One thing I've noticed with the smartest people I know
It has nothing to do with the schools they attented, the jobs they had or any sociodemographic trait.
There is one common characteristic I've noticed among the smartest people I know.
It's not waking up at 5 AM.
It's not taking cold showers.
It's not running marathons.
It's something less fashionable yet much more effective.
They are not afraid to ask for help. They consistently and proactively do it.
This is not a politically correct way to say they go to a therapist. I'm not talking about that kind of help.
I'm talking about engaging with experienced professionals from their industry who can provide advice, coaching, and guidance.
Certain cultures regard asking for help as a sign of weakness and discourage it. These cultures often associate the idea of someone successful with the know-it-all alpha male type, a self-made man against all odds.
As someone who has grown up in a country still largely dominated by such culture, I have been exposed enough to its drawbacks to realize how ineffective this approach is.
It's not just morally questionable, but also very unproductive from an individual perspective.
Still, the cultural imprint that has been thrown upon us throughout our childhood and teenage years is sometimes difficult to shrug off.
I still occasionally struggle with it myself, more often than I'd like to admit.
You don't need a well-defined problem to get started
Sometimes we assume we should wait until we have a clearly formulated problem statement before we reach out to someone else for help.
Sometimes we assume our problems are not that important to justify such an investment.
The reality is different.
Our jobs are difficult. The tech industry is in its infancy compared to most other disciplines that have been around for hundreds of years. And it's moving at a speed unparalleled in any other industry.
This means our jobs are still largely ambiguous, and what it takes to be successful as an engineering leader is a fast-moving target.
Adaptability and benefitting from external perspectives on your role and its requirements becomes even more important.
Talking to someone is very effective. It deepens your understanding of your situation, the nature of the problems you are facing, and how to address them.
Many of you should be familiar with the Teddy Bear Method1, also known as Rubber Duck Debugging2 in the software engineering space.
You can stick with a Teddy Bear as your main solution, but the problem with them is that they tend to stay silent. No matter how much you ask a stuffed animal for advice, your voice will be the only one you'll hear.
Well, unless it's an LLM-powered imaginary friend, which is not something I'd recommend anyway.
Talking through your situation with someone more experienced than you can help you clarify your thoughts. You will also get the added value of someone else's experience facing similar challenges.
I don't need someone to help, there is plenty of free stuff online!
There is a lot of material available for free online. Not all of it is good. A Drum Teacher I used to work with3 - until I became too busy with other things in life to keep practicing - used to warn students against the firehose approach.
Trying to educate yourself with all the material you find online, especially YouTube content, is like trying to drink from a firehose.
Online resources are extremely valuable and important. After all, it's what this newsletter is all about. At the same time, online resources can be deceiving, and a source of productive procrastination.
They can be deceiving as they are often written from the perspective of someone who is in a very different context than you are. It's unlikely that they wrote a piece to cover your specific case.
Most of us don't work in big tech companies4, yet the amount of space big tech companies take in the online discourse is disproportionately high.
For example, valuable and deep material on fine-tuning your SLOs calculation might not be very relevant if your company lacks any form of structured incident management process and just rock'n'roll through any outage.
Online content can also turn into a sneaky way to engage yourself in productive procrastination. You can spend days, weeks, and months just consuming online courses, articles, and newsletters, instead of taking action.
Articles and videos won't ask you the most crucial questions: what are you going to do, when you're going to do it, and when we should follow up on your actions?
All this is left to individual initiative. This lack of accountability combined with the busy nature of our lives makes it easy to procrastinate and keep consuming more content instead.
That's what I call self-education turned into glorified leisure.
Lastly, most content platforms’ incentives are at odds with your goals.
You are looking for effectiveness.
They are optimizing for time spent on the platform.
Algorithmically curated distribution will amplify the visibility of viral content. Most content that becomes viral does it because it pushes your emotional buttons, engaging directly with your reptilian brain.
Rarely that same content will be key in helping you become a better version of yourself.
