Three sources for personal and professional growth
Like many things in life, the easiest is rarely the most effective. Exploring online content, books, and actively engaging with others.
I’m often asked for recommendations on how to grow and become better engineering leaders and humans. Practice and experience play an important role, but practice alone doesn’t scale: you only have so much time to get things wrong and learn them the hard way.
Furthermore, direct experience offers limited opportunities for encountering new ideas and novel approaches.
The tech industry can often seem like a planet-scale echo chamber, even more so thanks to algorithmically targeted content on news outlets and social media platforms.
Passive consumption might be an effective way of building oneself a bubble, but it’s unlikely to offer real opportunities to explore new horizons.
Like all significant achievements in life, your professional growth requires you to do hard things.
Like many hard things, investing in your personal growth can lead to significant results.
I’m not talking about more money or prestige, though those can happen as a byproduct.
I’m talking about becoming a better version of yourself.
In today’s article, I want to explore three fundamental sources for sustaining your growth as an engineering leader.
They are ordered by their popularity, which is roughly inversely proportional to their effectiveness.
In other words, the most common approach does not generally lead to the best results.
Let’s start with the obvious one.
Consuming online content
We all consume plenty of content online. The simple fact that you’re reading these words is an example of that.
This is such an obvious source that you might be wondering why I’m even wasting time, pixels, and bytes on the wire to talk about it.
The reason is simple: though this is by far the most popular source, it’s the least effective.
Keep reading for a few more sentences before you give up to the urge to unsubscribe and distort your gaze from the screen.
The main problem with online content is that the signal-to-noise ratio is embarrassingly low. If that was true even before the advent of the “revolution” of AI slop, the situation has only gotten worse in the past couple of years.
The second problem subtly compounds with the first: most online platforms’ incentives are to keep people’s eyeballs stuck on their pixels for as long as possible, collect more personal data, and ultimately generate more revenue through highly targeted advertising.
The end result is a sophisticated machine deeply optimized for delivering engaging content.
There is no problem with that except for a major one: engaging content is generally short-form and low quality. It does push our emotional buttons and feeds an insatiable loop of dopamine release in our brains.
That’s not an effective way to learn anything new.
If anything, it’s a very effective way of screwing up your dopamine system and drastically reducing your ability to focus, build new complex neural pathways, and keep your pre-frontal cortex in good shape.
Sure, there is plenty of good content online, and I’d like to hope that this newsletter is part of it. But the ratio of good content over the total is embarrassingly low.
Plus, every single platform is trying to distract you with notifications, alerts, suggestions, and all sorts of tricks while you’re trying to read a long and complex article.
My best recommendations for finding high-quality content are to:
Be skeptical of anything recommended to you by algorithmically driven platforms, as they’re trying to optimize for their business model, not your personal growth
Do your own research. Invest time in actively browsing independent blogs and podcasts
Ask people around you for recommendations, and share yours. People around you have nothing to gain from their recommendations, and you can trust they’ll do it in your best interest.
Try to consume the content in settings that reduce distractions. I have an iPad that I only use for distraction-free work or reading. Nothing entertaining on it, not a single notification. No emails, no instant messages. You might think it’s a waste if you value an electronic device more than your own brain. I don't.
Reading books
As I often like to repeat, reading books is like calisthenics for your brain.
It’s not just my opinion, though, as plenty of research supports the idea that reading books has a massive positive impact on our cognitive development and in preventing its decline1.
What’s even more interesting, multiple studies suggest that reading physical books is significantly more effective than reading a digital version2.
But even with that caveat, reading digital books is way superior to consuming online digital content:
Physical books > Digital Books > Online Content
Book reading is a habit that requires an initial investment to be established. Even though I have always been an avid reader, in the last couple of years I’ve upped the game by setting an explicit goal: I want to read at least 3 books every month.
It doesn’t matter the topic, genre, or length.
Some months, I read more. Some others, I miss the target. But these are few and far between.
Establishing such a goal had a significant effect on my reading habits.
It operated as an external reminder and incentive to gradually replace the comfortable habit of picking up my phone during “down” times with a book.
The rate of about 40 books a year has also made the act of choosing the next book to read a much lower stakes.
On average, I buy more books than I’m able to read in a given period. This means I always have a large number of books I’ve already selected and validated available for me to pick up at any point in time, with little effort.
