Career development looks more like unlocking attributes for a different subclass in a role-playing game, than picking a distinct class that can never change. It’s not a path. It’s a collection of skills and attributes focused on certain outcomes. Applying foundational skills is heavily contingent on your role and responsibility.

Careers, management or not, aren’t straight lines. The skills you need for your career aren’t a tree with one root. You can skip between various skill trees, if you like! You can go deep, but wide is an option too. The more you know, the more you can delegate!

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A wise person from a Destiny 2 Slack:

I guess when you’re done with the main quest, you go back and do side quests

Careers (and lives) are non-linear. Occasionally their trajectories don’t make sense. They may even outright disappoint, in the moment. The silver lining is, they give us unique skills and experience that someone in the world wants if only we can find them.

Remember, the more complex the issue, the more prone communication is to being lost.

– Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

Communicating complexity is compression. Compressing ideas is loss-y. Can’t get around that. There’s ​no way to convey a complex idea and maintain fidelity​. To work with an idea amongst abstractions is to ​accept that rabbit holes will develop​. And, that sometimes problems will hide in the depths and mazes of those rabbit holes.

When you compress air, it heats up. The molecules are literally squeezed together, they collide more, and the air gets hotter.

In combustion engines, compressing air coming into the engine to a higher pressure means you can add more fuel to it and get more power without increasing engine size. But, doing so requires extra machinery, turbochargers or superchargers, and requires an intercooler to cool the air down before it reaches the combustion chamber so it doesn’t explode prematurely. Second-order consequences!

I haven’t (yet) thought of a snappy analog to compressing ideas — yet. A way to integrate this with a mental model continues to elude me.

Abstraction, in the every-day software development sense, is compression. All the cautions and mythology programmers tell themselves about abstraction distill down to “compression is great if you can accept the trade-offs”.

In other words: I want to make what’s important to me: teams, writing, and software. I need focus to decide what to write/build with excellence. I require attention to sustain that focus.

Henrik Karlsson on multi-armed bandits and focus. First, explore to find what I might want to focus on:

The trick is to collide your mental model with the outside world as often as possible. This is what exploring does. You think you know the distribution of payoffs of the slot machines, but you try something new. You discover that you were wrong. You update your model.

This is a life design thing. Get out in reality, seek novelty, try plenty of things, “touch grass” with the world outside my mental model, the more the better. Experience a bunch of things, surround myself with intriguing, intense, or impactful people.

Surely things could have gone differently for me if I’d done more exploring when I was twenty-something. But, much less of the world was available to me then. More important that I figure out the world needs exploring now and then and that I can explore even with the responsibilities of my forty-something years.

After the exploration, “exploit” what I’ve found. Choose a few things and go deep on them. Things which resonate with me and make me think “this is a thing that I can do or invest my time and effort in”. I start doing it and that is focus.

But, really choose those “pillars” of focus. If I pick seven things, I haven’t really chosen. Pick a few of these things, leave several on the cutting floor. Don’t construct some wild productivity system where I can spread my energy out over the seven days of the week, over seven areas of alleged focus and get nothing done (except possibly create a wobbly ideology and maybe a video course selling it ).

May I recommend the rule of three? It’s great.

Focus-and-exploit lets the brain work the problem even when offline, away from keyboards and tools. Pro-tip: mundane chores are an excellent tool here. e.g. take a shower, mow the lawn, go for a walk.

Why would focus compound? Part of it is time. If you care about less, you spend more time doing what you care about most. Also, you are always nonconsciously processing the thing you focus on. So cutting priorities means you work even when it looks like you’re not working. These days, I’ll spend the afternoon playing with the kids, doing the dishes, repairing the houses—being busy in a mind-clearing way. Then, when I sit down to write the next morning, I can type 700 words without thinking. The ideas have been churning in my head, just below the surface of conscious thought, and come fully formed.

If you’re really focused, your brain is always working on those three pillars. It’s thinking about whatever it is you’re doing, turning over problems, processing that information, compiling it, organizing it while you sleep, and while you do mundane things.

Austin Kleon suggested a similar approach. When he runs out of writing/creative energy, he cleans his pool. Basically, he takes his thinking mind out of the loop. Lets his physical body do something routine and mundane to invite the creative mind to return. (Sorry, I can’t remember which Austin Kleon thing I saw this as a comment on. )

If you like this explore and exploit stuff, you’re going to really dig Kent Beck’s ideas about explore, expand, exploit.

On the other hand, allowing ideas into my sphere of thought from social feeds designed to put me in a bad mood or get me to buy stuff breaks the focus. I need attention.

Craig Mod, How I Got My Attention Back:

If I tell people I went offline for a month, it’s like telling them I set up camp on Mars. It hints of apostasy, paganism. Tribes seem to find pleasure in knowing all members suffer equally. But, really, is the situation so dire that we can’t wrangle a little more control? We’ve opted into this baffling baseline of infinite information suck, always-availability. Nobody held a gun to our head. We put our own mouths on the spigot every single day.

