Here comes the “wallet.” What you see below is a smart card. A smart card is what you call in web3, and crypto-currencies tech is a “hardware wallet”.

Smart card:

Stored the private key(s)
Protects access to it (hardware + knowledge element like PIN)
Allows some crypto operations to be performed using the private key without this key leaving the device. Those operations are, for example, signatures.

Smart cards are well known. People use them for dozens of years. Every operating system, such as Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and Unix, knows how to handle one.

Every browser will allow you to use a smart card to access a website.

Smart cards don’t have to be a card. I use the USB “smart card” for my official, government-issued “keys” for signatures.

Those are USB dongle that hold a SIM card, which stores the keys.

Yes! You carry a smart card on your phone. There were country-wide rollouts of keys where mobile phones were used as ‘wallets.’

Software or hardware wallets you use for cryptwallets are in a nutshell smart cards. Different implementation and build to interact with ledgers, but the tech and purpose is the same.

The keys and “identity.”

The key is not your “identity.”

In technical terms, keys generated for your wallet are credentials. Credentials are something you present to the party to prove that you “own” the credentials which were earlier registered as the ones belonging to you.

It actually says nothing about the “identity.” It proves that the person making an action has control over “credentials.”

That’s it.

If someone else takes over your keys, it doesn’t mean it becomes you, but it can operate with your keys in places where you have registered them as credentials.

Common language, aka protocol

To use the keys, you need a lock. The lock needs some mechanism to know your key. It is how it works in the physical realm.

Rosetta Tone (source: Wikipedia)

In the digital realm, we use protocols to make it work between the involved parties. The protocol is a definition of communication between the parties (flow, messages, elements, data, responses), allowing me to talk and be understood in a certain way.

The protocol ensures that parties can build things independently, yet it will work if they follow the protocol.

That’s like IT industry 101.

In the authentication and authorization (more on those two later) context, we (as an industry) have worked hard to make it complicated and then simplify again.

Agreeing between vendors and providers on something people perceive as so sensitive (credentials, how those are verified, and how the proof of it flows across the Internet) is hard.

People always tended to “hack” some existing things to “use them” as protocols. The best examples from the past are LDAP and OAuth.

LDAP is a directory query protocol that was and still is abused for authentication purposes.
OAuth is resources access authorization protocol, which, with the advent of web 2.0, was (and still is) used for authentication.

Why abused?

None of those is an authentication protocol and doesn’t have a way of telling you anything useful about the user or the way it has proven its credentials.

You can assume some things from how the protocol works, but it is your assumption, and it doesn’t have to be correct.

In the world outside of Web 3.0 over a long time, work got us to the OpenID Connect protocol and work on standards like WebAuhN to ensure proper authentication flow over the web.

OpenID Connect (OIDC), as an example, allows different credentials to be used, so you can use your wallet keys as credentials and later follow the OIDC flow.

It works! Examples like cryptoauth.io prove that OIDC can work this way with cryptocurrency wallets.

web 3.0 goes OAuth way

For some unknown reason, web 3.0 decided to repeat mistakes made with OAuth and called it “Sign with Ethereum.”

Why mistakes?

It uses some behaviors and mistakes it for the protocol.

Yes, you can sign the transaction with your keys.
Yes, it proves that you have access to those keys.

The content of the transaction can be crafted by a site to tell it something about the user (in the end, they need a wallet address).

The thing that each side decides is that this sign-in transaction has a bit different message in it (yes, it can be standardized), that you don’t know what and how the user did the authentication piece … it all repeats mistakes from OAuth in the early days of web 2.0.

That’s the least disturbing thing (yet, I think it will bite people later).

Authentication is hard; authorization is even harder

Accessing resources, you have two processes happening.

Authentication proves that you have the necessary credentials and can use them either to register with a site or that you have registered (or someone did it) with this site before.

Authorization is the process of determining and confirming that you can perform given action.

In the case of using the wallet to sign in to the app or site, both are mixed: to connect the wallet to the site, you are signing a transaction with some specific messages.

Why does it not have to be right? Is it a problem?

Promoting wrong behavior! User gets in a habit of signing the transactions with the wallet without thinking about it (yet another site I want to try).

Space for abuse! Because it is a transaction, it grants access and confirms some operation. If an app or actor is malicious, they can trick you with it to sign the transaction to transfer your funds or grant some permissions you would not want to give them.

It isn’t necessary! The moment you access a site, it isn’t required to bind your keys to it. There are phases of your interaction. You sign in with some proof of possession of the keys, and then when you want to transact with it, you use your wallet and the keys to sign the transaction.
This pattern is used every day. Think about Amazon - you can browse it, add titles to the wish list, and you are not asked about your credentials.

The moment you want to purchase something or manage your device, you will be prompted to confirm that you are the one who owns the needed credentials to authorize the such transaction.

And …

Privacy and common sense

Last but not least - it grants the website or app access to the user’s state of possession. Transactions and everything connected with this wallet.

Think about it! If you were asked to provide your complete bank and credit card statement and log in to the site with pictures of cats, what would you think about it?

Be honest with yourself?

Would you generate those card statements and upload them to the website? Together with everything they can use to track also your future transactions?

Yet it is precisely what every web 3.0 user does when connecting to the website. The fact touching the wallet gives the app access to all transactions and related information associated with this wallet.

What is worse, you can’t revoke this access. Once your wallet address is known to this site, the site can query and mine your transactions on their whim.

It would help if you also kept your identity separate from the wallet. When you connect your “true” self with this digital wallet address, your personal transactions are getting known to anyone.

I bet every web 3.0 user asked if they want to give to the world all their bank and credit card statements connected to their identity would say a big “NO.”

OK, so what’s the point of all of it

Because of all the reasons above, I don’t think solutions like “Sign with Ethereum” are viable solutions to the single sign-on and “identity” problems of the Internet.

Technically, it isn’t a protocol; it is connected to the specific platform or requires complex infrastructure to work across the platforms.

From an authentication and authorization point of view, it mixes them together and pushes wrong behavior patterns on users.

It is terrible for privacy and hard for personal operations security (persona OpSec). Suppose you want to keep the separation between sites and your activities. In that case, you must manage multiple addresses and ensure separation is maintained.

It is HARD!

It will eventually lead to the equivalent of password managers for wallets (ideas are already showing up).

At the moment, because it is hard, it leads to multiple cases of phishing and lost money through rouge transactions being put in front of the user or sites aiming to steal user keys.

That’s the way forward?

The proper way forward is forging ahead of us as we speak, but here are a few of my ideas on where the focus should be.

Leverage existing tech and build on it

The reason it took 15yrs or more to develop things like OIDC is not that people were slow. It is hard to make it right and agree for people to work together on it.

Yet, it was done, and as it isn’t the most shining thing on the Internet, it has an impact.

My idea is that we should build on top of it. Think about the flows needed and how to combine existing flows of OIDC and WebAuthN to work with crypto-wallets keys. Tech is there; it is more about the attitude of builders.

MetaMask, one of the leading wallets, could be an OIDC provider in a truly distributed way. web3 sites could adopt OIDC or WebAuthN as an authentication method and separate it from the transactions and authorization part.

Relay on authentication protocol using credentials for sign-in, then do a step-up auth for authorization if needed.

WebAuthN and a similar set of tech are addressing the phishing problem. Why not leverage it? How it could be adapted to the transaction level?

That’s the way to move forward.

Focus on user experience and UX

User needs to know what they are doing. If the site requires authorization for the transaction, the user needs to visually see what they are signing up for.

There is a reason why every label on the planet uses similar signs to describe how you should wash your clothes.

Care marks on clothing are for a reason

The industry should work on a common visual language to describe the level of permissions granted to the site or in a specific transaction.

One of the lessons learned from the past is that UX matters greatly regarding the adoption, behaviors, and level of safety in authentication and authorization transactions.

The important thing - is the design for the three people at the table. The UX should be built with three actors in mind:

Site
User
Mailcious actor.

The user must know he is interacting with a good site and actor. That’s why the effort on passwordless auth and tech like FIDO2/WebAuthN was and is so important.

Design for interop and off/on-chain

Design for the scenarios which are on/off-chain. I want to use my credentials with apps working on-chain and off-chain. I want to store my credentials and present them for applications of a different sort.

It is a game of ecosystems; I get it. Designing for a single ecosystem to win is planning for failure.

Why was HTTP so successful? Because it wasn’t HTTP for Mozilla Server and HTTP for Apache server but a standard. A protocol everyone could adopt and use it.

The moment you require one ecosystem to be a major one, to solve a problem in every ecosystem, you design for a failure in the long term or complicated infrastructure of bridges, patches, and glue-n-tape solutions.

Those are my conclusions.

Some of them are probably wrong. Getting out of my own bubble is always a problem (for all of us). Yet I’m trying to be open and explore various options.

The situation is getting in a better direction. After the initial “Sign with Ethereum solves identity problem on the Internet,” I see more reasonable voices and work on the interop between the standards.

That’s good.

Yet, the biggest obstacle to the proper solution is tribalism and the desire for the single ecosystem to win.

That’s a topic for a separate write-up.

Pace yourself

Tue, 14 Dec 2021 06:00:00 GMT

Recently I solidified my thinking about the intensity of doing things.

Instead of optimizing for output, I optimize for sustainability.

It is not a rapid change; instead, I thought about how I want to do things and how I do it, but it wasn’t named so far. Sustaining activities over a long time is more important than stretching yourself to the limit for high output. The thing is - society around us tells us differently.

Society around you tells you to push harder, do more, optimize to cram more into each hour. You see people achieving, doing things that seem not reachable, and sharing X tips for improving your productivity.

When you see such a person attain their goals while running an ultra-marathon and taking care of five kids at the same time, there might be a question in your head: Why I can’t do it?

It is a wrong question. The good one is: Should I do it in this way?

This article is based on e-mail I’ve sent to my newsletter subscribers. If you want to receive such content to your Inbox + every week shorts of things I found interesting - Sign-up using form below.

Even if you can wake up at 4 AM (nothing wrong with it, I know people who do it and build their daily rhythm around it), and put 14hrs or work every day, is it a way to go?

Let me share a story here: I’ve never been on a diet. I know people need to follow the diet for health reason, or it is a way they control their weight (I follow my friend at 50in500.com who take on his path to lose some weight), so I’m not sharing it to say diet is wrong.

For me, diet is not sustainable.

Diet means the elimination of some food or limiting your daily intake (or both). My problem with diet is that if I use it to control my weight, I need to stick to it forever and say goodbye to a particular food. It will be a never-ending on/off diet cycle. It is not sustainable in the long run.

What I do instead is:

Trying to eat reasonably healthy and reasonably in size
Put exercise in my daily routine to make sure I’m getting enough move to counterbalance energy from food.
Observe the trajectory of my vitals.

Yesterday I had a pizza and a beer. I never looked how many calories it had or can I eat it. I know I will no do it every day, I had my 15k run before it, and I know my vitals are good and steady.

I optimize it for sustainability in the long run. I don’t want to be stressed about something I need to do daily (food) and restrained forever, so I know I need to pace myself around the long run. So far, it works great for me with steady weight over a couple of years.

Another example is my approach to writing and publishing online. I could commit to write every day or record every day/week for my podcast and start a YouTube channel too to it. I can run it like it for a while; you can see people do it, and social media algorithms and audience rewards them with reach and attention (assuming they have something to say).

The high chance is I would drop all of it after a month or two. It isn’t sustainable - at least for me (I know people do it for years). I pace myself. I do:

One newsletter a week
Weekly podcast alone or with a quest
Occasional blog post (this will change into a regular one, I promise :) )
Some social media posting.

But I pace myself here to not burn out of ideas and my will to do it to sustain those activities over a long time. Scott Hanselman talked about the same approach to deliver high-quality output over a long period in his video.

Those are examples from my private life, but I try to take the same approach for my professional life or tasks I need to do. You can work hard and do 20 or 30 things on your To-Do list daily. Then finish the work exhausted but with an “I did it” approach. Nothing wrong with pushing things and the “I did it” approach. Our brain is built to reward it. The highest rewarded skill in our professional settings is moving things towards completion.

Pace yourself.

Observe not only the output metric (how much you did or achieved) but also other “metrics”:

How do you feel physically and mentally?
Are you keeping pace in other areas, not only achieving the work results?
What you are sacrificing to achieve the results (there always is something), and how do you feel about it.

There is nothing wrong with being an achiever and have high output. Think if you can sustain it over a long period. Can you do it at the pace you are doing it right now for the next one or two years or five?

Pace yourself.

Pacing yourself means you might slow down or speed up and also that there will also be periods of crunch (pizza and a beer) that require you later to rest or calm a bit. Everything has a price, and if you speed up, you need to pay it later.

Important. Pace yourself against you, not others. You can improve, you can set goals in what you are doing, but pacing yourself against others will lead you to compare yourself to them.

Photo by Braden Collum on Unsplash

Breaking through our 'frame of reference bubble'!

Tue, 07 Dec 2021 06:00:00 GMT

What is (might be) the biggest challenge for you and me in our thinking?

Getting out of our experience and thought bubble.

I’ve recently observed a lot of thinking about solutions to the problems, which exists only in specific settings and environments and, based on it, making an assumption that the answer is needed. Because people who do it are vocal or backed by a lot of capital. Their approach to the problem gets motion, even if there’s no need for it from another environmental point of view or it was already solved.

So, I observe that my current thinking about it results from my experience bubble because of my info-bubble and environment. I don’t see other people outside of it where the problem might still exist.

Bottom line: Be aware of the experience and thought bubble and take deliberate steps to confront your thinking with others. For small things in daily life, in your professional life, and in business. You will not rule it out completely, but it will help you better judge things.

Nowadays (2021), it is hard not to take a step and not hear about crypto as a technology and financial instrument. As for every new thing, people try to apply it to different problems and areas. Some of them make sense, and some of them not - or at least not from my bubble perspective.

If I hear that we need crypto to solve problems with the current banking system for money transfer because it is slow, expensive, and not accessible to people, I have my doubts. I use daily a system that is accessible (mobile phone), fast and inexpensive (direct transfers to people, free transfers within the country, reasonable fees, and time for international transfers).

Believe it or not, I can go to ATM with my mobile phone and withdraw cash with no use of my card or fee. Same with paying for goods to another person with a phone and account or money transfer. A value proposition of doing the same with crypto with a low fee of a few % is an outrageous thing.

And BTW, in Africa, they solved it a long time ago with M-Pessa: a system based on mobile phones and optimized for low tech and low bandwidth environment and everyday use by ordinary people.

Yet, people work on solutions to tackle, which is my reality often was already attacked. Why? Because their banking system is stuck somewhere in the past and does not offer such possibilities.

It doesn’t mean that those problems do not need to be solved. There are no people in other places in the world who will not benefit from it. Our world’s capital weight and technology focus make solutions more oriented around the situation of few countries. People in the tech industry, backed by capital, work to solve problems seen from their bubble. Where such issues might not exist or are already solved in other places.

Instead of the next technological solution, what might be needed is to look at why this problem does not exist in other places and if it can be applied here as well.

The risk of being in your own experience bubble is also present in daily work and life. This article might be the best example of it as I write it based on:

My environment and country where I’m living
Information I acquired from my info- and social- bubbles
My life and world experience so far are limited to places I’ve been and people I’ve met.
My professional environment and what I do in it.

You might assume that people are doing something wrong based on your experience, but you don’t know why they are doing it in this way or what environment shaped it.

Yes, it might be a lack of knowledge or insights from other places, but there might also be a good reason why they do it in this specific way. It might be their culture, local regulations, limitations of their work or life environment which cause them to do it in a particular way.

If you want to be better at whatever you are doing, do not assume that your point of view is correct. Be aware of your experience and information bubble.

Ask yourself: what I don’t know about the specific problem or the way things are being done, which is outside of my frame of reference and how you can expand your understanding of it.

The last thing never was easier than now with:

Books and accessibility to it
Information and experiences transferred by people through media: posts, tweets, YouTube videos
People and their accessibility - you are one tweet or call away from almost every person on a planet.

We need more challenging of our way of thinking and looking outside of our frame of reference. Staying in it is comfortable but will only reinforce our beliefs and point of view on the world around us.

I leave it for you as food for thought. Don’t limit it to the technology; I used it as an example.

The more you work, the more you know in your field, the harder it gets to break through your information bubble. It requires deliberate effort to do it and you should take this effort.

Avoiding information overload and FOMO

Tue, 30 Nov 2021 06:00:00 GMT

I got a question about how I stay up-to-date and also avoid information overload. First of all, I don’t try to keep up-to-date; yet, many people pointed out that I’m still achieving it (at least in some of the areas).

It might be because of my natural inclination to ingest the information, manifesting itself in reading many books, articles, and papers on various topics. I don’t know if you believe in personality tests, but here are my TOP 5 Gallup’s strengths, which indicate that I’m an information sucker.

In the past (years ago), I’ve curated a list of sources, blogs, and articles to read. I had my own RSS feed gathered and later used the Flipboard app (even don’t know if it still exists) to replace it. Then I went over all those sources to read what had happened and be up-to-day.

That was when I had been affected by the information FOMO.

Years ago, I got a chance to have a one-to-small group meeting with some people, including Mark Russinovich, who was asked the same question.

His answer was somewhere along these lines: you don’t need to follow all those sources, monitor some high-level aggregation, and if there is something important, it will find its way to you.

Turns out he was right. The key is to let go of FOMO of not knowing. It is not about staying up-to-date, but more about staying sane. There is always more content to consume and process.

You don’t have to know about something first or even as a first million people.

You don’t have to know about it at all or only get to know when you need it. In most cases, it will find a way to reach you.

You need this sensing mechanism to signal that something is going on or there is something to check.

I stopped harvesting and curating my information feed and turned it into the more passive approach, focusing on feeding my feed. I focus more on my “sensing machine” than on the content itself. At the moment, it comes from:

Fine-tuning people I follow on Twitter / LinkedIn -> if you will tune out all the people making the noise, it is an incredible source of information and references. Especially Twitter.
I add to my list people from different fields not related to what I’m doing in life to broader my circle of interest and expose myself to those topics.
Check few sites which add information on a specific topic or general news. The trick is to not spend all the time hitting “refresh” but to glance it for interesting picks and, again, save it for later. I’m reviewing those once a day or even less frequently. Links I’m interested in lands in Obisidian daily note.
Subscribe to newsletters from people who write good things and sometimes from vendors - for example, I’m subscribed to few newsletters from Microsoft. I do not always read them in full, rather scan them and decide if it is interesting. If not -> hit delete. if yes -> scan it, pick important things, save them to check them later.
I save things to read/watch in Obsidian and then going through them in a free moment using its search function.
Last but not least, every couple of months, I remove people from the list I observe. I remove people right away if they are becoming annoying or share some FUD but deliberately adjust regularly.
I avoid having many browser tabs open and failing to watch binge on YT videos when I see them. Rather store in Obsidian and then get back to them.
I try to keep up with notes in my Obsidian vault to highlight things I find helpful or thoughts (same with books). Always a bit behind with it, and my flow here needs to improve a bit.

Do I always get back to them? Nope. There are dozens of links I still keep unread, but there is no blame for it. There is too much information you can absorb, and don’t even try it. Pick what you think is essential and drop all the rest. It still is more than you can process.

Elimination is not a wrong thing. Addition is. Think about what you can cut more than what you can add or spend more time acquiring information.

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

Career choices

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 06:00:00 GMT

In the last few months, I had a couple of conversations with people looking for a career change or direction at a different stage of their career. Last week, I participated in few job interviews (as a hiring person, not hired). I had a few thoughts after those meetings, and it might be good to share them here.

