I started my career as an engineer at Facebook before leaving to build a startup. Transitioning from a well-defined engineering individual contributor role to a nebulous startup leadership role meant a lot of falling on my face and a lot of lessons learned.
Here are 3 tips to keep in mind if you’re starting on this journey and want to fail less than I did.
1. Focus on What Matters by Zooming Out
In every context, it’s important to not get stuck on unimportant details.
When building an early stage startup your time is one of the few resources you can spend, so you better be spending it wisely.
It’s January 1st 2023, so I imagine everyone is making their New Years’ Resolutions. I want to talk about setting these goals and how it helps us.
I recently read a blog article titled The Power of Starting Again, which talks about the invigoration of restarting the new year with a clean slate. I appreciate the sentiment of encouraging action, but I think the reasoning is off.
Specifically, I’d like us to not focus as hard on the goals themselves.
Anyone else remember setting their status on MSN Messenger before Facebook took over?
Everyone was on that platform at the time, and if you were online you were expected to reply instantly. Crazy times.
For your status you’d usually just write what you were doing, or passive-aggressively signal that you were mad at someone. Definitely fun as an adolescent.
This is an article by a psychologist relating improv techniques to conversational patterns.
The piece is interesting because it explores some archetypes of people in conversation, how we might conceptualize what we’re doing in conversations, and how we might improve our conversational skills to bring out the best in each other.
Quote:
Givers think that conversations unfold as a series of invitations; takers think conversations unfold as a series of declarations. When giver meets giver or taker meets taker, all is well. When giver meets taker, however, giver gives, taker takes, and giver gets resentful (“Why won’t he ask me a single question?”) while taker has a lovely time (“She must really think I’m interesting!”) or gets annoyed (“My job is so boring, why does she keep asking me about it?”).