This has decoupled the event of finding a good book, something that takes up a lot of mental energy, from the event of picking up the next book to read. Whenever I pick up a new one, I know it has already gone through the selection process. This allows me to let my whims on the moment help guide the decision within safe boundaries.
Am I in the mood for a deep and complex topic, because I might be working on something related?
Am I in the mood for some dystopian sci-fi because I’ve been reflecting on climate change, tech broligarchs and international conflicts?
Am I in the mood for a book around self-development because I’m trying to up my productivity game?
The available backlog, combined with the ability to pick up a new book every 10 days on average, makes it easy for me to adapt to the needs of the moment and avoid spending too much time in the decision process.
That is why I recommend everyone to set a personal goal for reading, and then figure out moments during the day in which they could squeeze in a few pages, or more. Start with one book per month, and then see when you feel comfortable increasing the target.
If you think that reading books is too expensive, there are ways to mitigate the problem: public libraries, special offers such as the ones found on Humble Bundles, or even borrowing books from friends and family.
And just think about how expensive the opposite, not reading books, can be!
Actively exchanging with and learning from others
The third, and I believe least popular of the three practices (though I might be overestimating how much people in this industry read books), requires some disambiguation, as it might easily be mistaken for relatively common practices.
Let me start by clarifying what I’m not talking about.
I’m not talking about occasionally sharing your views with other folks online in forums, social media, or mailing lists, for those who even know they exist.
I’m not talking about chatting casually with your colleagues, not even deep discussions at work on how to approach problems or technical decisions.
I’m not talking about occasionally or even regularly attending meetups and hanging out, networking, or sharing thoughts with people you meet there.
I’m talking about something more specific, significantly more uncomfortable, and way more effective.
I’m talking about putting yourself in situations where you honestly and humbly share your challenges, fears, and thoughts with one or more individuals actively engaged in listening to you and offering their unfiltered, caring, and selfless support.
These sessions require, on one hand, your willingness to come prepared, be honest with yourself and others, and be open to hearing things you might not like to hear.
They also require the counterparty to have the right disposition. They need to genuinely care, be able to listen, and provide advice and support without judging or dismissing your challenge.
This can only happen in an environment built around mutual respect, psychological safety, and a high degree of mutual trust.
As of today, I know two main forms you can find this form of support:
Traditional coaching and mentoring. A mentor and/or a coach is a professional trained and experienced in doing just that. They know how to create the conditions for you to reflect on your situation, understand your strengths and gaps, and elaborate an action plan with constant follow-up.
They will also operate as sounding boards, challenging your beliefs and offering different perspectives.
As a matter of fact, this is one of the services I offer, and in the past couple of years, I’ve been helping a varied group of individuals become better versions of themselves.Special-purpose communities. Individual coaching can be, and sometimes really is, expensive. Not everyone can afford it, and it might feel like too big an investment, especially for people who are just getting started with taking control of their growth.
A good complementary alternative to it is special-purpose communities. Communities that are designed around the specific goal of helping people become better through a combination of general knowledge sharing and personalized problem-solving.
Good communities are those where you feel comfortable bringing in your challenges and problems, those you wouldn’t want to share with your colleagues or managers, knowing you’ll get some concrete advice and support in exchange.
This is exactly what the Sudo Make Me a CTO community was set out to be when I first introduced it about a year ago, and it’s still delivering on its promise today.
Both individual coaching and special-purpose communities are a high-leverage investment for your growth.
An investment I couldn’t recommend more.
I’ve mentioned my services, but there are obviously plenty of alternatives out there, especially on the coaching side. There are surely free alternatives in the community space, and some of them might be exactly what you need.
My recommendation is simple: pick one and try it out for one month.
See with your eyes the quality, depth, and value coming out of those active and engaged exchanges, and then decide where to go next.
If you decide to join the Sudo Make Me a CTO community, that will come at no risk. You have a 30-day money-back guarantee if you realize it’s not what you were looking for.
But I guarantee that taking that first step, even if you decide not to continue, will break your inertia.
It’ll put you on the right trajectory of investing in your personal growth with your time and money.
It will help you become a better professional and a better person overall.
What excuse do you have for not trying?
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There are plenty of resources you can find online on this topic. One good starting point is this short article, or this interesting study.
You can find a bunch of research on the topic if you search, and this article can be a good starting point to find the first pointers.