Update: In 2021, I gave away 12 scholarships in 12 months. I'll likely be launching additional scholarships in the future, but in the meantime, I would encourage you to start your own scholarship or set up a scholarship in memory of someone.

Huge thank you to the 17 contributors that helped me raise $13450! If you want to learn more about the AMPLIFY series, read on. :)

All 12 scholarships launched in 2021 had a goal to support and amplify a particular cause, like supporting minorities or green innovation.

Although I'll be selecting the scholarship topics and winners (along with partners – more on this below), you can suggest topics and contribute to any scholarships that resonate with you.

You can follow the entire process, including up to date information on funding, partners, winners, and more. But if you'd like to learn more about the "why" behind the project, keep reading...

One of the most unique traits of humans, relative to other animals, is our ability to deeply understand a topic and then codify that information such that we can document and transfer our learnings to other humans. This is how we continue to evolve as a species and build the world’s knowledge base.

This is education.

Education, like many other important topics, tends to get muddied with controversy. People argue whether education should be public or private, whether schools should focus more on practical thinking instead of memorization, or how much colleges should charge, among many other debates.

Higher education, in particular, has been getting a lot of flack recently. I can understand why. Certain systems put education into a space of privilege or make it "accessible" today, but leave people riddled with debt tomorrow. Regardless of your stance on how education should be administered, there is one thing that's hard to debate: education powers a better world.

Like many, I wish that education was free for all. But sometimes, we must meet the world where it's at. And that means doing whatever we can to enable more people to get a high-quality education, whether it's through a traditional institution or otherwise. It also means acknowledging that we're in a highly dynamic world and should do what we can to limit the switching costs for people that may have invested in learning one thing, but have so much more to offer.

To this end, I'd like to briefly share my experience with financial aid:

Throughout university, I was responsible for paying my way through. I was luckier than some, to live in a country where higher education came to the tune of $10k/year, instead of $50k. But still, as a student navigating this world shortly after leaving the nest... there was no way that I could've gotten my education without financial aid.

Just as importantly, I would have never been able to explore some of the more formative experiences of my early adulthood, like going on exchange to Sweden or being able to pivot careers without decades of loan debt hanging over my head. Both of these were a result of a lot of financial aid throughout university, across loans, grants, and scholarships that amounted to tens of thousands of dollars.

I was fortunate enough to have access to this aid. But many do not.

And here's the thing: the more people that have access to higher education, the higher likelihood that we'll all benefit from a brighter future.

Imagine if Bill Gates never met Paul Allen or Steve Ballmer at Harvard? What if Larry Page and Sergei Brin never did their PhD on search engines at Stanford that eventually led to Google.

Learning to Give

Now, I'm no where close to the wealth of some of the people above. But, I learned how to create a scholarship and a valuable lesson from Calvin Rosser – who guided me through putting this initiative together with Bold – that if you don't get in the habit of giving back now, you never will. We're so focused on the hedonic treadmill that we're always chasing greener pastures. More money. More followers. Always more... but also always for ourselves.

By giving back early, we're reminding ourselves that there is no "end" or no day where you have enough to start giving back.

Learning to give is just like learning any other skill like coding, writing, or public speaking. It feels uncomfortable at first, but you can get better at it. It takes practice for it to go from being foreign to a reflex.

I have benefited tangibly from people that have looked around and thought, "I wouldn't be here if it weren't for the kindness of many people along the way." Now, it's my turn. This is my first of hopefully many attempts to give back in some small form. Maybe one day, it'll be much more substantial.

Why Scholarships?

I chose to go with the medium of scholarships because I know first-hand how they can have a very direct and tangible impact on a person. Often, when you give to charities, your money gets dispersed in ways that you can't really follow. Some goes to marketing. Some goes to paying staff. Some goes go toward your intended cause. But the beauty with scholarships is that there is a direct path. And sometimes, you can change one life that will eventually change many.

That is exactly why I chose to call the scholarships series AMPLIFY, because they can have such an outsized impact.

I experienced this as a judge of the Toptal Women's scholarship during my time there. We were able to support such incredible women, like Martha who learned to code on paper, pieced together enough money to take a nanodegree on Udacity, and with the scholarship planned to build her e-learning chatbot, enabling more women in Africa to learn to code. She also planned to buy a set of Raspberry Pis to give more females access to the tech that she initially didn't have. One scholarship was awarded to one individual, but is likely to impact many, many more.

Amplify [1][2][3]

I’ve chosen to dedicate the first few scholarships to things that are close to my heart, inspired by the Elevate Series by Calvin Rosser.

The first three scholarships are:

• Amplify Women in STEM: We live in the information era, where technology underpins so much of our daily lives. Technology influences the way we communicate, learn, entertain. And it has an increasing influence on key issues like the economy, foreign policy, privacy, healthcare, and more. We need a diverse group of people designing our future and women have been historically underserved in STEM.
• Amplify Continuous Learning: Education is an opportunity, but also a mindset. And we believe that it’s important to foster this mindset within people of any age. This scholarship is in place to enable lifelong learnings that want to acquire a new skill that will be transformative for them, whether it be learning to code, digital marketing, writing, or whatever will have a lasting impact on their lives.
• Amplify Green Innovation: I believe that climate change is the most pressing issue our collective race is facing. And while there is reason for concern, there is also one very clear reason for optimism: innovation. History demonstrates that there’s almost nothing humans cannot achieve when they’re put to the test and have the right incentives.

These are the first 3 of 12 scholarships, but 9 more will be announced over the next three quarters. One scholarship will be awarded at the end of each month in 2021. And I'd love to involve you in the process:

1. All scholarships will start at $500. This may not seem like much, but it can be enough for someone to take a nano-degree, to present their work at a conference, or just to help make their next rent payment so they can focus on their projects. And it doesn't stop with me... I've set up this project so that others can join in...
2. If you’d like to give back, you can donate to one of the scholarships that I’ve created. If you donate $500 or more to a single scholarship, I’ll name you as a partner on that scholarship. Of course, none of this money goes to me – it all goes to the scholarship winner(s). Partners will be featured on the AMPLIFY page and will have the option in participating in the selection process. To see how this looks, check out the Amplify Green Innovation Scholarship, which I created in collaboration with Calvin.
3. You can contribute to scholarships that align with your values. Due to the platform that I'm partnering with (Bold.org), the minimum contribution is $50
4. If you don't see one to your liking yet, you can suggest future scholarships that will be released every quarter. You can see the launch calendar here.
5. Of course, if you'd like to start your own scholarship, independent of the AMPLIFY X series, I encourage you to do so!

If you've made it to the end of this piece, thank you for reading. I'm excited for this to be a start to my journey in giving back, and I hope that you'll join me.

If you'd like to follow along the way, you can join the conversation or subscribe below for updates:

FAQ

Who is eligible to apply to these scholarships?

Each scholarship has unique selection criteria that are detailed on each scholarship page on Bold. You can browse all of the scholarships on this page.

Do I need to be a student to apply?

Not necessarily! Each scholarship has it's own unique scholarship criteria and some do not require that you are pursuing post-secondary education.

Is there an age requirement in order to apply?

There is no age requirement to applying, however there may be other requirements in order to qualify. Please see the individual scholarship pages for more details.

What is the minimum donation required?

The minimum donation on Bold.org is $50.

Why scholarships?

I chose to go with the medium of scholarships because I know first-hand how they can have a very direct and tangible impact on a person. That is exactly why I chose to call the scholarships series AMPLIFY, because they can have such an outsized impact.

If I donate to a scholarship, can I help choose the winner?

I've set up this initiative such that people can partner with me on scholarships, if they contribute $500 or more to that scholarship. I can't incorporate every donor's feedback into the decision, but I do want to give larger donors the ability to have a say in the process. Other donors will be featured on the scholarship page, but not engage with the decision process.

How can I start my own scholarship?

There are several scholarship platforms out there, but I chose to work with Bold because they make it incredibly easy for you to set up scholarships, operationalize the process, be compliant, and allow others to contribute as well. You can follow these instructions online to create your own scholarship or set up a memorial scholarship.

PS: If you liked this article, you might also enjoy my podcast on all types of things like tip culture, technology people feared, or the the most influential artist you've never heard of, or my latest project.

Each new year, the world gets a little bit older...and so do we. This end to an era nudges us to take a step back and reflect on “how we’re doing” – to consider what we’ve accomplished, to evaluate the delta between our hopes and reality, and to assess whether we’re focusing on the right things altogether.

I like to call it “a look in the mirror”.

This article is mine.

Each Year Passes Differently

I’ve come to appreciate that each year passes in a unique way.

2018 was a hard year to beat. It was my year of sponge, filled with a lot of growth. Perhaps more importantly, it was a year without expectation. No one knew who I was or cared what I was doing. All that fueled my progress was the “time anxiety” of turning 25. And somehow, that was enough to make 2018 the year that I learned to code, launched 4 projects, and started leading a 20-person team while traveling the globe.

2019 was also a great year, but in a very different way. Most notably, it was the year that I launched my blog which has now been read my hundreds of thousands. I also had the opportunity to speak at my first conference (and my second). But outside of those accomplishments, the other milestones likely seem less “impressive” to an outsider, despite being equally meaningful to me.

In 2019, I made the difficult decision to walk away from leadership and switch things up, founding Integral Labs. I also spent more time with my family and found myself in a new relationship. And just like 2018, I kept reading, coding, and creating – albeit at a slower pace. More on all this later in the article.

If 2018 was my year of sponge, I’m not sure what I’d call 2019. It was the year where I stopped moving at full force and learned to appreciate that direction is even more important than speed. 2019 was the year where I learned more about what motivates me (and what doesn’t), where I want to be in the long-term, and how I need to invest my time to get there.

I’ll reflect on this change of pace as I look forward to 2020, but first, in true “open” fashion, here’s how I fared on my explicit goals.

2019 Quick Recap

I publicly stated my goals, so I might as well publicly reflect on them (plus a few extras). I’ll be leaving up the 2019 results for a few days, while I await getting my Mac back and then I’ll do a complete open page revamp.

✅ Goals achieved:

• 🌀 Learned illustration
• ✏️ Wrote and built blog to 2k+ subs (goal: 1k)
• 🎤 Spoke at multiple conferences (goal: 1)
• 🔑 Created resources for women in tech
• 💼 Incorporated my own business
• 🍁 Spent a summer with my family

❌ Missed goals:

• 📚 Read 12 books (goal: 24)
• 📈 $378 MRR (goal: $1k)
• 🏃‍♀️ Exercised 169 days (goal: 182 days)
• 💻 1 new coding course (goal: 3 coding courses); coded 89 days vs 125 in 2018
• 💸 Spent $26k (goal: spend <$24k)
• 📹 Didn’t ship projects live (goal: ship 2+ projects live)
• 🚙 Didn’t learn to drive (still can’t 🙃)

🔮 Unexpected happenings:

• 👩‍💻 Left my job at Toptal
• ✍ Wrote 18 articles, with an average of 3500 words each (or 63590 altogether), leading to 395k pageviews
• 📈 Trended on the Hacker News homepage 4 times
• ✈️ Traveled to 14 countries, including 3 new! (South Africa, Turkey, New Zealand). Very cool Nomadlist view
• 👫 A relationship

The Lessons Behind the Goals

Instead of simply stating what I was able to accomplish and what fell short, the more valuable approach would be to share what I’ve learned. Here are my top 5 lessons from 2019:

1. The power of writing

Almost exactly one year ago, I decided to launch my blog. The impetus at the time was simply to distill my thoughts and have a medium to share them. More tangibly, I really just wanted to write this article about remote work. However, something unexpected happened almost immediately: people cared.

To respond to this attention, my blog quickly became a focus throughout my year. I started the year with 0 subscribers. By the new year, I had over 2k people allowing me into their inbox and 395k site pageviews.

Perhaps most rewarding were the connections and opportunities (including my current job), that were due to my decision to launch this thing. This is something I’m proud of.

But the lesson here isn’t about me. It’s simply that this wouldn’t have been possible 30 years ago. In an age of infinite leverage, the ability to share your ideas through mediums like the Internet, is unprecedented. And the best way to do so? Through writing.

Prior to 2019, I was under the impression that there was just too much content out there. I’ve now come to realize that the truth is, there is too much low-quality content out there. When used with care, I see more opportunity than ever in the written word. (If you're interested in launching your own blog, I would very much recommend Ghost)

2. Old habits die hard

I started the year wide-eyed and in South Africa. I wanted to get the travel bug out of me, so that I could spend the rest of the year staying relatively put and ultra-productive. Despite my intentions, I found myself hopping around just as much as ever. What’s more concerning is the fact that I had the same intentions and outcome in 2018.

The choice to continuously be fickle (yes, I’ve grown to believe that being fickle is a choice to not commit to something) has eaten into my productivity and more importantly, my ability to lead the life that I want. Said differently, I’ve consistently prioritized my short-term desires over my long-term goals. But I’m recognizing with more conviction that even though nomading is fun, we all yearn for the same things in life: routine, relationships, and balance. In 2020, I’m choosing to be less fickle and prioritizing these aspects of my life.

3. Career enmeshment

This year, I learned a valuable term and an equally valuable lesson. Google defines enmeshment as “a relationship between two or more people in which personal boundaries are permeable and unclear”. The term career enmeshment was recently coined by Janna Koretz, but is something that I and many others have long experienced.

In 2018, I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to lead a 20-person team at the ripe age of 24. It wasn’t until I went looking for new roles this year when I realized how deeply I defined myself by my title. Instead of searching for work that I found truly motivating, I found myself sifting through other job titles or companies that would give me similar accolades. My career had become my identity. It took me a while to process this and gain the confidence to step away from leadership and explore a new role that would let me refocus on my skills.

4. The delicate balance of monetizing

I had a goal in 2019 to reach $1k MRR. I did not hit this goal and quite frankly, found this the hardest goal to make substantial progress on.

I find my struggles in this area particularly interesting. Why? I’ve helped companies on both sides of this coin: building products and scaling products. For some reason, I’ve struggled to translate these results to my own projects.

When I reflect on this, I think it’s because I hold my own work to a different standard. I’ve been operating off of the mentality that I should only work on things that I’m deeply passionate about. I’m also very protective over what I’m willing to put my name on and conservative in what I'm comfortable a price tag on. At a high-level, think this mentality is mostly good.

However, I have to be honest and say that sometimes I see people working on things that they’re either a) not passionate about or b) not super proud of, but they’re killing it. And at those times, I wonder whether I’m being too restrictive of myself. I have no intentions of launching dropshipping business or joining an MLM scheme, by any stretch, but I’m openly admitting to finding it difficult to find the right balance between sticking to my values and monetizing. I'm not sure if there's a lesson here, but rather something to ponder. We’ll see how this progresses in 2020.

5. Three core priorities

Perhaps the most important lesson of 2019 was one that I wrote about in February, but quickly forgot in the context of my own life.

My first article to go “viral” was You Don’t Need to Quit You Job to Make. The article focuses on the ability for people to work full-time while creating things, but more broadly speaks to the possibility to fashion one’s time more optimally in order to achieve more.

However, it does so under the pretence of being able to focus on three core priorities at a given time. For reference, these were my cited priorities in the article, including my hopes for 2019:

• 2017: Work, Travel, Relationship
• 2018: Work, Learning to Code, Building Side Projects
• 2019: Work, Scaling Side Projects, Sharing Ideas (Writing, Speaking)

I started 2019 with ambition to build a product or two and write for my blog, while still working full-time. It sounded tough, but doable.

As the year went on, so did my appetite to take on more. I wanted to continue learning to code. I wanted to attend and speak at events. I wanted to write weekly instead of monthly. Despite thinking I wanted to slomad, I still found myself hopping around. And in the wake of all this, I changed jobs and entered a relationship, while still wanting to keep up with my exercise and reading goals. I quickly went from having three focal points, to way too many.

Original

• Work, Scaling Side Projects, Sharing Ideas (Writing, Speaking)

Reality

• Work: Transitioning job, team offsite
• Products: Creating Upread, taking another coding course
• Writing: Publishing weekly, growing blog, monetizing
• Other: Speaking, new travels, new relationship

Candidly, I spent a few months spinning my wheels trying to find a solution that would encapsulate all of these goals. I genuinely thought I could.

But even when I was succeeding in one arena, I would feel bad about my progress in others. I would open up my google tracking sheet, only to see that it had been X days since I last coded or I was Y% off my exercise goals. By the end of the year, I came to the uncomfortable realization that I couldn’t just “do it all” and decided to deprioritize most things.

I focused back on three: my new job, my new relationship, and making the most out of the travels I had chosen to take. For a few months, writing, coding, and products were off the map. It somehow both alleviated and induced stress. But, it was the right decision.

That’s led to me consider how I’ll tackle 2020. I still want to make. I still want to write. And just like 2019, there will likely be many other things that fall into my plate. But I’ve learned that KPIs start to lose their importance if too many run in parallel; if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority.

In an effort to find a path forward, I remembered a comment that ironically was posted on the Hacker News submission of the exact same article. At the time, I must admit (as you can tell from my comment), that I didn’t really find it pertinent to my life. But now, I think it’s just as relevant as ever.

The idea is simple: approaching your life in epochs or seasons, so that you can not only focus more effectively on one particular area of your life, but also have peace of mind when you put some things on the backburner. With this concept in mind, I’ll have overarching goals, but will focus on one, maybe two key projects outside of my core work. The rest? It’ll have to wait until the next season.

Looking forward: A New Decade

In 2019, I came to the sad, but freeing realization that I can’t just “do more” or “optimize better” to achieve my long-term goals. Instead, I need to be more realistic and prioritize doing fewer things, but better. In order to get there, these are some areas I’m focusing on:

1.0 Learning to automate

I’ve had a lot of fun coding over the last two years (I can’t believe it’s been that long!), but something that I haven’t focused on enough is automation. I see this as a huge opportunity for me. I know there are repeatable elements to my life, which a computer can do much more effortlessly than I can. The only thing blocking me from accessing this "superpower" is the lack of attention that I’ve dedicated to it. In 2020, that will change.

2. Outsourcing

For things that can’t be automated, some can be outsourced. I recognize that I’m extremely privileged to even have this as an option, but I want to explore it for two reasons. One is simple: to free up my time. The second is less obvious: to learn to give up some control. My decision to outsource isn’t so much about location arbitrage or becoming hyper-efficient, but instead about seeking help and learning  to build something bigger than myself.

I’m constantly impressed by what other people are able to do around me when they trust people with their businesses. I just need to get there mentally. At this point, I’m not entirely sure what I should outsource, but that’s a priority for me to figure out.

“At first, it was hard for me to imagine anyone else being able to do these tasks that seems so ‘proprietary’ to me, but I quickly learned other people could do it, and they could even do it better.” - Pat Walls, 2019 Recap

3. Deprioritizing

Not everything can be automated or outsourced. And unfortunately, I want to do far too many things in life. So across those that I can’t automate or pay to get help with, I need to be more pragmatic about what I can achieve.  In order to deprioritize, I’m minimizing shallow work and focusing on productivity over business.

In his book Deep Work,  Cal Newport comments on a habit that I’ve increasingly faced: using busyness as a proxy for productivity. Many people use busy activities like hitting inbox zero, to convince themselves or those around them that they’re productive. But busyness is not productivity. This surfaces for me personally in surfing Twitter, reading a boatload of email newsletters, or rewriting my todo lists. I make excuses about why these are beneficial to my existence, but in reality, they are distracting me from the things I truly want to create or achieve.

“If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. [If I instead get interrupted a lot] what replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time… there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons.” - Deep Work

In order for me to achieve the things I want, I must no longer trick myself into being productive, but actively deprioritize things that aren’t driving me towards my core goals. As a more concrete example, I’m choosing to completely deprioritize speaking this year.

Another thing that I must admit has warped my sense of productivity is sharing everything openly. When you start building a following and sharing mini-milestones, it’s exciting that there are so many people cheering you along the way. It’s really a beautiful thing. But, it’s often not an accurate reflection of reality. For example, in the last three months, I did nothing especially notable or impressive. I worked and traveled a bit. I wrote zero articles. I built zero products. But I still had people reaching out congratulating me on X, Y, or Z, making me feel like I was productive and contributing throughout the entire period.

I think the pros in sharing openly still outweigh the cons, so I will continue to share, but just try to have a more objective view of my success judged solely by myself.

4. Slowmading

Every year, I tell myself that I’m going to slow down. And each year, regardless of my intentions, I still find myself swept up in nomadic indecision.

But this year, I’m moving in with my partner. Who knows exactly what that will look like and for how long. Some might even say I’m quitting the nomadic life. But I view being able to work remotely as the ability to be exactly where you want to be. And for now, that means a little less on the road, allowing me to focus on other things during the first few seasons of 2020.

5. Taking myself more seriously

The past year or so brought me a lot of unexpected ‘success’. I use the term success because I can’t put my finger on another word that would communicate the attention that many of my projects and articles have gotten. I couldn’t be more thankful. But what has also come from that is a lot of people seeking my advice. In 2019, I tried to respond to everyone and offer help in essentially every scenario. But it was draining and unsustainable.

In 2020, I’m trying to see myself as a professional and say no more often. In some cases, even charge for my services (inspired by Anne-Laure’s consulting page).

Taking myself more seriously also feeds into the types of projects I want to work on. This year, I hope to get started on a full-length book. For a long time, I thought that I wouldn’t write a book until much later in life or perhaps not at all. But, according to Google, a typical book is 90k words. This year, across just 18 articles, I wrote over 63k words, or ⅔ of a book! This makes me realize that with some dedication and focus, a book isn’t outside the realm of possibility, even at this stage of my life.

6. Taking other things less seriously

While I try to take things more seriously in work, I want to take things less seriously in play.

Speaking again to my “unexpected success”, I want to touch on the unexpected part of the phrase. As I built projects or wrote articles at the beginning, no one was watching. And I had a lot of fun expressing myself in boundless ways. I did things because I thought they were great and felt great creating them.

But as they started to get attention, I felt a deep seated pressure to continue on that path. Each article had to be as highly researched as the last and just as profound. I found myself asking the question, ‘What will the response to this article be?’ or ‘Could this article trend on Hacker News?’ instead of asking myself, ‘Do I think this is interesting?’.

In 2020, I want to fall back in love with the things that got me that unexpected attention again. I want to view my passion projects as exactly that: projects that I’m passionate about. The types of activities that I’m excited to have time for, instead of ones that feel like a drain on my day. I want to go down rabbit holes and create projects, even if they are just projects and may never become products.

I look back on 2018 very fondly. Why? There were no expectations. I was just learning and creating. I want to get back to that mentality.

7. Living a little

I remember sitting down in Singapore with a guy I met at a conference earlier this year. We got into the topic of personal development and I explained to him my philosophy of tracking nearly everything. He seemed overwhelmed and quite honestly a bit disturbed by the prospect of tracking things so precisely. At the time, I didn’t really understand his reaction.

But moving into 2020, I think I do. I still want to be tied to results, but also want to focus on some other things that won’t be another number in my spreadsheet. These include:

• Spending more time with my parents
• Investing in my relationship
• Developing a daily yoga practice
• Spending less time on social media
• Smiling more :)

My 2020 Goals

Finally, it’s time to share my tangible goals.

At first, I looked for ways that my 2020 goals could look distinctive from 2019. Surely, if they look the same, that means I’m not growing, right? Well, if I truly believe that being great is just being good repeatably, then that’s exactly what they should look like. I should continue hacking away at the things that I can see myself doing in 2 years, 10 years, or a lifetime.