#1 - At some point, it is more about lifestyle choice than a career choice

You were looking for a career choice to learn something new, develop a new skill, or change the environment. Earlier in the career, those are the main driver for a change. Later in the job, but nowadays even at its early stage, one of the main factors become a lifestyle choice.

Simple example: This week, I interviewed a person in a mid-career stage. Good job, good company, and all the boxes were ticked. Why was he considering the change of position? His company is looking to get back to the full, on-site office schedule. After over a year of working from home, he is not willing anymore to spend 2hrs+ every day on commute.

A lifestyle choice.

It doesn’t have to be about a commute and the office. It might be about your willingness to travel or how much time you spend working vs. not working. It might be your preference on hours (you prefer to work night shifts) or ability to travel. I interviewed someone who looked for a job to allow him to work while riding a motorcycle in Asia.

It might be your willingness to take risks of being without a job for a while for greater freedom or have peace of mind of full-time employment.

It is good to have an answer for yourself what is your preferred lifestyle choice and if what you do and how you do it supports it.

If the answer is not, is it something that suits you at this stage of your life, or if not, what has to be changed to support it?

#2 - There will be a moment of choice of who you want to be for the future. It is a hard one.

If you come as I am from a technical career, a good chance is that you developed it around some part of technical expertise. Then a world change, and you adjust. Take a new skill, learn, re-skill to the new platforms. That’s the cycle, we strive to be up-to-date with what is going on in our industry.

It isn’t unique to our industry; the pace of change seems to be faster (not always is), but the same applies to all industries and careers in it.

There will be a moment where you will face a choice - jump on the next technology change train, re-skill, get new certifications, etc., or maybe answer a question, “What man do I want to be?”. Am I still a technology expert, or I’m more business, team, or project manager.

It requires an honest discussion with yourself. The worst situation is if you don’t want to be in this place anymore, but you will stick to it because of change-related fear. It is a straight path to burnout in the long term - you will be doing what you do, getting new certifications, and doing more advanced projects, but you will not enjoy it.

It is good once in a while to sit with yourself and ask if it is a place you still want to occupy in the world. What helps is the realization of few things:

None of this is permanent or final. You can make a change again or revert it if you don’t like it.
It is something new, so you don’t have to be perfect in whatever you decide to do from day ONE. Give yourself time and set expectations around it.
Only expectations you think you have to meet are set by yourself. The world doesn’t pay that much attention to it.

From personal experience, I know this choice is hard. I had to make it, and I did it. I’m not that deep technical anymore (but well, I still can lift few heavyweights in technical space), and I don’t have a problem with admitting it.

From my observation, a lot of people struggle with their daily reality because they haven’t asked themselves and answered those two questions:

What is the preferred lifestyle they want to have?
Are they in the position they want to be in this moment, or do they stick to what they build over the years?

Having an answer to both helps make decisions around your career and life.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

The need for feedback

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 06:00:00 GMT

Often, things are different than you think, and explanations for what you see around are more straightforward than what you have thought.

If you assume that something is important or works in a specific way, but nobody told you it works like this; you should seek confirmation of your assumption.

Ask: “Look, I think this is important and we should behave in this way, because of X will happen. Is it right?” You will be surprised how often the answer is different than your assumption about it.

It is especially important when you enter a new environment (e.g., a new job) where you bring all your ways of doing things and assumptions from the last place and environment. Those assumptions might be wrong. You need to open a new book, use your previous experience, and not assume that things are always the same.

I see this pattern often with new people coming to our organization. I started to expect that it would take three to six months before they would shake all the previous assumptions and behaviors and accept that it is a bit different here.

Observe yourself and how you think about things you assume, especially in new environments. Be open. Ask questions when in doubt. It will give you a much better experience.

All people need feedback, and we need it often.

It is our feedback loop (wow, Mr. Obvious ;) ).

Without it, we don’t know if we should correct something or what is more important; we don’t know if what we do is good. Without it, even if we do a good job, our perception starts to deteriorate over time.

“Am I good at what I’m doing?”

“Is what I’m doing worth it?”

Feedback is not only negative or corrective. Feedback is also an appreciation of someone doing a good job or confirming it to someone. It doesn’t have to be big or wordy - sometimes simple “look, I liked what you delivered, and it is well done” is enough.

Ask yourself two questions:

When was the last time you’ve heard something like it from anyone at your team/company/family?
When was the last time you said something like it to anyone at your team/company/family?

We are being taught (at least in my part of the world) that good performance is expected (it starts with an early school experience). Often, only correction or feedback is delivered when you deviate from “excellence.” We are not being taught that feedback might also confirm someone having a good outcome or behavior daily.

The place we often forget about it in our homes and families (at least I need to pay more attention to it).

We all need to give more feedback, especially in cases where it is rarely given. What are those cases? An example from this week at work.

I spoke with one of my team members about the project in some trouble, and during the discussion, it was said about one of the team members: He is a good engineer, needs some experience, but he is a good one.

My next question was: Have you told him about it?

The answer: No, he knows it.

No, he doesn’t. And even if (s)he knows it, it needs to be said explicitly once in a while.

You and I live in a competitive environment with high expectations. People expect that things will always be done well. We need to excel, do a great job. If it is done this way, perfect, life goes on.

STOP. It is exactly a moment when we need to stop once in a while and say it explicitly - It was well done. You are good at what you are doing. You are a sound engineer.

There is a need to point out good behavior and reinforce it with positive feedback. People need it, and they assume that they are good and doing a great job might be wrong. This person might beat themselves with some small mistake they made, which is probably not a mistake but something negligible.

Why? Because the pressure around the IT industry and business are enormous. Success is everywhere (at least in what is presented), and expectations are high. In all this mess, we often forget to appreciate simple things. Job well done. We take it for granted.

It is not.

Think how often you’ve heard it and when was the last time you told someone that she/he is good at what she/he is doing.

Photo by Miguel Luis on Unsplash

Focus on what you can control and on lead indicators

Tue, 09 Nov 2021 06:00:00 GMT

Great book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” (seriously, I recommend it to everyone to read at least once) points “Begin with the end in mind” as one of those habits. It is true. Not having an end in mind can be a disaster; you will drift in many directions in the best case. At worst … you will finish where you don’t want to be.

At the same time, I’m not so found about strict goal settings - one of many contradictions in my thinking (you have to get used to it).

Recently I’ve participated in the run. Half-marathon to check my training progress.

In this particular case, an end was clear - finish the run. That’s it. There was also a plan and some assumptions about the result, but none was set in stone.

Even in a simple event, as a run, there are many moving parts and elements you can focus on: other people, starting position, weather, route, competition. I picked it up on purpose, as all of them are things outside of your control.

Even the final result itself is a thing outside of your control. You can do everything right, and then your shoe might break, or muscle cramps can hit you.

Here are lead indicators. If you haven’t done MBA (as I), you might not be familiar with it, but there are two types of indicators (simplifying):

Lead: happens before the result and are input into the process execution
Lag: occurs as a result of a process and can be measured after the process will execute.

In the context of race, the result is a lag indicator. It is a result at the end of everything that will happen between the start and finishes (and also what happens before the start, namely training). Whatever you think about it, you can’t control it.

What you can control are lead indicators. Suppose you put all the right effort into elements influencing lead indicators and execute a process (run). In that case, the result will happen—at least some version of it.

How I exercised this approach in my run in practice:

I did my training - that is given, there is no result without preparation. It was the first time I had a scheduled training with some structure in the last six weeks before my run.
I removed the result from my watch for the race. During the race, I was able to control only my heart rate and pace on my eye. Every kilometer passed my average speed during the last single kilometer distance.
I had an indicator of pace range, which is needed to run on average within my target goal.

Doing it this way lets me focus on lead indicators in my run:

Try to run each kilometer one at a time within the range ( I run the first ten not according to the plan, a bit faster)
Stay fed and hydrated.

Last but not least: I reminded myself, “you run alone; it is not a race with others.” Why? There is always a push to run with other runners as he can “pull you a bit.” Why is it dangerous if it isn’t your fellow runner with whom you set this plan together?

Because you don’t know their strategy and plan, they might run with a different approach and goal in mind, and for you, it might mean you will burn your energy on their pace.

Those lead indicators allowed me to focus on what I controlled, run each segment at a similar pace (on official marks, I always had 4:30m/km avg pace), and arrive at the finish line in planned time.

Am I writing it all to brag about my run race? Nope.

I observe a lot of people who focus on lag indicators that are outside of their control!

Think about it. Things like sales goals, personal financial goals, development goals with distant time frames are beyond your control. Those are all “lag” indicators and while it is good to have it defined (“Begin with the end in mind”), what you should focus on is:

Find out the lead indicators that are input to this result: sales calls and meetings, your savings vs. spending rate, the number of certificates you did, or time you spend on building new skills.
Identify those within your control.
Focus on execution of those goals which are within your control and measure lead indicators

Filter out the noise, focus on your definition of the end but don’t think about it (the end) but things on the way, which contributes to it and you can control.

The menace of mental accounting

Recently I run a half-marathon (not the first one). I did well. First thought after the race was, “Oh, I missed it,” but then it was - 1:34:51 for a half-marathon is a great time. I even qualified in the top 100 men in my age category.

What was the first thought when I arrived at the finish line of this race? You don’t have to believe me, but it was “Oh crap, I missed it.” What was “IT”? It was my expected result for the race.

I had a plan that assumed running it at 4:30m/km pace and finishes around 1h35m mark, but somewhere along the start line, I started to believe I could do it in 1h30m.

That was mental accounting in action. I had this optimistic thought, “Maybe I can do it in 1h30m,” and suddenly it was a goal in my head. Everything I could control was set to finish in my target time. I set my watch for it. It was a plan, but my mind started to believe in a “better version of a future.”

It is a trap.

It can diminish the fact that you did great and that you did what you planned, but somewhere along the lines, you “accounted” for a slightly better version of the truth. Then with your intended result, you are disappointed, even if before you would accept this result as a “flying A.”

How to fight against it? Anchor your expectation. Write it down on a piece of paper or a note. Then look at it as a checkpoint when you think you did terribly. Is it terrible?

I didn’t write down the expected result this time. My anchor, in this case, was my coach calling me after the race and saying, “What the f..k you are talking about?” You did great, and it is a result you planned for it.” He was right.

If needed, a simple piece of paper with a noted goal can be your “What the f..k” call.

Focus on what you can control. Focus on lead indicators and anchor your expectations to know, that you did well when you arrived.

Photo by Michal Mrozek on Unsplash

Long term thinking

Tue, 02 Nov 2021 06:00:00 GMT

If you want to create something, lead a good and enjoyable life, you need to apply long-term thinking towards this goal.

Long-term thinking is hard for us all. Yet, it is a #1 lesson I’ve learned over a time that it is a long-haul trip and you need to think in this category.

Why you should drop what you are doing right now for uncertain reward a couple of years from now?

Why should you run (swim, do any form of activity) now? It is known to decrease the chance (not avoid it as there is nothing sure) of possible cardiac arrest in the future. But you are here now, and it is painful and takes your time.

Where’s the reward for all your effort?

Everything around us tells us to focus on short-term gains and results, where long-term gains and results are what matters and where the actual gain is.

Thinking long-term is hard. You need to convince yourself now to think about the possible (not given) future and that you may benefit from the current activity in the future. Another example is planning ahead of time and executing steps to complete it, with future outcomes years ahead of you.

It makes things like losing weight or saving for retirement hard. That’s why many people don’t start it or fail initially, as the results are not there or are minimal in the short run. It is especially true in financial planning and savings, where you plan for a possible future 30 or 40 years from now.

Long-term thinking at the individual level is hard. Long-term thinking at the group level is like another dimension of being hard.

I had a recent discussion with a friend over dinner about global warming and its possible outcomes. Regardless of what you (or I) think about it, it is an exemplification of a problem with long term thinking:

You need to think about possible consequences (or lack of such) tens of years ahead of you.
You need to think not about yourself but about the people who might not even be on the planet and are strange to you.
You need to think about the possible events (or lack of such) which are not local, and you might not experience that firsthand.

It sounds like a tough job to convince someone to think about it all if they cannot sort out their financial planning to save for retirement in the first place.

It’s not about convincing you to think about global warming, but this is an excellent example of the problem with long-term thinking on a personal and group level.

My observations and practical approach to it:

I observe (anecdotal evidence) that people who put long-term thinking to work get better results live happier, and better prepare for the unexpected.
Trying to force long-term thinking on someone fails. You need to convince yourself that it is something that works and will help you be better off. Examples are all around it, and there is no need to produce them.
The biggest problem is motivation, with a lack of obvious evidence that it will work.

What I do about it:

I set my expectations and validation points towards the trajectory rather than the specific goal. Taking the example of financial preparation: I observe if my net worth is on a growing course, rather than putting particular goals to reach in an absolute number.
On things that do need long-term thinking, I don’t do checks too often. Instead of checking and planning things every week, I do it once per month or once per quarter is enough. Sometimes progress is not visible in the short term, and it makes people demotivated.
I try to confirm my assumptions and change those if required on a regular but longer basis - let’s say once a year. Do I work towards the future I want to live in? Does what I do contribute to it in the long run?

Long-term thinking is with me in many areas of both my professional and private life. Simple examples:

I do physical activities to stay healthy for a longer period (not granted), running and adding different activities (swimming, biking, strengths training - this one is planned) now and then.
I do financial planning towards the future to secure myself when I am not able or willing to work. It influences many decisions I make towards current spending.
I do regular health checks, as it increases (not eliminates completely) the chance of catching some problem early when it occurs.
I do spend time reading and researching things to increase my chance to have a promising, professional career longer in the future in various fields (even if I don’t know what it exactly will be in 10-20 yrs from now)
I maintain my activities around blog / social media / this newsletter even if I don’t need them right now. It helps me sharpen my saw and requires going outside of my daily “bubble.”

Those are simple examples of long-term thinking in action. It doesn’t have to be something drastic or fancy.

It is a deliberate process of thinking ahead and asking yourself questions about your desired future self, and acting for it, even if it is not granted. Progress is hard to make or measure in a short period.

Long-term thinking and acting with it in mind is the key to calm and successful (I need to research another word for it :) ) life on your own terms.

What are your long-term thinking areas and examples from your personal or professional life? Share it with me and others in the comments section.

Photo by Taylor Simpson on Unsplash

Simple decision making framework for everyday use

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 07:30:00 GMT

Decision-making model - my way to save time and attention

Here’s a thing: last weekend, I found myself looking at a screen trying to make some decision. Half an hour later, I was stuck in the same place!
What’s wrong with me?

The thing is, I had such cases in the past. It doesn’t have to be something significant. It should be easy. For some of us, it might not be that easy. I talked with someone about it. In general, it is an excellent way to deal with such a problem to speak with someone with a different experience. I learned to deal with it.

Yet, I caught myself doing it again this weekend. Nothing big, but it made me stop and think. The good thing is that I could observe myself doing it (progress!).

Soooooo stupid!
(or at least it is what I thought, catching myself pondering on some simple problem)

I could spend the next 30 minutes trying to sort it out. Instead, I took a piece of paper and broke it down into parts to build a framework for a future. So here it is. Especially for you, my framework to guide the decision-making process was created on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

PRINCIPLE #1 - Action beats no action!

Realize this. Such a decision is rarely a matter of life and death. Most of them don’t matter in the long term anyway. Every time! You need to act. The action might be one of two choices:

Do something about it, or
Forget about it and move on (yes, it is also action!)

In case you will decide to ACT - do it:

Saves your time; you made a call and can focus on executing it.
You are in it for a ride and can observe the result.

If you will decide NOT TO ACT, that’s fine, it also:

Saves your time,
Free your resources which you need - attention and focus.

You see - in both cases, you won on one thing - you got your time back. It’s a win! It sounds that simple, so why I (and you may be) have a problem with doing it?

It is fear coming from two things:

Fear of missing out on possible good outcome (you don’t have it anyway at the moment)
Fear of losing invested resources (be it time, money, or other thing involved) or the decision’s downside.

The thing is - you will not experience good or bad outcomes without doing anything. So there is nothing to worry about unless you will do something! Act and then enjoy the ride!

Easy to say but - “I need more data to make the right call!”.

Sure, that sounds like a reasonable way to think. Now look into your past and think:

How many times, data you’ve gathered made a much difference (like 2X or 10X)
How it improved your decision versus the time you spent on getting it?

Forget about it. Suppose you don’t have data points to make any judgment (even gut feeling is a judgment). In that case, FINE is not doing anything if you can stop pondering about it and move on.

PRINCIPLE #2 - Constrain yourself in the decision-making process.

If you will decide that you need more data to make a decision:
You’ve agreed to ACT (do something -> get more information)
Put constraints on yourself in this process.
It is a simple trick and an essential factor. You may underestimate the power of constraints (you can dig around and read about the theory of constraints). The most straightforward constraint is putting the time limit on how much you can spend on doing it or deciding with all information you have at this moment.

PRINCIPLE #3 - Avoid fake actions at all cost

What is fake action? It is something that you take to get you closer to a decision, but it is not doing it. It is a distraction.

Simple example - you want to start a podcast, but you go for a month as the first step for hardware selection.

Stop!
Spend 10 minutes selecting the hardware in your budget and recording it with people.

Fake actions take the form of tools, courses, books you need to read before you are ready to “ACT.” From my own experience, avoid it :).

PRINCIPLE #4 - Take one decision to remove other choices

Do you remember Steve Jobs? He was always in a black turtleneck. He decided to remove all other choices on what he is wearing every day, shop, etc. If it is possible, do the same! You are wondering where is a good time to start investing money.

Stop

Decide “I will do it every month, in X amount” and do not check the market statistics every day.
Want to learn swimming? Sign-up for a swimming school for six months to have two lessons every week. Done!
If you are acting, think if you can decide to take one decision to remove other choices.

That’s it:

Action beats no action!
Constrain yourself in the decision-making process
Avoid fake activities at all cost
Take one decision to remove other choices.

Will it always work? Not, but it will help you (and me) save two resources: time and attention.

Here is few points from my “piece of paper” session I’ve put as a side-note:

Thinking longer on a problem without new data will not do any good. Drop it or get more data with constraint for how long you will gather it!
If you are afraid of loss or downside -> ACT with limited resources (invest less money, commit to the small task). You will not lose much, but you will get something in a positive case.
Do not do “WHAT IF” thought exercises. It doesn’t do any good for you unless you have new data points, but it is not a “WHAT IF” scenario.
Take action always on what YOU believe will happen. Other people’s opinions are data points, but you need to know what will happen as an outcome.
Look for decisions with possible positive, long-term outcomes. Optimize for long-term effect in time, not short-term gains.
Take actions to build on your previous decisions. The compounding effect is real power, not only in the economy.
Do not look back and check what happened if YOU WOULD ACT in a certain way and regret your action! No reason for it! You can get back there! You can learn, but there is no point in regretting it.

Next time I will spot myself spending time on decision making, I will revert to this process. I hope you will find it helpful.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
*

Five ultimate productivity tips!

Thu, 18 Mar 2021 07:30:00 GMT

I will be honest with you. I’m not a productivity guru. If you need one, you need to look for someone else. This said - for more than 20 years, I work with great professionals who are putting a lot into upping their game. I’ve adjusted.

Why writing about productivity? It started with a simple reply to Nadir’s Debit tweet about him being overwhelmed with many communication sources and a load of signals.

I responded with a couple of things I do on my own to avoid it and keep sane in day-to-day work. Over 11k people saw this tweet, with people in hundreds saying it is something new for them; I had this “aha” moment. I thought everyone does what I do, but apparently, it isn’t the case.