In summary:
Online content can be a great resource to support your self-development journey
Its effectiveness is limited as it lacks proper accountability mechanisms that leverage our sense of social responsibility toward others
Content platforms are powerful machines optimized to keep you engaged as long as possible. There is a high risk of indulging in passive consumption, which is the opposite of taking action.
Find someone who can guide you
Developing yourself is hard. It takes a lot of willpower and energy. There is one reason why people keep saying that showing up is 90% of the work.
It's much easier to fail to show up when you have an appointment with yourself only. Reasonable excuses are offered to us all the time: we're too busy at work and at home, or just too tired to work on something in the evening.
Failing to show up becomes much harder when we know someone is waiting for us at the other end of the imaginary table. We feel obliged to stick to our commitments out of a sense of increased obligation. And as showing up is 90% of the work, you're already past the hardest part. This is a great way to build habits that will last.
This reason alone could be enough to enlist the support of a mentor or coach.
This is exactly what Adam Gilbert has done with My Body Tutor in the fitness space5. His thesis is simple: in the fitness space knowledge is not the main problem, accountability is.
When you work with the right person, someone who cares about you and your growth, they will give you the occasional dose of tough love. They'll call out your bullshit, and excuses.
They will help you develop higher standards for yourself in terms of dependability, discipline, and mental rigor.
If they do a good job, they will not try to change your mind. They will instead challenge your thinking, offer alternative perspectives, and then leave it up to you to make sense of all of it and decide what to do next. They will require you to make explicit commitments, and they will follow up on them.
When we do our own research we are often driven by confirmation bias, looking for information that validates our beliefs and desires about what it would take to be successful at our job.
When working with a mentor, they'll present the reality of what they had to do or see others doing to get there.
You will not always hear what you want.
You will not always like what you hear.
Face reality, not your wishes. It's tough but effective.
This is why I often recommend people to find a mentor, and why I've been increasingly turning my attention towards offering such services to people.
For every leader I can help do a better job, many teams and organizations will benefit.
One-to-one mentoring doesn't seem to scale only when you look at it from a narrow economic perspective. After all, there are only so many hours in a day I can dedicate to this practice, and there is no known way to clone myself.
When looked at from the perspective of second-order effects, the impact of good mentoring can be massive.
Improving by 10% or 20% the effectiveness and well-being of a 100-person team by investing one hour per month with the leader of that team is a perspective that I find very compelling. One that aligns with my definition of scalable efforts and impact.
Get a taste of what it looks like
With this article, I'm explaining why I'm interested in offering more mentoring and coaching services, starting with why I think these services are a more effective solution than just consuming the content being thrown your way.
To further put my wallet (time) where my mouth (keyboard) is, I'm introducing a special offer to all the readers of sudo make me a CTO.
I'm offering 10 FREE 30-minute coaching and mentoring sessions for my subscribers, between now and the end of June.
No fine print, no commitments, and no long-term engagement are required.
The only requirements are:
You are a subscriber of this newsletter.
Respect my time: be on time, if you need to cancel do it well in advance, be focused.
Come prepared: bring one topic you want to cover during the session.
This offer can only be used once, and it's only available to people who aren't already paying clients of mine.
I can't predict how long it'll take for the offer to run out.
If you miss it, you can get the same reward by referring 25 subscribers to the mailing list. See here for more details:
I'm looking forward to getting to know you more.
See you next week!
If you aren't, read this quick post to get an idea of the method: https://palojono.blogspot.com/2011/03/teddy-bear-problem-solving-method.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
In case you're wondering, it's Stephen Taylor from https://www.stephensdrumshed.com/
Exact numbers are difficult to find. Still, some studies report that there are north of 25 million software engineers worldwide. FAANGs are estimated to employ about 500k Software engineers. Even doubling that number leaves the ratio still in the single-digit percentage, around 5%.
You can find more about My Body Tutor at https://www.mybodytutor.com/