So, these are some of the goals I hope to tackle this year:

And the first epoch? My blog. I miss writing and have a laundry list of topics to cover. A few goals for “season 1”:

• Biweekly posts
• Grow to 3k subscribers
• Double organic traffic

So that’s a wrap. Here’s to a new decade filled with mini epochs and hopefully a lot more passion in my projects.

Thank you so much to everyone who spends the time following along my journey. It’s a beautiful thing to get to share your life with others.

I’ll be in Bali for the first two months of the year, but then I’ll be heading toward San Diego. If anyone lives around there, I’d love to connect!

‘Til next time.

PS: If you liked this article, you might also enjoy my podcast on all types of things like tip culture, technology people feared, or the the most influential artist you've never heard of, or my latest project.

Edit: Thank you to the 100k people who have read this piece. Writing continuously surprises me in just how far it can reach. Learning to write in a way that will make people listen is a powerful skill that I hope all people gain access to. Happy writing! - SS

If you told me 5 years ago that I would one day lead a 20-person Publications team or have a personal blog that’s read by hundreds of thousands, I would’ve laughed in surprise. Yet somehow, I’ve found myself in that reality. Here we are.

People often ask how I approach writing, so I decided to share this piece to sway the self-conscious writer inside each one of us. I hope it encourages others to develop a practice that enables them to write with confidence, by simply sharing how I’ve designed my own.

“Self-doubt can be an ally. This is because it serves as an indicator of aspiration. It reflects love, love of something we dream of doing, and desire, desire to do it. If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), "Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?" chances are you are.” - The War of Art

Practice Makes Possible

Growing up, English was my least favourite subject by far. In fact, I grew up in Ontario, which mandated that only a single subject must be taken all the way through secondary school. And of course, it was English. I remember thinking﹣as any teenager would﹣that the world was a deeply unfair place. I would happily pile on some additional Calculus or Chemistry, but the thought of another year in English made me want to cry (and probably did at some point).

Anyone that struggles with writing (or any creative pursuit, really) knows that when it doesn’t feel right, it’s not something that you can force. And if you do, you end up with a blank slate covered in word vomit.

But what most people don’t realize is that the resistance to writing is not unlike the resistance to other skills. And the antidote? Practice. Exposure. Iteration.

Practice makes any seemingly impossible task familiar. You can learn to write.

So since the days of braces and locker accessories, I’ve learned to write in a way that isn’t so scary. And the more I write, the more I feel the flywheel effect in action. I hope this article inspires the writer inside each person reading this, through the understanding that writing is a skill that can be acquired through continuous effort, easily accessed by creating a process with less friction.

Writing is Thinking

The first step to becoming “a writer” is acknowledging that no metric defines someone as “a writer”. And that anyone unabashedly claiming to be an expert, is likely far from it. You know what makes you a writer? Writing.

"Each time you write a page, you are a writer. Each time you practice the violin, you are a musician. Each time you start a workout, you are an athlete. Each time you encourage your employees, you are a leader." - Atomic Habits

Writing, just like all else, is a muscle that can be flexed and built up into a habitual process that eventually flows. Because at its core, writing is simple: it’s a method of sharing your thoughts.

What most people don’t realize is that it’s often not actually the writing that is difficult. It’s the thinking behind the writing.

“Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard." - David McCullough

Writing is essentially a robust tool that enables us to clarify and communicate our thoughts. While writing, you are forcing yourself to think critically and exercise parts of your brain that are typically on auto-pilot.  As Einstein once said, “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.” In attempting to formulate a written piece, you are going through the exercise of transforming vague ideas into clarified concepts externally, but also internally.

But what is often overlooked is the fact that having a clarified, unique, and thoughtful point of view greatly reduces the mental load required to write in the first place. So which is the chicken and which is the egg?

"It’s through writing that we exercise our ability to think; they’re not mutually exclusive tasks." - Grammarly

Writing and thinking are two peas in a powerful pod. Critical thinking leads to good writing, which leads to clearer thinking, and so on. By improving your writing, you are also improving your ability to think and vice versa. So then the question then becomes, how does one activate this process?

Reducing Activation Energy

The thinking <> writing (TAW) cycle described above is powerful, but also lofty. If I were to ask you to wake up tomorrow and have a finished article by EOD, I’m diminishing the mental load of you taking on two tasks: (1) the process of ideation and (2) the difficult task of abstracting these concepts into something that does your ideas justice. Almost certainly, one would be sacrificed across this short timeline. Most often, the focus on “producing an article” results in a majority of energy going into the output (2), without properly formulating the “why” behind an article (1), thereby making the writing process more painful overall. It’s the TAW cycle with a whole lot of friction, because you only have one turn around the wheel.

So my solution is simple: I separate the two and exercise the cycle many times over.

It’s extremely rare that I’ll come up with a concept and knock out the piece in one sitting. And I do this for a very specific reason: if I were to hold myself to that standard, I would never even make it to the drawing board. I’ve designed my writing process to embrace the practice of writing (and thinking), with a focus on reducing the activation energy to show up in the first place.

My Writing Process

Writing is by nature, a very personal and subjective process. So, if you take anything away from this article, it is not the specific steps that I’ve identified, but instead an ethos enabling you to craft your own.

To start, I would ask yourself the question, “What environment can I create that will make it most likely for me to show up to this task?”

For me, that has come down to two things:

• Decoupling
• Optimizing for one variable

Decoupling the Writing Process

As mentioned above, I intentionally separate out my process into multiple steps: 6 to be exact (more on this below). I do this to utilize my energy levels optimally, across active and passive states. I don’t always have the mental energy to hard-core execute (active), so I allow myself to constantly and passively conceptualize, without too much pressure. The process is designed such that when I’m ready to enter an active state, like a focused writing session, I’ve already established a clear line of thinking.

Writing Process Steps:

• Ideation - Passive
• Tracking - Active
• Outline - Active
• Idea Arbitrage - Passive
• Research - Active
• Writing - Active

While this ping-pong between passive and active states may seem chaotic to some, it is exactly what enables me to get things done without feeling overwhelmed.

There’s a great tool called Draftback, which essentially lets you “go back in time to look over your own shoulder as you write”.

I use the tool to reflect on my process and understand how I iterate through an article. Naturally, I’ve also used it to consider how I might improve my process.

For example, this article (the one you’re reading), was created over a period of over a month where I would go back and forth between thinking and writing, until I finally had solidified what I was trying to say. It took over 19k revisions.

Another article that I wrote, literally took six months and many, many more writing sessions.

I’m not necessarily encouraging others to iterate this many times, and if anything I’m trying to scale back my edits, but it shows that the writing and thinking process takes time to get right.

Optimizing for One Variable

I’ve learned to accept that you can’t have everything in life. That sentiment permeates into writing.

In my opinion, writing should never be something that you do just to check off of your to-do list. At its core, writing is a mechanism to try to deliver value to others. And over time, I’ve defined that as my core goal.

In order to achieve this, I have to come to terms with trading off other variables like speed. As mentioned, many of my articles take weeks, while others sometimes take months.

This clearly isn’t always to my advantage, but it gives me something to orient around. If I tried to optimize completely across quality, speed, SEO-potential, among other variables, I would get paralyzed. So instead, I focus on one thing: quality.

If you’re in a similar place of liberty to work on articles at your own pace, you may also consider making quality your north star. The point here isn’t that you need to choose the same north star, but to establish one that you form your process around. On that note, let’s jump into my writing process.

How I Write: 6 Steps

Step 1) Ideation: Passive

The first step in my process is intentionally passive. In order to get my TAW loop going, I set an open invitation to my brain to take note of anything interesting. More specifically, I look for anything within the intersection of: (1) interesting, (2) doesn’t exist online in that exact form, and (3) something I can contribute uniquely to.

With the barrier to entry to launching a blog or publish an article these days being so low, there is candidly a lot of crap out there. Before jotting down an idea, I ask myself, “Does this exist on the internet today?” and if not, “Should it?”. If I can answer those questions with confidence, I’ll consider pursuing the piece. For the same reason that I will never drop ship plastic goods that no one needs, I will never publish an article that I don’t truly believe can benefit others.

It’s not just about being considerate. It’s much harder to get attention on an article that is the same as thousands of others on the Internet. It’s also hard to write a good article about something you don’t care about (that’s why writing was such a draining task in school). So you can do yourself, along with the rest of the world, a favour by simply considering, “What is something that I can uniquely contribute?”.

For example, I don’t need to tell the world that remote work is growing﹣we have enough people doing that. But perhaps it would be helpful for me to talk about how someone with a non-technical background might find a remote role. I’ve been through multiple of these roles myself, hired a couple dozen non-technical remote teammates, and have spent years thinking about the topic.

Anything that checks the right boxes will get the TAW cycle started, but I still won’t try to force it. In a few cases, I’ll sit down and write up a full draft. But for most, this step is simply adding the concept in a new Google doc.

What actually goes into the document varies significantly. Sometimes, it’s as little as a single line or link. Below are two examples, where you can see that article concepts often start out super basic and often unclear.

These ideas for these articles come from absolutely everywhere. Conversations, books and articles, personal experiences, and random Google searches have all generated inspiration for pieces.

You know when you’re younger and someone disagrees with you, so they ask you to rattle off examples supporting your argument? Put on the spot, you feel stuck and unable to think of any, despite knowing there are many. The same would be true if I asked you to come up with 10 great article topics on the spot. Allowing yourself to catch onto signals passively is the most sure route to accumulating a lovely cabinet of concepts.

For example, the impetus behind some of my articles came from the following:

Step 2) Tracking: Active

The next step is tracking, which is basically just adding the idea to my ongoing spreadsheet. But more importantly, I’ll typically take the opportunity to quickly do some keyword research. This is for two reasons:

1. I want to see if the article has the potential to rank. Even though SEO is a fancy word for a not-so-fancy industry, keyword research is essentially a mechanism to see if this is something people are actually looking for. If there is no search volume, yet I still think it can deliver value, I’ll write it anyway. But I want to be cognizant of this: Google processes billions of queries and if there is literally no search volume, I need to be able to justify why this might be.
2. I also do keyword research at this stage to spot secondary keywords that may influence the outline I create next. I make sure to do it at this stage, because I’m not a fan of keyword stuffing, but I do believe in Google is a big data mine to understand what people want to know. If I incorporate those signals into the outline, I’m not only more likely to bring in more traffic, but genuinely deliver a better article serving people’s needs.

I could and probably will write an entire article (or 10) on how I approach SEO research, but for the purpose of this article, I’ll just share that I use these tools: Ahrefs, Keyword Planner, and Keywords Everywhere.

Step 3) Outline - Active

At this point, I’ll utilize the mix of my (rough) ideas and SEO research to create an outline. It’s always in bullet-point form and will have approximately 3-6 major headings, with sub-points underneath.

It’s important to start the outline at this stage, as this will set the stage for the next step of passive “idea arbitrage”.

Step 4) Idea Arbitrage - Passive

After creating an outline, I enter the fourth stage: Idea Arbitrage﹣my personal favourite. Despite the ridiculous name I’ve chosen for this stage, I ultimately feel as though this is the part of my process which makes my articles stand out.

In this stage, I simply let the article sit. I let the creative juices in my passive brain marinate and be stimulated by just about anything.

If I run into an interesting tweet or quote or tidbit from an article, I’ll make sure to add it to the right outline. I do this for literally weeks or even months, until I feel like I’ve crafted a unique point of view.

To augment this process, I love using two tools: Readwise and Weava highlighter.

• Readwise syncs all of my Kindle quotes (now over 1000 highlights across 20+ books). Prior to Readwise, I literally would take time and type these into a Google sheet. But now, it’s a seamless “Sync highlights” click and a delightful UI to sift through them. I’ll typically go through new quotes monthly and add them to the respective outlines that are in the passive idea arbitrage stage.
• Similarly, when I am reading an online article and a particular quote sticks out to me, I’ll utilize the Weava highlighter to store the thought and return to them periodically. In addition to augmenting my writing process, this practice helps with reading retention.

An important note: when I first started doing this, I would just blindly toss ideas into Evernote, but that required a whole lot of cleanup when I started writing the piece. With the new process of setting up the outline from the outset, I’m instead actively filing this information where needed. It’s my own personal Dewey Decimal system, so that when it comes down to writing a piece, I have a beautiful library to operate off of.

Step 5) Research - Active

Often, a piece needs more than a few tweets or quotes to truly have authority. So, I typically augment an article with at least a few hours of active research. This stage closely mimics the research that one would do to write a college essay, but this only happens once I’ve done quite a bit of passive ruminating, so that I have a clear POV of what I want to convey. I thoroughly enjoy this phase, as it allows me to “write to learn”; to build my articles off of not just my intuition, but the amazing work of others.

“To write a great book, you must first become the book.”  - Atomic Habits

Step 6) Writing - Active

Finally, it’s time for the hard part: writing.

I’ll typically only sit down to really craft a piece once I have at least a few thousand words of what I’ve started to call “notes ‘n quotes”. The reason I do this is simple: I am not a natural writer. Putting words down on paper sometimes comes naturally to me, but often it does not. And that means that in order for me to consistently write, I need to make it as easy as possible for me to build the habit; I need to lower the activation energy to start.

“When scientists analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control, it turns out those individuals aren’t all that different from those who are struggling. Instead, “disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control.” - Atomic Habits

If I’m sitting down to a blank slate of pixels, you better bet my brain sets off an alarm that “This will be hard and grueling and you can’t do this, Steph!”. But if instead, I’m sitting down to an outline that I’ve been passively ruminating on, that’s supported by concrete examples, it doesn’t seem so bad. I’m effectively approaching the writing phase, with maybe 7/10 of the work already completed.

Had I decided to write an article from scratch in a day, not only would the end result be more shallow, it would freak me the f*** out. And quite frankly, I just wouldn’t do it. In effect, I’m trying to be patient with my own psyche and set up an environment that makes me most likely to get started.

“There's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't, and the secret is this: It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write.” - The War of Art

When I am struggling to put words on paper, I’ll ask myself the following questions:

• How would I explain this to a friend? This helps me discern whether I’ve actually spent enough time thinking through the core concepts. Remember, writing is thinking.
• What specifically are you getting hung up on? I find that sometimes I can get caught up in certain problematic routines. For example, if I created an outline with a ton of info, sometimes I struggle to strip some of it out. If I reflect and catch myself doing this, I will more readily cut things out.

This is the only phase where I will set time limits. Not because I have deadlines, but because I’m trying to improve my “finishing muscle”. To this day, I still have over a dozen articles that I almost finished, but did not. And there’s a clear course across all of them. I got maybe 80-90% there, but since I didn’t finish them completely, the Lindy effect only becomes more material.

So while not always possible, once I start the active writing process (Step 6), I try to close out the article in that particular session, get my little hit of dopamine, and then move on.

“Resistance is most powerful at the finish line” - The War of Art

Personal Disclaimer

It’s important to note that this is my personal style of researching and writing, built upon the constraints (or lack thereof) within my life; most markedly that this is a personal blog. I don’t have deadlines or an editor to impress. Instead, my north star is delivering articles I’m proud of. In all honesty, this process almost certainly would not work in a paid writing environment solely due to turnaround expectations, but as an independent writer, I love the flexibility it gives me to create content that I'm happy to put my name on.

It’s also worth noting that because I’ve been doing this for a while, I have over 50 pending articles at some stage in the process. I estimate that for every article I publish, a few new article ideas spring to mind, so I’m never really jaded or in search of something to write. I view this entire process as a way to formulate, process, and share my ideas, but I’ve found that a byproduct has been that it helps me think more clearly. As I go through the weeks or months of dwelling on the core takeaways of a given article, I learn to transform what are sometimes vague and lacking concepts into tactile, digestible pieces.

As such, I’ve started to use the very process for a book that I hope to write: Thinking in Curves. It’s currently in the Idea Arbitrage state (and been there for months). :)

Just Do It

In hopes that you will go out there and write, I encourage you to focus on the process and not the outcome. Many of your articles, as many of mine are, will be flops. Even some of your best may never get noticed.

The best way to improve your writing skills is to write (and to write a lot). If you’re focused on a process that helps you build new skills, most notably your ability to parse and process information tactfully, you cannot lose.

With any skill that you hope to acquire, there is no magic moment. It’s a never-ending process of going from good to great. And certainly with writing, a post will never write itself, so it’s up to you to keep yourself accountable.

At the end of the day, there are few things more rewarding than looking back at a collection of work that you’ve delivered to the world that is indeed all your own. So get out there, design a process that works for you, and push forward with no intention of an expiry date.

“The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work.” - The War of Art

Recommended Reading:

• The War of Art
• Atomic Habits
• The Power of Habit

Recommended Research Tools:

• Weava highlighter
• Readwise
• Draftback
• Google Sheets

Recommended SEO Tools:

• Ahrefs
• Keyword Planner
• Keywords Everywhere

PS: If you liked this article, I have a feeling you'll enjoy this podcast episode about rethinking productivity and how to get more done.

PPS: You might also enjoy other episodes about all types of things like tip culture, technology people feared, or the the most influential artist you've never heard of on my podcast or my latest project.

“She successfully negotiated for her life’s happiness.” - Stuart Diamond, Getting More: How You Can Negotiate to Succeed in Work and Life

I’m excited to finally be letting the world know that I’ve moved onto a new opportunity after three years at Toptal. I've founded Integral Labs, a company that will allow me to work more closely with many companies on a variety of projects. For those wondering, I'll still be fully remote.

While this article touches on my personal thoughts and experiences, I hope it’ll provide a framework for others looking to make important and often difficult career decisions, in a world where change is the only constant.

Moving On

Career shifts always feel monumental. These instantaneous pivot points feel like they’ll forever change the course of your life and in many ways, they do.

This particular decision held similar weight, but somehow felt different. It didn’t feel like I was heading into a snowstorm with summer tires, but that I had actually been preparing for this change slowly, but surely, for the last three years.

The outside world only sees the most dramatic event rather than all that preceded it. - James Clear, Atomic Habits

The last time I "quit my job" was in 2016. It took me 10 months from the moment I started looking to land a role that I was happy with. This time, it took weeks from the day I mentally decided that it was time to move on. In 2016, I cried out of overwhelm as I gave my notice. This time, I made my decision with confidence. In 2016 time, I took whatever I could get. This time, I negotiated multiple contracts. And this time, I even had multiple companies trying to entice me to choose them.

This pivot has given me the opportunity to look back and assess what has changed. The short version is: a lot. The longer version is that I’ve taken a different approach to my career. In 2016, I felt stuck. I felt like I was digging my way out of the very path that I had built for myself.

Now, I’ve recognized that life is always changing and to stop viewing it as a linear path, but instead a continuous series of experiments. There is no longer an end-goal, other than the constant pursuit of learning and minimization of regret. While there’s still a long way to go, this approach has given me more opportunities and confidence than I could’ve ever imagined.

And upon reflection, I can trace it back to the distinct realization that in life, “you grow or you die”. Luckily, I spent the last three years growing myself even when no one was asking and took control of my future, because no one else would.

If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will. - Essentialism

This article is about my journey and evolution in the complexity that is one’s career, but I hope it also provides a framework for others to consider how they might “unstick” themselves and find confidence in their own unique path, through the approach of continuous iteration.

Inevitable Iteration

During my 3 years at Toptal, I was lucky enough to wear many hats. I had two official titles, but throughout the years I also had 5 direct managers and worked with hundreds across the organization. Things were always in flux. And throughout that flux, I also learned to be in flux.

As I picked up new skills out of necessity, I started to associate skill acquisition with opportunity. The more I stood up to the plate to learn, the more I was rewarded with additional responsibility. I could feel the cause-effect relationship being set it motion, and pushed it as far as it could go. That subliminal relationship ended up being one of the most powerful lessons that I’ve learned: opportunity is often present, but almost always hidden. It must be seized, and in many cases created. And while these ideas may be found in some textbooks, I think they can only truly be digested through practice.

In effect, the act of constantly iterating helped me recognize that opportunity wouldn’t show up in front of me. I had to iterate in thoughtful, but not always linear ways, to uncover opportunity that would never have been dropped on my doorstep.

Bloomberg cites that the average American career includes 15 job changes and that perhaps more importantly, getting to the C-suite (if that’s your goal), is no longer a “linear pursuit”. They use the metaphor of instead climbing a tree, through adding branches in the form of skills, in order to reach the top. The more branches, the higher the likelihood you’ll get there. The sturdier the branches, the higher the confidence you have to reach the top.

“Younger professionals approaching a career pivot—even a major one—ought not to think of it as a one-time “do-over” but as part of a new type of professional path in which the only constant will be change." - Jay Liddell

LinkedIn further corroborates this, by indicating that career switching happens much earlier, with people pivoting in their 20s and 30s, rather than their 40s or 50s.

But keep in mind that career switching doesn’t need to be black or white. Despite being at the same company for 3 years, I feel like I went through multiple career switches, even though it didn't always warrant an official title change. Instead, I chose to leverage the dynamism of my early roles to learn as much as possible, showing up every single day to a new problem. If you don’t have the ability to introduce this into your role, you must look outward.

Becoming Anti-fragile at Work

The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit. We don't just put off our lives today; we put them off till our deathbed. - Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

As I started to associate constant change with constant opportunity, I made an explicit decision to make learning my top priority; my north star. And soon, I would view this response to constant change as anti-fragility.

Nassim Taleb coined the term anti-fragility as “beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the anti-fragile gets better.”

Life continuously teaches you a lesson: change is the only constant. Each time you think you’re “on the right path”, life gives you a kick in the nuts, with a reminder that you still have much to learn. Battling the randomness of life will only create additional roadblocks for you. If instead you choose to orient around what you can change, through diversifying your skillset and experience, you are indeed learning to become anti-fragile. So when the world gives you a shock, you’re not just ready, but built to embrace the hit.

My first role at Toptal was on their growth team. Our mandate was vague, but extremely straight-forward: “grow revenue up and to the right”. We were trained to distribute risk and find opportunity where others weren’t expecting; to iterate until something worked, and then double down. As I learned to experiment effectively, I found parallels between my role in scaling the company and my ability to scale myself.

That concept took on a life of its own and is still evolving. But there have been two big pillars of this evolution so far: regret minimization and persistent skill acquisition.

Regret Minimization

I think many people feel stuck in their roles and perhaps their lives. Sometimes this is due to their inability to shoulder risk. But unfortunately, risk is a part of life.

If you take average risks you will, by definition, get average results. This is true both in business and in life. So if you tailor your life around the status quo, you become fragile; brittle to the monotony of an average life. When the market shifts, you shift. When a skill becomes obsolete, so do you.

Instead of minimizing risk, I instead like Jeff Bezos’ pursuance of regret minimization. Of the paths that you can take, which path will most likely result in the least regret later in life?

In targeting regret minimization, you are inherently handling risk minimization across both your current and future states. And that’s the key differential. Most people feel they can shoulder the risk of their current state, because they’re already living it, yet struggle to stomach new risk. I would encourage those people to ask themselves the question, “What would you do to acquire this [role, partner, opportunity, etc], if you didn’t already have it?”.

One leader I worked with admitted to staying at a company five years too long. Why? Because he was so busy in the company he didn’t take time to decide whether he should be at the company. - Greg McKeown, Essentialism

It’s scary to take something in your life that’s average, or even good, and replace it with the unknown. Humans deviate from risk like it’ll will kill them, when in reality, the more common “killer” is staying still. Parallel to cooking food in a frying pan, people get burned if they don’t move. If you don’t know how to leave a bad situation, you stay there and burn. If you are oiled up to move when the time is right, you turn golden.