Here it is. Regardless if you use Teams, Slack, you are an email junkie or IM addict, those simple tips will allow you to remain sane, be productive and keep everyone happy. Those are simple tactics I deployed years ago based on various books and recommendations I read. They work great for me; they work great for others I work with. They will work for you.

After the tips themselves, I put some thoughts on why we need them and what to do about it - stay with me till the end of this post.

Tip #1 - Disable all notifications, both on desktop and mobile (and watch or other devices you have)

Really. That simple. Just do it! Yes, I know you need to be up-to-date, and people might need something from you at this very moment. It is your FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) speaking. Stop listening to it.

Every notification is someone taking over your time and attention. If you are from the computer industry, you might be familiar with an interruption in the CPU. Interruption tells the CPU to stop what it is doing and take care of something very urgent.

Notification on desktop, mobile, watch are your interruptions. Kill it.

What works for the CPU isn’t working for you. You know why? Because CPU was designed for fast context switching and you are not. That simple. Context switching is killing your brain and your productivity.

You will not miss anything, and people will not be bothered with it if you will follow the next tip.

Tip #2 - When at work, shut it all down. Email, Slack, Teams … just shut it down.

Work doesn’t happen over email or Slack. It is communication. Communication is part of the work and can keep you busy, but communication is mostly a distraction. To communicate, you need to produce something - thought, design, ideas, plan of action.

To produce something, you need a chunk of not interrupting work. To make it non-interrupted, get rid of things you use to interrupt your work - email, Slack, Teams, Discord, WhatsApp. Whatever keeps you checking it and feeds your FOMO, shut it down.

Not put in a system tray. Shut it down! Make sure you will not “accidentally” open it while switching windows.

The same applies to your hundreds of tabs. Shut it down.

Tip #3 - Set boundaries and expectations. People will respect it (or teach them to respect it)

People hate uncertainty. Sending you an email or IM makes them tick - when will you respond. Manage it and set the right expectations at the same time setting your boundaries.

Set a specific time for managing your communication and let people know about it. Example - handle your email twice a day, let’s say at 10AM and 3PM. Inform others that it is what you do. Set OOF status on Teams or Slack with this message - I check it every 4hrs, your message will be handled.

If it is urgent, they will pick a phone and call you. In other cases, they will wait as they know what to expect, and they will switch their context to something else.

Sure. Some people will be pissed off. Take a moment and explain to them why you do it.

Tip #4 - Set your communication SLA (in ideal case team or organization-wide)

You can start with a personal SLA, but it works best if your team has the same rules. Email is not an synchronous tool. It is asynchronous. It is not an invasive tool. It is invasive for your time, only because you keep checking it. Stop.

Set SLA for a type of communication and response time. At my company, Predica, we set communication rules which cover:

Medium (how to communicate)
When to use it
When not to use it
How to use it (which covers the SLA part).

Here is what it says on email usage:

Medium	When to use it	When not to use it	How to use it
E-mail	• Minimize internal use! • To inform about something - no discussion needed or just a YES/NO answer with no urgency. • Something which is not either urgent or important and can be answered within 1 business day	• Do not email entire company or large groups of people, unless absolutely necessary (in such case consult your manager, use a distribution list/O365 group or BCC) • To - people who need to take action or voice in the thread • CC - people who need to know (be careful not to put too many)	• Keep it short and concise • Use links to ON or other systems • Use bold to underline most important things • IF there is more text, put ACTION items in bold or at beginning of email. • If the e-mail thread is 5 messages or more, call the person instead of continuing to mail • Do not send attachments internally instead use links so people can collaborate online on documents • Read twice before sending • A good rule is to delay send from outbox by few mins to reflect on your message in case of emotions:)

Notice SLA in it? If you send an email, you can expect that it will be answered within 1 business day. Wait. No urgency flags will fix that. No ASAP in the title will make it faster.

Set your personal SLA on what you check, when, and what people can expect from you when it comes to replying time. If they are aware of it, it will keep them calm, and nothing will happen. They will wait.

Tip #5 - Live a happy and productive life

Yes, it is that simple. Those four tricks will do the job and will make your life easier. There are many other simple things you can do to improve your chances of staying sane in this over-communicating world.

Put blocks in your calendar for in-depth work sessions.

It works for me like a charm. I used to keep a block on my calendar with the title “Do not book anything here without asking,” if someone sent me a meeting request for this block, then I rejected it.

Reject meetings with no objective or plan unless you are expecting it (you asked, and you know what it is about

Again, effortless thing. If you are getting a meeting request without someone asking you about it first and there is no plan and objective - reject it. Add a comment to rejection why you did it. Education helps.

If using Teams, set “Focus mode.”

I use Teams (It is OK if you don’t like it, I still keep using it). There is a nice feature in Office 365 that puts a chunk of blockers on your calendar for “Focus Time.” When in “Focus time,” your Teams will switch into “Focus mode.” Even if you forget to shut it down, nothing will get through it: no calls, no IMs, no notifications.

Nothing fancy but works like a charm. There is one caveat - you need to apply it. Guilty as charged, sometimes I forget about my own rules, and then my productivity plummets. How do I know it? I keep track with Rescue Time and see a number of tasks in ToDoist which are outstanding.

Few final thoughts. I kept a draft of a blog post about Slack for a long time and how it was supposed to kill email. I keep hearing people saying how email is killing their productivity.

Bullshit.

It is not a tool that kills your productivity. Be it time spent on email or time spent on Slack, even if you think it is more effective, it is not a tool that does it; it is how you use the tool. Do not search for a new tool to boost your productivity. Look at how you use what you have right now. New tools are distractions from the problem.

With that - productivity is not the ultimate goal. It can become a trap. It is OK from time to time to do nothing. Your brain needs to be bored to think!

Remember. You are not a CPU, you were not designed for some tasks, but the CPU has an idle time.

Photo by Clement Souchet on Unsplash

Digital Minimalism - removing myself (yourself) from social media game

Sun, 07 Mar 2021 19:29:19 GMT

Social media at the moment are broken (yay, says who). Me! Here’s my take on it and why I decided to limit my exposure to social media.

TL;DR - work out your own model. The longer I look at it, the less value is in what we call “social media.” I crafted my space in it, and I’ve decided to abandon some parts of it for good. At this moment, each of us should revisit the way it engages us. Social media are here to suck your attention. Your attention can not be recovered. Make sure you are getting something in return.If you are in it for a status game. Run AWAY!

Social media are not social anymore. We need a new name for it. Attention-based business models were created to extract as much value from their users (not the other way around) with a growing influence on our lives outside of the network. How to call it? At this point, I don’t have a good idea. But it is definitely not social.

Social is about interactions with a group. We all need it; the last 12+ months showed it for many of us. Yet, we are not getting it anymore from the thing we call “social media.”

This post will not be another outcry for “delete Facebook” (I do think it is one of the best things you can do for yourself at this moment). It will not be another call into a void about privacy (It is a huge problem there). It is a record of my current perspective on Social Media, how I turned it around for an excellent benefit for my time, life, and interactions with people.

I accepted that those companies’ networks are needed in some way for my work and are actually, if used right, a great source of knowledge. Some become so annoying and provided less value over time that I decided to drop them. Some I use.

Where things went south?

It started in the right way. Social media, in general, were not a bad idea. Keep in touch with friends and family through a single tool (or few tools). Maintain your social circle of friends and people you share interests with.

Then a newsfeed happened.

News-feed changed a stream of things your social network put for you into a stream of things. The social network decided is interesting for you. It came with optimization for monetization and the entire concept of gaming a system for again.

It wasn’t about keeping in touch anymore. It was about how much time you spend on the newsfeed. The things it started for - your friends, interests, people you talk with becoming fuel for a newsfeed. Designed and optimizes to give you a dopamine shot every time you check it.

I get it.

They need to earn money to run those servers and build a product. Why have they not named the price? My opinion - no knowledge or research on it - selling you on newsfeed had far more potential to earn money than any subscription scheme. Simple as that.

Then it was a roller-coaster of dopamine shots, your attention being minted into time on ads and time on ads being minted into currency. You stopped using the product. You become the product.

Social media are now nothing more than a constant advertisement stream, sometimes disguised as a status update.

Good things happen there, don’t you think?

It isn’t that it is all wrong. I know, I get it. People are still connected with other people. The great things about networks created in social media are that they allow many people to build a different future.

Positive effects I observe in my networks:

People building audience around their way of life, thinking or skills and building a new (better) lifestyle and future for themselves and families
People from places with limited opportunities (developing countries) with skills use it to show their skills and get work (same, better future)
Unlimited potential for reaching out to ANY person and ask a question. You might not get an answer, but finding yourself in discussion with someone with excellent knowledge on a subject and having it on the reach of your keyboard. BRILLIANT!

Those are BRILLIANT things! Especially for those people for whom it is an enabler for better life or change in a lifestyle.

WTF moment

For me, the cost of it vs. the value I was getting is not worth it anymore. I know how to handle it well. For a long time, I had removed the apps from my phone, disabled all notifications, had plugins in a browser to remove feed and likes. The single fact that such tools exist and I had to use them means that something is wrong. I need to protect myself from the harm that those sites and tools are doing to me.

What The Fuck! (sorry for the language)

I need tools to protect me from a site, which was about being “SOCIAL”? Is there something more fucked up than this?

The only way those sites can survive, grow and earn money is to get your attention. One way or another - attention is their currency.

If you are not there, you are not watching, scrolling, and clicking; you have no value for them. Attention is one of two resources (the other is time) to get back and replenish. If you spend it on social media, it means you are not spending it on something else. Those moments of attention spent on the right thing accumulates over time. It is a compounding effect.

Crafted my own space

I moved my social interactions into smaller, direct circles. Talk to people. Have a small, private group for chats with friends to share updates, moments, and laughs. Removed this part of my digital life from platforms completely (OK, still needs to convince a few people to move from WhatsApp :) ).

It is healthier, it is fun, it brought social to the interactions again. There is no fight for attention, there is no posing, bragging, no business models. No interruptions by a feed content which platform think is essential for me. I pick my time, space, and topics.

I also maintain a footprint on few platforms; at the moment, it is:

Twitter
LinkedIn

Twitter is the best source of information and a place where many good discussions happen. It comes down to the list of people you decide to engage and follow. It also is straightforward - I can pick any person and talk to them (or at least try). I did my work on curating my list of connections there. There is almost none of the political content in my feed.

It is also that Twitter is terrible for an advertisement that removed this entire “ads” game. You need to be interesting or have something to say - it works for you like an amplifier to whatever you are doing / selling, etc. It is tough there to be for the sake of a commercial thing.

LinkedIn is also different - it is for business. It is where a lot of business connections happen right now, it is suitable for recruitment. It is also good for professional content; yet, the number of ads and people using selling bots is becoming a bit annoying. Still, the benefits are there, and it is business.

For the rest, I keep it to my spaces. This blog. My newsletter. Recently started a podcast (this one in Polish, but stay tuned). I accept it will not be popular. I will not game the system, use Facebook or Instagram to play it, get followers, and scale.

I decided that places like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and few others are not for me. Too toxic, too much attention needed. If I will be selling something, that is definitely a place to go, no other reason.

It doesn’t mean it is not good for you. You need to decide. You should ask yourself one crucial question.

Are you in it for a value, or are you playing a status game with other people?

If you are in a status game - run away and never look back.

Digital minimalism

While writing this post, I came across the Lex Friedman podcast episode (recommended to listen to it, try it, thoughtful discussions) with Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, and other books.

Cal Newport mentions there a term he coined for one of his books - “Digital minimalism.” It is the right term for where I am heading right now.

It is well worth Watching (3 hours, I know, but make it 2X); if you are interested only in social media and attention topics, it happens in the first hour.

Digital minimalism is a way to go for me at the moment.

Put your actions where your words are

You have to put your actions where your words are. At this moment, this blog and other blogs/sites/podcasts I’m running are Google / Facebook free, as much as I can influence it.

What does it mean?

I do not put Google Analytics on the site or other web page.
I do not embed a Facebook pixel or similar tool from their arsenal on my digital assets.

Why I wrote, “as much as I can influence it”? I run those assets on platforms. I try to pick platforms I can control but do not always have time to check them at the moment or alternative to these tools.

I accept that there might be some tracking on the platform side; for example, my newsletter does track if you as a recipient opened it to give an Open Rate. If I find a tool that will do it, I will consider switching. The same goes with the podcast platform (I use Transistor.fm for it), blogging platform (Ghost), and few other places.

My resolution is that I will look for as many tools and avoid using tools that I know are being used to track you as a person.

I stopped using Facebook and Instagram, and I do not have plans to return there. Yes, I still have an account there (for reasons covered a bit further), but I don’t have plans to use them in the future to come.

I also deliberately will work over removing those services from my other accounts (logins, integrations, etc.). In this case, convenience is not that important over the long term.

This effort is time well spent. I look at it as a long-haul effort with a compounding effect. Fewer distractions from social media to get a convenient logon (which requires you to be logged on to the platform) means more time spent on something, which might not bring results. On my own terms.

Why I still keep these accounts?

Yes, I still own these accounts. You can find me on social media platforms, which I don’t use.

Why not delete them?

It is a part I need to figure out yet or broader we all need to figure it out in technology. I keep these accounts as I don’t want someone else to be able to use them. I want to have control over my handle, which I used in the past, and if needed, prove that I am behind it.

Over time, develop some solution to prove that we are or what more critical we are, not the person who stands behind a specific account or profile. In recent posts and newsletters, I mentioned Distributed ID and Verifiable Credentials a couple of times. If those will be accepted, it might present some pieces of a solution.

For now, I will keep them.

That’s it. No life-changing advice. This post was needed to summarize my approach at the moment and make you think about yours.

Is what You are getting from your engagement in social media worth your time and attention.

Think about it for yourself.

Cover Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash

Avoid inertia! How to thrive in years to come?!

Sun, 07 Feb 2021 21:21:35 GMT

It’s been a year since we are in a pandemics, more or less under lock-down or other restrictions. The result of it is that the world has changed in many ways at a professional and personal level.

Even if we will solve the pandemic’s problem or learn to live with it, changes accelerated during this period will stay with us.

There are many examples of changes, which accelerated. Remote work, e-commerce, logistics, education changes at schools and e-learning, offices’ role. Too many to count.

Those changes were already on the way, in some cases years away. Now they accelerated, and within the year, we did as a collective a fast forward for 5 (or more) ways in many areas.

As with every change, there is inertia opposing the change. Inertia is people and forces who will look to get back to “normal.” There is no way back to it if we call previous practices “normal.”

What is normal anyway? It is a way to react to change in “baseline” to call something “normal” (a baseline) and calling the change “not normal.”

There is no way back to “old normal.” People and companies are looking to get back to the office, stores, and travel again. Changes are in motion. New practices emerged and will develop further. You can work against it or look at using it for your leverage.

A case of shopping and inertia drag

I’ve never been a fan of shopping. That might influence my point of view on it. I haven’t visited a mall or shopping center for a year now, and it hasn’t crossed my mind to do it, even if these are now open.

This Saturday, I jogged on my route, which takes me next to one of my neighborhood’s shopping malls. What I saw there was inertia to change in its pure form. People were standing in line to enter the mall (there are limits of people inside) in -5C outside.

It is the best example of “normal” trying to drag people to the old way of doing things.

Inertia!

Last year shopping has moved online! It was there; the previous year accelerated it for everyone. My small grocery store started to take orders online and deliver them. My fresh veggies are still delivered to my doors once a week.

You want proof. Check stock prices of e-commerce platforms, Amazon or Shopify.

The selection online is better, prices are lower, delivery and returns are free and easy.

Now let’s talk about inertia in shopping. Building a shopping mall is an expensive project. Maintain it is a costly business. Businesses present often had to pay steep prices to get it and have their place there. Why?

A shopping mall was a conduit between the customer and the sellers.

There is a lot of capital invested in it, and this capital will have one goal: CONVINCE YOU TO GET BACK TO SHOPPING IN THE MALL. There is no return on the capital invested without you in the mall.

It is hard to re-purpose those places for a changing world. The strategy is to get people to go to the shopping mall to spend time and money again. The queue in front of the mall I saw proves that it works. Inertia is strong in us!

This process is not limited to shopping malls. You will see it everywhere - in offices, entertainment, conferences, media. It will drag you back for different reasons - money, power, control, status.

Following the inertia drag in the short term will not make much difference. Long time it might make a huge difference.

The cost of inertia and getting back to “normal”

Not fighting the inertia has a cost. It cost you personal resources (time, attention). It might also cost you monetary value (the price of goods in a shop, cost of travel) and the long-term cost of lost opportunities.

You can choose - get back to previous practices:

Go to the office every day and commute to it back and forth,
Choose your place to live based on the location of your work
Spend time in a shopping mall instead of buying goods through e-commerce and delivered to your doors
Travel 16h to the tech conference to “feel” it
Drive for 4h to get t0 30m customer meetings (they are most likely distracted anyway).

or change the way you operate to leverage the change and build on new practices:

Work in distributed teams, without attachment to the physical location, commute, and work hours
Quick e-commerce shopping with access to personalized offers online with quick delivery
Remote learning and up-skilling, without a need to travel to the on-site location
Sped up the learning process (watch only important pieces, skip the fluff) instead of flying to the conference
Delegating tasks to people all around the world through remote tools and services

Leveraging new, emerging practices and services will benefit you in freeing two resources:

Time, releasing time from things you were used to in-person or required you to travel.
Attention, remove distraction, commuting time, office chatter, and switching contexts.

People who will spot inertia and learn to avoid it will enjoy the leverage on those two resources: time and attention. It is not a call for the hustle and more work in extra time, far from it. Extra time and attention you will free-up can be used to:

Spend time on rest, boosting your productivity in the active periods
Upskilling in the current or future areas which allows you to build an advantage in the world
Build digital skills or products to deliver them to others
Go and workout or, in another way, take care of your health, with good long-term effect.
Educate yourself in economy and finances (become financial savvy) and use your assets.
Research on new emerging practices and trends to invest time for the future.
Be flexible to take on new challenges without the need to re-think life (moving, changing the place to live)

These effects will compound over time. Everything compounds over time! It is hard to spot it at a given moment, but it will.

Time and attention spent on those elements will let you build a better life, health, career, work, and rest ethics.

In the end, it will lead to your competitive advantage and wealth (however you will define it, not only limited to money).

Here is a dilemma

Nothing is that straightforward, so here is a dilemma. People who will enjoy new practices and changes are likely to benefit from it anyway. Let’s say it - most of us are already privileged.

You have the means and resources to access services online (it is not granted for everyone).

You have time to spend on learning and taking care of your health (again, not granted for everyone).

You have some resources to spend on education, investing, and otherwise benefiting from having it.

We are in a position to look for work in a distributed environment.

The dilemma is that those changes will not benefit all people (it never is). The people who struggle already will experience the biggest inertia drag.

I will not pretend I have the answer to this dilemma, but it is something which I am aware of (and you should be as well)/

What does it mean in practice?

Nice theory, but what does it mean in practical terms? How can you apply it to your daily life and work?