But it’s so delicious. That spigot goo — buoyed by pull-to-refreshes and pings and wily dots. Giving up attention, so seductive.

I can’t focus if my attention has me thinking of “5 amazing one-takes by Scorsese” or “INSANE Porsche 911 builds”. Too much social media feed is an inescapable gravity well of wandering thoughts. Modern, programmed attention makes it difficult to think our thoughts or sustain them.

However, disconnection is a luxury, and a bit ascetic. The real tactic requires figuring out how to thread the needle, striking a balance between connectedness and Waldenponding.

So I need guidelines, even when discipline wanes:

The internet goes off before bed. The internet doesn’t return until after lunch. That’s it. Reasonable rules. I’m too weak to handle the unreasonable.

What works for me:

• Remove the glaring offenders in my “attention” life. Mute, unfollow, etc.
• Set coarse rules that protect my time to focus. e.g., I take the first hour of my day for a writing routine, while my energy is high and the world is mostly asleep instead of eager to distract me.
• Remove decision-making. I listen to the same album on repeat during my writing session (currently, A Love Supreme). I work through the same five-item to-do list every time to get my energy going.
  

Attention and energy are finite. Don’t worry when one or both dwindle. At the end of the day, after numerous meetings, the weekend after a long week. That’s when it’s basically okay to allow a little temptation into your day. Don’t succumb to hustle culture! I encourage you to take a break from crushing it now and then.

Excellence. This bit started with trying to figure out how focus and attention generate excellent work. In particular, I need more than acumen and experience to make exceptional things, teams, organizations. I need to choose the right thing to focus on. But, tying up excellence with identity can cause misery or generate path dependence. I require honesty with myself when I’m doing great work and when I’m going through the motions to keep the work going. Focus and attention are preconditions for making excellence.

I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album but This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time – Andre 3000

It’s all works in progress. Many posts are rough drafts I put out there to keep myself going. I have no idea which ones will stick and which ones will bounce. Plenty of drafts and following the way the wind blows me.

I know that if I let my attention wander, I will put less out there. Ergo attention. And I know that if I try to make several kinds of things, I will put less out there. Ergo focus.

Teams and organizations have focus and attention, too. Builders — developers, designers, etc. — focus on their slice of a problem. Teams focus on the problem as a whole. Organizations focus on solving problems that generate an impact on the metrics or goals they’re chasing.

Priorities are the attention of a team or organization. The negative space in those priorities reflects problems and impacts the group will say “no, thanks” to. That suggests a tidy way to think of personal and group attention; we should say “no, thanks” to attention-sinks which aren’t aligned with our personal goals and priorities. “No, thanks” to algorithmic feeds when our goal is to write, for example.

(Time to land this thing.)

Focus is a capacity to get stuff done. To choose a problem and put many hours and days into it. A sense of purpose, if that’s your thing.

Attention is deciding what the mind is thinking about. Attention can complement focus, or derail it. It’s how minutes turn to hours, in good ways (or bad).

Shallow focus and attention see us bouncing from one idea to another. Often, without our intention to intervene (i.e., dopamine hits). The good focus and attention turns minutes into hours of engagement and days of interesting work into the weeks and months of a notable career or legacy of work.

Barry Hess, You’re a Blogger, Not an Essayist:

I’m not going to look down on you for micro-posting on your blog, either. Heck, I might do it myself. I don’t prefer it, though. A blog isn’t Twitter. Just like I don’t think of a blog as something containing 2,000-word, heavily researched posts.

You don’t have to be an essayist. (Though you can be one if you want!) Don’t let those essayists discourage you from blogging.

Just write. Just blog.

Cosign.

Keep a journal for work, champions.

It’s pretty easy to get started—just create a text file.

Throw in a new heading each day and write down whatever you did—a single line for each task is usually enough. I put the newer dates at the top so it’s less scrolling to get to the most recent content. Over time you end up with your own little private reverse-chronological blog-in-a-file.

Each day, dump in commands you’ve run; links to documents you’ve created, reviewed, or read; tasks you want to get done; or goals you want to achieve.

You’re building a little outboard brain where your work history is just a short grep away.

Endorsed. Journals are the best PKM impact-to-effort ratio out there. I like DayOne, been using it for more than ten years and thousands of entries. But, anything works! Your notes app, a text file, a document in your preferred word processor. Anything you can search later and access anywhere is good!

The most important thing is to turn what’s in your head into “words on paper”. That’s when the magic happens!

Inflection points are just sustained implementation of a very reasonable thing. Often, the role of the great leader is not to come up with a brilliant strategy, but to convince people to stay the course with a very basic strategy.