The ability to choose cannot be taken away or even given away—it can only be forgotten. - Greg McKeown, Essentialism

When faced with a decision like switching or leaving a job, I’ve started to look for pockets of opportunity via the simple question, “Where will you learn the most?”. It’s nice to get paid (and nicer to be paid well), but it’s even nicer to stretch and come out of a role further ahead than where you started. This will put you in a position of significant leverage over those who spent that same time—often years—plugging and playing, only to find they’re not sure where they can go next.

The professional tackles the project that will make him stretch. - Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

By designing around regret minimization, I’ve tried to take a more broad view of risk. Is it risky to leave this job? Sure, but it’s also risky to not explore other opportunities out there. If I never try, I’ll never know, and therefore I’ll lose out on the opportunity to gather more data for the experiment that is my life.

“Some departments at NASA, for instance, were overhauling themselves by deliberately instituting organizational routines that encouraged engineers to take more risks. When unmanned rockets exploded on takeoff, department heads would applaud, so that everyone would know their division had tried and failed, but at least they had tried.” - Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit

Saying Goodbye to "Leadership" (For Now)

Part of my confrontation with regret minimization was deciding to step away from leadership, at least for now.

For those who don’t know, I spent the last year and a half leading a team. I learned a lot about leadership, people, and processes along the way. But unfortunately, I felt my skills atrophying and despite trying my best to lead by example, I found myself spending the majority of my time leading, and no longer doing.

I must be clear that I’m very grateful to have been given the opportunity to lead a large team so early in my career. Partially because I have now tasted it, and no longer have this lofty goal in my head that I could’ve spent my whole career trying to achieve. I now know exactly what leadership entails and while I still have much to learn, I also can move onto other things with a clearer mind and motive.

Sometimes this is impossible because people can become so addicted to leadering that they resist any attempt to lower the amount of it they do. - Venkatesh Rao

It would be a lie if I said I didn’t hesitate to give up my title and my perceived value. Once being considered “an executive” and getting to lead a team of ~20 certainly gave a nice boost to my ego. And sometimes I still get a dopamine hit when I get a LinkedIn InMail request from a hopeful candidate to join my previous team. But those moments are fleeting.

I’ve learned to break away from the potentially toxic association between my perceived value and the title that sits on my profile, and instead make decisions around what truly enables me to continuously improve and uplevel myself﹣not what impresses others. I've also come to appreciate that effective leadership comes in many forms and often not from those flaunting the title.

I'm excited to get back into spreadsheets, grow the heck out of new products, and have fun while doing it. And if I am truly minimizing regret and not risk, I will regret optimizing for external validation (a title), versus building more branches of my tree.

The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

Once I decided that I wanted to start moving into a new role, I was a lot more intentional than the last time around.

This time, I specifically wrote out what I wanted. What does my ideal future look like? I used this to guide my decisions, but with one constraint: I tried not to look too far into the future.

“It’s no longer about finding a career for the rest of your life, but what could you do for the next few years—and what would you learn.”  - Arianne Cohen

I’ve consistently found that basing decisions out of hypotheticals too far into the future never ends up faring well. Change is constant, including people and plans. And the further out we look, the more caught up we get in the “what ifs”—most of which would never pan out.

• What if this company goes public?
• What if my boss really does give me a promotion?
• What if X, Y, Z problem gets fixed?

Instead of trying to project where something would take me in 10 years, I tried to envision what would be best for me now. What in the short-term would I regret not pursuing?

• Which opportunity would I want to show up to tomorrow?
• With which people would I want to spend every day with for the next year?
• What will I most certainly learn in this role over the next few months?

Promises or hypotheticals are nice to play mental gymnastics with, but the reality of what I would be living was more concrete and actionable. Instead of getting stuck trying to over-optimize for the future, I recognized that no perfect decision exists, particularly across longer timelines and more importantly, the decision I needed to make should be based in today.

Finally Finding Leverage

The final puzzle piece in my journey was a change in my confidence.

Let’s first acknowledge that applying to jobs sucks. It is an open invite for imposter syndrome to kick back in because you don’t have specific skill #18 or unprepared interviewer never called you back. That’s exactly why I decided to take a different approach this time around: I applied to roles when I wasn’t even searching. And by applying, I don’t mean sending in my resume, but by subtly letting the world know what I could do.

I encourage others to do this through side hustles or projects that allow them to learn, while also working towards some passion of theirs. In fact, I believe the biggest contribution to my happiness and success over the past year has not been my full-time job or my title, but instead my side projects, including this blog. Many millennials are finding the same, according to Bloomberg.

“A third strategy, however, involves adopting “side hustles” that aren’t necessarily related to your full-time gig. Anything from developing software to giving gardening advice to running your own nonprofit, such extracurricular activities will help strengthen other muscles—and could make you more desirable to other employers.” - Arianne Cohen

By working towards my skills on my own terms, I had unknowingly made myself more hireable. So the second I opened myself up to the concept of leaving, the world did too. In fact, I had 3 offers on my doorstep within weeks of my resolve, without having to publicly announce anything. All three of them were inbound and people who had seen my work online.

Not everyone will have the same luck and it took a great deal of work to get here, but the idea is that it’s important to spend the time becoming the person that someone would want to hire, even when you're not actively searching.

A Constant Evolution

If you’ve gotten to the end of this piece, hopefully you have the seed that you need to start iterating towards your goals, which will be the fuel to becoming anti-fragile. This is a constant evolution, simply because there is no end. Instead, I encourage people to orient around learning and moving in the right direction, instead of some arbitrary title or checkpoint years in the future. Even with my new venture, I see this as a continuum of this adventure, where I'm excited to learn from a new set of smart people.

"Never forget: This very moment, we can change our lives. There never was a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our destiny."  - Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

PS: If you liked this article, you might also enjoy my podcast on all types of things like tip culture, technology people feared, or the the most influential artist you've never heard of, or my latest project.

Recommended Reading:

• Give and Take
• Getting More: How You Can Negotiate to Succeed in Work and Life
• Originals
• Drive
• Essentialism

I love the Internet. It does this magical thing where it takes people millions of miles away and connects them. Like you (whoever is reading this article) and I, through a shared medium; in this case, this article.

It gives many people who will never venture outside of their physical borders, insight into what else might be out there in the world.

While once a person would be exposed to perhaps a few hundred people over the course of their entire life, now each and every person with a smartphone in their pocket and a social network sending them way too many notifications each day is exposed to millions of people. Hundreds of millions. - Colin Wright

I’ve been lucky enough to grow up with the Internet and build one world through it. But I’ve also been lucky enough to explore much of the physical world and travel to more places than many people would hope to in their lifetime.

Yet no matter how much I travel, whether it be across physical borders or to new communities on the web, I consistently run into one wall: my bias. Sometimes conscious, often unconscious, sometimes certainly negative, while other times resoundingly positive﹣I’ve come to learn that many of my biases come simply from where and how I grew up.

For a long time, I lazily chose to resolve that there were just too many microcosms in my life to properly analyze or derive tangible understanding from. It was easy to take the stance “I am who I am”, instead of evaluating what precursors continuously shape my perspective.

One of these often-overlooked influencing functions over one’s life is language. A majority of language is shared across borders, but upon traveling more, I’ve become fascinated by the things that are in fact, not shared. The words that don’t translate.

Eunoia: Beautiful Thinking

Around a year ago, I decided to aggregate a list of these untranslatable words into a project called Eunoia. Eunoia itself is one of those words, meaning “a well mind; beautiful thinking”, derived from ancient Greek. (Fun fact: It also happens to be the shortest word in the English language that contains all six vowels.)

I built Eunoia during a 24h startup challenge, while live-streaming with people from all over the globe. In the spirit of digital collaboration, we crowd-sourced the seed data of about a hundred words. Since then, Eunoia has grown as a database to over 500 words across 50 languages and 50 tags, and has been viewed by over 20k people, across over 150 countries. If you'd like to explore immediately, hop directly to the Eunoia or my 30 favourites below.

Eunoia has become the vehicle for me to become fascinated with the diversity of untranslatable words, ranging from the familiar (think: Nintendo and Ubuntu) to the lesser-known. But perhaps more importantly, I’ve learned that each of these words offers a window to understand different cultures, which can influence anything from the way you make decisions to the habits you form.

By the end of this article, I hope you’ll also have a newfound appreciation of how language closely intertwines with culture, and also how these two partners impact each of our own unique wiring.

Have You Heard?

So, what exactly are untranslatable words? These are words so unique, that they have no direct equivalent in other languages. You’ve probably heard of a few of these before, without even knowing. I bet many people have happily played Mario Kart or installed Linux without realizing that Nintendo and Ubuntu were two of these untranslatable words.

These words, past their initial intrigue, offer us a looking glass into specific cultures. After all, for a culture to come up with a word, something must happen often enough. And for it not to exist in other cultures, it must not have passed that intangible threshold. This very concept means that with untranslatables, we very likely experiencing a distinctive feature of a culture; intricacies.

“What do you do when you can’t express yourself with a given set of words? Well, if it comes up enough, you come up with your own.”

For example, in Persian, there is a term for “a camel that won't give milk until her nostrils have been tickled". This word simply wouldn’t and hasn’t developed where I grew up in Canada, because it isn’t encountered frequently enough. Similarly, bowing is such a precise science for the Japanese, that they’ve created an array of words for the practice. Other cultures have come up with entire mini-languages, like the Inuit with over 30 words for snow and the Albanians with 27 different words for moustache.

To give you a better sense of the beauty in these untranslatables, here is a snapshot of a few of my favourites. You’ll find a longer list at the end of the article and you can always explore the full list at Eunoia. Perhaps you’ll find, as I do, that some of the words seem to resonate with their origins.

• Friluftsliv (Norwegian): “Free air life,” signifying a fundamental understanding of the positive impact of being in nature
• Gökotta (Swedish): To rise at dawn in order to go out and listen to the birds sing
• Arbejdsglæde (Danish): Literally "work happiness"; the feeling of happiness provoked by a satisfying job
• Yugen (Japanese): A profound, mysterious sense of the beauty of the universe…and the sad beauty of human suffering
• Torschlusspanik (German): The fear that time is running out on achieving life goals
• Ellipsism (English): A sadness that you'll never be able to know how history will turn out

A Looking Glass

With a single untranslatable word, some may get brief insight into a specific feature of its origin. But what happens when you aggregate hundreds of these? As someone who loves data, I wanted to find out.

I took it upon myself to classify the 500+ words in the database. I must admit that this analysis isn’t without fault. The labeling was at best subjective and at worst inconsistent. The database isn’t what I would call robust at 500 entries. But I wanted to share the results, because I think they provide a foundation for the key point I’m trying to convey in this article.

When I started to look at the data, a few things stood out. At the very least, certain stories emerged. For example, Northern European countries are often regarded as some of the happiest people in the world. This showed up. Certain cultures seem to have more negative or adverse terms. Others were more focused on beauty or nature or love.

While the analysis is certainly not deterministic, it invites us to spot trends in the fringes of these languages. I invite you to explore these yourself by going through any of the specific languages on Eunoia, like Japanese to see if anything stands out to you. Without too closely targeting any individual data point, let’s further consider what untranslatable words can teach the rest of us.

How Languages Impact Your Environment

Although many of the untranslatable words have no practical applications, I do think that they provide us a basis from which to learn.

Consider first the concept of language. There are over 7000 languages in the world, differing in form across vocabulary, but also velocity, sentence structure, and much more. Humans learn language before we even learn to walk, and this establishes our ability to communicate and contribute to the world. We often think of language as a means to an end, but rarely take the time to consider whether language in itself is influencing our thoughts, not just enabling the sharing of them.

Let’s further consider the plausibility that the relationship between language <> thought <> culture is not linear or uni-directional, but instead a virtuous cycle. In fact, this was hypothesized by Edward Sapir in 1929 and then furthered by Benjamin Worff. Although controversial and often disputed, the Sapir-Worff hypothesis or linguistic relativity, argues that the “structure of a language determines a native speaker’s perception and categorization of experience”. Others have communicated this by saying that language is a filter, enhancer, or framer of perception and thought.

“Language is a map in itself. Our experience is shaped by the words we use. How words shape their experience of the world.” - Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F***

Allow me to try convincing you that although language is likely not deterministic, it can have an impact on the way you think, the way you learn, the habits you pick up, and the decisions you make﹣especially if we don’t actively try to expand our horizons past that which we’ve been served.

“The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same worlds with different labels attached” - Edward Sapir

What are Words?

Have you ever considered what a “word” is?

The definition of a word is: a single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing, used with others (or sometimes alone) to form a sentence and typically shown with a space on either side when written or printed.

Words allow us to take something we experience, ranging in complexity, and translate it to another human (or ourselves) in familiar terms. We often don’t even notice this phenomenon happening. For example, instead of saying the “the protein filament that grows from the follicles on your body”, you’ll just say “hair” and other people understand what you’re talking about.

“Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon the absolute truth.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

As aforementioned, we create these words once they pass a certain threshold of importance. The invisible Pareto principle is active, where we likely have created words for the twenty percent of possible situations that make up 80% of our collective experience. Once concepts pass a threshold of need, words will naturally be created to fill the void. We can liken this to the concept of doing things manually and only automating when it happens often enough.

But consider the implications of us codifying experience into words. We are taking the intricacies of something much more nuanced and parsing it into something much simpler. And even though we have hundreds of thousands of words to convey the diversity of our experience and thought, we are still removing a layer.

“The claim isn't that it's impossible to have a thought unless you have language for it, but rather that having language for something makes it easier. It's a close relative of Kolmogorov Complexity and a variety of theorems from machine learning regarding hypothesis classes - different languages have more or less effective ways to express the same concept, and choosing a language with better notation for a given topic can make that topic easier to handle.” - @saulrh

Speaking in Colour

Let’s remind ourselves that colour is a continuous wavelength, despite our vocabulary bucketing it into labels. Even though our biological make-up allows us to see millions of colours, we only articulate a few. We don’t say wavelength 534nm or RGB(52, 235, 85), but instead green. Or in other cases, pink. Or maybe we add an additional adjective like bright purple.

Russian utilizes 12 basic terms to represent colour. In English, we typically reach for 11: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, orange, pink, purple and gray. If you’re someone that interacts with colours often like an artist, by which differentiating between them becomes an essential part of your life, you may instead actively utilize dozens of these terms. Words like periwinkle, taupe, cyan become part of your immediate vocabulary. Our experiences allow us to see “shades of grey” that were always there, but never highlighted or categorized.

By contrast, the Berinmo language (Papua-New Guinea) has five colours, Tsimane (Bolivian Amazon) has three, Dani (Papua-New Guinea) operates with only two. Dani’s spectrum is composed solely of mili and mola, cold and warm colours, respectively.

The most compelling study about the relationship between colour and language was published by Jules Davidoff, which studied the Himba tribe in Namibia. They have five colour groupings:

• Serandu: reds, browns, oranges, and some yellows.
• Dambu: variety of greens, reds, beige and yellows.
• Zuzu: most “dark” colours, like black, dark-red, dark-purple, dark-blue.
• Vapa: some yellows and white.
• Buru: a collection of greens and blues.

Since the Himba tribe doesn’t differentiate between blue and green in the same way, as they both fall in “buru”, they were found to distinguish between the two. Interestingly enough, they are instead able to parse differences between greens that a Westerner may think is identical.

In the below image, there is one square that differs from the others in both circles. It's also in the same place in both circles of squares. Due to the way the Himba tribe labels colours, they were actually able to spot the unique green square on the left relatively easily. However, they had much more difficulty doing so on the right-hand side.* To them, the dambu outlier on the left-hand side stood out like a sore thumb, in the same way that the blue square stands out for most people reading this article. It's mind-blowing to most individuals that operate off of green and blue labeling, but to them, it's a matter of buru and dambu.

*Note: This study has been debunked, but I've left it in this article as I think there are still elements to learn from. Even if it's as simple as learning that the world doesn't think in the same colors as we do. While we have 12 colors, the Dani only have two.

By the way, if you find this stuff interesting, you should read up on the origins of the colour blue.

Time: Another Social Construct

Let’s consider another example: time. Time, similar to colour, is a social construct. Something that certainly exists, but is made tangible and acted upon through humans’ ability to communicate it. Many mammals can see colour and might have some vague awareness of time, but humans have created language to communicate and discuss these concepts at a deeper level. However, similar to colours, the way humans communicate time is not always equivalent or universal.

If you grew up with English as your first language, as I did, you probably can relate to three dimensions of time: past, present, and future. This seems obvious and almost factual if you were brought up in this frame of mind.  Now consider that in Mandarin, there are no verb tenses or conjugation. And even more notably, in Yimas (Papua New Guinea) there are actually not three, but instead 8 tenses: three present tenses, three past tenses, and two future tenses.

Present tenses, for example, are distinguished by their “level of completed action”:

• Present perfective = completed events
• Present imperfective = ongoing events
• Present habitual = regularly scheduled and occurring events

It would be naive to believe that exposure to these intricacies didn’t have at least some impact on our approach to thinking or perceiving. In fact, Keith Chen has put together research which indicates that speakers of certain languages which “encode the future and present separately behave more recklessly with respect to their health and money”.

There are many similar parallels in other aspects of our life, which many of us assume are comparable across cultures. Korean, for example, has 7 speech levels depending on who you’re talking to, while the Vietnamese have 18 words for “you”. Language doesn’t dictate what you’re allowed to think, but can be an invisible filter on what you pay attention to.

Outliers: Optimizing Your Brain Cache

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, offers us some additional insight into how language can inconspicuously have tangible impact on outcomes.

Gladwell explains that Chinese-speaking children tend to learn counting earlier than their English-speaking counterparts, simply because Chinese numbers are more “regular and transparent”. Eleven, for example, is literally “ten one” in Mandarin, feeding directly into a system for quick mental math. Moreover, their ability to recite a series of 7 consecutive numbers had a higher success rate, due to the simple fact that in Mandarin, they fit within the two seconds of dependable brain retention.

“And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers—4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 7, 6—right almost every time because, unlike English, their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds.” - Outliers

Similarly, he identified that certain Australian languages lend to better space orientation, due to the languages having “absolute spatial deictics”. Even in darkness, their keen sense of direction can identify north from south, as they’re accustomed to saying “the object to the south” or “that person to the north”, instead of simplifying to “that”. The requirement to be aware of direction in order to communicate effectively has this embedded in their prioritized consciousness or “brain cache”.

To reiterate, language does not have deterministic outcomes; English-speaking children are not guaranteed to learn math at a slower rate, but it would be doing ourselves a disservice to completely ignore the ability of language to draw focus or attention to certain aspects of our lives.

The Power of Habit: Emotional Granularity

Now let’s consider that although the impact of language is often subtle, it permeates our every day. And without an intentional awareness of it, it can have significant impacts on our lives, through the formation of habits.  

“Habits are powerful, but delicate. They can emerge outside our consciousness, or can be deliberately designed. They often occur without our permission, but can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts. They shape our lives far more than we realize—they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them.” - Charles Duhigg, the Power of Habit

Charles Duhigg, author of the Power of Habit, wisely identified that in fact, a community was simply a “giant collection of habits occurring among thousands of people that, depending on how they’re influenced”. In the same book, he reminds us that habits often “emerge without our permission”, the same way that language can influence our lives, without our active consent. Now, this isn’t some big cautionary tale, as most of the time the intricacies of language are not harmful, and perhaps just slight changes that enable the diversity of culture that we need in the world.

The recommendation here is simply to take a step back and consider the shaping influence of language and analyze how language may be impacting our lives, through habits, for better or for worse.

Lisa Feldman Barret, author of How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, has performed research that shows that our ability to label our emotions can greatly impact our ability to effectively process them. She explains that “Emotion vocabulary is a bit like a directory, allowing you to call up a greater number of strategies to cope with life”, emphasizing that a person’s emotional granularity can have tangible benefits on their ability to respond to those emotions.

Consider once more that the language that we have at our disposal is the language we have day in and day out. It helps us convey our emotions, but can also enable . and feed our emotions. The cyclical nature of emotions can drive us into places we never expected and often the end to these cycles lies in being able to render an explanation of that emotion: to label it. So when you’re stressed that you’re running out of time to achieve your life goals, label it “torschlusspanik”. Or, if you experience the fear that everything has been done, think “vemödalen”.

Translating the Untranslatable

So what’s the takeaway here? I think untranslatable words offer us the opportunity to expand our horizons, through simply learning about and questioning that which we were not previously exposed to.

“The feelings we have learned to recognise and label are the ones we notice – but there’s a lot more that we may not be aware of. And so I think if we are given these new words, they can help us articulate whole areas of experience we’ve only dimly noticed.” - Tim Lomas

What can we learn about how we can find success or perhaps even more valuable, happiness, through the pursuit of Ikigai; a concept without presence in other languages?

Similarly, what can we learn from the Danish term Arbejdsglæde? Literally meaning “work happiness”; a concept completely foreign in nature to some, but clearly common enough in Denmark for the Danes created a term for it.

On the other end of the spectrum, how can we learn about the state of humanity through the Japanese word Karoshi, meaning “overwork death”, attributed to the widespread occurrence of people literally dying on the job?

Or perhaps Gökotta, a Swedish term, meaning “to rise at dawn in order to go out and listen to the birds sing”. Is it possible that the simple fact that there is indeed a word for this makes it more likely for the Swedes to incorporate this act into their daily lives? I don’t have all the answers, but I want people to be asking these questions.

My World, Your World

In learning about untranslatable words, we are getting to explore new worlds and through introspection, a window into ours and other people’s underlying “wiring”. We are not just loosely learning about trivial terms, but in certain cases, a lot about ourselves.

When we travel, we are forced to experience the beauty of new cultures because they are elegantly shoved in our faces. You cannot escape the beauty of Japanese culture in Japan, because it permeates everything around you. We often go through a process of overwhelm, adoption, and then admiration as we encounter these new things. If we do it enough, we finally start to question what the “right” way of living is.

Not everyone has the ability to experience this phenomenon by traveling outside of their borders. But I think one of the best ways of exploring other cultures from anywhere in the world, is to explore untranslatables.

“People fail to see how things are inefficient because of functional fixedness - they assume that things are the way there are and that’s that. Before you can make things more efficient, you have to imagine alternative configurations of reality.” - Here

Although the shifts in perspective aren’t ground-breaking, it’s enlightening to realize that entirely new realities exist. For some people, there isn’t just one moustache. Meanwhile, other can visualize their search for meaning in a 4x Venn diagram. What’s important here is that you actively search life for these clues. Search for things that may have just been a “that’s how life works” statement in the past, and instead question whether you’re limiting yourself in some way.

What I find perhaps the most intriguing is the concept that untranslatable words seem like outliers. And while they are, I think they represent shades of grey in the spectrum of life. They represent realities that cultures developed because using the term X or Y wasn’t enough. New realities.

PS: Come join the conversation on Twitter.

PPS: If you liked this article, you might also enjoy my podcast on all types of things like tip culture, technology people feared, or the the most influential artist you've never heard of, or my latest project.