I can not tell you how you can do it; I can tell you what my actions (some implemented, some still in progress) based on the changes I observe are:

I used to be in the office every day. Our office is open under restrictions now (required by the law), but I will re-adjust to be there but not in 100% capacity when it opens in full. More like 3 days remote/2 days in the office. I live close to it anyway, but work from home allows me for other changes.
I will limit my travels going forward. I do not plan to go to any technical event or conference soon, requiring extensive travel. I will travel less for business, checking if it is a good investment of my time first before committing.
I will not commit to on-site conference speaking and similar appearances if travel is required. Even without extensive travel, I will judge how much time it needs me to be on-site and decide based on it.
I invest in my distributed work environment: simple things - desk, good display, a good computer, furniture. I plan to use it way more as I used it last year.
I will make changes in the place of living (already in progress) and re-evaluate it further as the future will unfold (distributed work from outside of Poland for more prolonged periods etc. )
I default to shopping online for almost everything now. Convenience and time savings first over small prices need me to travel to the shop or extended time for pickup.
Limit or remove from living things, limiting my mobility in the long term.
Build more presence online and through tools, make sure I don’t have a barrier to use any means to interact or work with people.
Make sure I can access my resources online. Hey, banks and other places - if you are online first, you have my business. Close and break ties with those who need me to be physically present.
Pay more attention (can I?) to my services and assets’ online security.
Invest in assets and communication methods, which scales online (look at this blog) over those requiring physical presence or extensive travel.
Use the time saved on health (exercises, 2020 was already a good year for it), education, and re-allocation of my focus to new areas.

Not a full list, but it should give you a hint on where to look and what to avoid. As you can see, those don’t have to be

Have you had some thoughts about it? Have you observed some inertia move in your environment?

Are you willing to be dragged by it or build upon new practices that will emerge from this whole mess called 2020 pandemics :)?

PS. I don’t know if “inertia drag” is an official term. If not, let’s agree that I coined it.

Cover photo by Jezael Melgoza on Unsplash

Lessons learned so far

Mon, 04 Jan 2021 07:52:53 GMT

It isn’t a guide for you to live by. It is a dump of my current thinking, done for myself, to compare how my thinking has changed over the years.

This post wasn’t planned, and I haven’t thought about it in advance. It resulted from thinking about those things and reflecting on the past years on a lazy Sunday afternoon of Jan 2021 (yeah, 2020 gave us a lot to reflect upon). It might be hectic, and it is more than likely, that you read those things from other people before. We are the result of countless interactions, people we’ve met, and the books we’ve read.

Why do it in public instead of private notes?

Last year I started to be involved in mentoring activities. People I worked with were of different careers, backgrounds, ages, and current occupations. What I observed from those sessions was:

Questions asked are formed around a few topics and areas of life and career.
It helps me to build a stream of thoughts on the subject if someone asks a right question
Usually, I have my well-formed opinion for those topics, didn’t bother so far to write it down unless someone asked.
A lot of answers in different conversations were the same.

I decided to write it down. The start of the year is a perfect moment to do it, for two reasons: I will have something to refer to when speaking with people about it. I would be able to compare in a year if I changed my mind on something.

Before I jump to writing it down, I will start with a disclaimer, coming from my review of Scott’s Galloway Book:

This book is one version of answers to those questions

It is not a book (it might be one day), but this comment still stands. Don’t treat it as a point of truth. It is input. Subjective input of someone who has a life, career path, and environment different than yours. Which, of course, doesn’t make it invalid at all.

I woul also appriciate if you would leave a comment if you would like each (or some of them specifically) commented in a separate post or maybe audio version? Things might happen in 2021.

DISCLAIMER!
Lessons learned - it doesn’t mean I have succeeded or excelled in all of them. Some of these are the results of my failures.

Let’s dive in - here are my lessons learned so far.

1. It is a long haul game

There is no more straightforward way to say it. Be prepared; this thing called fulfillment, useful life, and career is a long haul game.
You will see some people doing it quicker than you, overnight success or getting to the “top” (whatever top is) in matters of days.
For (almost) all of us, it will not be the case. It will take years. It won’t be easy, and sometimes it won’t be pleasant at all.

Overnight success happens, but it is almost always a result of long-time work if you observe it. It is an example of survivorship bias - hard to repeat and with colossal competition trying to achieve the same.

Good things might happen when trying to repeat an overnights success with the right mindset, but you will burn time and attention to something that wasn’t worth it.

Long haul means that you need attention and focus for an extended period. Going after every new medium or social site will make you burn, not achieve a lot.

Photo by Preillumination SeTh on Unsplash

2. There are no shortcuts - you will have to work to earn it

We are living in a unicorn world. People who achieved overnight success or unicorn companies are all around us. We are always on a “next brilliant idea” to “nail it.”

No.
You are not (in most cases).
Accept it.

It is never about the single big idea to “nail it.” With enough LUCK, some people will get it at the right moment and time. It is what fuels news and what makes noise.
Hard to replicate, almost not possible if you will not be in the right moment, place, and with a bit of LUCK.

Hunting for the next shortcut, to the thing which will “set you,” this one project to “change everything,” next “startup idea” to become a unicorn, will most likely burn you out.

People I’ve met who are successful worked on a single thing for a long time spent years building it. They were not taking shortcuts. You will not hear about them in the news.
Why?

Because a success that requires work doesn’t sell “clicks” and “views.”
Media knows that many people will look for a shortcut, so it is in their best interest to fuel this “search for a shortcut” by pointing out such examples.

There are no shortcuts. You will have to earn it!

3. Take care of yourself; you will need it for the long haul

What is the most important thing you need for the long haul?

YOU

The Sooner you will realize it, the better. From all investments I’ve made along the way, this one pays off best.
Pick some activity and do it. Sleep. As much as you need.
Think about your food choices. I don’t advocate for any diet (confession: never been on a diet in my life).
Think about your mental health, do a check with someone professional in this area. Talk with other people.

Warning - it requires work, #2 applies not only to career :). No shortcuts.

If there is something that will give you 10X benefit in the shortest time, it is an investment in your health, fitness, sleep and mental health.

Photo by Dustin Belt on Unsplash

4. Don’t compare yourself to others. You observe them long in their version of a game.

You see someone successful. You want to be as this person, have this freedom, resources, glory … whatever it is. Then you compare your current SELF to this person or, simpler, to your peers. How does it make you feel?

Stop

First, you see this person in point of time on their long haul journey. You don’t know how much time and work went into this single picture you are looking at.

Second, they are not YOU! You don’t have to follow, do the same, be like them.

Third, everything has some dark sides. If you look at this person from a social media perspective, you will most likely see a false picture. If you speak with them only at a conference or event, you don’t know how much is going on in their life that you would not want to get.

You can ask them about the tactics, experience, lessons learned, but do not compare yourself to others.

5. Become financial educated

I’m not saying you should become the next Warren Buffet (most likely, you don’t want to be like him - see #4 above). Invest time and educate yourself in economics and financial area.

Understand how you earn money, how you spend it, how and what taxes you are paying, and those things on the market (even if you don’t invest in the market).

At any point in time, you should be able to give some approximate answer to these questions:

How much you spend per month (also on what), and are you saving?
Do you have enough savings to last 6 (12 recommended) months without an income?
What is your current net worth, and it is growing in the previous two quarters?

If you can’t answer these questions, work your way to answer them, and then work further.
This blog is a great way to start your education (one of many) - Investment Moath

One important exercise is to work your NUMBER! What is a NUMBER! It is an amount you need to save to stop working. It might be much lower and more achievable than you think, but it will give you one thing - LONG TERM PERSPECTIVE!

The Sooner you will start to work on it, the sooner you will see results. Again - no shortcuts!

Photo by Christine Roy on Unsplash

6. Learn to cut your needs (in a reasonable way)

Some people become Minimalists. I’m not, at least not by declaration, but I buy little stuff. I’m not saying you should not buy things. I’m not also saying that this lesson is about things alone.

Every need, especially related to material things you add to your life, makes it a bit more complicated and fragile.

What you want is your life to be simple and less fragile.

Remember - every novelty will wear off. Every gadget, after the initial rush, will become the next thing in your house. Before you decide to get something or add something to your life, ask yourself an honest question:

WHY DO I NEED IT?

If it is for external reasons (remember, do not compare yourself) - you don’t want it.

Cut your needs, own less. You will be much happier and have time for other things in your life.

7. Know why you do it?

Whatever you are doing, pursuing the career, building a company - think WHY you are doing it.

No, I’m not referring to Simons’s Sinek’s WHY! It is much over-hyped. It is your internal “WHY” of doing things.

Is it power?
Is it a desire for a specific lifestyle?
Is it a need to help others develop?
Is it a way for you to feel safe in the world

Those reasons might be selfish. Do not be afraid or ashamed of it. Getting a simple and peaceful life for you and your family is an excellent reason to do much stuff.

Knowing “WHY” you do this will help you with few things:

Push further in challenging moments (it is a long haul and no shortcuts)
Decide what not to do.
Now when to STOP.

The last one is important. You need to know when to stop and when it is enough.

8. Money is a wrong answer to the question above

Money is the wrong answer to the “WHY” question. I’ve never seen someone who was driven by money and was happy and successful.

Why?

Because it is not a solid foundation for a person. It will sooner or later cause you to make some shortcuts or choices you would not do otherwise. It will also drive a specific type of people near you, which might not be the best life-long company.

Inevitable, it will also cause you to compare to others, and there will always be someone who has “MORE.”

9. You are not them: waking up at 4 AM will not give you a success

When you read a book or listen to a podcast focused on particular habits or routines, remember - YOU ARE NOT THEM. It is not this habit or practice, which puts them where they are!

WAKING UP AT 4AM will not MAKE IT DONE!

It is a long haul; there are sweat and work in all it; you see these people at the end of a long journey (or its current Stop). You can wake up at 4AM, drink magic mushroom coffee and eat some high-tech powder food while meditating in the ice-cold lake, but it will not DO IT for you.

It might be right for your body. It might give you more time to work on important things, but it is not habits or routines to follow, which caused were those people.

Too often, I see people going from one routine into another, which should boost their success. It is a distraction.
Again - no shortcuts.

10. Learn from others and from books

This said - you should learn from others and read books.

Books are the cheapest way to tackle the brain of other people. However unique is what you are doing (it isn’t, believe me - only a handful of people works on something unusual), those things were done before. There are timeless lessons in books that were written ages ago. We are not that different in many aspects than people in the past. Many things had happened in the past, which will happen to you.

Develop a habit of learning from books. Read them, listen if you have trouble reading (yet reading is still better).

When reading - take notes, highlight things, write your summary.
Do not jump right away to implement the advice. Process it in your context, then execute.

Time invested in reading books paid more than 10X for me and many others I know.

Photo by Alfons Morales on Unsplash

11. Most fancy jobs or occupations are not what you want to do!

You will see a lot of people with fancy titles and occupations. In most cases, being the next “ninja” thing or “personal social media coach” is not what you want to do.

The truth is, for the long haul, the surest path is through businesses that are already out there, and in most cases, those are not the fanciest jobs out there.
You don’t have to invent a new industry. Take the existing sector, make it 1% better. That will be enough.
Others will be more visible with their flashy titles, but you will have a job done and take credit for it.

Fancy jobs tend to be seasonal. Comes and goes every year or so, and then a flock of “social media ninjas” goes to look for new dope. You can work on your long haul journey.

12. Do not mistake a tool with a goal

It becomes crucial in the current world with its social media noise and the overwhelming presence of people around you. You may fall into the trap of “being visible,” working on “your presence” in new social media.

Those are tools. Being famous on social media is not a goal. It isn’t for most of us. There will be a couple people who will reach the status there and be set for life.

It is called “LUCK.”

In social media’s best interest is to promote it as THE WAY! Why? Because it fuels their money engine.
Often, people you would consider as successful are people you will never see on social media.
It doesn’t mean that you can’t use it - it is the cheapest distribution machine at the moment for your work.

Don’t mistake the tool for the goal. It applies not only to social media.

13. Invest in building opportunities

What is essential for you over the long haul is to have opportunities. Especially early on in your life, work towards creating a lot of options. It is where tools that allow you to become visible are coming in handy.

Interactions with your peers and people from outside of your close circle will build opportunities.

Posts on the blog or videos on a channel will build opportunities.

To give you a practical example - let’s call out Mr. Gavin Ashton (we know each other from our professional lives). Gavin had a successful career track. He continued to build opportunities. One of those was this post - Maersk, me & notPetya.

This post gathered the attention and landed him a new job and a new career path.

Invest in opportunities:

Be visible
Learn how to speak and speak in public
Agree to random meetings once in a while
Allow people to introduce you to other people
Introduce your friends to people you know

Each interaction builds an opportunity. It might be in the distant future, but a chance is greater than ZERO it will come. If you are not doing those things, your prospects that this opportunity will realize is ZERO.

14. Invest in your network; you will need it for a long haul

Invest your time in building a network.

A close network of people you work with, friends, people you interact with more often.
A more wide network of people you know, you meet once in a while, friends of friends, doing completely different things.

It will help you in the long haul:

It will build opportunities that will materialize over time
If you will need a bit of advice or someone with the right skill, you will be able to tap into your network

Besides, it is fun. Be curious about people.

One more thing - there are no shortcuts. To build your network, you will have to invest your time and energy. Time and energy are needed to develop and maintain your network and contribute to its success.

Invest it and don’t treat it as a transactional business. There are no tabs to be kept.

Photo by Hanson Lu on Unsplash

15. Invest in your friends (or other people in general)

Your close friends and family are what matters. They are your safety net, and you are their safety net. You might not realize it, and they will not tell you, but it is right in many areas.

You need to invest in it. Spend your time, energy, attention on those people. It doesn’t mean that you can’t be selfish, and you have to say “yes” to every request or attend to every drama unfolding in this circle.

Investing means being interested in them and present when they need it. Sometimes it is a single day across 10 years. It is worth it.

When the day comes, you will need your safety net.

16. Know when to stop invest in your friends (or other people in general)

Same as with a bank account, someone might overdraw from your account. The relationship becomes toxic. A long-time friendship goes in a direction you don’t like.

Talk with them, invest your time … to some point. It is OK to be selfish and know when to draw the line if it is not working.
If the other party is not investing in your relationship or it hurts you, it is OK to say STOP. Be honest about it.

It is OK to let someone go.

17. It is all about trust - if you find it, try to not break it

Trust is a foundation of all good things which happen. Many things come to trust between people.

I was lucky to find people I can trust in many areas:

Among my friends and family
My business partners
Further circle of people in the community

When you find people you can trust, invest in them. It is a scarce thing, and it will pay off in the long term. Try not to fail this trust. It will not break immediately (unless you will do something foolish), but it will be tough to rebuild once broken.

People you can trust, who are also your friends (it doesn’t have to be connected) and if you are lucky are also fun to be around, is the best WIN in your life!

18. Your biggest asset (besides your time) is your attention

Everyone says time is your biggest asset you can’t rebuild. There is another one - YOUR ATTENTION!

We are living in an environment that fights for your attention. People around you, web sites, applications. Devices! Your phone wants to get as much of your attention as you will give it.
Your attention is needed to push things forward and do your goals. It is getting harder to keep it and stay focused. You also have to learn how to say “NO” as it is the best guard of your attention.
You don’t have to be much better than others in your field if you can focus and keep your attention on delivering and doing things.
Remove distractions. Say “NO” to things, which are not contributing to what you want to achieve.

Say NO to many things. Keep your focus and attention.
It is one of your most significant assets.

Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash

19. It is all about compounding effect (not only in finances)

Have you heard about the compound effect? If not, you can find it in connection to finances. Simply saying - small changes accumulate over time and are adding to the impact.

It makes small sums of money accumulate over time to grow into a large amount in personal finances.
Problem with compounding effect? Results are small and are not visible in the beginning. It takes time to compound to take time and show the results.

It applies not only to money and personal finances. It applies to your career, building your skills and knowledge. If you are aware of how it works, it is easier to observe it and not fail because of a lack of results.

The compounding effect gives you a way to think about long term results, giving you leverage.

People do not believe in long term results. They are wrong!

20. Be aware of survivorship bias (and other biases)

If you haven’t heard about survivorship bias, make sure to read about it and understand it.
A lot of what you see as a success or what is presented as such results from the fallacy of survivorship bias.
You see a successful startup, and you want to follow their way of doing things. Is it repeatable? Are there others doing it with the same result? Is it a way or LUCK?
It is where survivorship bias comes into play.
Be aware of it and filter what you see through it.

There are other biases you should be aware of. Reading You Are Not So Smart is an excellent way to start to notice them

21. Know what your strengths are and use them to your advantage - 10X on them

I learned this one hard way. Don’t try to do things you don’t know how to do and you don’t enjoy them. Get to know your strengths and what you are good at and enjoy it - 10X on it. The results will be much better, and you will not suffer. More - others around you will not suffer.

It doesn’t mean that you should not try new things. Try it. But if you fail at it and you don’t enjoy the process - drop it. If you fail at it, but you enjoy doing it - master it, it needs practice, but it might be the next thing you will become good at.

Work on your strengths, make them even stronger.

22. If in doubts, look where the money goes or who benefits from it

A lot is going on in the world right now. You will be in a situation, which will not make sense, but you will have to orient yourself around it.

If you don’t have to orient yourself somehow and act - you can drop it altogether.
There are two types of things you should learn to distinguish:

Things which influence you and you can do something about it
Other things you should not bother yourself with.

If you are in the position that you need to handle some sort of situation, and you don’t know the full picture, apply those two questions:

Where the money flows
Who will benefit the most out of this situation.

Then apply Occam’s razor principle to the possible answers. You will be right in most cases or at least in a close approximation of what is “right” about understanding the situation.

Do not complicate things. Things are simple. That’s why conspiracy theories usually are wrong (which doesn’t mean that there are no facts in it).

23. Most flashy people have much less to teach you that those who are quiet for a long haul

Most visible people have little you can learn from. Again - do not mistake the tool for a goal.

It was visible in 2020, where many people would consider “successful” by visibility standard had trouble staying afloat.
People you want to talk about for success in the long haul are quiet. In most cases, you will not find them on cover pages of magazines.

The best way to identify and get to know those people worth your time is through your network. Invest in it.

24. It is not only about hard work - there is LUCK in it (sorry), but hard work will get you close to it

Hard work will get you far. What you need is also a bit of LUCK. People will not admit it, but many businesses succeeded because of the right moment in time and the right place. The market was ready for ripe. One founder met another founder, and something clicked with the first opportunity.

It won’t happen without hard work; LUCK is not enough. When LUCK plays its hand, hard work is what will help you play it. There is no reason to hide it - there is an element of luck in all this thing called “life.”

I appreciate that I had the luck to meet the right people more than once in my life. But I also understand that it happened because of the work I did before it happened, which created OPPORTUNITIES for LUCK to play its hand.

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

25. You don’t need to be in 0.01%; it is good enough to be 10% better than others or in the Top 10% of your cohort

People think that they need to become billionaires or to create the best company in the world for a specific product or service.

Nope!

You don’t have to be in 0.01% of people in this world. If it gets you, they’re - good for you (yet, it will also cause you some trouble).
It will be enough to be 10% better for good life and success than other people trying to do the same or be in the TOP 10% of your market area.
The pie is huge. Getting a bigger share of it comes with the price of time you spend on it, resources, and stress.

If you want to be the next Bill Gates or Elon Musk (I admire the guy, I don’t exactly think it is a role model in all aspects) - go for it! Remember then that it is a very narrow space, and the risk of failure is much greater than the chance of success.

Hey, but they made it. So why not you! Why not the f..k YOU!

26. Be antifragile - subtract from your life

We add things to our life. Each item added to our life, be it a physical thing, relationship, hobby, or need, adds TWO THINGS as well:

complexity, and
maintenance.

Buy a car, and you have insurance, a car garage, and fuel you need to provide.

By adding things, you are increasing the fragility of your life (and also stress). Why? Every item you add puts some pressure on you: time to invest, financial.
Be more antifragile.
Not only add but also subtract from your life. It is OK to let go of things, experiences, people who are not contributing to you having a better and more stable life.
It is easy to add things, but it is hard to let go of something we already have because of our human nature.
It requires a conscious process of removing things from your life to make it less fragile.

The book which best describes this concept is Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile; it is recommended read if you haven’t read it yet.

