/Career Advice

The ACE Technique For Starting New Things

- Charlie Andrews tl;dr: (1) Advice: imagine you’re giving advice to someone else in your position. What are the concrete next steps you’d recommend they take? (2) Commit: identify how long each day you feel comfortable taking your own advice. I usually find 30 minutes or an hour is good. Some activities also have a natural “increment” that you can use as your commitment, like “I will send one cold email to a potential customer every day.” (3) Exit ramp: give yourself an exit ramp by identifying a date when you’ll reevaluate your commitment. This date needs to be soon enough where the commitment feels like a sacrifice but doable. 

featured in #570

Emotions: A Code Book

- Kent Beck tl;dr: Kent shares a personal journey of understanding emotions using an established framework. He views emotions as envelopes containing important messages, encouraging readers to decode these messages instead of suppressing emotions, giving a "cheat sheet" that defines what kind of message each emotion brings, e.g., Fear as a call to focus, Anger as a call to enforce boundaries, and Guilt as a call to change. This self-understanding helps navigate life's challenges and fosters personal growth.

featured in #569

How To Give A Senior Leader Feedback (Without Getting Fired)

- Wes Kao tl;dr: Wes share some ways you can share feedback with senior leaders, or anyone more powerful than you—while being respectful, helpful, and protecting yourself from their wrath.

featured in #569

How To Give A Senior Leader Feedback (Without Getting Fired)

- Wes Kao tl;dr: Wes share some ways you can share feedback with senior leaders, or anyone more powerful than you—while being respectful, helpful, and protecting yourself from their wrath.

featured in #568

Writes and Write-Nots

- Paul Graham tl;dr: “AI has blown this world open. Almost all pressure to write has dissipated. You can have AI do it for you, both in school and at work. The result will be a world divided into writes and write-nots.” Paul believes this will have larger consequences than we realize. 

featured in #568

Lessons

- Joe Lonsdale tl;dr: “These lessons summarize what Joe Lonsdale learned from working over many years with Peter Thiel, a chairman and founder of Palantir. These are very much worth reading — they will change the way you think.”

featured in #568

Lessons

- Joe Lonsdale tl;dr: “These lessons summarize what Joe Lonsdale learned from working over many years with Peter Thiel, a chairman and founder of Palantir. These are very much worth reading — they will change the way you think.”

featured in #567

Please Just Stop Saying “Just"

- Scott Ringwelski tl;dr: “Not because anyone is being rude, or because anything they are saying is necessarily wrong. Nobody is being intentionally malice, here. It’s that (in my opinion) the word “just” added as a qualifier to an idea carries with it a whole bunch of implied baggage.”

featured in #567

The Art Of Workplace Finesse (Part II)

- Wes Kao tl;dr: In this week’s post, we’ll cover examples of finesse in the workplace. (1) Identify when to ask for forgiveness vs permission. (2) Acknowledge that perception matters. (3) Know what you can get away with. (4) Don’t be too literal. (5) Know when to be discreet. (6) Never bet against incentives.

featured in #566

5 Frameworks To Master Communication And Influence As An Engineer

- Jordan Cutler Wes Kao tl;dr: Wes and Jordan discuss the following frameworks: (1) Reduce cognitive load using phrases like “For example”, “Action Items”, “Action Needed”, “Next Steps,” etc... (2) MP-CB: Main point, context below. (3) Anticipate the objection. (4) CEDAF for delegating tasks. (5) QBQ: Question behind the question. 

featured in #565