Untranslatable Words List

Below are 30+ of my favourite untranslatable words (please feel free to explore the other 500+ directly on Eunoia):

• Abendrot (German) - The colour of the sky when the sun is setting
• Donaldkacsázás (Hungarian) - Translated as “Donald ducking” or wandering around one’s house with a shirt but no trousers
• Tachiyomi (Japanese) - To stand in a bookstore and read a book without buying it
• Tsundoku (Japanese) - Acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one's home without reading them
• Nintendo (Japanese) - “Leave luck to heaven” or to leave one's fortune in the hands of fate
• Friluftsliv (Norwegian) - lit. ‘free air life’; open-air living; living in tune with nature.
• Innerer Schweinehund (German) - Literal: 'Inner pig dog'; the lazy voice in your head. It symbolizes the part of you that doesn’t want to go jogging, that prefers staying at home with chocolate and pizza and is just generally lazy.
• Torschlusspanik (German) - The fear that time is running out on achieving life goals
• Kintsukuroi (Japanese) - To repair with gold. Understanding that a piece is more beautiful for having broken.
• Pisan Zapra (Malay) - The time needed to eat a banana
• Gökotta (Swedish) - Lit. 'early-morning cuckoo'; waking up early to hear the first birds sing.
• Wei-wu-wei (Chinese) - "Action without action" or effortless doing; conscious non-action; the deliberate and principled decision to do nothing for a reason.
• Prozvonit (Czech) - To call a mobile phone and let it ring once so that the other person will call back, saving the first caller money.
• Arbejdsglæde (Danish) - Literally "work happiness"; the feeling of happiness provoked by a satisfying job
• Petrichor (English) - The smell of earth after rain
• Ellipsism (English) - A sadness that you'll never be able to know how history will turn out
• Seigneur-terrasse (French) - Someone who spends time, but not money, at a café
• L'esprit de l'escalier (French) - Thinking of the perfect reply after the conversation is over.
• Kabelsalat (German) - Tangled up cables; literally “cable-salad"
• Rückkehhrunruhe (German) - The feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness.
• Sophrosyne (Greek) - A healthy state of mind, characterized by self-control, moderation, and a deep awareness of one's true self, and resulting in one's true happiness.
• Panapoo'o (Hawaiian) - The act of searching your head in order to help you remember something you have forgotten.
• Tima (Icelandic) - Not being ready to spend time or money on a specific thing, despite being able to afford it
• Ikigai (Japanese) - A reason for being; the thing that gets you up in the morning.
• Kuidare (Japanese) - To eat yourself into backruptcy
• Age-otori (Japanese) - The bad feeling one gets after a terrible haircut
• Dapjeongneo (Korean) - Used when someone asks a question despite knowing the answer, expecting the listener to make a smart and studied guess
• Tingo (Pascuenese) - To borrow objects from a friend's home one-by-one until there is nothing left
• Desenrascar (Portuguese) - An informal word that means the act of figuring out things
• Hanyauku (Rukwangali) - To walk on tiptoes across a hot surface
• Dolgostroj (долгострой) (Russian) - A construction project that seems to go on forever
• Tartle (Scottish) - The act of hesitating while introducing someone because you've forgotten their name
• Mahj (Tamil) - Looking beautiful after having a disease
• Chandamama (చందమామ) (Telugu) - Literally "uncle moon"; referring to the moon when admiring it
• Ilunga (Tshiluba) - The capacity of being ready to forgive a first time, tolerate a second time, but not a third time.
• Ubuntu (Zulu) - Being kind to others on account of one’s common humanity.

I recently woke up with the realization that I’ve been leading a team for well over a year. What was once very foreign and daunting is still a work in progress, yet somehow feels manageable. Even, familiar.

As I reflect on my evolution in leadership, I can’t help but think of the early days; back when I had “no clue what I was doing”. What stands out is the troublesome perception of leadership that I started with, extracted from pattern-matching the “leaders of our day” (think Musk, Jobs, etc).

I had mistakenly confused visionaries with leaders.

I’ve now learned that when these two are synonymous, an incredibly powerful dynamic is unlocked, but also that these two attributes can just as easily be mutually exclusive.

This realization has led me to further question, “What other misconceptions might there be about leadership?”. This article is my perspective on exactly that. But first, a story:

Being Handed Opportunity

Some of my readers already know that I lead a Publications team. To date, this has been one of the most amazing opportunities that I’ve been given. What many don’t know is that I found myself leading this team of 20 at the ripe age of 24. And when I began to lead this team, I was by far the youngest of the group.

Many of my new teammates had a decade (or two) on me, and despite how much I wanted to believe that age was just a number, I could feel the apprehension. But how could I blame them? Now that I was in the “driver’s seat”, I too felt like an imposter.

Here’s the thing: when you enter a position where no one is going to assume you know what you’re doing, you need to work that much harder to prove that you do.

So, I acknowledged that if I didn’t have all the answers, I better find them.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that the sheer act of acknowledging that I wasn’t born a leader and that I would need to to become a better leader﹣just like any other skill in life﹣was a huge step in the right direction. But that in itself led me to a crossroads, or rather, a question: what makes a good leader?

What Makes a Good Leader?

The Internet is riddled with advice for people just like me, searching for queries like “what makes a good leader” (SV: 3600), “how to be a good leader” (SV: 9900), and “qualities of a good leader” (SV: 10500).

Unfortunately, many of the results are easy to process but hard to action. For example, how exactly does one become a "great communicator"? What I find especially troublesome about these pieces of advice is that I think they paint a very narrow picture of effective leadership.

When I think back to some of my best managers, I never equated their ability to lead with always having a smile on their face or never faltering while leading a meeting. Similarly, their ability to “make decisions quickly” (or not), having a threshold number of years in industry (or not), or the strength of their conviction (or not), often didn’t correlate with their leadership ability or potential. These common conventions are found all over the Internet, but quite frankly, don’t always add up.

So as I apprehensively started leading, I took another approach. I made it my goal to learn how to be a good leader, iteratively. I read psychology books. I held discussions with fellow managers. I intentionally asked for feedback from those around me. I tried to distill the skills, attitudes, and choices that made my prior managers effective leaders. Having had my fair share of good and bad managers, I wanted to at least try being the former.

I slowly, but surely began to understand that there are two types of leadership: “by consent” and “by force”. And even though leadership is often represented as a convoluted practice that few truly master, it’s really just a representation of human behaviour and cooperation. If you miss that, you will inevitably fall into the “by force” bucket and as Napolean Hill reminds us in his book Think and Grow Rich, “History is filled with evidences that Leadership by Force cannot endure”.

Over a year and a few stumbling blocks later, I have now formed a much clearer perception of how we can get to this state of consent; the state of effective leadership.

The competent leader requires no "title" to give him the respect of his followers. - Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich

Learning to Lead

At its core, I believe good leadership results from learning to lead. And in order to learn to lead, three key principles need to ring true. These pillars of good leadership don’t necessarily mirror what you’ll find in the hundreds of listicles floating across the web, but they are based on the principles of interaction and connection﹣not power﹣and thus I believe should always ring true.

These principles are also non-negotiable, so once internalized, will create the right value system to guide leaders toward the right actions. And with the Pareto principle in mind, I believe that you can get yourself in the top percentile of leaders by simply embodying the following behaviour.

3 Must-Have Effective Leadership Qualities

1. Have humility
2. Scrap any agenda
3. Lead through influence

When I reflect back on truly amazing leaders, there are very few things that seem to ring true across all I’ve encountered. And ultimately, it’s been their uncanny ability to bring out the best in others, through truly caring, having humility, and leading through influence.

Imagine a World

Before jumping in, I want to convey why I care about good leadership (and why you should too).

At the heart of society we find people. At the heart of people’s lives we find work﹣and a lot of it. In fact, the average American spends 90000 hours of their life at work over their lifetime, yet 80% are dissatisfied with their jobs. That’s over a decade of straight, continuous work.

It’s not a new concept that fulfilling work creates a happier society, while non-fulfilling or toxic work, destroys the psyche. While there are many inputs that go into making a job stressful or negative, a bad boss normally tops that list. In fact, 75% of employees report that their bad boss is the worst part of their workplace.

I’d like to imagine a better world. One where good leadership is the norm and where “kissing up and kicking down” is not tolerated.

“We needed help to create a world where bad managers are the exception, and the learning curve to become a good manager isn’t so high.” - Know Your Team

In order to get there, I think we need an updated view of effective leadership that corners on this idea of constant iteration. Leadership has never been and should never be viewed as a skill that people are born with or without.

And to access this ideal world, our organizations need to reprioritize.

We need to celebrate compassionate management rather than the next unicorn to have scaled quickly, at whatever the cost. We need to recognize that any organization, however successful, is made up of thousands of people pushing that vision forward. We need to recognize that good leaders lead people, not just a company.

I want to dismiss the bells and whistles that circle leadership books and pare it down to a few simple principles, that I believe action us towards that ideal.

And with that world in mind, let’s dive in.

1.0 Having Humility

“When I wake up in the morning, I always think about three things: What are my strengths, what are my weaknesses, and did I work hard enough yesterday” - Eric Yuan, Zoom (Glassdoor #1 Rated CEO)

Signaling Trust

When I started leading, my first instinct was to exude confidence. If I wasn’t always confident, how could my team have confidence in me as a leader?

I’ve now learned that confidence shouldn’t be the central point of optimization for leaders. Instead, the most important trait of a good leader is humility.

Humility is commonly defined as “a modest or low view of one's own importance; humbleness”.

If we strip out the negative connotation, it’s simply the ability to see yourself objectively; your good and bad leadership qualities alike. Although you don’t often find leadership books calling for this underrated trait, I would argue that humility is a leader’s greatest asset.

Why is this?

Let’s start from first principles:

1. Becoming a leader does not inherently make your ideas more or less right.
2. Becoming a leader does not inherently make you more or less skilled.

When you become a leader, very little actually changes. Sure, you get a nice new title to toss up on your LinkedIn profile and maybe a corporate credit card. But you know what doesn’t change in that moment? Your skillset. Your intelligence. Your ability to make mistakes.

Unfortunately, when some individuals get promoted, their confidence skyrockets, despite no respective change in ability occurring. Moreover, many people utilize confidence as a signaling tool; a proxy for level of ability.

It’s important to understand that confidence does not promise possession of skill. And confidence that doesn’t match skill-level falls into two buckets: doubt or delusion. Both become detrimental when the delta between confidence and ability is unearthed by others.

A confident leader that lacks the requisite skills is much worse than the humble individual that can follow through. People often talk about risk taking in leadership and I'd actually that the biggest risk a leader can take is extreme overconfidence and the hope that their team won't notice. By faking confidence, you break trust between your team and are signaling that their perception of you is more important than a relationship based in reality. And since leading a team is all about influence﹣not illusion of control﹣you are destroying the very fabric of that.

More importantly, in this state of overconfidence, a leader is shielding themselves from the possibility of improvement. The precursor to ability is awareness and targeted effort, yet overconfidence blocks one’s ability to even recognize that there is more to learn.

“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.” -  Leo Tolstoy

The Antidote

Just like confidence, humility is indeed also a signaling tool﹣to the world and to oneself. But, the big differentiator between humility and confidence is that humility is actually tethered to one’s ability.

Humility is the antidote to overconfidence. With an accurate view of your ability, you are unlocking the door to actually improve.

And when practiced effectively, humility enables leaders to see themselves objectively; to acknowledge that their ideas are no more, but also no less, important than another person’s. In understanding this deeply, you are creating the right standard for rapport with your team.

Humility is confidence in what you know, not that you know. It’s not complete confidence, it’s representative confidence﹣the only type based in reality.

Humble leaders know they don’t have all the knowledge or answers and therefore they actively listen to learn. They also know their own limitations and that self-awareness helps them get better. - Orly Maravankin

Humble Confidence

All leaders should be striving toward a humble confidence; the keenest sense of awareness for their true capability. Humble confidence is in effect, self-realization, when the true antithesis to humility is ego or pride or arrogance, and perhaps at the worst end of the spectrum, delusion.

The beauty of humility is that it’s absolutely essential for developing all of the other skills or qualities of effective leadership.

Seeking Feedback

If humility is the antidote to overconfidence, its partner in crime is feedback.

Once a leader has embraced the concept that they won’t always have the answers, it’s much easier to be authentic and vulnerable. Utilize your desire to improve as an asset, and bring your team along for the ride.

“Advice seeking is a form of powerless communication that combines expressing vulnerability, asking questions, and talking tentatively.” - Give and Take

Some leaders shy away from highlighting mistakes or requesting direct feedback, so as to not compromise people’s perception of them as a leader. Contrary to this belief, asking your team for feedback is often a net positive. Feedback is one of your greatest strengths as a leader; good leaders accept feedback, while great leaders actively request it.

In fact, there is a set of research called the Pratfall effect, which suggests that exhibiting a lack of perfection can actually result in enhanced trust and interpersonal appeal, so long as you’re relatively competent.

So talk openly about your mistakes! Rid the stigma that always being right is better than always being reasonable. Embrace the transparent, unsurprising, and very human fact that sometimes you mess up, and that you’re totally resolved about it. By definition, if you’re working towards something difficult, mistakes will be made. If they aren’t, it’s likely that you aren’t taking enough risks.

Leaders need to learn to stomach the concept of risk<>reward, and be okay with the mistakes the must come with that. And in being transparent about these mistakes, people will respect you more for being an open book, rather than exuding levels of fake confidence.

This public introspection also enables your team to be more effective, by giving them a seat at the table. Ideally, you hired a bunch of smart, creative people to contribute to the mission, not just agree with your ideas. The best teams are dynamic in thought and if you are in full resolve about your own opinion, you prohibit that dynamic from flourishing. Malcolm Gladwell relates to this concept in his book Outliers, by reminding us that “planes are safer when the least experienced pilot is flying, because it means the second pilot isn’t going to be afraid to speak up”. The same is true with leadership, where effective team leadership enables the entire team to take part. If your team is afraid to speak up, you better bet they won’t stop you from nose-diving.

In short, good leadership comes from those who actively invest in learning how to lead well, and without asking your team for input, you’ll never know if you’re moving in the right direction. It would be like designing a product without talking to your users. While it happens often, it rarely succeeds.

2.0 Drop the Agenda

“Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.” – Jack Welch

With the strong foundation of humility, a good leader needs to take the next step and drop any agenda that may have once existed. As an individual contributor, people are often struggling to have their work seen or their voice heard. But once you transition into a leadership role, it no longer becomes about you. Your role is to prioritize the success of your team over your own. That is the most common thing that new leaders miss: your new role is not just a continuation of your old. You must completely realign your priorities.

And this is exactly what I mean by scrapping the agenda. Reversing your priorities such that your personal gain is no longer at the top of the totem pole. Without doing this, you will never be able to establish the level of trust that you need with your team.

So then the question becomes, how do you establish trust with your team.

You need to ensure that your actions match your values. It’s a simple statement, but is easily overlooked in practice.

Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, conveyed this by explaining that “generating trust was foundational” as he led the company through the early days, their IPO, and their subsequent acquisition. For him, trust was a function of consistency/time, both of which had no substitute in the “trust equation”.

Trust also comes from the combination of several things:

• A belief that you have someone’s best interest at heart
• The confidence that you have the ability to help that individual
• Demonstrating the character that especially in tough situations, you will do the right thing.

At the end of the day, trust is a feeling. And in the case of leadership, trust comes from the faith that someone truly has your best interest at heart. That’s exactly why there can be no back-channeling. No kissing up and kicking down. No blaming.

"Trust is not an action or a resume, it is a feeling that others have about you.” - Matt Russell

"If a leader is a REAL LEADER, he will have no need to advertise that fact except by his conduct-his sympathy, understanding, fairness, and a demonstration that he knows his job." - Think and Grow Rich

People say that “leadership starts at the top”, and that’s because leaders need to enable their peers to operate from a place of 360° trust, meaning that trust is not unidirectional, but instead above, below, and lateral. That is exactly why if a leader is operating from a place of fear, it’s nearly impossible for them to lead effectively, because that trust is likely uni-directional, if present at all.

Part of “ditching your agenda” and enabling trust is to care personally (one of the fundamental pillars of Radical Candor) to the point that you are no longer sympathizing, but instead empathizing. Your team’s problems become just as much your own. The same is true for failures.

“Jeff explained to me that empathy is feeling what another person feels. Compassion is empathy plus action. It’s actually doing something to help the other person. In a work environment, this involves stepping back to be a “spectator of your thoughts” and taking time to understand others. We are naturally egocentric, meaning that we see the world from our own perspective. There is nothing wrong with this per se, but it means that we tend to expect others to behave just as we would and to get frustrated when they act differently.”  - Eric Yuan

Although it doesn’t always come naturally, a key quality of effective leadership is learning to put yourself in the position of another. Any agenda is simply a roadblock to getting there, and thus must be completely removed from the equation.

3.0 Leading Through Influence

Leading vs Managing

“Leadership is about influence, not control. I am not the first person to make this observation, but it is worth repeating. The truth is that control is an illusion. You can’t control anyone, even the people that report to you.” - Michael Hyatt

We’ve experienced the types of leaders that are contagious. They inspire others to follow because they want to, not because they have to. They don’t just have their team’s consent, but also their enthusiasm; their belief.

The only way to attain this relationship with your team is to systemize positive behaviour. And the best way to systemize positive behaviour is to live by it.  For example, the best way to motivate others to improve is to exhibit your own continuous improvement.

This is one of the key differentiators between leaders and managers. Leaders have people who follow them, as opposed to managers that have people who work for them. It’s hard to admire someone that consistently asks, without ever giving back, or at least proving that they too can deliver. Good leaders recognize that their ability to inspire is not based out of the things they say, but the things they do. By leading through influence, leaders not only make things easier for their team, but also for themselves, as their team will reward their acts of camaraderie with mutual respect and effort.

“When people want to follow you they will always give you their best; while, if they only follow you because they have to, they will always give you the bare minimum that they can get away with.” - Matt Russell

Talk Doesn’t Cook Rice

In practical terms, leading through influence means taking the time to understand exactly what your team does. It also means stepping up to contribute individually and not just hand out tasks.

This concept touches on a more significant takeaway that spans all work. As Napoleon Hill said, “The world does not pay men for that which they "know." It pays them for what they DO, or induce others to do.” The idea that some leaders expect that they should be paid or lauded for what’s cooking “up there” is ludicrous. Leaders, no different from the independent contributor, are responsible for driving value and should never feel above doing exactly that.

You know what says, “I’m the boss”? Literally being a boss at what you do, not what you say. Your role as a leader is to inspire and enable your team to be the best they can be. The best way to achieve that is to lead by example; if you want someone to do something, do it first. Lead the goddamn way.

“If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him.” - Gandhi

Make the Tough Calls

Life is filled with complication. As a leader, you can’t be there to make every decision for your team. So how do you ensure they’re making the tough calls when it matters most? By setting the example.

One of the toughest calls that a leader will need to make is termination. And often, who a leader chooses to hire or fire is arguably the most important set of decisions they can make for their organization. If you are truly prioritizing your team’s success over your own, you need to base your decisions on what will drive better outcomes, collectively.

For example: if there is a team member who is a great individual contributor, but is a jerk to the rest of the team, this is not okay. In addition to the intangibles, their impact on other members of the team almost always outweighs their individual contribution. In other words, an individual’s contribution cannot be viewed in a silo and if you’re leading the team, your action or inaction is a choice; a reward system.

“On a dream team, there are no ‘brilliant jerks.’ The cost to teamwork is just too high. Our view is that brilliant people are also capable of decent human interactions, and we insist upon that.” - Netflix Culture Deck

“The actual company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.” - Netflix Culture Deck

If you choose to prioritize someone’s siloed impact over their net influence, you are signaling what gets rewarded. This is particularly important once you recognize that some team members are givers, while others are takers. Should you only account for the direct output of each individual, you are likely grossly underestimating the impact of the givers on your team.

In the above example, you’ll notice that Person A may be the most effective when you isolate only for siloed contribution, but when you factor in team dynamics, their total contribution is the lowest. In some cases, the total contribution may even be negative.

“If you can recognize competition as a destructive force instead of a sign of value, you’re already more sane than most.” - Peter Thiel, Zero to One

I also have heard some leaders say things along the lines of, “They’re just too good individually. I wouldn’t be able to replace them.” My answer, although admittedly simple, is that you can and you should. Being incredibly talented and a good teammate are never mutually exclusive, and one of the most underrated leadership qualities is to be able to action that.

"Great leaders make the hard choice, and self-sacrifice in order to enhance the lives of others around them." -  Brent Gleeson

In conclusion, if you want your team to bite the bullet and make the right decisions, especially when they’re hard, it’s your responsibility to do the same.

Setting a New Agenda

I recently listened to a conference talk, where the speaker asked the audience to “imagine a world without traffic jams”.

It was the sort of question that seemed arbitrary at first, but invokes a very vivid image of a better future. From that image, you can think backward and conceptualize what would need to change for the world to get there.

Now I want you to imagine a world without sh***y managers. A stark contrast compared to the reality we live in, but also not impossible. What are the steps that we need to take as a workforce to get there? What does that new wave of leaders look like? What must we no longer tolerate?

What I didn’t realize when I first started this journey into leadership was that I never needed to rule the roost. I just needed to have the right core values and the rest would take care of itself. It’s truly amazing what a splash of humility, trust, and honesty can do for your team and your company. Everyone can learn to be a great leader, if they prioritize improvement over ego.

I believe this world can exist, but it takes a consistent look in the mirror for the leaders of today to learn to be the leaders of tomorrow.

If you liked this article, I would recommend the following books:

• Radical Candor (Kim Scott)
• Give and Take (Adam Grant)
• Originals (Adam Grant)
• Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Daniel Pink)
• Think and Grow Rich (Napoleon Hill)

PS: Come join the conversation on Twitter.

PPS: If you liked this article, you might also enjoy my podcast on all types of things like tip culture, technology people feared, or the the most influential artist you've never heard of, or my latest project.

In an age where "software is eating the world", what can we learn from the tool that has withstood the test of time? This piece illustrates how the fundamentals behind Excel can be used to envision the next wave of bulletproof technologies.

2015: I love you
2016: I love you
2017: I love you
2018: I love you
2019: I love you

One “I love you” for every year since I’ve fallen in love with...Microsoft Excel?

You may be surprised to know that I’m not the first to write a love letter to Excel (or to use it to create one), nor to confess an Excel addiction. But in an age where software is “eating the world”, I want to talk about the tool that has withstood the test of time.

A Year in Excel

Just like many other “relationships”, I was introduced to Excel a few years prior, but the fire was lit in 2015. I jokingly say it was the “year of the spreadsheet” because I spent the greater part of that year living in one.

I worked as a business analyst crunching numbers for the Fortune 500. I vividly remember being told on my first day to notice how the other, more seasoned consultants didn’t use their computer mice as they navigated their spreadsheets. Their circuitry had turned the combinations of CTRL+[insert keystroke] into muscle memory. Soon, that too would be me.

In the years prior, I thought my ability to create a scatter plot with a trendline meant I was proficient with the tool. But that year, I was exposed to the immense power of Excel. We used the tool to build complex models that would predict anything from the price of oil years out to the minimization of real estate cannibalization. Everything we built was deeply complicated and proprietary, yet also only with a single tool: Excel.

During my 11 months in that job, I estimate that I spent over 1500 hours in Excel. For perspective, there are less than 6000 hours in total across those workdays; including sleep and whatever else I managed to fit in around Excel. (You better bet I calculated that with a spreadsheet)

To be clear, I don’t regret a minute of this. But I do want to reflect on it.

As technology becomes more omnipresent in our lives, we’ve started to champion the technologists behind these inventions. We write about the latest gadgets and SaaS companies as if they will change the course of history, while VCs are willing to bet millions on the next cohort. Simply consider how Musk, Zuckerberg, Page, and Bezos have all become as common as celebrity names in the household.

But I want to talk about Daniel Bricklin and Doug Klunder, or the piece of software that despite being invented over 30 years ago, lives on hundreds of millions of machines. I want to talk about a tool that spurred entirely new industries and still remains the biggest competitor to many new-age companies.