27. Be antifragile - take small risks and bets

Take small bets. Bets which will not ruin your life but might have a positive impact on it. It will contribute to your experiences and to your compounding effect in your life.

It is easy to fall into the trap of a stable life career. Things are good; why bother to change something or try something new.
When things are right, it is the moment to take small risks and bets to explore OPTIONS.

Why?

It creates OPPORTUNITIES. You will check the new path, and in case your current stable pathway will be disrupted, you have another to follow.
Those risks don’t have to be significant. Take 10% of your energy and spend it on small bets.

It will pay off in the long term and make you less fragile.

Photo by dylan nolte on Unsplash

28. No grey zone

There will be countless opportunities coming to you for a quick chance to make money or “do favors.” It might look like a small thing, but every time, ask yourself - will it create a “grey zone” in my life. Something you will not be comfortable with later if it will be revealed. Something which will have to stay hidden?

If it is a case - skip it. Say, “NO.” Do not create those “grey zones” in your life with your actions. You don’t need them. The compounding effect also applies to such activities.

In my case, I prefer a good sleep over easy money. Remember - there are no shortcuts. If someone proposes something which sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be right :). If there is a chance to strike a deal, but you have to bend your moral compass - you don’t want to do it. It will hurt you in the long term, and you are in it for the long haul.

I’m happy that I can’t recall a single item in such a grey zone. If someone posted on the Internet about me, I would be ashamed of it, or I will have to explain myself (and yes, it includes photos from my heavy metal/punk rock youth).

29. Appreciate what you have

That simple. Whatever you have - appreciate it! It might be much worse; if you look around, you will see people struggling even more than you are.
I appreciate how lucky and privileged I am to live in a stable country, with my kids having access to school and knowledge.

It is not granted.

30. Don’t take things for granted

Whatever you have right now, don’t take it for granted. You earned it. You arrived at this place in your life because you worked hard, had a bit of luck, and in general, because you worked it out.

Nothing of it is granted! You need to earn it; you will have to work to keep it (in one way or another). One day all of it or pieces of it might be taken away from you or gone.
You are unique - every one of us is. You are not unique - it isn’t that these things you’ve got are granted because of you being YOU!

Appreciate it, don’t take it for granted, be prepared to lose it (especially every kind of material possession).

That’s it for now.

I haven’t listed those points up front before I start to write this post. Most of it was somewhere; I thought about it (mostly while I run).

If you made it through it till the end (I know, ATTENTION is a precious thing), I would appreciate it if you would leave a comment. Simple “+1” will do, but if you have thoughts about it or your own lessons learned, I would appreciate it.

It would be interesting to check this list in a year, five or ten years from now. What will be added? What will be removed?

Cover photo by Jordan Rowland on Unsplash

Sensing machine: what it is and how to build one?

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 12:45:32 GMT

How to tell what might be the next thing? What to do next? What is the “sensing machine”? Does such a thing even exist?

I tweeted a short response to the thread around Amazon and AWS:

AWS is Amazon’s sensing machine to know which industry and business take on next.

Original tweet

And it looks like it caught with an audience. Let’s talk about the sensing machine idea. Do you need one, and can you build it for business or individual needs?

Warning: There will be references to Wardley mapping. You’ve been warned.

NOTE: Those are my thoughts and observation. This post contains no insider knowledge about processes or decision-making.

Sensing machine

It isn’t a formal idea of “a thing.” I spoke about it a few times with Krzysztof Daniel using this term.

You are in the business of NOW. You do whatever you need, and there is a chance you do it right. How to tell it? Are you still in business? Aren’t you? It means that some of the things you are doing, you are doing right. There’s always a space for improvement.

You need to handle the basics before thinking of more complicated things. In business terms, things like cash flow, hiring, watching, and following your indicators of being “OK.” It might be your health and fitness, personal finances, and getting on the right track of your career.

NOTE: If you don’t know where to start, you can begin evaluating doctrine within your organization - You should always start with doctrine. Unless you should not

The moment will come that you will start to think - WHAT’S NEXT? What problem to tackle next? What is the next thing in your business line? Should you change your focus?

The question is: How to decide, what is the next thing? How to tell what is taking off?

Here is where the Sensing machine idea kick’s in.

It is not a “machine” as a real thing. It is a process of gathering signals to tell that something might be a “next thing” of your interests worth pursue it for the future.
It might be new technology emerging, which will sweep your current consulting services market.
It might be a new need among the customers to address and capture it before others do.
It might be a new, emerging market where you can move and dominate it.
It might be a new skill, programming language, which will give you leverage in the jobs market.

Whatever it is, there are signals that it is coming. The question is - how you can “sense” it and turn it into actions.

It is what I call a “sensing machine.” A method to capture the signals that “something” is going on in the market, what you can analyze to decide, and your next move!

AWS as a sensing machine for Amazon

Let’s get back to the tweet quoted above. How can AWS be a sensing machine for Amazon as a business?

AWS is Amazon’s cloud, where it delivers compute, storage, and all kind of higher-level services built on top of it to its customers.

If you are a business, you can leverage it and build your application and services on top of AWS services.

You can also look at current AWS offerings and what their customers might need and build a service or tools complementing AWS itself.

Another option is to build a solution on top of AWS and sell it to other companies.

In all these cases, what AWS gets from you is at least two signals:

Your cloud services bill
Your user’s traffic, in the form of business customers using the service or AWS users, using a tool, complimentary service, or solution.

(most likely, they get more singles but let’s use only those two obvious elements and not delve deeper into it)

If your business (or broader your area of business) is growing, your spending on AWS cloud will most likely increase. If your tool or service is successful among AWS customers, it will generate a bigger bill coming from AWS usage will increase.

Bottom line: a business that generates money and uses AWS gives Amazon a signal through customer traffic and an increase in AWS usage on your services (and increased bill you pay them).

What is essential, they don’t have to breach your data confidentiality or snoop into your accounts to see what’s in them. They can observe “signals” like:

Network traffic
Service consumption (and type of services)
Bill

To sense that there is growing business in some of “their” customer segment.

What Amazon can do with such information is to see:

What type of business is it?
What customer needs it fulfills and how?

And then use it in their decision-making process (I don’t have any internals on it) to decide to enter this market if it makes sense for them.

How it materializes are new business areas where Amazon starts to operate. In the case of AWS partner/services ecosystem with some of those being “Amazoned” at every re:Invent with new services announcements?

It isn’t only what AWS customers deliver on top of AWS for their businesses. What you do as an AWS user, what workloads and services you are utilizing are a single AWS sensing machine.

Of course, AWS is not only Amazon’s source for its service machine. They have an entire Amazon marketplace at their disposal.

Is Amazon alone in it? Let’s take a look at GitHub.

NOTE: Again, it is my point of view, not on any internal knowledge you might think I can get being MVP or MS Regional Director :)/

GitHub is many things. It is a code repository and DevOps platform for Open Source and commercial projects.

It is big enough and essential that Microsoft made a bet and purchased it.

Microsoft can use it (I’m not saying it is using it in this way), as a sensing machine, for what is emerging in software development.

What information can GitHub provide as a “sensing machine”? Let’s speculate a bit on it:

What are current trends in the usage of languages and tools (contributes to Microsoft’s developer tools and APIs)?
What are emerging coding and DevOps patterns and practices?
What are emerging topics and trends in specific software development areas, e.g., trends in Machine Learning or AI projects.

Those are to name a few. Open Source projects can deliver a lot of information on emerging in many domains and across developer communities.

It is an intelligent sensing machine for a company like Microsoft, delivering cloud services and developer tools.

Assuming they use it this way, those signals are input to the decision-making process of developing new tools, areas of investment in Azure services, etc.

Another example brought to my attention through Twitter was BlackRock’s Alladin. It looks like an interface to BlackRock’s sensing machine for the financial market, made available to its investors as a service.

Can you develop your sensing machine?

The short answer is: Yes, you can!

Please, don’t expect a simple, clean recipe here with “Ten steps to build your sensing machine” (would make quite a good title for online training, don’t you think)?

Every organization and individual has many signals available for “sensing.” Let’s look at a business example:

If you see a flow of inquiries from customers in a specific industry (if it wasn’t visible for you so far), it might be an excellent decision to take a look at what is happening there.
If some of your customers start to use more and more of your services or increase demand for specialists in a specific area, it might be a signal that something is developing there.
If bills from a particular customer, who is using cloud services through your organization as a billing entity grows, it might signal new business there which generates it.

As an individual, you can also build it based on public signals like:

Twitter discussions and topics trending out there
Job market observation of job postings, new areas and requirements in it
Trending topics on conference talks (be aware of Buzz and that novel, exciting things are rarely discussed at mainstream conferences)
Trends in technical papers and articles
Open Source projects and tools.
Questions from audience on social media and your blog posts
Open questions you send out to your peers or audience on your digital media

Having your own “sensing machine” is not enough. You also need to decide your next thing is a tool to analyze the signals and make sense. Here is where Wardley Maps can help identify the user’s need you see, the components (some of them might come from your sensing machine), and what is there for you in the value chain to meet it.

Not familiar with Wardley Maps? Let me fix it for you: Simplest introduction to Wardley Mapping in 90 seconds provided by Ben Mosior

Ben provides excellent learning resources at Learn Wardley Mapping.

You may also take a look at OODA Loop concept.

I hope you enjoyed it, and you can start to think right now, how to build your SENSING MACHINE for your business or personal development.

Cover photo by Garett Mizunaka on Unsplash

A computer which made me smile!

Wed, 04 Nov 2020 07:42:16 GMT

How did your adventure with computers start?

(Assuming you have one - not everyone is in IT, but everyone started somewhere)

Mine started with Atari 65 XE.

It wasn’t easy to get one. Yes, I’m not joking. For me, it wasn’t like to go to the shop and buy one. My childhood was in communist Poland. To get one of those, my parents first had to save a lot of money. They had to exchange them into hard currency (it wasn’t allowed) and only then go to the select store and buy one with hard cash.

Then I got it!

It was replaced with the first PC after a while, which was another considerable sacrifice from my parents (I keep a receipt for it somewhere to remember it).

It isn’t a post to write about history. I thought about the future when I saw the recent announcement of Raspberry PI 400. A small computer, hidden in a keyboard running Linux.

What is important - it costs $70. It is a lot in some places, but it is more affordable than even the cheapest laptops and Chromebooks.

(To be honest, I couldn’t resist and buy one; I will have a discussion with myself about it doing my monthly budget thing.)

It is a perfect device for educational purposes. What is more important, you don’t have to carry it around - it is still Raspberry Pi, it runs out of SD card. Get your SD card in your pocket, go to school/friend/club/library/friend, plug it into another RPi 400, and you are set.

When I was growing up with my Atari, there was another thing I dreamed about. Getting connected to BBS (think about it as an early version of the web). I read about it in printed (sic!) computer magazines.

There was one slight issue with it - my parents didn’t have a landline (yeah). When they got a landline connected (early 90’s), there was no Internet connectivity in our area.

I got first connected to the Internet when I got to my university (‘94). My world has changed.

Why write about it?

Days before the Raspberry Pi 400 announcement, I saw this tweet.

Starlink (and others who will follow) is out there. Working. I have my concerns about how it will pollute our night sky and similar. But I know that somewhere, out there is a kid who wants to get connected to the Internet (likely he has a phone by now), and it might be his version of my parent’s landline.

Get both together: affordable, ready to use, and standardized computer and widely available, not dependent on surface infrastructure access to the Internet. As an outcome, you have an environment to enable more kids to educate properly and in computer science.

It might be their first endeavor to work and built their own RPi 400 from available components. It might be even cheaper than getting one from the store.

I’m not drinking a cool-a-aid on technology here. I know the world isn’t perfect, and a lot is missing.

$70 is a lot in many countries - I understand it. When my parents got me my computers, they had to save months to buy it.

There is a need for education to be built around it. The materials are out there. The search engine will help kids to find it. They will need a sort of guided way through it.
Educational materials might be there, but:

not in the correct form (a video that will not be perfect for a bandwidth), or
language (the first step might be learning the language).

Those are all obstacles that can be overcome. I’m sure it will develop to be more accessible if there will be a need for it.

Educational materials are there - it has to be easy to find and follow.
Hardware costs will go even lower and will reach a broader range of people.
Bandwidth will get cheaper and more available and affordable.

I put together a quick map around it. Feel free to clone it with this link and change it.

It will unlock more potential in people than all AI buzz-word projects taken together. There is a good chance that this potential will be applied to something more than selling more ads. Solving different problems, known to local people, which are missed by valley now.

Don’t want to get too excited, but somehow, will all gloomy outlook of another round of lockdown. This small computer made me smile.

Or it made a kid with an 8-bit computer dreaming about a land line smiling.

Last but not least - THANK YOU, MOM, AND DAD [’].

Pick your battles, weight the risks

Sun, 11 Oct 2020 16:58:54 GMT

People are terrible (in general) at picking the right battles. It will help you in your career and life if you learn and decide where your battles are.

For the record - I write it in August 2020. Why is it important? This blog post is based on observation of the COVID-19 outbreak around us at the moment. It is not limited to the COVID situation.

UPDATE: I put this entry aside. I publish it in October 2020, when this entire discussion and situation is even more relevant (again).

People are terrible at picking up battles.

I’m most likely bad at it too. Over time, I got better at questioning myself: “Do I want to fight this battle?”

What triggered this thought was observing people around me, picking wrong battles, or rebelling against some simple daily life rules. What was common in those cases:

Rebelling against these rules didn’t need a lot of efforts
It comes from perceiving the world through an “I” angle.
If something would go wrong, the potential outcome was actually not worth the act of rebelling against it.

Few examples from my daily life observation:

Runners or bikers crossing the road on the red light:

I run. I often meet and observe other people who run or bike next to the same trail. I live in the city and run in the city. Cities do have streets. When we have lanes, and running/biking paths, what is inevitable are crossings.

What I observed a lot (at least in my bubble, which is in Poland, Warsaw) is when a runner or biker approaches the crossing at the very moment. The lights turn red for his/her path. They will not stop. Instead, they do tend to speed up and cross it on the red.

Why?

Photo by Janis Rozenfelds on Unsplash

I get it. It is about the result, speed, competition. On the other side, there is potential injury and accident. Even if it is not that fatal, another consequence is making life for others (drivers) a little bit harder. In general, it MAKES a LOT OF sense for everyone to stop when lights turn RED!

Is it worth it?

I get it. You are not sure if these measures are needed. There is a lot of discussions on how to approach this entire situation. There is uncertainty. In the end, those are simple things, with little impact on you.

Depends on your location it is different, but here it is:

Wear the mask if you enter the shop, restaurant, or other public places inside.
Disinfect your hands before entering.

That’s it. Can it harm you? IN 99.9999% not. I’m aware that there are people with specific conditions who need to avoid it. It is like the earlier case as:

(1) it has little impact on your life in its entirety,
(2) it has a significant effect on you or others if something will
(3) go wrong (you might get infected and infect others, etc.), and
(4) doing it, in general, makes sense for the entire population.

In both (and many other) cases:

It makes sense for the good of the population
It is easy to rebel against it as the perceived price to pay for it is low
We would not be that happy if someone would do it against us.

It is in daily life, and it is based on my experience in my location. I’m sure you can find your cases for similar behaviors in your everyday life.

Picking battles in professional life

The same happens in our professional lives. I observe it a lot when working with people. We pick the wrong battles and work on things with little impact. It is easy to rebel against those things, and for whatever reason, we choose to believe, it is a battle worth fighting.

Often it has little impact, and it might be right for a broader environment.

We waste energy on it. We pick too many small, not important battles to fight every day instead of focus on something which has an impact.

Risks to avoid

Avoiding all risks will get you nowhere. You need to take some risk to do something in your life. Each one of us has a different risk profile, which determines how we take on risks.

There is one risk class you want to avoid. It is one with the minimal payoff, the minimal possibility that something will go wrong, but with a large negative impact if something will go wrong.

Think about this “red light” example I gave at the beginning. Little to gain, a lot to lose in an unlikely but possible event of an accident.

Look at risks when thinking about your battles.

Pick your battles
Pick fewer battles than that.
Put some battles back.
That’s still too many battles.
Pick the battles that matter!

Cover image: Photo by Cristofer Jeschke on Unsplash

Hustle or not: MAXIMIZE opportunities, MINIMIZE distractions

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 12:00:00 GMT

Hustle or not! Very often, when someone says “do not,” the voice is raised - “Easy to say so when you have a career. What was your approach when you were young?”

Maybe it isn’t a direct answer to this question, but here is how I think about it (now, let’s be frank - when I was younger, I haven’t thought about it a lot :) ).

It is a continuation of mini-series around career development over time. If you are interested, in two recent posts, I wrote about:

Why I split it into two parts and approaches? Sounds obvious but let’s say it: because those stages are different.

When you start, it is about MAXIMIZING your opportunities! Later it is about MINIMIZING the distractions and things you don’t want in your life.

Maximize opportunities

Hustle or not? Is it a question?

If you talked with current me, I would say - no! If you spoke to 20+ years me, I would say, “Bring it on, baby, give me more.”

It wasn’t a conscious decision back then, but it turned out it played well for me.

I did plenty of things:

Delivered talks on conferences
Writing two different blogs (in Polish and English)
Spending time on on-line forums
Writing articles to magazines
Writing and reviewing books
Writing tools and scripts (besides the work)
Working full-time job

I was young (still am), I had plenty of time, and I used it to hustle. In perspective, I could do it more efficiently, and I could spend a bit less time on it.

Regardless, the goal was to MAXIMIZE the number of opportunities.

In this period, it was good for me as I haven’t had a good plan what exactly to do with my career and life (I still kind of don’t have it, but it is a subject for another post). If someone offered me an exciting opportunity outside of Poland back then, most likely, I would live somewhere else now.

The point is: early in your life, you want to maximize the potential number of opportunities and paths you want to take. Let’s face it:

Hardly any decision at this stage is life long choice
Those decisions doesn’t have long-time effect
These are not final, and everything can be changed
You still have years ahead of you to try out some new things.

What you want to do then is to keep them coming, trying, and finally decided - OK, this is IT. You want to see if this will take me somewhere.

Hardly anything will result in a decision that will affect your life. (Avoid doing things with potential extreme outcomes on the dangerous side, and you should be fine).

Minimize distractions

Maximizing opportunities has one disadvantage. It creates a lot of noise and obligations. It also takes a lot of time. It is worth realizing it early, and even at an early stage, filter out some things, which takes a lot of time and are not promising any results.

Later, it is where gravity shifts. You found your thing or even a couple. You bet on those things; there is a good chance that one of those has developed into your full-time job and career. The number of items that take your time grows. You find yourself battling with your schedule and calendar.

Don’t.

What you want to do is to start to cut distractions and maximize output. Distractions might be people asking you to deliver talks on every conference around, as you used to do it. It is nice; it is easy to say yes. you need to start to ask yourself a question:

What is the impact of it?,

What outcome I will get from it for myself and the work I want to do?

Distractions might be people you spend time with, where you don’t see anything coming out of it, or you see that they drag you back. I’m not saying you cut off all your friends from the past, but there are some relations where you can’t say why you still keep it going.

Distractions might be all the side tasks and projects you did in the past, like writing for other blogs, answering the questions on the forums, etc.

You have to name them as it depends on what contributes to what you want to do and your priorities. If you still have no idea about it, you are still in the phase to maximize the opportunities. Or you have finished one thing, and you are not sure what is the next one. Then there might be a short period to maximize the opportunities again.

The more you mature, and the more you develop, it is about MINIMIZING distractions and maximizing the outcome.

What is the outcome? You need to define it for you?