Leaders lead folks in exercising a plan or series of plans (i.e. strategy). Basic strategies are almost certain to outperform complex strategies. Complex strategies tend to leak energy and effort at the seams between the basic/legible parts and all the edge cases and exceptions that generate complexity.

“Sustained implementation” implies both quality of execution and compounding returns on effort. Sustaining any strategy is more likely to compound effort than frequently changing strategies. But, bear in mind that high probabilities don’t guarantee that an event will happen.

At the team level, strategy is “why is this project/idea/work important enough to ignore all the other things we could be doing?”. The strategy generates the alignment which makes execution decisions easier. The alignment gives you a principle or goal to return to when things don’t go to plan. The strategy and alignment are guidelines helping teams pull together in the same direction, instead of zeroing out their effort by all pulling in different directions.

No strategy is worse than no strategy. A lack of strategy is the worst thing, probably worse than having no plan. Any given present/actual strategy is likely to outperform no strategy. So definitely have a strategy, even if it is simple or your first try at having a strategy.

S-tier writing skill: organize a story or idea within a story such that the reader understands or builds upon it, makes it theirs.

A-tier relationship skill: organize or set stuff down such that your partner can find it later, without needing to ask you where it is. (Riffing off Merlin Mann here, I think.)

Ergo: organizing, and empathizing, are skills worth developing.

It’s a bit of an affordance. Put the idea, code object, etc. where you’d expect to find it or naturally reach for it. Even better, put it where you think someone else would look for it first.

Tiago Forte, How to Take Smart Notes: 10 Principles to Revolutionize Your Note-Taking and Writing:

In other words, instead of filing things away according to where they came from, you file them according to where they’re going. This is the essential difference between organizing like a librarian and organizing like a writer.

All those productivity hacks might pay off, some day!

Cannot overstate the value of regularly delivering working software.

My single most effective software dev habit is to start with a walking skeleton — a “real” if very stubbed out program that can be deployed on its real infrastructure, receive real calls, visited for real etc. — because of what this does for non-programming stakeholders.

When they see a real working thing and then they see that thing get meaningful improvements they tend to chill *way* out and get much easier to work with.

You can save a week of effort on process with a couple hours of sharing tangible progress.

Related: you can save a week of planning with a couple hours of programming. You can save a week of programming with a couple hours of planning.

There are two voices

“Focus on doing the most important thing so that you can get it done. Then, you can do the next most important thing, and so on”, says one.

“Follow your interests. Turn your energy into some kind of progress. Even if it’s not aligned to the absolute most important thing, all the time”, says the other.

They’re not-wrong!

The Important Thing

If there’s anything more useful than one clear priority, it’s One Important Thing. Maybe they’re two sides of the same coin. Either way, if you know that Thing #1 is more significant than Things #2-10, you have an advantage.

Priority makes focus. Purpose makes focus. Aligning purpose with priority. That’s a winner.

The big tent of principles

That said, it’s possible to pursue smaller things and stay in alignment with priority and purpose. The big-rock/one-important-thing isn’t an identity. They don’t have to represent your life goal. I recommend against trying to stay aligned with a big life goal, lest one miss all the lovely moments and achievements along the way. In other words, stop to say ”well if this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is”.

The big tent of principles means you can connect the dots from working on something for a short period of time, say a day or month, to what you’re trying to do with the months and years of your life or career.

Side note: your big principle needs a bit of an open-ended definition. If the principle you’re basing the years of your career is “make a push-button UI that is 5% better”, it’s difficult to fit side-quests into that tent. “Improve the low-hanging fruit in human-computer interface and swing for the fences a few times on drastically improving the state of the art” is a better big tent principle.

Focus begat finish

Focus is a means, not an end. The end is finishing. Not almost-done, basically done, or waiting on one little thing before it’s done. Finished means it’s out there, people are reading it or using it or thinking about it or benefitting from it in some way.

Focus makes the room in your life (and inside your head) to make the thing or polish it or package it or tell the people about it. But focus alone won’t finish it.

Finishing is dozens of little details that need doing, aren’t doing themselves, and may indeed look dissimilar to monk-like focus. It’s probably an entirely different topic. For the purposes of these notes, remember that it’s easier to finish if you have developed the discipline to focus.

No

Saying “no” is the first step. Apps and trinkets and minimalism and meditation are not the key to generating focus.

To paraphrase Prince: “Nothing Compares 2 No”.

Saying “no”:

• Reduces your inbound volume of work
• Decreases coordination and collaboration multipliers that generate drag
• Aligns more of the tasks on your list with the thing I said “yes” to
  

OTOH, many people feel bad vibes when they hear or say “no”. Say the literal word with care.

Don’t get so wrapped up in focusing and how other people do it and your ideal schedule and preparing to do the work that you never get around to doing the work.