Even after decades of innovation, I want to talk about Excel.

Talk About Ubiquity

“Excel is one of the most successful products in the history of software.” - Andy Lee, Partner Software Development Engineer at Excel

Whether you like Excel or not, it’s hard to dispute that it has been a major underpinning to modern-day business.

Just in terms of sheer market penetration, Microsoft believes that 1 in 5 adults use Excel. And despite recent advances by competitors like Google sheets, it is estimated that there may still be 1.2B Microsoft Office licenses floating around. Compare the $13.8B that MS Office raked in over 2016 relative to GSuite’s $1.3B, and you get a sense of the sustained market dominance.

But what’s even more impressive about this feat is that we’re talking about software that was introduced over 3 decades ago. And despite the numerous updates and creation of now 476 functions, the concepts behind Excel and even some of the original code still remain. (More on this later)

“You’d think that there wouldn’t be any code from 15, 20, 30 years ago, but a lot of it still is.” - Andy Lee, Partner Software Development Engineer at Excel

You would expect this age-old software to be obsolete by now, but instead it’s thriving. A simple search on Udemy for “Excel” generates more than 10000 results, compared to the 7000 for Javascript. It’s also apparently the number one skill mentioned in job ads, finding its way into every 1 in 3. And if we accept the fundamental nature of spreadsheets in that they are indeed programs, Excel remains the most popular software development environment in the world.

“Microsoft Excel is the most familiar, flexible, and widely used business application in the world due to its capability to adapt to almost any business process.” - The History of Microsoft Excel

The combination of insane backwards compatibility (30+ years!), a gentle learning curve, and almost complete interoperability has resulted in Excel being a market leader for far longer than many companies could ever imagine. Perhaps most principally, people can trust that they can use the program completely out of the box. No dependencies, no boilerplate; it just works.

So despite hundreds of new Microsoft products having been released since Excel’s inception, CEO Satya Nadella still thinks its spreadsheet product stands out.

“Think about a world without Excel. That’s just impossible for me.” - Satya Nadella

Changing the Course of History

Albeit a bit dramatic, Microsoft Excel fundamentally changed the way people run their lives and their businesses.

Personally, I do everything in spreadsheets. I track my life (ranging from how often I exercise to how often I floss), I create lists, I project my finances, and much more. The beauty of spreadsheets are in the fundamentals, which is exactly why the tool can be translated into dozens of practical uses.

“I never know how people are using Excel, because it’s used in so many different ways.” - Terrence Huang, Partner Development Mangaer at Excel

At its core, Excel did and still does something very fundamental. It took something previously reserved for a select few﹣intensive numerical analysis and made it accessible, and even enjoyable, for the rest of the world.

“Excel actually changed the way business works, really by making it easy for people to use and to be able to make decisions and do calculations and put charts on their data” - Derek Burney, Corp VP Data and BI, VP - Data and Business Intelligence

Although Excel didn’t fundamentally invent the spreadsheet (we’ll get into that later), it was the vehicle to take dynamic computation into the mainstream. Zuck wasn’t the first guy to build a social network, nor was Musk the only dude to think we can make commercial space expedition possible. But they are the ones building such things at scale, just as Excel took the concept of the spreadsheet and delivered it to the world.

The advent of MS Excel was one of those era-defining innovations; one that “launched thousands of startups and justified millions of layoffs”, and has now stimulated entirely new industries. Simply consider the swath of job titles that have emerged in business analytics, just like the one I spent the greater part of 2015 in. These exact jobs didn’t exist until Excel enabled us to process and visualize data; to play around with the “what ifs”.

“Corporations and organizations have a lot of information or data that’s in back-end systems, and we need to be able to empower people to look at that data, twist it around, analyze it, pivot it, and examine it in different ways so that they can uncover some insight. So, Excel plays a tremendous role in the whole business intelligence world, by virtue of the fact that it’s the tool that people use. It’s the one that they actually touch.” - Derek Burney, Corp VP Data and BI, VP - Data and Business Intelligence

Entire companies are completely built off of the back of Excel. And for those where Excel isn’t mission critical, it’s almost always still part of the mission. What’s both insane yet also incredible, is that new companies are still emerging in 2019 which still have Excel as their biggest competitor.

And even as numerous new technologies have emerged and businesses raise $Ms of dollars, people still opt for Excel. According to a Gartner study in 2015, more than half of IT leaders said they “mostly” or “completely” opt for spreadsheets when performing analysis. This only indicates the explicit competition Excel poses on the data analytics industry, but doesn’t convey the limitless application that people use the tool for: building todo lists, exercise logs, inventory sheets, and much more. Even Excel used their product to generate the RSVP list for their 30th year celebration.

“Spreadsheets are used for everything. From light-weight databases, to todo-lists and scheduling, data gathering, data analysis, and sophisticated business processing. These are all examples of common uses for spreadsheet software, and this is obviously by no means a comprehensive list of the things spreadsheets are used for.” - Hjalmar Gislason

Imagining a World Without Excel

“[I was] sitting next to a person on a plane and started talking and they grabbed me by the shirt, “You work on Excel? I love Excel!”” - Jon Devaan, Sr. VP Windows Development

People (like me) don’t just use Excel. They love it. And as I was researching for this article, I stumbled on a simple question: “If Excel disappeared, what would you use?”

For some of the simpler solutions it provides, there are certainly parallels. But for its more complicated applications, I’m not sure whether there really is a replacement. I truly wonder how many businesses would be “sh** out of luck” if Nadella woke up one day and decided to cut Excel.

How many businesses would not be able to function?

Consider not only the number of explicit businesses that were built off of Excel, but also the sheer amount of business intelligence functioning off of the tooling. All the dashboards. All the financial decisions. All the forecasting. So much in our business ecosystem functions upon this product; certainly every job I’ve occupied over the last 5 years.

“We have financial companies that use it to crunch vast amounts of data to run simulations so they can help determine what’s going to happen in the world. They don’t just use Excel as the tool for writing formulas. They actually build solutions on top of Excel. Things that have been running for 10-15 years.”  - Terrence Huang, Partner Development Mangaer at Excel

When Hiten Shah asked Twitter “What’s an app / product you use at work that you can’t live without?”, the most upvoted comment﹣beating out new-age apps including Zoom, Slack, Notion, 1Pass, Webflow, and many more﹣was none other than grandfather Excel.

So while Excel may not stick around forever, it’s truly difficult to imagine a past, present, and future without it. And during its reign, it’s certainly changed the course of history.

The History of Excel

34 Years of Magic

As much as I love the product (have I told you that I love Excel?), I’ve also grown to love the history of MS Excel.

If we go back to the invention of Excel (34 years ago), so much has changed in the way people communicate and work. And yet, Excel at its fundamentals has not.

Before you get your panties in a knot, it’s important to note that Microsoft did not invent the concept of the spreadsheet. If not Microsoft, then who invented the spreadsheet? We have Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston to thank for that.  

Dan is commonly regarded as the inventor or “father of the spreadsheet”, after creating the very first spreadsheet application: VisiCalc﹣standing for visible calculator﹣in 1979, together with Bob Frankston. Dan was the first person to conceptualize the grid-like structure that continues to be the backbone of the modern spreadsheet. In fact, if you search “who created Excel?” into Google, Dan’s name shows up, despite never being employed by Microsoft.

“I imagined a magic blackboard, that if you erased one number and wrote a new thing in, all the other numbers would automatically change […] I imagined that my calculator had mouse hardware on the bottom of it and a head-up display like in a fighter plane.”- Dan Bricklin, TEDxBeaconStreet 2016

As a technology, the invention of the spreadsheet accelerated the entire PC industry. Steve Jobs is credited as saying that VisiCalc, propelled the Apple II to the success it achieved more than any other single event.

“There have been two real explosions that have propelled the industry forward. The first one really happened in 1977 and it was the spreadsheet.” - Steve Jobs

This was truly the beginning of the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) computing, something that we now largely take for granted. Bricklin and Frankston’s contributions were furthered in 1983 by another company, Lotus Software (later a part of IBM), launching a more popular Lotus 1-2-3.

Around the same time, Microsoft had already launched its precursor to Excel called Multiplan (code name: Electronic Paper), which unfortunately struggled to compete with the Lotus 1-2-3. In fact, Jon DeVaan (member of Excel 1.0) recalls that in 1984 the spreadsheet market was virtually 100% MS-DOS and Lotus 1-2-3.

Recalc or Die

Microsoft decided to invest in the development of a new product under the code name: Odyssey.

With the success of Microsoft now, it’s hard to imagine the company as an underdog or that Project Odyssey was one that defied the odds, but Excel 1.0 creators were just a small team of four: Mike Koss (team lead), Jabe Blumenthal (program manager), Doug Klunder (lead developer), and Jon DeVaan (copy protection). Other members of the early team include Steve Hazlerig, Ed Ringness, Charles Simonyi, John Hopper. To get a sense of the era when Excel was created, consider that Microsoft revealed their mouse, the Microsoft Mouse, only two years prior in 1983.

“It was a product that Microsoft built from the ground up. Started as an underdog and had unparalleled success and is now a true mission critical part of most businesses across the world.” - Andy Lee, Partner Software Development Engineer at Excel

Ironically, as Lotus 1-2-3 was beating out Microsoft on MS-DOS machines, Microsoft made the difficult decision to develop a product for the Mac, since Lotus wasn’t available on that OS and it was faster at performing the computation required. The decision wasn’t taken lightly, with Doug Klunder quitting when the decision was made.

“Just imagine having this product where one of the key components of it is really only understood by this guy who will quit routinely and go be a migrant farm worker down in California. It was not necessarily the most traditional or stable of environments.” - Jabe Blumenthal

“It caused a bit of a problem when I left in the middle. Rather than trying to write everything down, I presented what was essentially a three-day lecture on Excel’s design … that was videotaped for reference.” - Doug Klunder

Luckily for all of us, Doug made it back after a stint farming lettuce fields, to create what was perhaps the most critical feature of Excel 1.0. Referring to Excel as “his baby”, Klunder estimates that he originally joined Microsoft somewhere in the span of employee number 45 and 65.

“I was literally living in my office, sleeping just a few hours a night and cranking out code around the clock, and the window office got too cold at night.” - Doug Klunder

Perhaps the winning feature of Excel was its recalculating capability which Doug developed. The team’s unofficial motto was “Recalc or Die” after Klunder’s “intelligent recalc”. Instead of recalculating the entire sheet as changes were made, Klunder’s algorithms only recalculated cells impacted by the change. You can imagine that in an era where computing power was fractions of what it is today, this was a huge performance feat that pushed Microsoft ahead.

“Those early PCs couldn’t crank through numbers the way today’s powerhouse machines can, with the result that changing a number in a spreadsheet could bring things to a halt while the change rippled through all the interconnected calculations.” - Doug Klunder

The release date for Excel 1.0 was September 30, 1985 and ever since it came out, Excel truly took the lead. In the years following, it has also claimed many other “firsts” including the first to allow users to customize spreadsheet appearance, auto-fill, and the ability to intelligently copy cells.

And despite Excel seeming like the perfect name in hindsight, the code name for the project was actually Odyssey and potential product names at the time included Master Plan and Mr. Spreadsheet. Can you imagine if I was writing “An Ode to Mr. Spreadsheet?”

Keep in mind that this was a product made in the times when Microsoft still had yet to IPO and most product was still touched by Bill Gates. And I think largely why Excel emerged as the spreadsheet leader was the ethos behind Bill and the Excel team. In fact, Klunder gives credit to Gates himself for the idea behind how to implement the product-defining intelligent recalc feature, despite Gates telling him he implemented something completely different.

“Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer.” - My First BillG Review

The story pares down to a team that focused on long-term objectives and built up a system that could (and would be) be a market leader for decades to come.

“When you think of the longevity of Excel, it’s amazing. We had this incredible ethos of being really efficient in how we programmed Excel, which I think is an excellent long-term fundamental.” Jon Devaan, Sr. VP Windows Development

“Of course many features have been added, but the basics of the spreadsheet are the same. And I still use spreadsheets that I created 25 to 30 years ago.” - Doug Klunder

Spotting the Next Excel

In an age where "software is eating the world", we must ask ourselves: “What can we learn from this story of Excel?”

If I can convey anything to you in this piece, it’s not my love for Excel nor how much money Microsoft is making, but how spreadsheets fundamentally changed access to information. It took something that only a few people could process (data) and allowed the world to touch it, see it, and manipulate it. There was no longer just a black box.

“That was really the important thing at that time, to move software from, you know, the PhD thesis user-mode into something that an average person could use.” Jon Devaan, Sr. VP Windows Development

The concept of enabling access is something we as users often take for granted, but a principle that technologists have been leveraging for decades. And just like Excel didn’t invent the spreadsheet, you don’t need to invent the concept, but instead build the access bridge. This access bridge simply needs to identify a constraint for many individuals and to remove it, ideally with technology, just as Klunder enabled high computation on slow machines with intelligent calc.

To be more concrete, here are some new age examples:

• Companies like Webflow or Wordpress or Squarespace make it exceptionally easy to create websites.
• Ghost, which this blog is created with, makes it exceptionally easy to launch a high-quality blog in minutes.
• Stripe, makes it exceptionally easy for independent merchants to sell online, just as Shopify made it exceptionally easy for any old person to start an eCommerce business.

The world already glorifies these tools, but often doesn’t sit back and reflect on the entirely new access they have given us. Without these tools, only a small subset of individuals with tailored experience could participate. Now, the whole world can.

Amidst the “no code” revolution, we can consider Excel to be an enlightening case study featuring a similar concept: creating an access bridge to something of value. So the question now becomes: “What is something currently at the fringe﹣something only a few experts have access to﹣which would fundamentally benefit the wider population? And what can be built to enable these individuals?”

It’s now our job to identify something of value that many people have assumed is inaccessible to them, and then make it accessible.

Long live Excel.

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PS: If you liked this article, you might also enjoy my podcast on all types of things like tip culture, technology people feared, or the the most influential artist you've never heard of, or my latest project.

I was recently contacted about an opportunity. On many levels, this opportunity “checked all the boxes”, but there was one caveat: I’d have to move to San Francisco. For many (including a previous version of myself) that would be a dream. But for current me, it would mean throwing away the very life that I had spent the last 3+ years intentionally building.

Despite having spent over 10 months looking for the “right” remote job back in 2015 and now living the life I had long envisioned, I would be lying if I said that I didn’t seriously consider the switch. The lure of money, connections, and “the valley” was cogent.

Yet, when I thought about what I truly wanted and prioritized in my life, it became immediately clear that I’d be trading down. More specifically, I’d be trading the freedom to optimize my life for one that was predominantly determined for me.

Ultimately, I turned down the role, which of course prompted the company to continue to look for the right person to bring onsite. That response﹣while completely logical﹣got me thinking...“Will they be able to fill the role?”. The obvious and correct answer is yes. But what sparked the question was the realization that they were looking “inside a box” for someone who is already thinking outside of one.

Looking Outside of the Box

In the digital age, many companies cite their greatest challenge as the imminent “war for talent”, due to the imbalance of supply and demand, resulting from the widening skill gap.

With the speed of change in our workforce increasing, companies see “winning the war” as the only way to stay innovative and ahead of the competition. Their solutions result in ping pong tables, salary wars, and ridiculous inflation within tech hubs, in an effort to attract top talent.

As companies place higher importance on attracting, recruiting, and retaining top talent, I wonder whether some companies are missing a big puzzle piece. I ponder whether the companies that couple their highly developed vetting processes with a need for onsite talent, are not only limiting the sheer number of candidates, but perhaps the best? I can’t help but wonder if they’ve eliminated a significant chunk of individuals who are already living in the very future that these companies are hoping to create.

Do you see the disconnect?

Company: “We need someone who has proven their ability to execute. We’re looking for people who see things differently; people who think outside of the box and create innovative solutions.”

Recruiter: “Great, how about someone who lives in Poland? She moved there to be with her husband, so that they can raise their daughter together. Flexibility has allowed her to bootstrap a company to an 8-figure valuation, but she just sold it and is looking for her next challenge”.

Company: “Sorry, we can’t do remote.”

Although I can certainly recognize my own bias, it confounds me that companies are willing to auto-eliminate a group that I’d consider diverse and forward-thinking; a group of people who have already creatively redefined their world.

Put simply, these individuals literally looked at their lives and thought, “There must be a better way”, and then took the initiative to impact change. As more companies search for “creative ways to recruit employees”, I can’t help but wonder if they could develop a strong, yet overnight, competitive advantage by simply opening their doors up to the remote workforce.

The Remote Affinity Ratio (RAR)

The first step in evaluating whether you should be more open or less open to working or hiring remotely is identifying the potential bias you may have towards this new way of working.

I’ve personally been working remotely for the past 3 years. That may not be a significant amount of time for most people, but it’s actually represented 75% of my experience in the full-time workforce. In many ways, it’s all that I can remember.

As I started to further consider the concept of quantifying someone’s affinity or openness to remote work (and perhaps new ways of thinking or living), I conceptualized the “remote affinity ratio” or RAR.

Put simply, it’s the ratio of: years worked remotely and total work experience.

RAR = (# of years worked remotely) / (# years in workforce)

The metric is not intended to be one borne out of competition, but instead to reflect on how one’s prior experience may impact one’s openness to new working norms.

With this lifestyle so ingrained in the way I operate, I need to keep in mind that much of the world still does not operate this way. So while it surprises me when individuals or companies are completely closed off to the concept, when I think of the timescale that others draw their context from, it starts to make a little more sense.

As a simple example, picture the life of a 55 year-old, who’s been in the workforce for 35 of those years and the comparison of their “world” compared to the picture of my own that I drew above.

Even if this individual works remotely for three years, it only represents a single digit percentage of their career and therefore a majority of their perception will still fall outside of this new approach.

When compared side-by-side, it’s not surprising that it’s easier for me to visualize a different way of working and living. Not because I’m better, smarter, or more creative, but because I have lived this new approach for longer and I have fewer barriers in seeing past decades of prior experience. My viewpoint on how things should work isn’t solidified yet.

RAR is a metric which is purely meant for reflection; to try to understand how our experiences accumulate to form our perception of what is or isn’t possible/better/optimal.

So to those who are still remote-averse in their quest towards finding and retaining talent, consider whether the concerns are founded in experience or historical perception. More importantly, is your perception a reflection of where the world is today or your RAR?

With the concept of RAR in place, I started to think about some of the fundamentals of remote work and what someone with a high RAR may deeply understand, yet may be invisible to those with limited exposure. I honed in on three ideas that seem to be the most nascent:

• By convention, remote workers tend to think outside of the box
• Flexible work incentivizes people to optimize and improve
• Survivorship bias impacts the way people view remote work

With a deeper understanding of these three points, I truly believe that hiring managers may be more open to the concept of hiring remotely because of the positive tradeoffs that exist in enabling a larger, more innovative talent pool.

Innovation Nation

TechCrunch recently published an article claiming that remote workers and nomads are the next tech hub for innovation. A few weeks later, Stripe declared that their next engineering hub is… remote! It's no secret that companies are capitalizing on the intersection between innovation and the distributed workforce.

By simply giving someone the freedom to replace a commute with other things, they not only have more time to innovate, but are left less exhausted and more inspired. These individuals have not only started thinking outside the box, but living outside of one (a cubicle) as well.

Remote work enables people to start thinking creatively about how they get their work done, but also invites people to optimize past that. Many take that opportunity to consider how they can improve their mental and physical health, finances, business opportunities, and more. Consider the overlap between digital nomadism and things like financial independence, technology, entrepreneurship, minimalism, and investing here. The creative force of the remote revolution has pushed people to innovate across each of these domains, resulting in entirely new concepts, like FIRE.

Many people are familiar with Peter Thiel’s famous question from Zero to One:

“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

Thiel, in effect, is attempting to isolate how individuals think. While Thiel’s question may unearth intelligent or creative minds, I would argue that an even better way of isolating those who are able to predict the future would be to find talent who are currently living it.

The Wrong Incentives

Suppose that you have a series of plants that you no longer have the capacity to take care of yourself. You have two options:

1. You can offload your plants to individuals who will come into a specific location to water them. This location has the exact amount of water and sunlight to keep the plants alive. The plants likely won’t die, but they certainly won’t flourish. The good news is that you can watch those who you’ve hired come in and water the plants.
2. You can opt to have other individuals take care of your plants. These individuals have more resources and can optimize them as they see fit. While you can’t watch these individuals water the plants, you can pay them based on their successful ability to get the job done well. The success of this working relationship is built on trust and impact.

Now imagine these plants as your company. These scenarios are not so unlike the comparison between hiring individuals “in-house” and giving employees the freedom to work remotely. While the second scenario may result in some dead plants (or terminated hires), what is more likely to happen is that the individuals will appreciate that they have the space to operate and produce results. Meanwhile, the first scenario still has ample potential to result in dead plants and can only ever achieve the maximum potential that you’ve predetermined.

Here’s the thing that a lot of people don’t acknowledge about offices: you literally have no incentive to improve. When your day is ultimately tethered to the number of hours you need to be there, why decide to be more efficient?

• Why bother producing higher quality work?
• Why bother improving your workflow to half the time it takes to do a task?
• Why bother developing 2x complex solutions that deliver 10x impact?

Why bother being better, quicker, or more optimal? Why bother.

This concept, of not giving people space to innovate and create their own path to impact, compounds further.  

Why? I fundamentally believe that once you get someone to start considering how they can work more optimally, this permeates into other aspects of their life. They have now trained their brains to remove noise and optimize toward impact. This will inevitably impact the way an employee engages with problems they face across contexts.

In short, by enabling remote work, you are inadvertently training your people to improve the way they think and how they can achieve more. Most importantly, you are giving them the space they need to get there.

Survivorship Bias: Searching in the Wrong Places

Still not convinced? Let’s talk about survivorship bias.

When I go to coworking spaces full of nomads, I’m always impressed by quality of people that I meet. While there is always a distribution, a majority of individuals are looking to improve their lives in some way, whether it be starting a new business, learning a new skill, investing in a better diet, or looking to develop some form of a better habit.

When I hear of significant swaths of industry being apprehensive of remote workers, I can’t help but wonder if some survivorship bias is at play.

For those new to the term, survivorship bias is: the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility.

In this context, consider that individuals with a bad experience working with remote workers will likely be the loudest. Similar to the insurance industry, people are quick to report and amplify a bad experience, while being perfectly content to tread silently when multiple positive experiences happen.

“Studies have shown that the most vocal customers are the ones who’ll express their feelings. Everyone else will either give companies another chance or just leave.” - Walker Donohue

Instead of treating negative experiences as an outlier, these amplified experiences become the narrative for others. In insurance, if a few claims are processed slowly, their Trust Advisor rating is 2 stars. With remote work, if a few individuals are unaccountable, the entire distributed workforce is deemed undependable.

Once this narrative is set, it’s hard to break. Even when positive stories are shared, the “N” is too low to offset the perception.

When you think about what examples may be forming your perception of remote work, how many of those are based out of your own experiences? What is the sample size? How does this compare to the good or bad hires onsite?

There is a false perception that all remote workers want to “go remote” to lead an easier life. The reality is that they often want to live a better life, which is distinctly different. For example, many individuals are looking for the opportunity to spend more time with their children, to optimize their schedule, or to devote unproductive time like a commute to something more productive. In fact, according to the IWG Global Workspace Survey, over 50% of people would prioritize flexible working over working for a prestigious company or more holiday allowance.