It doesn’t have to be something to be delivered or the next goal to achieve.

It might even be “doing NOTHING” if it is a lifestyle of choice for you.

Early on - MAXIMIZE opportunities.

Later in the journey - MINIMIZE distractions.

Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash

It is not a career, it is a lifestyle choice

Wed, 09 Sep 2020 06:00:00 GMT

You are on a roll. You develop your career, change jobs, and responsibilities. Few years pass, and something does not click.

You need to change.

The big question is: what is the change and which direction should you choose?

It is the second article in a mini-series triggered by discussions on career changes and development with people on Twiter and other social media. If you are interested in another related article(s), take a look here:

Where would I start with building my work profile now?

Recently I had a few discussions about picking a new direction or developing further a career. People I spoke with were not juniors. Those people were advanced. Some of them had jobs I would consider successful, and I bet people around them do the same. Based on those discussions, I’ve gathered these thoughts to set expectations:

It is not a list of occupations or positions to look for
It is not a career path advice
It is a reflection on my current thinking framework around the subject I shared with others.

When you come to this point - how to choose WHAT’s NEXT?

Before I begin - one disclaimer: those are my thoughts, based on my experience and path. Your mileage may vary, so it is OK that you think take different approaches. Comments are open.

If you are new here and/or you are interested in what my path was - here is my take on it: My path to where I am now

When you are at a certain point of your career, and assuming you are not struggling for daily survival, reasons, and approach to change in a job takes a different shape.

In my case and from my observation case of many others, the questions change from my next career step:

What kind of lifestyle I want to lead?
How can I maximize my leverage in what I do?

It is not a career choice; it is a lifestyle

Putting aside the pure skills side of the question - if you are doing well and something is itching you, you need change. Before asking a question about what job to find next, you need to answer a more important question.

What kind of life I want to lead?

Seems philosophical. It is, but at the same time, it isn’t. Suppose you feel this itching, and it is not financial or ambition. In that case, it is a sign that something in your environment is not clicking. Before looking for the next job or opportunity, after your initial skills acquisition period, it is good to decide what lifestyle you want to lead.

To discover it, you need to ask yourself some questions and be honest in answering those. What are those questions? I ask myself some of those:

Do I like spending time with people I work with and this environment?
Is it challenging for me (aka am I learning and developing some new thoughts and ideas)?
Do I contribute to the success of others around me (in the company environment)?
Am I happy with time split between what is essential for me?

Most important is what life you want to lead and with what you are comfortable:

Are you fine with someone assigning you tasks, or you don’t feel good with it, and you want to work on your own terms
Are you OK with showing up at specific times and working particular hours, with less risk (which often is an illusion)? Or instead, you trade a bit more uncertainty in your life for being able to do nothing or pursuit your personal goal for extended periods?
Do you want to spend time with other people or prefer to be alone or with your close family and friends only?
Do you imagine yourself staying in one place for a couple of years, or rather change a place and environment every now and then.

In my current mental model around it, those are the questions I ask before thinking waht I want to do. (Not to mention that currently, I’m still OK with building Predica as a company.)

Then you can move to the next part of a thought process, but before that - one remark.

You need safety

To be able to think through it this way, you need safety.

What is as the safety net needed is:

Financial safety - if you will have trouble at the end of the month to cover your bills, security is tough to achieve
Family or what you consider your close circle - people you think as your closest circle, need to be on-board with your choice. If not, they at least need to understand that you know what you are doing. It contributes to your safety and removes unnecessary friction in your life.
Be on good terms with yourself - yes, you need a friend who will not second guess your opinions without constructive voice, and you need him in your head. It doesn’t mean you don’t need to look at your actions and re-calibrate. You have to do it. It has to be constructive, and you need to like the choices you are doing.

Whatever choices you will want to make, having safety in those areas is something you will always appreciate. It will make your life easier. Notice that all these items are well within your reach and control. There are no external factors. Even if you will think about financial safety, it is well within your control and ability to achieve it. Of course, it is a matter of priorities you put for yourself in this pursuit (hard to achieve it if you decide to spend all money you earn immediately).

How I can use what I already learned as leverage?

The next question I ask would be where I can gain the most significant leverage on what I have already learned?

How I define leverage? It is how I can use my time to multiply the effect of my efforts to:

Do more in this area with others
Pass what I know on others to develop them
Allow me to do something different then what I already did and know.

In this, I’m a bit selfish but also looking at developing others:

I have learned something, and I used it before, I want others to know it as well and use it (development of others)
When others will know how to do it, I will not have to do it :) (my selfish part)
I will be able to learn other things and pursuit goals in areas, where I have not known a lot yet and I want to improve (my development and being a bit selfish element)

Over time, I’ve found out that leveraging what I already know through others, free time to learn new things, or pursuing other topics is more important. Over time you can make career choices focused more on leveraging your past experiences than on particular technical skills or tasks.

Think about the person you are - you have a couple of them

It is connected with an extra topic or mental model: personas you are! Why?

Each one of us has some personas you developed over time. Some of them are related to your private life (father, brother, husband, friend). Others are related to our professional career (developer, specialist, finance guy).

Those personas can be so strong that they define who you are in specific aspects. It defines you as an authority for others in this area. It is a thing that lets you get where you are now. It is your defining thing.

If your entire career was built on being a brilliant developer, it might be hard for you to pursue something else, which will need you to do less of it.

When thinking about your next career step, think about your personas. Writing it down helps. Think about those you associate with most.

Do you want to keep to it? Why?
Does keeping it limit you in one of those earlier things -> pursuing your desired lifestyle and leveraging your past experience to free time for new things?
Do you feel comfortable thinking that you will not be the best at a given thing anymore? (relax, it is not going away)?

Then you can ask another question: If not this one, what I want to pursue next? What will be my next persona to build?

Giving up is hard, but you will have to give up on something

Why answering questions about your current persona and what you want to pursue next is essential? Because following your desired lifestyle and new career path, it might be required to give up on part on something which was your identity so far.

Giving up on it is hard!

It is, believe me! How do I know? Because I decided to give up on a couple of things that were part of my identity.

I gave up on knowing every detail in my technical area (I still do it, but I know I don’t have to learn and understand it on my own)?
I allowed myself to think that I will not do what I was doing for the most part of my life anymore (technical consulting)

From a professional career point of view, it meant that I have to give up on a lot of things that built my identity. And I did it.

I gained something instead of what allows me to build my next 20-30 years of life :).

My career development mental model (as of now)

Being in this place and time, my current mental model decides if I want to change something, and what it should be is based on these three parts:

What lifestyle I want to lead, and what career choices and paths support it?
What is my leverage in it, to free time and capacity for new opportunities for me?
What persona I want to develop or what is interesting for me next?

If you will think about it, it is about maximizing what you want to do and minimizing the things you want to avoid.

I also recommend to you to read Sebastian Gebski blog post around the same topic Clarity. It makes a difference.. It provides a bit different angle to the same issue.

Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash

Where would I start with building my work profile now?

Thu, 23 Jul 2020 08:48:49 GMT

Where would you start if you would be starting your career now?

It is a good question?

My post about career path and flow - My path to where I am now triggered some positive feedback (Thank you!) and also a couple of people reaching out to me to ask “what should I do”?

I don’t feel competent enough to give career advice. I’m at the same place for 11 years now, and during this time, I haven’t participated in the “job market” from the “being hired” perspective. I do have some thoughts and observation, and it is what shared with those who asked.

If people are asking, then probably there are more people interested in this topic. It calls for a post. Better - a series of posts.

I’ve split it into two (or maybe more in the future) separate posts. Those are:

Where I would start (the one you are reading now)
Career or lifestyle choice (the one you will read next week).

Maybe it will evolve into longer series, but now, let’s look at these two viewpoints.

Why two posts? I think that your perspective will vary on your mileage in the career already. It looks different at the beginning and after a few years. I also believe that lifestyle choice is essential at the beginning; however, I also think it will be harder for me to explain it to someone who just freshly graduated and is out there to conquer the world.

Thought’s in this post are based on a few discussions I had which started with questions like:

What do you think I should do to get an internship?
Where to invest my learning time to have the right skills for the future?
What career path I should pursuit for next years?

These questions were coming from mostly younger people - graduated or after first jobs or a few years on the job. Some of them were not juniors - they had excellent skills and track record already. Why they asked it then? I think it is because what they still develop is “experience.”

Disclaimer !!!
Those are my thoughts about it, with my career path behind me and based on my observations. Think about it for yourself, challenge what you read here and in other places!
I’m not YOU!

I come from the IT world, and I thought about it mostly from the IT point of view, but I think this applies to other industries.

With that …

Where I would start right now?

If you haven’t read it before, you may want to check the piece I wrote some time ago - You should not work for free!. It sum-up my point of view on current possibilities.

And let me say one thing - THE POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS!

I know how it sounds :).

Think about it:

You can do a primary education using Khan Academy
You can do all the courses from MIT or Harvard online, with textbooks available for your own work
You can do industry certification courses online

Until you want to get some official credentials, it doesn’t cost you a penny in hard currency. It cost you your time and effort. Usually, in the beginning, it is what you have in plenty or at least in some amount.

As I heard on the podcast last week: There is no person who can not wake up a half an hour earlier?

If it isn’t clear so far, I will not start looking for a job or internship immediately (and for sure not for free), but I would work on my skills and credentials for a bit on my own.

With a bit of visibility and work, did I look on the market … or not (depends how you would work out the pieces so far when it comes to income and so on).

Here are FOUR things I put together when I thought about developing from scratch, with my current perspective and knowledge.

#1 - Work on your profiles

I don’t think about the party pictures on Instagram or movies on TikTok and pursuit an online media career (I think that long term it is one of the worst choices you can make).
Decide what your places will be and start to work on them as early as possible. Keep on working on them regularly and think about it as a long term investment.

Whatever you will choose as your place:

Put your name on it, full name not “XY A-11 CrYYpey Jar” acronym. You work on your name from the beginning
Good picture which doesn’t’ have to be formal help
It is essential - State where you are and what you work on clearly. You don’t have to pretend to be an expert if you are not one yet!
Let people know where you can help them, and what they can expect from you.

Do it consistently across all of your profiles. You don’t want to be one person on Twitter and others on LinkedIn.

Make sure you get back to those profiles once in a while, and you update them. You will change, and it has to reflect it.

#2 - Decide what you want to be known for. Be consistent.

It is OK to try different things, especially early in your career. Saying that - throwing yourself in a new framework every week will not necessarily help you over a long time.
Pick your topic and stick to it for some time.

What topic to pick? It is a separate discussion, and we will not have it here.
Whatever you will pick - document what you are doing across your profiles. And be frank about it that you are learning. It builds your portfolio and credibility.

Put out there summaries regularly:

What you have done
What you have learned and decided to pursue further or drop
What sources you have used

If you decide to pursue something else - put up a note why you did it and how this new thing connects (or not) to the old one.

Document it. People will follow, but also it will show your development path to others.

#3 - Reach out to people in and outside your field and ask questions

I think it is the most underrated option you have out there. There are plenty of people writing about your area and sharing it at the moment. They have other people who are discussing it with them. It is the best place to tap into their minds.

Look what are the active people with knowledge in your field, follow them. Participate in the threads and under the blogs/articles/videos.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions.

There are no stupid questions. You are learning. You might not get the response or not get it timely. Respect that.

No one must respond to you! Nor meet on your time or agenda

Possibility to ask questions directly to such people and get in touch with them is a gift you have. It is not something given to you for granted. Respect that, and you will see that people will give back their time and knowledge for you (as this post :)).

Don’t treat it as a replacement to Google Search. You can find answers to technical things and details in Google, blogs, and on StackOverflow. Ask them about their reasoning, experience, opinion, directions they are heading. Ask about things they say - why they have done it this way? Why do they learn this thing, not another? What have they done in the past?

I think that ability to ask people on an open internet and connect with them is one of the most underrated opportunities to develop at the moment.

Give back - share what you’ve learned, summarized, and distilled for others (do blog, note, your own post with question and answer).

#4 - Get some credits and experience on your own

It is hard at the beginning, but if you start early, you can do it even before your first job interview.

Build your profile with code or whatever you work on. Then build your profile on freelance sites - UpWork or similar places. Make sure to stand out there. How? It is the next profile to develop and leverage what you already have learned and built:

State clearly what you can do and how?
Pick the area where there might be less competition
Show of your portfolio

Do your pet project and build it. Connect with other people doing pet projects. Do not do a pet project to show off your technical skills. Try to build it around some business or people’s problems. Document it clearly - I do it because there is such and such problem I want to solve. There are plenty of people trying to learn, React, or other frameworks, but they are not that appealing. It is why we have online courses.

It doesn’t have to be a pet project. Some people are organizing challenges online (to build something or work in a collective way of solving problems), which spans over a longer time and is a great place to build your portfolio with others.

Those investments over time will give you a portfolio and will build credibility.

What is the goal in all of it?

Why is it not a list of solid steps to build a career of developer/engineer/put what you like here?
When I think about it from the perspective and look at how the world evolved, especially in recent months (I think a lot of it is going to stay with us), I would not pursue a specific career path from the beginning.

What I would do is to make sure I build for yourself OPTIONS!

And these steps are things you can do with no up-front financial investment, which contributes to this process and let you learn something. The options might play out differently, but you would not want to not have it.

On the solid skills side in IT, I think that what allows people to stand out is to be move versatile and have basics from different domains. Skills I would develop in some capacity from the beginning now would be:

Data analytics
Security
independently from the core of what would be my interest.

What I also recommend you to start to think early on, is softer side skills and working with people. You can start with my list of Books for younger “me”, but don’t limit yourself to it. Ask others what they would recommend to you!

As I wrote at the beginning - it is a first in a series of two posts. The other one will be focused on a more different angle. I can summarize it in the “What Now?” question.

Let me know what do you think about this list. Do you have your own thoughts from your career already? You see something working for you or others?

Comments and my e-mail are open :).

Photo by Gia Oris on Unsplash

My path to where I am now

Fri, 15 May 2020 07:55:07 GMT

Nader Dabit from AWS (currently) started a Twitter thread about career progress and what was his path to get where he is right now. It looks like it was an exciting topic for many as his original post got so far around 2.8k retweets and over 15k likes.

It is not about likes or retweets, but the measure of interest is how many people chimed in with their stories. It sparked a lot of interesting discussions about career choices, decisions, and motivation of individuals.

I prepared my own reply to Twitter. Then I started to think about it and turned it into this retrospective post. Why?

It is not about joining the crowd. I think it is cultural, but in my part of the world (Poland) we don’t talk much about it. About our experiences, how we got there, and what was the path.
I thought that it might be interesting for people to see the path to get me where I am now.

In general, I think that many people see only the end state. Where people are right now and are missing a point of what it takes to this point. That the person they compare themselves to or they observe, started somewhere. It wasn’t probably the most exciting job and place on Earth.

Another thing is that I want to put a bit of context from this part of the world (Poland). What is the difference? Reading people’s answer, I see a gap between my career and theirs in my age. What is the gap? Literally almost the first 20yrs I wasn’t doing anything professionally with computers.

Why? Simple - because there wasn’t anything to do in this area in Poland. Maybe not anything but very little.
It just makes me appreciate more what we have achieved both as a country and as an industry here.

Here is my path to where I am right now:

First computer @10
First paid computer job @20 ($100)
First FTE position @23 (~$5000)
Sysadmin @24 ( ~$10k)
Building dot-com portal @25 (If I remember my salary doubled to roughly $20k)
- Here is where the magic started
Consulting at different companies @27
Microsoft @30 (~$100k)
Independent @34 (~$250k)
Founder at Predica @35 … till now

It also got me thinking, and I distilled a few thoughts about the choices I’ve made and the decisions behind it. I put the summary at the end of this post.

Nice, but what are the conclusions.

First computer @10

Around 10. I actually started a bit earlier with access to one of the first PC XTs at my uncle’s office. My first computer was Atari 65XE, and it was a feat back then for those who are not familiar with Poland’s history.

We had to first get some USD (which wasn’t easy) and then
buy it in a unique store, where you could pay only with hard currency.

If you would ever have a chance to live in a socialist country - skip it. You would be better off. Believe me.
Then my parents invested in me and bought me a PC AT 12Mhz, so I was PC-boy from the beginning, learning simple coding in Basic and spreadsheets on my own. I also picked up some coding in DB called Paradox.

First paid computer job @20 ($100)

That might be odd if you are not from this part of the world.
Why at 20? What was I doing before? It is simple - before 10 and around my 20’s there wasn’t really a market for computer jobs in Poland. It started just a few years earlier, so I started my first job during my university time.
It makes a huge difference as we have developed all of it in the last 30 years, and now this industry is booming. Most of my generation and earlier are self-thought computer geeks.

BTW - it was a Microsoft Access database implementation. I was doing similar gigs later as a side job next to my study.

First FTE position @23 (~$5000)

I got a job as an HTML developer/designer - all in one. Fun fact - I hadn’t done any of HTML before I started. I did a little just for some text formatting. It also shows the state of the industry back then.
On my first day of work, our sales rep dropped me a few photoshoots and said: “Do a web site for them.” It was a hotel next to the highway close to the city I lived in.

It was closest to single page application that I have developed in my life :).

BTW - a few weeks ago, I was preparing for a podcast, and I found out that guys who hired me are still there and still have the same web page. Most likely, there is a code I put somewhere there :).

Sysadmin @24 ( ~$10k)

Shortly after, I switched to the position of sysadmin for Windows at the World Bank Office and a few months later to a similar position at ISP provider. Responsible for Windows and a bunch of Windows / FreeBSD servers. We provided something novel back then:

Automated, self-service web hosting
Free e-mail mailboxes.

Sounds like a cloud :)? Yes, it was very similar to what we call the cloud right now. Maybe not that well done (one day, one of our customers run Doom on our server from the image he uploaded - true story).

Building dot-com portal @25 (If I remember my salary doubled to roughly $20k)

ISP was sold and transformed into a dot com company in Poland. We build a portal. We created a web sited for companies to run their front-page and e-mail mailboxes. We got to the IPO on the Polish stock exchange (it is still there as a bank). And we flopped like all other dot-coms. It was too early, and there was no business in it. People didn’t have the Internet to use our pages and other services.

BTW - I found out that people still have sites we provisioned for them automatically up and running after 20 years (sic!). It means there was business in it as they most likely still pay for it to someone.

Here is where the magic started

Around this time, I started to write in public and doing my first speaking engagement. The first one was at a security conference in 2001, speaking about the Active Directory security model. It wasn’t planned, but in retrospect, it was one of a turning point in my professional career with a set stage for many other things.

Start to write. Start to show-off. Now it is easier than ever. It is also harder than ever :).

I did a lot of writing at this time. I wrote blog. I wrote book. I wrote tons of articles to magazines. Writing is important

Consulting at different companies @27

I moved to infrastructure/security consulting at various Polish companies. Moved to Warsaw. I spent few years in my first job here. I was laid off with all other networking/security folks. Had 3 months stunt at a local polish software house, then hired by HP to Managed Service.

HP was something new. Entered a corporate world and learned ropes how it works (freezes, cuts, travel and expenses, time reports). I learned a bit or two about corporate politics. At HP, it was still a Polish market.

Microsoft @30 (~$100k)

It was a big jump. I moved to Microsoft to Consulting Services. The most significant change was that the local MCS strategy was to work abroad in Europe. It is where I got the first time exposure to customers and projects outside of Poland.
It was also refreshing to work for a big brand in the IT world. People perceive you differently when you have big M on your chest under the suite (not really, we didn’t have them).

It is also a period where I started to speak outside of Poland and get some recognition in the international community. It was a really interesting experience, as I could match my experience and what we do with people from outside of Poland.