Founders often ask how they will find talented employees and furthermore, retain these talented employees. Here's a hint: give them the freedom that they so clearly desire. The vast majority of distributed employees are not looking to work at the beach or even live anywhere near one－they are looking simply for autonomy over their lives.

What am I trying to communicate here?

1. Don’t let survivorship bias influence your perception of remote workers. Build up your own impression through experience.
2. It’s important to reframe the intentions of those looking to work remotely. Often, people do not want to work remotely to do less, but instead are looking to do more. If you vet for these signs of ambition, you will likely find yourself attracting talented employees.

Hiring Outside the Box

We’re taught from a young age to “think outside the box”, yet I think many have been trained throughout the decades to optimize within one. As hiring managers, when you’re looking for these truly disciplined thinkers, I question why so many companies automatically eliminate so many that have already proven through action their ability to think outside of the box.

You may hear the “horror stories” of a company hiring a remote candidate that went exceptionally badly, yet I’m sure the same hiring managers could cite an equally misguided in-office hire. Since remote work is the newer, more innovative model, we use a few examples to push back on the more innovative model.

Instead of using bad hires to discredit the entire model, I would encourage hiring managers to think about the type of individual they want to hire from the ground up:

• Is it someone that takes initiative to design their own life?
• Is it someone that works to find creative solutions to enable this life?
• Is it someone who can work dynamically and flexibly?

If that’s the type of person you want in your company, don’t eliminate an entire cohort of them and open your mind to the future of work. In the “war for talent”, there is no better competitive advantage than getting access to thousands of candidates that your competitors are too fearful to explore.

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If you liked this article, I have a feeling you'll enjoy this podcast episode about traditions, including the 40-hour workweek:

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Edit: Thank you to the 100k people who have read this piece. It looks like many people are struggling with the concept of "greatness". Let's continue to support one another on the journey there.

Over the years, we’ve all encountered our fair share of successes and failures. As I’ve acquired more of both under my name, I’ve started to contemplate which experiences were truly “great” and why.

Interestingly enough, I realized that it was not the sporadic highs that were exceptional, but instead the long hauls; the sequences of events that seemed minimal at each juncture, but compounded into major gains. This led me to think further about what greatness truly means. I’ve come to learn that it’s not about overnight successes or flashes of excellence, but periods of repeatable habits.

Perhaps “great’, is just “good”, but repeatable.

Consider This

Before stepping into the bulk of this article, I want to clarify two things:

• Greatness is not instantaneous
• Greatness is earned

The first step in becoming great is recognizing that you’re likely not already great. In fact, it comes from recognizing that there is no such thing as greatness at a specific instance in time. Greatness is instead a reflection of a period of effort, since greatness in a single instance can be reduced to luck.

Moreover, being “great” is not about being better than someone else. It is about being dependable and disciplined, and ultimately it is earned.

Many people, in theory, want to be “great”. In fact, each month 1000 people search “how to be great”, 260 people search “how to become perfect”, and 2400 people search “how to be the best”, looking for discrete answers on how to get from 0 to 1. Yet, many people in life realistically do not want to put in the effort over a sustained period of time to actually get to 1. They are looking for the “secrets to success” that in many ways, do not exist. You know what brings success? Hard work brings success.

So before proceeding forward in this article, I implore each of you to consider that if greatness truly is a reflection of non-instantaneous, earned effort, ask yourself if that’s the life you’d like to live. Ask yourself whether you’d like to spend your days, weeks, months, and years in a constant uphill battle.

If you ultimately find that you don’t want to do that, that’s fine! It doesn’t make you less of a person. At least you’ve broken from the holding pattern of thinking you want to do X but not understanding why you haven’t gotten there yet. And if that’s the case, go enjoy your Netflix and chill completely guilt-free.

With that in mind, let’s dive into what truly makes someone “great’.

It’s Hard to be Consistent

There’s a false impression that success or notoriety comes with being flashy. This notion comes from the media focusing on outliers, whether it be events or personalities which diverge from the norm. Not only can this encourage people to aim for notoriety just for the sake of it (think Elizabeth Holmes), but it makes the rest of us believe that correlation (of those outliers) is causation; in other words, success of those individuals is due to their offbeat ways. But here’s another storyline: the most sure and therefore the best way to “success” is through consistency.

“Until you work as hard as those you admire, don’t explain away their success as luck.” - James Clear, Atomic Habits

To be clear, consistency isn’t necessarily the easiest way to success, but one that can be achieved with a higher level of certainty, rather than hoping for a lottery win or someone to “discover” you. Continuous effort is a more thoughtful approach that leads to greatness when the following statements are true:

1. Inputs are consistent over time
2. Intentional inputs lead to expected outputs

Consistency

“No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich” - Outliers

There is a famous saying from Napolean Hill which says, “If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way”. I would actually argue the quote should be, “If you cannot do great things, do small things a great number of times”.

If you don’t have the opportunity to “do great things”, focus on consistently achieving small wins. These small things in fact do not need to be done in a great way, but a good way, repeatably. In fact, I would advise not to focus on perfection, as it is often the enemy of the successful.

There’s glimmer and hoopla around unpredictability, but in reality, it’s much more difficult and therefore impressive, to be predictably good. For example:

• It’s easy to wake up whenever you “feel like it”.
• It’s hard to stick to a routine of getting up at 6AM.
• It’s easy to pivot from side project to side project, focusing on the new shiny object of the month.
• It’s hard to stick with a side project for years, many of which may not be profitable for a long while.
• It’s easy to give up on someone when you hit a roadblock or the next potential partner becomes available.
• It’s hard to be faithful and invest in a relationship for decades.

We normally set out in life with good intentions. We intend to set a morning routine or work on a business until it's profitable or to “love someone forever”. We imagine that as we invest in something, we will naturally continue to move in the right direction. If anything, things will get easier, right?

The described trajectory is what we perceive on the left. Predictable, linear, and a direct reflection of effort put in.

Rarely does success in anything look like that. Life is a series of tiny nodes that tend to look more like the right hand side. There two key elements worth calling out in the more realistic graph on the right:

• Compounding is always present. The earlier steps in any process will be more strenuous, yet it’s difficult to imagine the potential compounding that comes later on.
• With the ups, there are always downs. This seems obvious, but we often forget this when we are in periods of down. We quit at these local minimums (the highlighted sections in red above), because we cannot see the next peak right around the corner.

The local minima are especially psychologically taxing due to something called the Hedonic treadmill or hedonic adaptation. Essentially, as someone achieves new successes in various aspects of their lives, their baseline shifts to reflect that new level and therefore, their expectations and desires are re-established as well. There is no net gain in happiness and thus, it becomes even more difficult to stay “level-headed” during these down moments.

That is exactly why a specific search for success can be problematic and instead of looking for unsustainable shortcuts in life, it’s much more effective (and healthy) to aim for continuous habits that bring you success as a byproduct, not as the end goal.

“The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.” - Atomic Habits, James Clear

On your journey to greatness, you need to fall in love with the process which includes many local minima and maxima. Staying consistent and pushing through both of these continuously is what will truly differentiate you from those that are simply “good” and isolate you as one of the few that are “great’.

Inputs → Outputs

The second important aspect of achieving greatness is acting with intention. Your actions and results will not always reflect your intentions, but as you move towards “greatness”, you should have a better idea of what inputs actually deliver output. You’ll still make mistakes﹣as we all do﹣but you’ll have a better grasp on what is more likely to work out. For example, your success rate may be 30%, versus someone flying blind with a 5% success rate.

Let’s look at a simple example:

Imagine company X has two sales people. Salesperson A happens to land a $1M deal in his first week. However, he struggles to land anything substantial for the next 6 months. Meanwhile, salesperson B manages to develop a process over the first month, bringing in only $100k which he’s able to scale up and double month over month.

After six months, this will be the revenue generated by each party.

You’re probably thinking… "So what? That’s just a classic example of compounding."

Yes! That’s exactly the point. The best things in life often aren’t miracles, but well-thought out approaches that are sustainable. The same thing is true with businesses, marriages, and just about anything with repeatable elements. If you invest time into solving for what leads to success continuously, you will reap those benefits for years to come. So even in the least quantifiable situations, reflect back on what could’ve made a previous loss a future win.

Consider the best companies over time. None of them emerged overnight, nor was there a single inflection point that determined the success or notoriety of these companies. The line of separation between the “great” companies of all time and the “not so great”, is their ability to stand the test of time.

Would you rather be Juicero that raised $100M and went bankrupt within a year of its Series C, or Zoom, which took almost 8 years to take on more funding than $30M and is now one of the most profitable and highly sought after “unicorns” in the valley?

On top of consistency, greatness comes from asking the right questions and iterating to learn what inputs drive favourable outputs, and ideally why. “Greatness” comes from an identified or researched process that when followed, has some degree of certainty in the outcome.

“Moving fast and breaking things” is not a strategy, unless you are clearly defining a process of learning so that in the future, you can “move fast and break less of the same things”.

A Habit of Progression

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” - Albert Einstein

Understand that in order to achieve the things you want in life, you’ll need to establish a habit of progression. You literally need to become good at being decent.

There is one thing to clarify: this habit of progression must come with the right inputs. Being consistent with something leading you in the wrong direction, will unsurprisingly lead you in the wrong direction. So if this is the way you are constantly moving (excluding short periods of local minima), pivot until you determine what the right inputs are. I recently stumbled upon a concept of zero acceleration, but non-zero velocity, which encapsulates this idea well.

Before you find the path that you want to double down on, this habit of progression takes the form of iteration. I see many people who are stuck in this stage and feel like they’re moving nowhere. Perhaps they go take a degree for a year and find that wasn’t right. Maybe they go and work for a company for two more and realize that wasn’t right either.

If you’re struggling to identify the right path, create more nodes of optimization. For example: if you’re making changes every year, you only have maybe 80 in your entire life to make. Instead, try testing things intentionally every month or even every week. Pilot a lot and then double down when you have found your path towards “good”.

You may ask, “what makes good, good?”. Ask yourself the question: “If I were to continue this every day for the next year, would I be in a better place?” If the answer is yes, you have a path towards “good”.

Once you have found your inputs, then you’re in a good place to turn those inputs into the right habits through deliberate practice. Ie: you’ll be in a place to shift from good to great.

This process of shifting between iteration and consistency is all part of developing a habit of progression. Once you make this habit your north star, you are no longer dependent on that  “one big break” or that one company to “finally give you a chance”.

And finally, if you’re reading this advice and think, “I’ve heard this before”, then ask yourself whether you’ve truly acted on this advice. When is the last time you truly iterated and tried new things? When is the last time you found something good and then truly stuck to it for years?

Two Steps Out

While you’re moving towards “greatness”, keep in mind that it will likely happen slowly and that’s okay.

When I think about the growth trajectory of my life and similarly, anyone that I’ve been close with, changes have always happened slowly. Whether it was a close family member falling into deep mental illness or friends building businesses to near-unicorn valuations, nothing ever happened overnight. Even more notably, no one would have ever expected those outcomes years prior.

In the grand scheme of things, I think it’s because you can only ever see two steps out. What do I mean by that?

Say that in life there are 100 tiers of happiness. Of course, life is more complicated and dynamic than this view, but bear with me for a minute. Let’s say that you’re on “Tier 57”.  You may be able to see Tier 58 and 59, but I think it’s nearly impossible to fully empathize or even comprehend level 21 and similarly 89, unless of course you’ve been there before. Even if you have, it becomes a distant memory that’s difficult to fully internalize. Remember, the Hedonic treadmill is almost always at play.

Why is this important? Everyone wishes to elevate their life and in association, their happiness. For us to reach these top tiers, we cannot hope for this to just happen. We must expose ourselves to various inputs that may lead to better outputs, and train ourselves to recognize what’s working.

And that’s exactly the point of continuous improvement. Since I believe that we can only ever see “two levels out”, we can’t discover these new inputs without slow, but repeatable change. We must explore 58 and then 59 and then all of a sudden, 61 will appear as this new array of opportunity we had never considered before.

As a more tangible example, when I started working in an office, I simply couldn’t fully visualize remote work. I knew it existed, but I couldn’t truly imagine this new way of living. And even once I started working remotely, it took years of iteration and pivoting to expand into the lifestyle that I now call my own. And of course, there’s probably many more tiers to explore that I simply haven’t visualized yet.

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.” - Henri Bergson

That’s precisely why it’s good to continuously surround yourself with new environments and people, and to focus on slow, but steady compounding. I think this tweet from Michael Nielson captures what I’m trying to communicate.

Try to remind yourself as you’re iterating, that there are new levels that you can’t even conceptualize right now. Regardless of how far along you are, know that these new levels of success will appear as you work towards the next one or two. And soon enough, you’ll be 10 levels ahead of what you could have ever imagined.

Stop Speculating

“I have seen impractical and improbable things accomplished. All it took to achieve improbable things was an optimistic attitude and a refusal to give up.” - The Woman Who Smashed Codes

James Clear, from Atomic Habits, mentions a study in which students in Jerrey Uelsmann’s University of Florida photography class were divided into two groups. The first group would be the “quantity” group, while the second would be the “quality” group. The former would be judged solely on the number of photographs they submitted, while the latter would be graded on the excellence of a single image.

The interesting outcome of the experiment was that the best photos were produced not by the quality group, but by the quantity group. Why? While the quality group spent their time speculating what perfection may have been, the quantity group took action in testing what was truly great.

“It is easy to get bogged down trying to find the optimal plan for change: the fastest way to lose weight, the best program to build muscle, the perfect idea for a side hustle. We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action” - James Clear, Atomic Habits

In other words, the “search” for greatness is often misguided, perhaps because what we imagine to be great, is in fact not that great at all. Instead of speculating what may make you great, get out there and start doing. Do not look for perfection or even greatness, but instead signs of “good” and start making tangible progress.

How Do You Become Great?

So if you’re still asking the question, “How do I become great in life?”, I would ask you to reframe the question as “How do I become good in life” or even “How do I become decent” and focus on developing those habits to repeat over time. Transform these habits to be your baseline.

Remember, there is no “magic moment” when you become great, so if you are looking for your path towards greatness, stop looking for “greatness” and consider that your most probable path there is just to focus on what’s good.

If you have an understanding of what inputs equal favourable outputs then continue moving in that direction. As you move past the local minima and maxima, you’ll soon be beating out the 50% that quit at X time, the 75% that quit at Y time, and the 90% that quit at Z time. Soon enough, you’ll be the great one that was once just “good” among the rest, but stuck with it and learned something along the way.

In being consistent over time, you become the outlier.

Remember: great is just good, but repeatable.

This article was originally inspired by me trying to more deeply understand what “made people great’, but ended up being a dive into some of the psychology I’ve been experiencing more recently. Over the last few months, I think I’ve been on one of my local minimums in terms of direct “success”, but in writing this I feel motivated to keep pushing to my next local maximum, with the understanding that there will be many more of both moving forward.

PS: If you liked this article, I have a feeling you'll enjoy this podcast episode about other narratives that we believe, that may no longer be serving us.

PPS: You might also enjoy other episodes about all types of things like tip culture, technology people feared, or the the most influential artist you've never heard of on my podcast or my latest project.

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Note: This article was written well before the world encountered COVID-19. However, most of the advice still applies and in many cases, is more important than ever. Best of luck out there! - SS

Almost 40 years since the Internet was born, we’ve learned to develop a completely new world. One of the more recent developments that has emerged from this connected community is the way our societies have learned to find new opportunities in distributed form.

Remote work has been inching forward for years as it has capitilized on our ability to connect digitally, while people open their minds to the distributed workforce. Entire industries have been built from this revolution, so it’s hard to believe that even just a few decades ago, this form of working (and living) was simply unavailable.

Despite rapid change since the first coworking space opened in 2005 or since Slack was founded in 2009, there are still some misconceptions about the distributed workforce. Some people still believe this is all a fad, while others believe it’s a symptom of a cohort of non-commital millennials. After working fully remotely for over three years and meeting the hundreds (if not thousands) of other remote workers, I’ve grown to appreciate that neither is true. The workplace is shifting as it has many times prior, to accommodate the new opportunities that we as humans have made available.

As we transition, I’ve noticed that many people want to participate in this future, but sometimes don’t know how. In fact, one of the more common misconceptions that I still run into is the perception that only a few roles can be done remotely, namely technical roles.

This notion is born out of the expectation set by some companies that will only hire out specific positions remotely (for example: a company that employs a remote dev team, but refuses to offer remote work outside of that), and is perpetuated by individuals who say “their positions cannot be done remotely”. In this article, I’ll attempt to address why this notion is misplaced and why remote work is the future of work -- not just for our developer friends. Hopefully I’ll also provide some tangible insight into how you can search for, vet, and potentially land a non-technical remote role, should that be something you’re interested in pursuing.

Asking the Right Questions

In order to understand whether a role can be done remotely, most people ask a question like:

• “Where are the most remote jobs?”
• “What jobs allow you to work remotely?”

While these are fair questions, I would encourage people to think not only about careers that typically allow you to work remotely, but careers that can be done remotely. I would instead ask questions like:

• “Is my work primarily done through a computer?”
• “Could my work be done through a computer?”

With the intrinsic understanding that the “remote revolution” was spawned from the ability of the Internet to connect us, that truly becomes the right question to ask. An adjacent concept to understand is that we must start thinking outside of the box as we look to the future. As the digital age accelerates, we need to keep in mind that many of the jobs that we’ll have may not currently exist.

I would encourage each remote job seeker to think progressively and not only within the realm of their current environment. Of course, certain positions over-index on remote work, but the key here is that opportunities are emerging every day and it’s important to realize that there are indeed remote jobs for non-technical individuals. And quite frankly, I think a majority of people would be surprised to understand the full breadth of jobs that can be done remotely.

Note: As you search for a non-technical remote role, I would implore you to learn technical skills in the long-term. As mentioned above, the workforce is changing and remote or not, the digital age is upon us. By taking the initiative to pick up technical skills, you’re putting yourself in a more abundant future. On that note, here’s a series of tips for looking for non-technical remote work.

Job Boards

The most obvious place to look is at remote job sites. With everyone and their best friend trying to start a job board in 2019, it’s important to identify the best remote job websites. When you’re looking to establish what you’ll be doing for potentially the next few years, quality matters.

My two most reliable recommendations for job boards are RemoteOK and FlexJobs. In 2015, I chose to search for remote work and was able to find non-technical positions through both of these platforms.

• RemoteOK is a free feed that segments jobs by various tags, including Non-tech and Marketing. I’ve consistently found RemoteOK to have higher quality positions as compared to other remote job boards and I like the simplicity of the UI.
• FlexJobs is a paid platform, but in my experience, completely worth the investment. It’s approximately $50 a year, but enables you access to a large database of vetted remote positions. The platform as a whole has various filters ranging from location-specific to “Anywhere in the World”. When I was searching years ago, I found at least 3 solid positions on FlexJobs, including my role at Toptal where I’ve been since. Once again, the investment of $50 to ensure a better outcome for years is one of the best I’ve made.

There are many other remote job platforms that exist including Remotive which segments by “Other”, Remote which has search functionality, a FlexJobs alternative called Virtual Vocations, and other more general platforms like We Work Remotely.

When you’re faced with information overload across these job boards, here is my approach for how to search for telecommuting jobs.

• Set a cadence where you check these boards. When I was searching 3 years ago, this timeline was every 2 days.
• Set up specific filters that you check. I always checked for marketing and growth roles.
• Utilize the email feature that many of them have, where you get notified about jobs that are posted within certain filters.
• Set clear expectations for the types of jobs that you will even spend time on. For example, if you want to be fully remote, do not bother spending time on positions that are America-only. Similarly, if you have years of experience, do not apply to entry-level jobs just because you want to “go remote”.

Remote First Companies

There are specific types of jobs that people typically think about when it comes to remote work. For example, developers, designers, and data scientists all come to mind and are typically the titles that take up a majority of remote job board real-estate.

While this is certainly true, a great place to locate jobs that you may not find on job boards is to follow specific remote-first companies. These tend to be tech companies, but there are always non-technical jobs in IT companies! (Ie: IT companies don’t only hire developers)

As you venture into the realm of “tech jobs for non-techies”, you’ll find roles that span product managers, marketers, social media managers, operations leads, and more. All of these roles can be done remotely and more companies are opting for this structure.

Some examples of these remote-first companies include Toptal, Buffer, Auth0, Basecamp, Zapier, Automattic, InVision, and Mozilla. Not only do these companies offer remote roles, but they tend to be full-time remote jobs, unlike some of the more part-time consulting-based remote roles that you may find elsewhere. In addition to that, these companies are entirely remote and have set up the right systems to enable successful distributed teams.

You can find lists of these companies in the following places:

• RemoteOK lists companies in order of the frequency that they post remote roles to its platform.
• NoDesk has a list of 450+ fully remote companies here.
• Remotive put together a list of 900+ startups hiring remotely in 2019.
• This list of 400 companies which can also be edited on GitHub
• Key Values helps sort companies by various values that you care about, including remote work.
• FlexJobs has a list of flexible (not necessarily fully remote) companies listed by state.

Once you identify companies that you’re interested in, go to their career page. This is where you’ll find a multitude of roles that aren’t on every job board. For example, as of writing this article, there have been 11 jobs posted on RemoteOK in the last year from Toptal, while there are over 100 jobs currently open on Toptal’s careers page, of which a majority are not engineering roles.

This exercise is not intending to criticize RemoteOK. In fact, as mentioned prior, RemoteOK does much better than other job boards in reporting this data. For example, as of writing this article, I see 0 results on remote.com for Toptal and 0 open positions on We Work Remotely according to the company page (and only 10 historically). Even as a paid product, FlexJobs reports 13 positions.

The idea of this exercise is just to demonstrate that still, the best place to look for a wider range of non-technical remote jobs is on each company’s careers page. There is certainly an argument for browsing the job boards on a frequent basis and resorting to the careers pages during more comprehensive searches. I would do some form of this exercise monthly, should the quicker searches not be yielding the results that you hope for.

Remote Non-Tech Jobs

Past these non-technical jobs in the IT industry, there are remote roles emerging in areas that many would simply not expect. They include remote sales jobs, remote admin jobs, remote finance jobs, remote legal jobs, and even jobs that span medical, real estate, among others.

Remotive recently compiled a list of hundreds remote roles and their salaries (which I’ll get to later), which were predominantly developer or design positions, but also highlighted many other positions you can do remotely. To name a few taken directly from the sheet:

• Director of Customer Success - $159,000
• PR Manager - $53,300
• Marketing Operations Manager - $150,000
• Head of Communications and Partnerships - $67,000
• Talent Lead - $90,000
• Community Lead - $150,000
• Product Evangelist - $70,000
• Account Manager - $43,000-$100,000
• Event Manager - $75,000

Most of these roles fall within marketing or operations, which I’ll touch on in the next section. However, there are even more surprising roles that can be done remotely. For example, within a few weeks of me writing this article, I located these job postings on the aforementioned remote job boards.

• Head of Real Estate
• General Counsel
• Pricing Strategy Manager
• Recruiting Director
• Travel Agent
• Chief Storyteller
• Program Manager
• Clinical Team Manager

In fact, FlexJobs has a feature called “100 Surprising Jobs”, which aggregates roles of such nature. There are postings ranging from Card Story Editor to Radiologist to Law School Curriculum Writer. I’ve linked the final job postings which I found through FlexJobs, since the FlexJobs links won’t work unless you have an account.

Note: Depending on when you read this article, many of these will have expired, but that just means there will be new postings to explore!

Roles of such nature are less common, but so are the individuals searching for these roles. Should you be unable to find the right remote role, I would encourage you to push the envelope in your current position. I previously worked for a company in management consulting that had never had anyone on the team work remotely. As I was leaving for my role at Toptal, I was offered the opportunity to switch to a fully remote consulting role. I didn’t end up taking the offer, but it showed me that I was the one actually the limiting belief, not my company. Since then, they’ve had multiple people switch to remote positions.

Remote Marketing Positions

In the “year of the IPO”, there has been such a strong focus on companies being able to sustain hypergrowth at all costs. Regardless of “product market fit”, companies achieving hypergrowth require a world class marketing/growth team to enable their success. In fact, there have been entire programs launched like Reforge which aim to train the next group of top “growth experts” and entire industries carved out of this evolution in marketing, like search engine optimization (SEO).

If you’re looking to transition to a remote online marketing job, I would first encourage you to become proficient in analytics. Having an analytical background is extremely important, regardless of which marketing niche you go into (ex: SEO, email marketing, paid advertising, etc.)

Should you be looking for a remote marketing job, most remote job boards have a Marketing-specific section that you can navigate, instead of going through all postings.

• RemoteOK - Marketing
• Remotive - Sales and Marketing
• We Work Remotely - Sales and Marketing

It’s worth mentioning that it’s pretty common for marketers to eventually take their marketing skills, especially if they are specialized, to open a remote marketing agency or essentially serve clients directly.

Entry-Level Remote Jobs

There is a common perception that in order to get a remote employment position, you need to already be relatively experienced in your field. While this helps, as it does in any interview process, it’s not essential. I’m speaking from experience, as I entered many of my marketing-related roles with little direct experience.

I would encourage those “newer on the block” to consider the following points:

• Remote communities are powerful. Attend events and learn from others. You’ll be surprised at how quickly those relationships will become mutually beneficial.
• Most remote jobs care more about your ability to perform rather than a specific degree or credential. As you’re interviewing, don’t focus on your Ivy League diploma, but instead of prior experiences that proved you can #getshitdone.
• Digital skills are dynamic. What is important now will likely be moot in 5 years. Proving that you’re able to learn and adapt is essential.
• It is a positive sign if you’ve worked remotely before. Consider freelancing and improving your skills before you score the “dream job”.
• If you don’t have certain skills, take the time to learn them! The digital era democratizes so many skillsets. In taking the time to learn them, you are simultaneously validating your ambition. This may lead down surprising paths, like starting an online business.
• Whatever you do, please do not make a living off of, as I once heard someone say, “selling useless stuff to dumb people”. Always offer value to the world. :)

I’ve written a more thorough set of tips to consider when applying to any remote job, in the Practical Tips section of my Honest Guide to Remote Work.

Salaries: How Much Should I Make?

Although I cannot provide any global salary advice, there is one important thing that I should mention. Don’t assume that transitioning to a remote role means that you need to downgrade your pay.

Working remotely is a shift in our ability to live and create more opportunities, not less. It’s a shift that allows you to achieve more within your limited time; an opportunity to redesign your life. There is no reason why that should equate to you earning less. In fact, companies save significant overhead with remote workers, as compared to those housed in an office.

As you’re trying to establish your salary range for a remote role, consider what you would be willing to take if the role wasn’t remote. Your remote range shouldn’t stray far from that, as you’ll be doing the same work, just in a location or environment conducive to your success.

I would also suggest doing a quick analysis of salary ranges on Glassdoor, specifically for the remote-first companies listed earlier in this article. For example, what do marketers make at Toptal or Auth0 or Buffer? Buffer actually openly shares all of their salaries, via their remote salary calculator.

Remotive has also compiled a list of salaries from hundreds of remote workers across positions, industries, and seniority. Take these as simply another data point in your triangulation for determining what you should look for. However, comparison only goes so far, so the ultimate data point is determining the amount of money that will let you achieve your baseline happiness. Never sacrifice that in your search of a new role.

As for benefits, there is a pretty wide range in terms of companies offer remotely. Some offer very few, while some place benefits at a high importance. The one benefit which you’re unlikely to get if you work for a company that you are not a resident of, is healthcare. Below are two examples (Zapier and Ghost) of fully remote companies and their benefits.

Parting Advice

As someone who has been working in non-technical roles remotely for the past 3+ years, I have seen the world change immensely. These changes signify a new world that is enabled through technology and connectedness which simply wasn’t available in the past. This is the future of work.

This isn’t just a bunch of millennials who can’t commit to a normal job, it’s an entire shift in perspective, of individuals deciding that there is a better way of working. This isn’t the first time the workforce has shifted significantly and will not be the last. The most obvious positions that first made the switch were technical, but now many non-technical positions can be done online. Remember, if your role can be done digitally, it can be done remotely.

As I leave you with this information, please remember to look for legitimate remote work. Legitimate means something slightly different to each individual, but the key is that you should not be trading away parts of your life (whether that be your career, your integrity, your financial stability, your passions, etc.) to work remotely. Remote work doesn’t solve your problems and if you are trading down in one major aspect of your life (something you’ll spend ~⅓ of your life on), that will only introduce additional problems.

These changes are exciting and I hope that in a few years time, this article will be completely obsolete, as non-technical remote roles will be so customary and common.

Best of luck!
- Steph

PS: If you liked this article, you might enjoy my podcast or my latest project.

Join the conversation on Twitter:

If you liked this article, I have a feeling you'll enjoy this podcast episode about traditions, including the 40-hour workweek:

Related posts about Remote Work:

• The Guide to Remote Work That Isn't Trying to Sell You Anything
• Best Practices for Managing Remote Teams: A Psychological Perspective
• Finding Top Talent: Stop Looking Inside a Box for People Thinking Outside of One

After learning to code for the past year, I’ve recently found myself in the realm of asynchronous Javascript.

Throughout the last few months, I’ve really struggled with this component of the language and have had to go over parts of the course I've taken many times over. Even after doing that, I still felt pretty lost in terms of how I could take the information and translate it to something actionable.

During my most recent review of the material, I realized the only way that it would truly stick would be to create something with it. So, I decided to test my knowledge by building out a tool called Progression Page. Upon creating this application, I did feel much more capable of utilizing tools in the asynchronous toolbox.

Progression Page is a tool that helps people track and visualize their daily progress in learning to code, so in the spirit of helping others learn, I decided to share this tutorial to inspire others to create mini-applications using Google Sheets as their database.

Using Google Sheets as a Database

I track everything that I do in Google Sheets. When I say everything, I mean everything.

I track how often I exercise, how many books I get through, how often I learn to code, and much more. I do this to keep myself accountable because I believe in quantifying progress is such an important precursor to “success”﹣not just in my “work life”, but in all facets.

Since tracking my effort has been so essential in my personal progress, I’ve always been surprised when others don’t do the same, especially when the lack of tracking tends to end with results like this:

I wanted a place where people could easily log their progress towards coding publicly, so people could keep them accountable. That’s exactly what Progression Page does; it allows each member to log their daily progress in terms of what they’re learning, how long, and how often in a Google sheet, in addition to their skills, goals, and more. This information is pulled directly from the sheet and displayed on the webpage.

Progression Page is one of many examples of people using Google Sheets as a database. For example, Sheet2Site utilizes Google Sheets as the database for sites ranging from events to products to job boards. Although there are certainly pitfalls of using Sheets as a database.,  the beauty of it is that you (and others) can easily view, edit, and scale the information as needed. With that in mind, I can’t wait to see what people create with this technology at their fingertips.

Preface

Before jumping in, I want to preface that my code may not be "optimal" or refactored exactly as it should be. Remember, I’m still a n00b (aren’t we all?).

As someone still new to development, I’m focused on creating things that work, before worrying about how scalable or flawless the application may be.

I also should mention that this article is created specifically for those using Node.js, although I’m sure it can be tailored for other backends. I won’t go through the steps to set up a Node.js/Express.js application from the very ground up, so it’s really for those familiar with that infrastructure.

Things that this article will go over:

• How to authenticate OAuth2 in Node.js
• How to connect with the Google Sheets API with Node to create a Google Spreadsheet database through 3 approaches
• How to integrate data from the API into an Express.js application

Things that this article will not go over:

• How to style or deploy a web page
• How to use Node.js or Express.js from the ground up
• How to use the API across other back-end languages

Getting Started

To start, you should have a basic Node application set up with npm initialized.

From here, you’ll need to install the packages that you’ll be using for this application:

• express (for rendering dynamic pages)
• request (for making HTTP requests)
• fs (for the Google API)
• readline (for the Google API)
• googleapis (for the Google API)

npm install express ejs request gs readline googleapis@39 --save

Ensure that you’ve properly required each of these dependencies at the top of your index file, as shown below.

var express     = require("express"),
fs              = require('fs'),
readline        = require('readline'),
{google}        = require('googleapis'),
request         = require('request'),
app             = express();

From here, you should also set your view engine to ejs so that the program recognizes EJS files that are being rendered without needing to define the file extension each time (ie: you can easily call res.render('test') instead of res.render('test.ejs')).

app.set("view engine", "ejs");

Setting up a Route in Node.js

Since this particular application will send the pulled data to a webpage, we first need to set up the route that will be serving this application. To start, this can be a standard route that we’ll direct to the test subdirectory, rendering the test.ejs. I’ll be editing this endpoint for each part of the tutorial.

app.get("/test", function(req, res){
  res.render('test')
});

Setting up the Rendered Page

You’ll need to create a views directory which hosts your EJS files. I also set up a few other things that I utilize in my node applications which aren’t essential to get started, but are needed for other steps past this tutorial, like adding styling.

• I added header and footer partials, although those are not necessary for every application. If you do not know what those are, just ensure that your EJS files have all of the required information as a normal HTML file would have, like the DOCTYPE and <head> section.
• I added a public directory to house styling and other files supporting the site. In order for the application to recognize this directory, the following line is required prior to any routing.

app.use(express.static(__dirname+"/public"));

Once you’ve taken these steps, your directory should look something like this!

At this point, you should have the core dependencies in place for our Node application, so we can start working with the API!

Linking Node.js to Google Sheets

A bulk of this tutorial will be going through how to connect with the Google API. There are multiple ways to connect with the API and I’ll be sharing three:

• Google Sheets HTTP Requests Via V3
• Google Sheets API v4 with OAuth2
• Google Developer Console and google-spreadsheet Package with v4

You are welcome to utilize any of the methods below and skip to the approach that is most helpful to you. Before hopping in, I should mention that I would encourage most applications to use v4 for the following reasons:

Reasons to use v3 HTTP method:

• It’s easier to set up

Reasons to use v4:

• v3 will get deprecated eventually
• Using the v3 method requires the spreadsheet to be published
• Using the v3 method only allows reading and not writing
• You are dependent on the order of tabs with the v3 method
• You have less flexibility in your requests with the v3 method
• The output is cleaner in v4

Method 1: HTTP Requests Via V3

As of today, arguably the easiest way of accessing the API is through v3.

This version offers an endpoint that returns all of the information in a single JSON simply by accessing a designated URL. To utilize this method, it’s as simple as the following steps:

1. Go to your spreadsheet and click File → Publish to the Web

1. Select the parts of the document that you want to extract data from. These must be published in order to pull data via this method.
2. Utilize this URL structure to access the data, replacing SPREADSHEET_ID and TAB_NUMBER with the correct information from your sheet:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/cells/SPREADSHEET_ID/TAB_NUMBER/public/values?alt=json

For example, the following URL will return the information from the first image with a JSON depicted in the second: https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/cells/1UIV4RkOx8KJK2zQYig0klH5_f8FCOdwIWV8YF2VyF8I/2/public/values?alt=json

Also, if you remove ?alt=json from the end, you’ll receive the data back as an XML.

Should we want to make this request via Node, instead of the browser, we can utilize the request package that was installed at the beginning of this tutorial. If you’ve never used the request package, you can find the documentation here. Below is an example of the code that would be run in node at the URL: domain.xyz/v3, rendering the page and passing in the response object that can be used in the test.ejs file.

app.get("/v3", function(req, res){

  // Defining the request URL
  var options = {
      url: 'https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/cells/1UIV4RkOx8KJK2zQYig0klH5_f8FCOdwIWV8YF2VyF8I/2/public/values?alt=json'
  }

  // Using the request package to pull the information using the options object defined above
  request(options, callback)
  
  // Callback function logging the request body in the console if it was successful
  function callback(error, response, body){
    if (!error && response.statusCode == 200) {
      console.log(body);
      
      // Rendering test express file while passing in the response object to be used.
      res.render('test', {response: response})
    } else {
      console.log(error)
    }
  }
})

Something very important to keep in mind as you're writing the callback (and for future sections of this tutorial), is to ensure that your callback response object is named differently than the response defined in app.get(). In other words, they need to be independent variables, or else you will run into errors. In the example above, the first response object is named "res", while the one in the callback is named "response". You can call them whatever you see fit, but do ensure that you are independent from one another.

Returning to the limitations outlined earlier, I should mention that although the v3 API is quite easy to use, I would recommend continuing on to learn about how to utilize v4 of the API.

Outside of v3 requiring your data to be public, not allowing any writing to the spreadsheet, and less flexibility with your requests, perhaps the most compelling issue is that v3 will be deprecated at some point in the future by Google and so it’s worth moving onto a more reliable solution now.

Method 2: OAuth2 with V4

Let’s get started with v4! This section will teach you to utilize v4 through the methodology that Google provides (without any third party packages).

Google already provides pretty good documentation for how to begin integrating with v4 of the Sheets API. They offer a Quickstart guide for most back-end languages including PHP, Python, Ruby, .NET, Go, Java, Go, and of course, Node.js.
You’ll see in the quickstart section that there are four steps to follow. You can follow the instructions directly from this page provided by Google, but I’ve left a couple guiding notes below.

Step 1: Turn on the Google Sheets API

• Once you’ve enabled the API, you’ll get a client ID and client secret that can later be managed in the API console. For the purposes of this type of authentication, you will only need the credentials.json file which should be saved in your working directory (ie: wherever you have app.js or index.js running).

Step 2: Install the client library

• If you followed the earlier steps of this tutorial, you will have already installed the dependencies.

Step 3: Set up the sample

• If you followed the earlier steps of this tutorial, you will have already required the dependencies at the top of your app.js or index.js file. You can now copy the code over from the quickstart page to your working Node file. A few clarifying notes on the code that Google provides:

Authentication

The function fs.readFile() actually initiates the process of authentication via calling the authorize() function, using the information in your credentials.json file.

The test code is set up to call listMajors() as the callback function upon authentication, which we’ll change later on.

fs.readFile('credentials.json', (err, content) => {
  if (err) return console.log('Error loading client secret file:', err);
  // Authorize a client with credentials, then call the Google Sheets API.
  authorize(JSON.parse(content), listMajors);
});

In order to perform the authentication, there is a set of functions that actually runs the process. The authorize() and getNewToken() functions are predefined and can be moved to the bottom of your Node file or even exported in from another file. There is no need to mess around with the below code and it can actually be placed outside of your routing, in order to clean up your code.

/**
 * Create an OAuth2 client with the given credentials, and then execute the
 * given callback function.
 * @param {Object} credentials The authorization client credentials.
 * @param {function} callback The callback to call with the authorized client.
 */
function authorize(credentials, callback) {
  const {client_secret, client_id, redirect_uris} = credentials.installed;
  const oAuth2Client = new google.auth.OAuth2(
      client_id, client_secret, redirect_uris[0]);

  // Check if we have previously stored a token.
  fs.readFile(TOKEN_PATH, (err, token) => {
    if (err) return getNewToken(oAuth2Client, callback);
    oAuth2Client.setCredentials(JSON.parse(token));
    callback(oAuth2Client);
  });
}

/**
 * Get and store new token after prompting for user authorization, and then
 * execute the given callback with the authorized OAuth2 client.
 * @param {google.auth.OAuth2} oAuth2Client The OAuth2 client to get token for.
 * @param {getEventsCallback} callback The callback for the authorized client.
 */
function getNewToken(oAuth2Client, callback) {
  const authUrl = oAuth2Client.generateAuthUrl({
    access_type: 'offline',
    scope: SCOPES,
  });
  console.log('Authorize this app by visiting this url:', authUrl);
  const rl = readline.createInterface({
    input: process.stdin,
    output: process.stdout,
  });
  rl.question('Enter the code from that page here: ', (code) => {
    rl.close();
    oAuth2Client.getToken(code, (err, token) => {
      if (err) return console.error('Error while trying to retrieve access token', err);
      oAuth2Client.setCredentials(token);
      // Store the token to disk for later program executions
      fs.writeFile(TOKEN_PATH, JSON.stringify(token), (err) => {
        if (err) return console.error(err);
        console.log('Token stored to', TOKEN_PATH);
      });
      callback(oAuth2Client);
    });
  });
}

Testing the API Call in Node

The final function which Google provides as listMajors() is the function that will actually be used to define what information is being manipulated using the API.

ListMajors currently pulls from a predefined spreadsheet (id = ‘1BxiMVs0XRA5nFMdKvBdBZjgmUUqptlbs74OgvE2upms’) that Google has set up. In this case, the code is set to pull from range A2:E and you’ll notice that the data that is returned in the response.data.values object.

The listMajors function (or whatever you change it to be named) is the callback to the original authentication function and this function will be where you house your res.render() and send data to your webpage. More on this later.  

/**
 * Prints the names and majors of students in a sample spreadsheet:
 * @see https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BxiMVs0XRA5nFMdKvBdBZjgmUUqptlbs74OgvE2upms/edit
 * @param {google.auth.OAuth2} auth The authenticated Google OAuth client.
 */
function listMajors(auth) {
  const sheets = google.sheets({version: 'v4', auth});
  sheets.spreadsheets.values.get({
    spreadsheetId: '1BxiMVs0XRA5nFMdKvBdBZjgmUUqptlbs74OgvE2upms',
    range: 'Class Data!A2:E',
  }, (err, res) => {
    if (err) return console.log('The API returned an error: ' + err);
    const rows = res.data.values;
    if (rows.length) {
      console.log('Name, Major:');
      // Print columns A and E, which correspond to indices 0 and 4.
      rows.map((row) => {
        console.log(`${row[0]}, ${row[4]}`);
      });
    } else {
      console.log('No data found.');
    }
  });
}

Step 4: Run the sample

• In the command line of your node application, run node ., which will prompt you to authorize access. As you grant access, you may notice that a token.json file is created in your directory. Don’t delete this file as it is used to remember that this particular application has been authenticated.

Now, you should be able to test out whether everything is set up correctly, by running your app.js file in the terminal. When this happens, you should see the data from listMajors() print to the console as below.

Customizing the API Call

Now that you’ve set up the authentication layer in your application, it’s time to actually use the API! As mentioned, this means that you’ll be customizing the callback function which is currently listMajors().

In order to pull data, you’ll continue using the sheets.spreadsheets.values.get(), or if you are looking to pull multiple sections the function you can use sheets.spreadsheets.values.batchGet(). The documentation for both of these methods can be found here:

• spreadsheets.get
• spreadsheets.values.batchGet

Let’s start with the former.

Getting Data

For this case, you’ll only be editing a few things from the listMajors function since it’s already set up with the get() method. I’ve renamed it datapull() for clarity and made the following adjustments:

1. Changed the spreadsheet ID to my spreadsheet's ID
2. Edited the range to pull only the cells that I want (‘tab2!A1:A10’ in this case)
3. Set up the response object which I’ve named ‘rows’
4. Passed the data from the rows object into the express file via the res.render call

app.get("/v4-get", function(req, res){

  // Authorization
  fs.readFile('credentials.json', (err, content) => {
    if (err) return console.log('Error loading client secret file:', err);
    // Authorize a client with credentials, then call the Google Sheets API.
    authorize(JSON.parse(content), datapull);
  });
  
  // Callback function pulling data
  function datapull(auth) {

  const sheets = google.sheets({version: 'v4', auth});
  
  // Pulling the data from the specified spreadsheet and the specified range  
  var result = sheets.spreadsheets.values.get({
    // (1) Changed spreadsheet ID
    spreadsheetId: '1UIV4RkOx8KJK2zQYig0klH5_f8FCOdwIWV8YF2VyF8I',
    // (2) Changed the range of data being pulled
    range: 'tab2!A1:A10',
  }, (err, response)=>{
    if (err) return console.log('The API returned an error: ' + err);
    
    // (3) Setting data for daily tracking
    const rows = response.data.values;
    
    // (4) Rendering the page and passing the rows data in
    res.render('test', {rows: rows})
  });
  }

Getting Batch Data

Should you need to pull multiple sections from a spreadsheet, you can keep most of the code the same while replacing .get() with .batchGet(), while making the following changes to the request:

1. Updated the function to be a batchGet() function
2. Updated “range” to plural “ranges”, while inputting the series of cells that you want to grab
3. Setting the output of each range to a constant
4. Organizing the output data into two arrays
5. Rendering the express file while passing through both arrays (in this example: “rows” and “data”)

app.get("/v4-batch-get", function(req, res){

  fs.readFile('credentials.json', (err, content) => {
    if (err) return console.log('Error loading client secret file:', err);
    // Authorize a client with credentials, then call the Google Sheets API.
    authorize(JSON.parse(content), datapull);
  });

  function datapull(auth) {
  const sheets = google.sheets({version: 'v4', auth});
    
  // (1) Updating function to use batchGet()
  var result = sheets.spreadsheets.values.batchGet({
    spreadsheetId: '1UIV4RkOx8KJK2zQYig0klH5_f8FCOdwIWV8YF2VyF8I',
    
    // (2) Updating "range" to "ranges" and inputting the series of cells to grab within the array
    ranges: ['tab2!A2:A12', 'tab2!B2:B12', 
             'tab3!A2:A', 'tab3!B2:B']
  }, (err, resp)=>{
    if (err) return console.log('The API returned an error: ' + err);
    
    // (3) Pulling first two ranges into arrays - data format changes from.values to .valueRanges[range defined above].values
    const rows1 = resp.data.valueRanges[0].values;
    const rows2 = resp.data.valueRanges[1].values;

    // Pulling last two ranges into arrays- same data format as above
    const data1 = resp.data.valueRanges[2].values;
    const data2 = resp.data.valueRanges[3].values;
    
    // (4) Organizing the data output into two arrays: rows and data
    const rows = [rows1, rows2]
    const data = [data1, data2]
    
    // (5) Rendering the page and passing both the rows and data arrays through
    res.render('test', {rows: rows, data:data})
  });
  }
});

Hopefully, it’s clear that using the .get() and .batchGet() methods in v4 enable you to have much more control over the requests that you hope to make. There are many other methods that the Google API enables via v4, including the ability to write via the update() and batchUpdate() methods. With this in mind, let’s jump into the final approach for using the Google API which utilizes a third-party package.

Method 3: Node.js OAuth2 - Google Developer Console and npm google-spreadsheet package

The final method utilizes the Google Developer Console and a third party npm package called google-spreadsheet which arguably is much cleaner than the functions outlined in the Google documentation. In order to utilize this approach, the first step is to install google-spreadsheet and to require the modules at the top of your file:

npm install google-spreadsheet

var express     = require("express"),
fs              = require('fs'),
readline        = require('readline'),
{google}        = require('googleapis'),
request         = require('request'),
GoogleSpreadsheet = require('google-spreadsheet'),
creds             = require('./client_secret.json'),
app               = express();

There are a few administrative steps in order to enable authentication through this approach.