I learned about the gap we have: most of the people I got to know had a long career in IT starting somewhere in teen days. There was an entire generation gap on our side.

Independent @34 (~$250k)

I decided to quit and become independent in my area. There wasn’t a better moment for it:

I got a good career at Microsoft
My firstborn just arrived, and we were fresh parents

My first gigs were coming from … Microsoft, but not solely. I was more lucky than skilled to land a few training engagements since day ONE of being solo.
Actually, my solo work in the first month paid me a few monthly salaries at Microsoft (which wasn’t bad). Then I had a couple of projects in a niche, Microsoft IAM, and it became an overnight success for my scale.

There are no overnight successes!

I knew little about building and running a company. I remember that one thing I knew was to keep profit and positive cash flow. I got a bit overwhelmed by my success. It turned out there was a demand for what I did.
Hired some people, started to work with some friends who also started a company.

I started to work 16hrs a day, and my life started to look not precisely how I wanted it to look. Finally, become a founder at Predica

Founder at Predica @35 … till now

I joined three other guys at Predica (we knew each other from Microsoft briefly), and the rest is history. At the moment I entered, we were 20 people. Quickly scaled down to approx. 10 because some business didn’t work as we planned, and we had to lay off some people. Just to track the salary/income progress - my salary was roughly $35k (yearly) as a founder. No bonuses or dividends promised and actually none paid.

Quite a cut from a year of solo work.

Few years forward - we are 250+ people with offices across several countries. The last revenue we have publicly reported at the end of 2017 was around $7M. Pay attention; it is revenue, not my income, and as we invest in the company, the salary varies.

It is where I am at the moment and plan to stay for a while.

Nice, but what are the conclusions.

Writing it down and thinking about it gave me some conclusions that might be applicable for others as well:

Having a late start is not a problem. It is always a good time to start something new.

Compare do many people at the market right now, I had a late start. I wasn’t doing anything professionally with IT until 24. I don’t think it is a problem even now. It is only an image that IT is for young people and startups. It isn’t. There is always an excellent way to start.

Appreciate the opportunities you have right now

It was also a different situation back then. Right now, with all the opportunities around, ways to build your profile and technology at hand, really, the sky is the limit.
Remember. Back then, if I wanted to try something new or have two computers talking to each other, I literally had to have two computers. And network. No virtualization attached.

I’m against hustle. I don’t think it is a viable approach and a good one. I did my part. You don’t need to hustle to get things done. But if you are not taking this opportunity, if you are already healthy, in the IT industry, educated and well - it is your choice.

Not taking the opportunity or doing it small is also good. As long as you feel right with it.

The only wrong choice is to not be happy about the place you are right now and not doing anything about it.

Stand out! Show off! Most likely, in one area or another, your skills are something unique.

The way you are doing it is unique. It is not showing off for the sake of fame. It creates your options, which might come handy later down the road. It calls for a separate post. I think that when I decided to take some action and engage in speaking, doing something extra work, stepping in where others didn’t were a critical point in my development.

Long term - all of them paid off. Even if I have not thought about it in a currency at the moment, it happened.

Do not let money to make your decissions

My career choices were never money-driven. Easy to say now, but I think that money is the wrong approach to making decisions. At least when you reach a certain security level for your basic needs, family, and financial safety (always save for rain day, it will come).

There was an element of money in the deal (it is a mutual deal at the end), but decision alone was never driven by money. Initially, it was about changing a place to the one I can learn more and do something new. Best if with smart people around. Then when I switched to Microsoft, it was about … yeah, Microsoft. I have to admit it. There also was a part of skills - I know that at that time, I would not be able to do such things in other companies in Poland. But at least in the first year, it was refreshing to work for Microsoft ;).

Being on the hiring side now, I see people who are unable to make a decision because they can’t afford to leave the current status or position from a financial perspective. Short terms - it provides a good outcome. Long term, I don’t think it will pay off.

I did a jump twice.

First, when I changed from Microsoft to solo - I had literally ZERO customers and deals. I went from a good salary to NO INCOME secured. It played out well but also could play out differently.
The second time it was when I changed from solo to company. I could stay solo and most likely doing brilliantly for next year. Maybe I would even establish a small consulting shop, which was my goal at the beginning (I pivoted early :)).

But I did, and I do not regret it.

If you want to try something, do it!

It was a thing with my change to independent consulting. I always wanted to try it. I was tinkering with this thought for more than a year. It was never the right time. Right now - I would do it earlier. Why? Because in most cases, there is nothing (or at least not a lot) to lose and what can go really wrong. I mean - REAAALYYY WRONG.

It doesn’t mean you can jump the cliff unprepared. Think about what you need to survive and be secure for SIX months. Better for TWELVE months. Prepared. Execute.

Build a long-lasting trust with people.

When you meet people you can trust along your way, stick to them. Trust is everything in the long term. It takes time to build. It takes time to establish a relationship based on trust. But once you have it, it will be your best leverage. It goes in two ways. You have to put your work into building trust as well.

Working solo is nice. Working in a group is better.

Being independent is nice. It gives freedom. It provides income (mostly).

Working with trusted people and building something more significant is better (at least in my current opinion). Why? It gives you the leverage you can’t build on your own. Advantage of people having your back, the organization to support you, other skilled people doing a heavy lifting where you can’t or don’t have time to learn.

It doesn’t come without work from your side. You still have to put your work in there. Why? If you will not do it, why should others do it for you?

I would not trade building a company with all 250 people at the moment for being independent, even if paid bigger bucks (probably it would).

Last, having a plan and a goal is helpful. Not having one is not bad.

To be completely frank, a lot of what happened at the beginning of my career was “DYNAMIC”. I haven’t had a plan, and a goal, like I, will do this at my 30’s and I will be in this place at my 40’s. It wasn’t a conscious decision. It was my way of doing it at this stage of my life.

Now I do it a bit differently. I have a goal set - I will write about it as well. Right now, I appreciate having a goal, a direction, and a plan. However, if you don’t have one, and you don’t have an idea for one at the moment, don’t feel bad about it. I know the entire world says you should have one. You should set your goals and achieve those.

The entire world is doing it to get your attention. Maybe you haven’t figured out what you really want to be doing.

Not having a goal is OK. Experiment. You don’t know where it will take you in the long run. Make sure to do some checkpoints along the way are you still happy with where it is going.

There is no overnight success.

If something looks like it, it is one of two things:

A LOOOT of LUCK
Or it is fake

That’s all, folks. I turned a short tweet into a lengthy post. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any questions about my career path, choices, thoughts - comments are open.

Photo by Michel Porro on Unsplash.

Events and conferences goes VR!

Sun, 03 May 2020 13:39:44 GMT

Events and conferences will never be the same. They will go VR.

People are joking that COVID19 did a work of digital transformation instead of CEOs or CDOs. Don’t know about digital transformation, but pandemic did put in motion a lot of wheels. Results will be visible in the coming years. Some start to be evident right now.

For the record; I wrote this post on Sunday, May 5’th, 2020 - still during the partial lock-down caused by COVID19 pandemic.

There are many areas of our lives touched by the pandemic and changes inducted by it. Some are visible. Some will become visible in the months or years to come.
The moment it started to be a global outbreak, I started to think about things that will change.

Cinemas, that was the easy one. The shift towards streaming was already happening. Will we get back to the cinema? How many will survive, and will people go there? Why? So far, it was about movies played in the cinema first. Now? It goes streaming right away.

Others emerged during the pandemic as a response. Think 3D printing. People used it to produce medical parts and PPE. Much cheaper in some cases. It turned out to be useful. And cheaper.

It will speed up the trend which was already happening. It isn’t only in 3D printing as technology. People start to produce designs of easy to made replacement for the equipment. People will use it to avoid disruption of the supply chain.

Vendors will use patents to stop it. Laws and regulations will prevent it. The previous status quo will not go away without a fight. For sure, some discussions around the ricing of equipment will happen.

A few weeks ago, I started to think about another one.

Meetings and conferences.

What do you like about conferences? People? Travel? The actual content of the sessions? Why are you traveling to conferences?

Not for content, that is for sure. The typical conference spans several tracks. Sessions are shorter and shorter, as a response to a shorter attention span. Remember - not that long ago session time was 75 minutes as a standard. Most of the content is available later as a record (not a lot of people watch it anyway). Chat in person with the speaker after the talk has excellent value, at least for me. Yet, it is easy to reach out to them over the Internet as well. Most of them are open to talk.

In my case, conferences are about people and conversations. I bet it is for most of us. Yet, the cost of time and travel is high. Cost in many dimensions: personal, environment, financial (put it in your order of things). It makes attending conferences less and less appealing. Regardless if it is speaking or visiting it.

At the moment, all such events are stopped. It is a good and needed reboot to re-think how we do it. There were a lot of events organized for the sake of gathering money from sponsors. There was a lot of redundant events. We’ve created a whole industry of conferences. Did we get a similar size of the value in return from it?

Do we need it? Do we have to travel and burn fuel to spend a day on fast forward, speaking with strangers and listening to talks, which are available later on-line?

Do we need a venue for it? Does it have to be physical? A lot of events are already happening on-line.

Vendors already took a safe side and moved large conferences on-line. Microsoft does a Build 2020 on-line, in two days and for free.

No travel.
No fuel burnt.
No jet lag.
Companies save money on expenses and tickets.

At the same time, it means no money in the local economy where it was about to happen. Lots of places will have to re-think its accommodation and hotel industry future.

One thing is sure - we will not get back to where it used to be. For sure, there will be a lot of effort to return to “normal.” It might be too late; the shift has started.

Conference meets VR

If not physical, where will we go? It is what started my thinking around it. I saw people posting screenshots from the virtual event.

It looked nice. One guy even posted a selfie of his avatar with a speaker.

So far, I was ignoring a VR almost completely. Few checks on possibilities and toying with it. During the pandemic, I started to explore it. Is it a viable option to replace conferences? Is it an option to take part in the meetups or to meet with people in VR other than Teams/Zoom/Whatever calls? Will it make a difference?

In did little research. I’ve found several services that provide viable solutions at the moment. I’ve never heard about AlspaceVR before. It already provides a way to conduct events on-line in VR.

I read about Second Life a long time ago. I almost forgot it exists. I saw talks and even bookclub meetings happening there.
Fortnite launched party mode and is hosting concerts there.

People are going to VR. Try to buy Oculus set - you will see it is hard to get. I started to look to get my own. For the first time in years, I’m considering getting a stationary PC for it.

Events and meetings will follow. Of course, there will be plenty of conferences happening in “real life” still. The old industry will try to restart itself.

On-line first and VR will follow. More as reboot than restart.

If I were in creative space, I would start to set up a business around VR avatars. People are people. They will want to look good in VR.

Evolution of events

I did an early draft of this post and then saw Simon’s Wardle thread on changes in the value chain, using events as an example (read in full).

Bottom line from it. We will see a restart of the old event industry. The industry restart is driven by investment in venues and building event companies. Smart people (and money) already work on the new state of the world and practices around events. They are after reboot, not restart.

I will use VR in meetings and events this year for sure. I will see how it goes and how it works. It might be too early for the mainstream, but the shift has already started.

The same changes are being triggered at the moment in many other places and industries. It will be interesting to observe the dynamics of changes. For sure, businesses and money will work to undo changes in thinking from the last two months. It will be harder, as adjustments will also happen in months to come.

New companies and practices are emerging to address post-COVID reality and requirements. Those will be

For now, I’m going to shop for some VR gear.

What are your bets or thoughts on technology, industries, and practices?
Where do we see significant change as a result of the COVID19 pandemic this year?

(I put on my TODO list a follow-up to this entry a year from now. )

The most important skill you can learn with no cost?

Sun, 26 Apr 2020 11:52:19 GMT

What is one of the most important skills you can learn on your own, within your time and at no cost?

The answer is simple.

It is writing.

I write blogs for nineteen years now. It was never close to being popular, yet I reckon it as one of the most essential factors in my career.
If you look at the current world, it seems that video is eating everything.

People consume in visual form. The attention timespan is shorter. Yet, the most essential thoughts and discussions still take place in writing. Blogs, articles, books - we produce them and read them.

Writing is a process of putting thoughts together to communicate. It removes the immediate emotions (the way you express it when you speak). At the same time, it lets us deliver and generate feelings in the reader.

Writing requires from your thinking about the recipient. What you want to communicate, what you want to achieve with it. It needs to be precise, to think about the subject you write on, and express your thoughts on your own pace. It gives time to research the topic and organize your thoughts.

I read it on Twitter, and I can’t attribute it to anyone. I agree with this statement.

At some point in your career there are three, most essential skills:

Listening

Writing

Speaking
It is better to learn them early.

I couldn’t agree more. If there is time to start something new, start to write!

Clear and precise writing will make you stand out from others. It is a way to make an impression on someone you are communicating with.
Same as there is a pleasure in writing well, there is a pleasure in reading well written and clear text.

Will technology make writing to go away?

Will video make writing go away? Will we stop to do it as it takes too much time compared to calling someone?

My view here is like the one on translation technology. It is one of the best use of technology we can have. To translate between languages and let people communicate.
Having tools does not remove the advantage for people knowing languages. They will be able to communicate without a tool. They will be able to control and express thoughts and in the recipient language. There will be no intermediate tool for them.
It will give them an advantage in crucial conversations and moments. It is not required when doing grocery shopping, but even then, having a friendly chat in local language help.

Same with writing. People who will be able to write will have it work for their advantage. Technology will be there to support us. It will not replace the process of writing going in our head.

How to write?

There is a simple way to learn how to write and get better at it.

Write.

Even if you will not publish it.

Write.

Write, then read what you wrote, and re-write it. Think about your intent. The reader. The goal of your writing and re-write what you wrote to match it.
It is pure joy to make your text 1/3 shorter and deliver the message in a more transparent and precise way.

Here are my current writing process and workshop for writing.

I write in the simplest possible way. Using markdown or simple text and distraction-free editor. I’ve found that writing on an iPad with AI Writer works best. You don’t need a fancy editor to write text. It is you, paper or screen, and words you type. That’s it.

I leave the text for at least a day. Then I get back to it and I re-write it. I read it, cut, change, throw away the pieces of text, or add them.

When I’m done with editing on my own, I go for tools. I use a few tools to make my text better:

Grammarly; here is where I do my extra grammar and spell-check.
Once I’m done with Grammarly, I paste the text into Hemingway app. I remove, re-write, and change sentences based on its suggestion.
After Hemingway, I paste it into Rewordify to see if there are some suggestions for wording.
After all this, I reread the text and do my own re-writing.
In the end, you get blog entry as this one, document, or e-mail from me.

I use a similar process when writing e-mail or documents at work. The process is different depending on the medium (paper or e-mail).

Where to start

If you want to start writing, I recommend this book - On writing well.

Besides the book, start writing.
Write dirty.
Write for yourself.
Write every day.

Important!
Do not try to be someone else. Write as you speak. It will be much easier. Read what you wrote aloud. Listen, if it sounds like you. Paul Graham has a great essay about it Write like you talk.

Happy writing.

Photo on VisualHunt.com

You should not work for free!

Sun, 19 Apr 2020 12:56:46 GMT

I haven’t worked for free for my entire career. Not a single day!

I would never ask a person to work for my company for free. It didn’t happen during 10+ years we run a business with my partners. It won’t happen in the next 10 years.

It doesn’t mean I haven’t done anything for free for anyone. In opposite. I did many things for free. I contributed to the community, I helped individual people, and I did work for NGOs (or similar entities).
During the current lock-down (COVID19, for the record of readers who will read it in years to come). I helped a couple of schools to get in a remote learning environment. I didn’t charge them. There is no hidden business agenda. I don’t expect them to get back to us later to work with us on business terms.

It was helping someone with my skills and time. It was my decision to contribute both to help some people. I do not consider it work. It was a contribution.
Work is something you are being paid for. By definition, you trade your time and/or skills for a value expressed in currency or other goods.
And no. “You will learn so much” isn’t a currency. Have you ever bought your coffee for telling a barista: “Look. I have exceptional needs for my coffee, and you will learn so much doing it”.

Have you? If the answer is yes, I want to learn from you about your negotiation skills.
And I will pay for it.

Why bother with people willing to work for free?

People who are willing to work for free for commercial entities and projects do it on a false assumption. They assume that their work is less valuable, but the skills and experience they will gain will make it more valuable next time. It is wrong. It is an assumption created by some businesses that want to get people to work for them for free.

What is next time, they will also ask you to do it for free? It might never end.

If your skills are not yet at the level, you can charge a premium for them; you can be paid less, but still, you should get paid. It is your time and skills what is in the equation. If your skills are on a lower part of the scale, your time still is valuable. You should not trade it for nothing. And again - the promise of magical learning and experience from watching great people do the work is not a value you should trade it for.

Why write about it now?

I saw some posts last week where people encouraged others to work for them for free. On commercial projects, promising that it will give them years of experience, which can’t be gained otherwise. And I saw people cheering up this idea and jumping on board.

It is a result of years of work of companies and individuals, who are subsidizing their business model with free labor. There is always the next wave of interns and juniors to tap into. There are still graduates who want to gain some points on a resume. There are always people who want to re-skill (it will be an essential factor in years to come! ).

People who will take a bite of e promise of great skills and expirience to boost their careers.
I bet you can build a model where you have a stream of people pouring in, to help you do your commercial projects for free exploiting those people.
It is wrong.

Every work delivered on commercial project or engagement should be paid! Period!

If you think people should work for you for free, to gain knowledge or experience, you should offer the same to your customers. That you will do projects for free for them. Would you?

In business,there is nofree projects

In business, there is no free projects. Free proof-of-concepts and trial engagements does not work.

Why? Such a situation lacks one crucial element - engagement.
If someone is getting something for free and does not take part in it with financial stakes, there is no engagement and commitment.

It doesn’t have to be paid in full by customer. It might be even that someone else (vendors of solution) will want to pay for it. Even then, the value of a project has to be on the table. It has to be explicit states that there is value X attached to it. And there has to be a discussion about participation in this value.

What has to be there is that all parties have skin in the game. If not, the outcome will always be mediocre.

Again, why?
Because if there is no stake in the project, there is no perceived value in it.

If you are learning - work on your own project instead of doing FREE work

As a person, you might be at the beginning of the road - you want to learn new skills, upskill, or re-skill yourself. Doing some free work for a commercial entity might sound like a good idea. It is not.

When you discuss that kind of work - have a discussion about the payment/salary. Be prepared for it with your requirements what it should be. Do the homework. Have options prepared. If they will want to lower your pay, trade it for something:

official recognition in the project,
letter of reference from CEO,
your name in the contributors list,
referral to next opportunity.

Do not accept work for free.

There is a better alternative to such free engagement. Start your own project in the same area? What kind of project? Few ideas:

Research people in this area and write a summary of their work. Create a curated list of their content and publish it.
Research this business area and write a report on it
Start a development project and post it on GitHub, spread a word and ask people to tell you what they think about it
Start a blog or channel on YT. Document your learning in this area. There are people already behind you on this track who will enjoy it.

Why is it a better idea than doing some project work for free?

You gain knowledge by learning and researching the topic or area of expertise?
You build network and recognition in this area. Asking questions, participating in discussions sharing outcomes. All those activities contribute to your brand.
You may actually get paid in different models for work you have done.
Most important: you build your own brand and person. Not other people - YOUR! OWN! BRAND and PERSON!

Why is the last piece essential? Having a brand as a person build options for you. Choices that will pay off later down the road with new opportunities.

You don’t know who will read what you will write on the topic. You don’t know who you will reach with your questions and activities. One of those persons might later get back to you or through the network. And it will result in some next opportunity.

Working for someone for free at the same time builds options for other persons. Not you.

Between:

#1:work for free and build other person brand and options and,
#2 Do something for yourself without being paid and create your own brand and options,
my choice is simple. I go for #2. It is better for you in the long term.

If you don’t know where to start, ask people in a field to give you advice. There are plenty of people who will help you with some mentoring advice.

Businesses - pay your people! Always!

For my fellow entrepreneurs, business owners, and managers. I have one ask.

Always pay people you ask to do work for you.

If your customers asked you to work for free, you would not do it. If people asked you to give away your goods for free, you would not do it.
Why?
Because it is not a viable business model. There is one thing between business, product or service, and profit. It is called PRICE! (credits goes for @DHH for reminding this ancient true forgotten by many).
If someone contributes to your business, they deserve to get paid. If they are not contributing to your business, why you hire them in the first place.

Pay for the work people do for you! They deserve it!

If you think otherwise as a person who works or as a business owner, I would hear your point of view. But I don’t promise to change mine!

Photo credit: ishane VisualHunt.com / CC BY

Mapping the blog

Sun, 12 Apr 2020 20:29:58 GMT

What selecting a blog platform might have in common with business strategy? A lot. In this post, I will introduce you to the world of mapping, and how it can guide you through decisions, where to focus on business or career.

Here is why I decide to pay for blog platform instead to run it on my own!

When I decide to switch my blog to English (again), I also wanted to get rid of Wordpress as a blogging engine.

Why?

Several reasons but those what really were behind this decision:

Wordpress become bloated, and it requires too much maintenance
Simple things like plugin updates often ended up in solving plugin compatibility issues
Writing experience is not that nice. I don’t want to build a commercial site, I just wish to blog with simple communication features.

For all those most annoying was dealing with upgrades and plugin updates. I understand Wordpress is powerful, but it is too powerful for me.

If not Wordpress, then what? It is a question. I looked at several options. This post is a summary of it, but next “what blogging engine to use” writeup would be boring. I wouldn’t bother writing it. Instead of it, I thought I will take use it as an opportunity to introduce some mapping I do as a hobby in my life.

What is this mapping thing?

Several years ago, I stumbled upon this thing called Wardley Mapping. To be completely honest, it is one of the most useful and powerful tools I’ve learned in recent years. In simple words, mapping is a process of decomposing the system and environment starting from user needs and based on it, building awareness of the situation you are in.

The powerful but straightforward concept in it is an evolution and assumption that everything evolves. What you are doing right now, tools you are working on - it all evolves. You may see them as complex and unique right now. Over time, it will all evolve:

From the early concept (maybe such thing exists or can be done),
Through custom-built ( let’s build something working and do it again from scratch every time )
to product ( just go and buy it ),
and finally to commodity ( wow, it comes from somewhere, but I even don’t know how it got here ).

When you start to think in this way and observe people and businesses around, you would be surprised how many of them are investing time and effort in things they should not. Mostly because they don’t think who is the user is and what the user needs. Because of that, they fail to spot what addresses this need and how the given element contributes to it.

As abstract as it sounds, it is efficient. Once you start to practice it, you may do powerful things with mapping:

See where you invest your time in areas, which you should buy or rent instead of building it
See what skills might be required for your career in the future
Build a model of your value chain and where the actual value of your business is
See where new needs emerge and how you can address it.

I think that skills like this will be more in demand in new AC ( After COVID ) reality as many businesses will have to change the way they do business. Most of them will do it blindly, not knowing what the environment they operate in is. The map would help, but … you need to start mapping.

If you want to learn more about it,

Check Ben’s Mosior website Learn Wardley Mapping,
Watch Ben’s summary of Simon’s Wardley book
Read the book itself at the end.

You will find some additional resources at the end.

Let’ map the blogging

It sounds nice, but how exactly mapping helps in practical terms? I use this blog change as an opportunity to show how I use it to support my decision making.

I knew I don’t want to use WordPress. I also knew I want to use a ready theme for a blog and be able to do things like comments and newsletters for communication with the reader.

I considered several options, and I narrowed it down to:

Use one of the engines to generate static pages and host it somewhere (for example on Azure where I have free resources)
Host it on existing engines like GitHub and GitHub pages
Use one of Wordpress alternatives, like Ghost as a self-hosted or hosted option

There are plenty of other approaches, but those were the ones I pre-selected.

Start with use need

Before I start to map my choices, let’s begin with a user’s needs. I have two users for my blog:

An Author (yours truly)
A Reader (thank you!)

As An Author I want to communicate with my audience. To do it, I need to:

Write new blog posts
Distribute it to my readers

I want to communicate with my readers

Using comments under the blog posts
With newsletter reaching inboxes of those, who are willing to share the e-mail with me

My dear readers look for new content to satisfy their intellectual needs and educate themselves or to get to know the latest on my person. Simply:

Read blog entries on whatever device then use
Get an e-mail with updates if they wish

Let’s start our map

As an author, I create blog posts. It is my creation based on my thoughts, experience, and research.
To deliver it to my audience and to let them read it, I need blog site where they can reach my content.

To run a site, I need a blogging engine and platform to host it. Both elements are available in plenty and can be hosted (commodity), self-hosted (product). Still, you can also build it and operate yourself (custom). An essential element is that all of it needs to be managed and maintained, which was my main pain-point with Wordpress as it takes my time.

Before, I self-hosted my Wordpress (product) on a ready platform. I still had to operate on my own (updates, configurations).

To run a blog and reach my audience, I also need some way to:

Have comments on my site
Send out e-mails to newsletter subscribers
Reach out to people on Social Media

I assume those elements are part of my blog engine and platform and also can be hosted, self-hosted, or custom-built.

Now we are ready to map some options I choose for my blog.

Mapping the blog: Part 1 - Static web page generators

I saw this being used by many friends to run their blogs. It is fast and friendly. You can get cute themes for it. It also speaks to my geek part.

To use it for my blog, I need:

An engine (ready and available as a product)
A platform to host the files (Azure Storage + Azure CDN looks like an easy option)
A theme which is also available in plenty

Besides, I would have to:

Build some comment system for the blog
Handle e-mail subscriptions and newsletter (this comes ready with products like MailChimp)

Where it falls short for me is that it all requires some too heavy operations from my side:

Some coding skills
Run and operate build and pipeline to deliver it
Do customizations in the theme and engine

In effect, there is a lot of activities to deliver the result - working blog site. Those custom activities do not provide a lot of value, which Readers will appreciate as for them, the outcome is the same - blog post published on the web site.
It might load fast and be light on the network, but most of them would not notice it.

Mapping the blog: Part 2 - Ready engine, GitHub pages

Ready engines to work with static content like GitHub pages looks much more user friendly in this case.
I can create content from my editor in Markdown and store it in the GitHub repository. I can get some themes to make it look nice and publish it using GitHub Pages.

It takes parts of operations away as the platform is delivered in its entirety as a product. I still need some coding skills to be able to build a site content and adjust a theme and to integrate external components like E-mail platform.

Not perfect, but much better than static web generators from my personal workload point of view. It still delivers the result for readers - a working blog site. It gives somehow limited functionality unless I put in use my rusty coding skills to make it better.

Mapping the blog: Part 3 - Let’s look at Wordpress alternative

As the third option, I looked at Wordpress alternative - Ghost. I looked at it in the past but not very thorough. I saw years ago Troy’s Hunt article on using it as a platform for his blog.
I’ve decided to take a look at it.

The Ghost delivers a ready engine for the blog as an Open Source project. You can grab some free or paid themes, install it, and you are prepared to go. It also has good SEO options, prepared e-mail, and other systems integrations without plugin systems as in Wordpress (which at the same time might be a limitation).

You have two options to host it:

Self-hosted on the platform of choice (free when it comes to Ghost itself)
Ghost Pro site where Ghost hosts it for you (paid hosting option)

What does it take to self-host Ghost? I’ve decided to try it with my Azure account. It is actually quite easy to set up if you know some basics of Azure and to work with it.
What it takes is:

Cloned repo of Ghost on Azure (I used GitHub for it)
Azure App Service to host it
Azure Storage and CDN service to store blog content like images

You still need to use external services like MailChimp to send out newsletters. Still, Ghost provides ready integration options for it.
I managed to set it up in one afternoon; however, it took me a couple of hours to polish it, and it requires a bit of coding in the themes to make it work smoothly.

Look that I had what I needed, but it still requires my operations to run it and keep it up-to-date (however, this piece can be handled automatically with AzureDevOps or GitHub Actions).
I have some credits on my Azure account provided by Microsoft so I could run it for free. For real setup, it might cost you a few bucks (mostly App Service cost).

Mapping the blog: Part 3.1 - Where platform becomes commodity

I wrote at the beginning that everything evolves towards commodity. Running a platform for a blog is a commodity. You don’t need to think about how to do it.
Platform and operations around it evolve towards commodity and become a service.

I liked Ghost as a platform and decided to give a try for the Ghost hosting option - Ghost Pro.

With the hosted version of Ghost, I don’t need to maintain my own platform and operations around it. It all evolves into a single service provided for me by the Ghost. Integrations with standard services like e-mail providers are given or simple with no coding (configuration of template or option in the engine).

It simplifies what I need to maintain to provide the reader with his need through my content. I can focus on what contributes the most to this need in my activities, which is writing blog posts.

I’ve decided for my own setup to still keep a few simple elements on my side:

GitHub where I store the content of my blog (posts, images, files) in a repository in case I need to restore it
Azure Storage and CDN for my own content to keep link independent from the platform or blog URL

Those are services with little or no maintenance and cost in my case.

What this story should tell you?

You may ask, what was the point of explaining in a complicated way that I’ve chosen a hosting platform to run this blog? Good question?

This post had two objectives from my end:

Make you interested in Wardley Mapping as a tool to look at the world around you
Make a point, that even if you can do something, and it seems like no big deal, maybe it is not worth to do it on your own, as it does not contribute a lot to the user need you are trying to address.

Key to addressing a later from those two points is to get to know:

Who is your user?
What need are you trying to fill?

You would be surprised how many businesses can’t answer those two questions.

You don’t think so? Ask around.

Happy mapping!

If you want to learn more about Wardley Mapping, there is an excellent repository on GitHub with Wardley mapping resources.

Books for younger "me"

Mon, 06 Apr 2020 20:28:24 GMT

Everything changes. The universe is not the same as what it was when I was born.
My country and world were not the same when I was young (thank’s whatever might power did it).

I changed.

I had a reflection on it, and a lot of things and behaviors I use right now would make my life easier looking back.

There is an eternal question - if I would do things differently back then, would I be me. Or my current version of me (I’m pretty happy with my current version of me).

Don’t know.

What I do know that there are simple things each of us can do to make life easier and more … I looked a word here for a few minutes … effective.

I’ve gathered a few books I would like to read 20-25 years ago. They would make a difference.

This is mostly “how” edition. Not on the “why” or “think” level. Most of it is recommended in many places, but I decided to put it here anyway.

Let’s do it:

That’s it. If you haven’t read those books, you can add it to your list and read somewhere along the way.

I’m not a zealot of these books. I don’t treat them as a bible and align each of my actions with it.

I use it.

I know that using what I learned from them lets me be less stressed, more productive, work better with people.

I haven’t put the number in the title (yeah - for SEO, it should be “10 books which changed my life and universe forever!”).

Why?
The list might change.
It will.
Everything changes.
Evolves.

Photo on VisualHunt.com

Design for a trust

Mon, 06 Apr 2020 20:20:25 GMT

I see plenty of cases where the company is losing customers. Every single day. They drop them when they don’t have to.

Lot’s of it is because of bad customer experience. I’m not speaking about UX. I’m talking mostly about processes and little things that are designed for the wrong purpose.

Oh, I’m sure those are designed for the purpose. On second thoughts, probably some of them are not. They are just created.

There is one group that caught my eye recently. Processes designed with a lack of trust in mind (or just squeezing a lemon a bit more now).

Example. I have a lease on my car. Every month there is a payment.

My choice. I don’t use automated payments. Various reasons.

Every month I get an invoice, and I cover it. Last month I was skiing (a great trip). The invoice came into my inbox. I saw it, but I missed it on payments.

Happens. That’s on me.

A week later, I got an e-mail. It said: we’ve sent you a mail (yeah, this paper thing coming to your mailbox) with a request for payment. Request for payment in PDF was attached to the e-mail.

I made a payment right away. It was 1 or 2 days after the payment was due.

They got my e-mail. The company knew I got an invoice. The company knew I’m late on the day the payment was due. They could send a reminder:

“Hey, dude. Remember about this car. We care about it too. Check if you have not missed the payment. Have a nice day (yeah, we know you are skiing probably)”.

That would be it.

I know why they have not done it. Later I got another invoice. The company charged me 20$ for this mail they sent me. All according to T&C of the lease.

Am I angry about those 20$? Nope.

What I see is a poorly designed process, NOT DESIGNED FOR TRUST. It is designed to squeeze a bit more on the population of customers.

Will I finish my lease with them. Yes.
Will I be their customer again. No.

Of course, if they will beat others on the market with their offer, I will consider them but not as a first option.

I see it in many places. Things designed with “we don’t trust you” or “we assume you are cheating” assumption. Chance is designed with no assumption at all. Or not designed. Put in place to maximize the current $ churn and not for the long run.

It is easy to lose the customer. Don’t lose them over stupid things.

Remember. On the market, you lose customers only once!

(yeah, I look at you Apple and your keyboard :) ).

Photo credit: vagawi  on Visualhunt.com CC BY

Creators vs consumers

Sun, 05 Apr 2020 20:43:41 GMT

During one of the meetings at the company, I had a conversation about creators vs. consumers. It is an exciting topic. Simple, but requires a little realization
.
It is not about everyone who becomes next Ridley Scott or Stephen King. It is about small choices and approaches in daily life. Over time those choices, have a more significant impact on our experience and career.
What is it about then?

What is your choice in life: the creator or consumer approach.

The creator is about the active approach.
The creator is not about becoming the next Gary Vaynerchuk. (I recognize the guy’s work and effort. Still, this model has an enormous toll on a person, and it is more about survivorship bias than a method). It is a choice of getting to know and share about it.
You solve some puzzles in your daily work. Tell others about it. There is a problem at hand to solve, don’t wait for other people to do it, try to do research on your own and send it out to the team.

It is a choice of taking ownership. If you feel something is wrong or you need a change. Change it. If you decide not to, do not complain. It is nobody’s fault. It is not a world fighting against you.

It is you making choices every day. Like with this blog post. I decided to write it. Why? It is not because I have some goals related to it, but I want to write and share. So I wrote it.

I could decide to spend this time sitting on the couch. It is a choice. In this choice, I chose to be the creator. Creating my own environment and life.

A consumer is a passive approach.
You need something - you ask around if there is no return you leave it. You know something, but you decide not to share it with others. Not that you want to withhold it for your own, but you don’t - no energy spent, no value seen in it. The reasons are plenty.
It doesn’t have to be what people recognize as “creation.” It doesn’t have to be the art, blog, video, or picture. It might be your choice to be a person to produce something extra at work. Share it with others. Be its document template, piece of code, daily routine experience, a book recommendation.
It might be a choice of helping out a junior person joining a company. It might be starting a self-study group for those who want to join.

It is a choice of contributing vs. waiting for someone to add to your work.

It is the same in life. You can decide to act and create your own little environment. Choose how it looks like. Or you can consume it. Take what is given without influencing it.

It is not wrong. It is a choice. And it is OK, it is not a negative choice. Just remember - If you don’t want to create it, there is nobody’s fault in it.

With both sides of your decision, it is like compound interest - small outcomes accumulates over time. If you are acting with the creator’s mindset over time, people will start to recognize you as such. You will be an expert, SME, person to go to - you name it. Your life will have a direction. Often, it is not pure knowledge or expertise, which makes a difference and makes people stand out. It is choosing to be a creator vs. consumer.

My favorite example is speakers at the conferences. Ask yourself a question - “what is the difference between speaker and audience in the session?”

I bet that after some sessions you attended or watched online, you had this thought: “oh, that was simple.”
The difference is simple: they choose to be on stage. That’s it. Because of this choice, speakers have the benefit of the trust and recognition. Of course, the speaker can ruin it in the first five minutes of the talk. But at the moment they do it - that is
The difference, their choice to act. The rest is a workshop - how to speak, prepare, old jokes at hand.

It is effortless to slip into being a consumer. It is even OK for some time - everyone needs downtime.
If you want to achieve something, you need to take a creator’s attitude. Start small, make it a habit. It will pay off over time.

Photo credit: Ragesh Vasudevan on Visualhunt CC BY-NC-SA

Tomek Onyszko

Social networks and information delta

I was always a social media person… even before social media.

There’s no reason to be on majority of social media sites, unless…

Information delta

What I’m not looking for from social networks

X/Twitter… (un)likely winner

Bubbles

Pick your interest, block and mute at will… and then block and mute even more

It is a tool, not a life

There always was NO FUTURE

It was easier “back then”

My version of “NO FUTURE”

But it was easier, now it is so fast.. so much things to learn

The Choice

Ignore the noise and people out there

Habits

Status game: quit it!

Status Game!

Is status a bad thing?

Guilty as charged

Status game drains you, your resources, and attention - it is a distraction

Be a pro! Status and happiness will follow

How to recognize you are playing this game?

Are you saying we all should wear the same clothes to hide our status?

Your keys are not your SSO

Meet the wallet

The keys and “identity.”

Common language, aka protocol

web 3.0 goes OAuth way

Authentication is hard; authorization is even harder

Privacy and common sense

OK, so what’s the point of all of it

Leverage existing tech and build on it

Focus on user experience and UX

Design for interop and off/on-chain

Pace yourself

Instead of optimizing for output, I optimize for sustainability.

Pace yourself.

Important. Pace yourself against you, not others. You can improve, you can set goals in what you are doing, but pacing yourself against others will lead you to compare yourself to them.

Breaking through our 'frame of reference bubble'!

Getting out of our experience and thought bubble.

The more you work, the more you know in your field, the harder it gets to break through your information bubble. It requires deliberate effort to do it and you should take this effort.

Avoiding information overload and FOMO

Elimination is not a wrong thing. Addition is. Think about what you can cut more than what you can add or spend more time acquiring information.

Career choices

The need for feedback

Focus on what you can control and on lead indicators

The menace of mental accounting

Focus on what you can control. Focus on lead indicators and anchor your expectations to know, that you did well when you arrived.

Long term thinking

Simple decision making framework for everyday use

Decision-making model - my way to save time and attention

PRINCIPLE #1 - Action beats no action!

PRINCIPLE #2 - Constrain yourself in the decision-making process.

PRINCIPLE #3 - Avoid fake actions at all cost

PRINCIPLE #4 - Take one decision to remove other choices

Five ultimate productivity tips!

Tip #1 - Disable all notifications, both on desktop and mobile (and watch or other devices you have)

Tip #2 - When at work, shut it all down. Email, Slack, Teams … just shut it down.

Tip #3 - Set boundaries and expectations. People will respect it (or teach them to respect it)

Tip #4 - Set your communication SLA (in ideal case team or organization-wide)

Tip #5 - Live a happy and productive life

Digital Minimalism - removing myself (yourself) from social media game

Social is about interactions and meaning

Where things went south?

Good things happen there, don’t you think?

WTF moment

Crafted my own space

Are you in it for a value, or are you playing a status game with other people?

Digital minimalism

Put your actions where your words are

Why I still keep these accounts?

Avoid inertia! How to thrive in years to come?!

A case of shopping and inertia drag

The cost of inertia and getting back to “normal”

Here is a dilemma

What does it mean in practice?

Lessons learned so far

1. It is a long haul game