1. Go to the Google Developers Console and navigate to the API section. You should see a dashboard.
2. Click on  “Enable APIs” or “Library” which should take you to the library of services that you can connect to. Search and enable the Google Sheets API.
3. Go to Credentials and select “Create credentials”.
4. Select “Service Account” and proceed forward by creating this service account. It can be named whatever you want.
5. Under “Role”, select Project > Owner or Editor, depending on what level of access you want to grant.
6. Select JSON as the Key Type and click “Create”. This should automatically download a JSON file with your credentials.
7. Rename this credentials file as client_secret.json and copy it into your working directory.
8. The final administrative step is super important! Take the “client email” that is in your credentials file and grant access to that particular email in the sheet that you’re working in. You can do this by clicking “Share” in the top left of your spreadsheet and then pasting that email in the field, enabling with “Can edit”. If you do not do this, you will get an error when trying to pull the data.

In order to test whether the code works, we can start working with the API! Below is some example code which effectively authenticates and gets the data from the second tab of the identified spreadsheet. I've left notes identifying where the authentication is taking place, what is being requested, and where the response is being returned.

While you’re testing, make sure to take a look at the output in the console which will either log the error or the response object. If you are getting a 403 error, this means that something probably went wrong in setting up the authentication.

app.get("/google-spreadsheet", function(req, res){
  
  // Identifying which document we'll be accessing/reading from
  var doc = new GoogleSpreadsheet('1UIV4RkOx8KJK2zQYig0klH5_f8FCOdwIWV8YF2VyF8I');

  // Authentication
  doc.useServiceAccountAuth(creds, function (err) {
  
  // Getting cells back from tab #2 of the file
  doc.getCells(2, callback)
  
  // Callback function determining what to do with the information
  function callback(err, rows){
    
    // Logging the output or error, depending on how the request went
    console.log(rows)
    console.log(err)
    
    // Rending the test page while passing in the response data through "rows". Can access specific data points via: rows[i]._value
    res.render('test', {rows:rows})
  }
  });  
});

With this package, it becomes even easier to start writing to the spreadsheet as well. For example, perhaps you want to write to the spreadsheet daily with your progress. Here is an example of how you might do that:

app.get("/google-spreadsheet", function(req, res){
  
  // Identifying which document we'll be accessing/reading from
  var doc = new GoogleSpreadsheet('1UIV4RkOx8KJK2zQYig0klH5_f8FCOdwIWV8YF2VyF8I');

  // Authentication
  doc.useServiceAccountAuth(creds, function (err) {
  
  // Adding a row in tab #4 with the date and the number 1
  doc.addRow(4, { date: "=today()", progress: "1" }, callback)
  
  function callback(err) {
    if(err) {
      console.log(err);
    } else {
      console.log('You added your progress for the day.') 
      
      // Rendering test page
      res.render('test')
    }
  }

  });  
});

From here, you can utilize the functions within the docs of the google-spreadsheet package.

Connecting the Google Sheets Database to Express

Hopefully the last few sections were helpful in identifying different approaches that you can take to connect with, authenticate, and pull data from the Google API. The final step in utilizing the database to produce a website/application that uses this information in real time is to pass through the data to the rendered EJS file.

At this point, you should have a few routes set up which pull data that you need from the API. You are free to use whichever route that you choose in order to pass this data through to the express file of your choice (via your res.render() call). Within the express file itself, you are able to utilize this data through EJS (embedded javascript) tags.

These tags allow you to render Javascript in-line or alongside your HTML. For example, if you were pulling from a batchGet() function which passed data through to the express file as “data” and “rows”, you can use the EJS tags to loop through your data and print it directly to the page.

Input (pulling from this file):

<% include partials/header %>

<div class="container">

    <h2>This is a tutorial for using the Google Sheets API!</h2>
    
    <div>This data is pulling from the second tab:</div>
    
    <!--Looping through the 'rows' array and printing the output within the EJS tags-->
    <% for(i=0; i<10; i++) { %>
    <div >
        Rows data: <%= rows[0][i] %>, <%= rows[1][i] %>
    </div>
    <% } %>    
    
    <br>
    <hr>
    <br>
    
    <div>This data is pulling from the third tab:</div>
    
    <!--Looping through the 'data' array and printing the output within the EJS tags-->
    <% for(i=0; i<10; i++) { %>
    <div >
        On <%= data[0][i] %>, I made the following progress: <%=data[1][i]%>
    </div>
    <% } %>    

</div>

<% include partials/footer %>

Output (rendering from the EJS file):

Once you set up the right database-link, you are free to style the page and add additional functionality, just like any other HTML page, since EJS is essentially HTML with Javascript embedded.

Over and Out

I hope that the information provided gives you enough of a backbone for understanding how to make requests and then actually embed requests within your Node/Express application. You’ll have to think through your individual approach for setting up the data structures you may need,  but the method still remains the same.

As demonstrated, the Google API provides multiple methods for accessing data from Google Spreadsheets and I encourage you to use whichever method best suits your needs. I would also encourage you to dive into the documentation to learn more about the possible solutions available. I'm really excited to see what you create and as always, if you have any questions as you’re learning, feel free to shoot me a message!

PS: If you liked this article, you might enjoy my podcast or my latest project.

Join the conversation on Twitter:

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My “Story”

Four years ago: Sitting in a lecture hall learning about thermodynamics and pipe sizing.

Three years ago: Sitting in an office creating Excel models for the Fortune 500.

Two years ago: Obtained by first Macbook and began diving into the world of SEO, product, and digital advertising.

One year ago: Decided it was finally time to learn to code.

Six months ago: Launched my first project.

February 2018

After many years of working on the fringe of technology, February 2018 was when I finally decided that it was time to stop watching with my nose pressed up to the glass window. I wanted to be part of this world.

Up until February 2018, I had always watched technology emerge in awe, but continuously made excuses as to why “I couldn’t do that” or justified why that world “was for other people”. February of 2018 was the start of my journey to make this world less of a black box and instead start creating, slowly but surely.

Specifically, this is a story about my year finding the right inspiration to finally learn to code and eventually launch four projects over the course of 2018, leading to a nomination for Maker of the Year and a Maker’s Fest Golden Kitty. Hopefully, if you’re in a similar place - one where you’re on the verge of taking the leap - this article will act as a form of coding inspiration and push you over the edge.

You = Your Worst Enemy

There have been and always will be blockers in my life. Upon reflection, the process of finally learning to code taught me one important thing: I was often my own biggest blocker.

For years, many of the excuses I had made were rarely based in reality, but instead justification not to start. I told myself narratives that others succeeding in ways that I had always wanted were cut from a different cloth, were given different opportunities than I, or were simply too far ahead. While some of these may notions may hold truth in specific scenarios, I had built a habit of making these assumptions without properly vetting their accuracy.

Most of the stories I told myself were myths. Specifically, these 7 myths of learning to code prevented me from thinking coding was accessible. But it was really right there at my fingertips. Whether I was wrapped up in finding the perfect idea, or in identifying the perfect stack to learn, I was always doing those things instead of actually making process. In an age where education is cheaper and more accessible than ever, all I needed to do was start.

Thankfully, I finally wrapped my head around this last year. I didn’t do anything revolutionary: I picked up a Udemy course (one that I would now definitely recommend!), picked a project to build, and started tracking whether I was making progress every single day.

8 months → 1 month → 24 hours

Before you can launch a product, you need to build a product. And before you can build a product, you’ll need to learn how to build a product.

Learning to code from scratch isn’t as difficult as many make it out to be, but I don’t want to give the false impression that it’s “easy” either. Taking on any skill or industry takes a significant amount of dedication and programming is no different. However, it is beneficial to know that similar to other skill acquisition, learning to code accelerates with continuous effort.

For example, this was a brief overview of my timeline:

• Eight months learning to code and launching my first project
• One month coding my second project
• 24 hours coding my third project
• 10 days coding my fourth project

On Product Hunt, MYGA made it to #1, Eunoia made it to #2, and FeMake made it to #4. The point is not that applications should take 24 hours or even one week to create. Instead:

• Each time you launch, you will learn something which will better inform any other project you work subsequently on. Put simply, you will learn from your mistakes through either direct or indirect feedback. More on this later.
• Although learning to code may take a while to grasp, things will get much faster. For example, my fourth project was similar in complexity to my first, but took a lot less time. It wasn’t until my third project where I felt that I could truly ship quickly.

The idea here isn’t revolutionary, but simply that a lot of the heavy lifting will happen at the beginning in the form of learning. Learning is powerful and exactly what has enabled me to build every single one of my applications, but I realize that it can be overwhelming and difficult to stick to. There is always going to be chaos before order, and that’s why it’s essential to be aware of exactly what you’re diving into.

1, 2, 3, 4

Learning to code was a central goal for me in 2018. I can attribute my “success” in actually achieving my goal to a few things, which I’ll dive into further:

• Clearly identifying “why”
• Consistently tracking progress
• Creating while learning
• Starting small

Start with Why

Before you jump into development, you should identify why you’re making the leap. Hint: if it’s to “get rich,” you’ll never make your way through the long and continuous learning process.

There are many reasons why someone may want to learn to code. Some include:

• Becoming a paid developer
• Launching your own products
• Working more effectively with your coworkers

While there is no correct answer, I encourage you to identify a reason that will continuously motivate you and as you go through the process, ask yourself whether the actions you’re taking are leading towards that goal.

For me, it was being able to build and launch products, so I would ask myself questions like:

“Will learning this technology enable me to create my first project?”

“Am I learning valuable skills that I can build upon for years to come?”

“Am I adding to the ecosystem that I hope to be a part of moving forward?”

Make sure that your goals accompany you throughout the process and aren’t just a simple “end goal.” For example, if your singular goal is to “Hit #1 on Product Hunt,” you may find yourself disappointed if you don’t manage to hit that particular metric, regardless of how beneficial your journey may have been.

300 Hours

When I began to learn, I decided that the best way to hold myself accountable was to track my progress over time. Therefore, I tracked whether I was (or wasn’t) learning development every single day. Ultimately, I can look back on the past year and quantify my progress - specifically, I can say that I spent approximately 300 hours learning and launching applications.

Although this number will differ for each individual, it also provides a basic understanding of the level of commitment needed to get there. For example, if you’re planning on only dedicating an hour a week to this endeavour, it takes a really long time — six years! Just like anything in life, continuous yet consistent efforts will get you there quicker than you expect.

For example:

• 1 hour per day (7h/week) will get you there in <1 year!
• ~2 hours per day (15h/week) will get you there in <5 months!
• A full-time commitment (if possible) will get you there in <2 months!

I’m sure that many people think that these timelines sound unlikely or incorrect, but I would emphasize that development is not unique to other skills. Input equals output. I see people googling "fastest way to learn coding" (volume = 140) or "how to learn coding fast" (volume = 880) or "easy way to learn coding" (volume = 70), when in reality it will always take a non-trivial amount of time and investment.

Regardless of the exact accuracy, we are very quick to set these KPIs in our daily lives, but strangely against implementing them in our daily lives. By simply measuring how much time you’re spending learning to do X, you have a much more objective view of your progress.

Create While Learning

Since the initial phase of learning can take time, I would encourage people to break it up into steps. At each major node (ex: HTML → CSS → beginner JS → intermediate JS → etc), make sure that you’re creating something, regardless of how simple it is. For example, your projects could be:

• A simple personal page
• A todo list
• A small directory

By adding small projects along the way, you are essentially reinforcing what you are learning, while also lightening the psychological load of absorbing information prior to utilizing it. Programming by doing is the most effective way to truly crystallize what you're learning – it's the equivalent of exercising the language you're learning in its native environment.

I would also encourage people to come up with a larger project that they hope to accomplish as they start to acquire the requisite knowledge. The concept doesn’t have to be revolutionary (mine certainly was not), but it should be a project that you can continuously work towards as you’re learning. The act of creating will not only motivate you throughout, and ultimately help you learn more effectively.

Start Small: Launching is Learning

All of us are guilty of thinking our ideas are better than they actually are, so the only path to objective validation is launching.

For that reason, I would really encourage makers to launch sooner rather than later. You do not need to have been learning development for years to launch, and in many scenarios, you should launch before you feel ready. This is partially true because you will never truly feel ready, but also you should want to receive product feedback ASAP. This will inherently prohibit you from going down a path that isn’t validated (making features no one cares about, polishing a site no one will ever use, etc.).

As you’re learning development, focus on getting “shit out the door”, since launching is learning, Keep in mind that making a product is all about constantly learning and pivoting, and it’s extremely hard to do this objectively (ie: not just based on your own singular opinion) without launching.

Once you launch, get immediate feedback on what people care about. Based on both data and specific feedback (not vague comments like "this is a great app!"), you can determine whether a project is worth proceeding forward with. Try your best to look at a launch objectively and tease out flaws in your original thinking. Remember: launches are free feedback!

As you’re building, don’t get too hung up on whether your product is 100% perfect or utilizing the most scalable stack. Do you know what stack the number #1 product yesterday was made with? Yeah, me neither.

That is another reason why I encourage those who are unsure about learning to code to opt for that instead of building with “no code” or hiring the work out. The ability for you as a creator to make small, yet meaningful tweaks quickly is underrated. Similarly, your ability to pivot to a new project without searching for the perfect “no-code” tool or dropping another few $k on developers, is going to allow both you and your wallet to stay lean and agile.

In other words, you'll be able to create and pivot more quickly, and in the future not need to rely so heavily on others to create your visions. Even past that, just having a technical background helps you work more effectively with developers and understand the tech industry at a deeper level.

No One “Knows” What They’re Doing

If I haven’t convinced you to start learning to code yet, I will leave you with this bit of wisdom: no one truly “knows” what they’re doing. Those that are further ahead of you in a certain space have likely just been doing it from longer.

In a world ruled by dichotomies, people are viewed as “technical” and “non-technical,” but in reality, everyone is just somewhere along a curve of technical ability.

It’s helpful to recognize that many makers are still learning and often feel like imposters, even if they’ve been creating for years. The only thing that separates those who are successful from those who aren’t, is the few that are willing to continuously build, iterate, and learn from their mistakes. So if you’re unsure about starting, my encouragement is to just try it out.

• Don’t consider yourself technical? Try development before writing it off.
• Unsure of your ideas? Share them and get feedback.
• Afraid to launch? Do it anyway.

Build Your Own Path

I hope that my story helped provide some inspiration in you potentially taking the leap in learning to code on your own. However, with anything in life, remember to build your own path. Just because you see everyone on Twitter saying that X industry is “next” or you see the media glamourizing venture capital, that doesn’t mean that you need to go down that route. Remember that we live in a world where the most clickable headlines make the most money and thus the way the world is represented by the media often isn’t the reality of how things work.

So instead of focusing on what you know now, focus on what you can learn for the future. Don’t get overwhelmed by the concept of 300 hours or how far ahead someone else may be. Focus on continuous investment in the things that will bring you opportunity and happiness along the marathon that is life.

And most of all, remember that there is a start to any process. So just start. :)

If you have questions at any point throughout the process, feel free to send me a message!

PS: If you liked this article, you might enjoy my podcast or my latest project.

Related posts about Making:

• You Don't Need to Quit Your Job to Make
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Some of the links on this page are affiliate links, but I only promote products that I have used.

Over the past year I’ve taught myself to code. I’ve built and launched four web applications, taken courses from front-end to back-end, can work with APIs, and know what a Promise is.

Yet for some reason, I still don’t feel like a developer.

I thought this feeling would slowly fade over time as I learned more, built more, and code no longer looked so foreign. But to this day, this identity still doesn’t seem to fit and it’s unclear when it ever will. I’m left wondering...

When will I feel like a developer? When will I “become” one?

I’ve been thinking more about why I still feel like an imposter. Is it due to a personal perception, an external one, or another reason entirely? I decided to reach outside of my own world to find out.

TL;DR

When do you become a developer? No one knows!

The Golden Question

I decided to poll hundreds of people to see when they thought this inflection point happened. Was it when you…

• Wrote your first line of code?
• Got your first user?
• Created your first project?
• Got hired as a developer?

Or perhaps it could be something else entirely? When you...

• Understood the difference between X and Y?
• Could teach another person development?
• Moved past “Mount Stupid”?

Candidly, I was expecting the responses to fall more heavily within “Woah IDK”, since I was so unsure of the answer myself. Interestingly enough, many people seemed to have concrete views on this. However, what was perhaps just as telling was that those views diverged from one another. All answers received ~20-30% of the votes and from a quantitative perspective there wasn’t any more clarity as to what the “right” answer was. Perhaps that was the answer in itself.

A “Developer” Perspective

First, I’d like to share some of the responses from those who did have a defined point of view.

Write first line of code (17%)

From Quora: “You can consider yourself as a programmer when you are able to write at least one line of code. We don’t care about the length of the line, but this line of code should produce something which is correct.”

Create first app (33%)

Get hired as one (22%)

Woah IDK (28%)

Other

How to Save the World

The results of this thought experiment reminded me of a video that I saw in the earlier days of the social media﹣back when Vine was a thing.

The video was titled “How to save the world”. Naturally, you’d expect something highly enlightening about the state of the world and/or our future, but instead you get a boy who says:

• "How to save the world"
• Search for world
• Click on an image
• And “save” the world (as he’s saving the image to his computer)

Obviously this is a joke, but perhaps an unintentional lesson that we don’t always need to take things at face value. Perhaps there are more interesting interpretations of what "a developer” is or "how to be a developer" that we can dream up and maybe learn a thing or two while we’re at it.

“What do you do?”

I started to think about what software developers really do. Upon further consideration, it became apparent that software development often doesn’t have the same enforced credentials as some other occupations. For example, there are rarely self-taught doctors or open source construction projects.

Sure, there are many software engineering degrees, but there are also a significant number of paid/non-paid contributors in the software industry that do not have any sort of certification.

With so many people "coding without a degree", I’ve put some thought into why some roles require a degree and others do not. I came to the following two thoughts. A profession that requires a degree...

1. Has an agreed upon, correct approach to get to a specific outcome
2. Has a certain set of steps required to learn said approach

For example, someone who is a doctor needs to learn a discrete set of theory, do a discrete set of surgical procedures, and when push comes to shove, they need to know the “right” answer. Of course, there are some situations with ambiguity, but in many cases there is a correct order.

What I find so interesting with software is that there are a myriad of approaches that can be taken to get to a myriad of solutions. In other words, there are many wrong methods, but also many correct methods﹣and you can get to these correct methods without being formally trained. This is partially due to the democratization of information, but also that software development is in many ways the act of problems solving without a single correct answer. Therefore, there is no single approach to learning it.

For example, there are software engineers who can create similar solutions with completely different inputs (ex: languages, frameworks, tools, functions, etc.), while others are also creating wildly different solutions with the same inputs (ex: unique applications with the same underlying tooling). This rings true for other creative industries as well. For example, if you gave two people a canvas and paint, they could create wildly different things in which neither would necessarily be incorrect.

“So, are you a coder? Well, are you a problem solver?”

Nth Degree of Correctness

I think we can further this idea, through the concept of certain roles having an “Nth degree of correctness”. What I mean by this, is the varying degree of approaches that will get you to a “correct” solution. For example, with data entry there is one correct solution: the data getting input correctly. Sure there are variables like speed, but ultimately, there is only one correct outcome. As we’ve already identified, software engineering almost always has multiple correct solutions.

"In fact, no one understands as well as a computer scientist that in the face of a seemingly unmanageable challenge, you should neither toil forever nor give up, but as we’ll see, try a third thing entirely." – Algorithms to Live By

We can start to visualize some of these roles and their “degrees of correctness” in an effort to gain some clarity regarding how jobs or industries may evolve.

The further to the left (the fewer “correct” solutions), the more that particular skill can be trained and repeated. This is also similarly true for the skills which can eventually be trained by a computer to learn and repeat.

On the contrary, the skills on the right rely more on problem solving, discretion, and ultimately the lower barrier to entry opens up new approaches to learning which we’re seeing in many spaces like design, development, and marketing.

The Beauty of Development

As aforementioned, in order to participate in some industries, you need clear accreditation. This in itself has compounding effects on the difficulty for independent parties to contribute and advance the space.

Perhaps that’s something so beautiful and optimal about software development. Its lower barrier to entry is what enables so many people to contribute and perpetually keep the industry growing and thriving.  

That’s inherently why no other industry can keep up with the level of innovation that software allows, not just due to its function, but it’s openness. When you have millions of people openly contributing to something, those contributions inevitably result in progress and with that constant evolution, there will always be something new to learn. This results in an infinite learning curve which I think is beautiful.

Keep Your Identity Small

The concept of “becoming a developer” also had me thinking about identity. Paul Graham, well-known YC co-founder, has given the advice to “keep your identity small”. Perhaps we can utilize that idea to further understand the implications of the original question.

Starting with a definition taken directly from the WWW, a software developer is:

A programmer, developer, dev, coder, or software engineer is a person who creates computer software.

Notice that the definition doesn’t include any information about degrees or projects or status, but instead focuses on the act of creating. If software development doesn’t require a formal degree and all it really means is to create software, why do so many people have trouble considering themselves one.

Perhaps that’s because more often than not, a different picture is painted. Instead, there’s an image (for some) that to be a “developer” you need 10+ years of experience and can code with your eyes closed. I’m being facetious here, but you get the point. There’s some degree of gatekeeping that exists, whether intentional or unintentional, and I believe that plays into our ability to see ourselves as developers, even as we are indeed developing.

For example, someone on Quora mentioned:

I had a professor who once said, "you can't really call yourself a programmer until you understand recursion."

While it’s good to understand the fundamentals, these sentiments or requirements for being a programmer often prevent people from being able to identify with a subject and not everyone is able to effectively “keep their identity small”.

The act of gatekeeping or drilling home the fact that someone is not a developer until X step, results in people (like myself) feeling like imposters. And when someone feels like an imposter, they are unsurprisingly less likely to continue or even start in the first place.

Redefining a Developer

Hopefully I’ve convinced you by this point that there is no specific instance when someone becomes a developer. More importantly, building these barriers can be potentially damaging for people as they’re unable to view themselves in the lens of that identity.

Two concepts emerged from this thought experiment that I like:

1. A reflection on the beauty of development. The open source nature of both learning and creating is what I believe will continue to make the software industry thrive for many years to come, due to the systems in place which allow for open contribution. There is truly no single path to becoming a software engineer or steps to become a programmer.
2. The concept that perhaps we should remove “titles” or base them on your level of contribution versus your level of prior knowledge. In other words, your affinity to learn, create, and build. Whether it’s through open source projects, creating tools for the community, writing articles, or mentoring someone, I think that the act of engaging more accurately defines a developer.

In short, it’s now clear to me that especially in software development, titles do not matter. Instead of a one-time designation like a degree, being a “developer” should be measured by whether you’re still adding value.

Perhaps that’s why the word development is so synonymous with evolution.

PS: If you liked this article, you might enjoy my podcast or my latest project.

Related posts about Tech:

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• Step by Step: Setting Up Ghost with a Digital Ocean Droplet

Earlier this year, I decided to launch a blog. Just like everyone else in the world, their mom, and their dog, I wanted an outlet to share my thoughts.

However, when it came to actually launching my blog, I didn’t know where to start. With about  2847 platforms ready to power your blog, I was running into the paradox of choice. Should I choose Wordpress, a custom site, or just hand over my publishing to Medium?

The only thing that I became quickly sure of was that I wanted to host the blog on my own domain. I started off by looking for headless CMS tools, but quickly came to the determination that it wasn’t an optimal use of my time to design an entirely new front-end.

I asked a few friends for suggestions and the name Ghost kept coming up. Apparently, it was a well-optimized platform with a Medium-like UI that was made by an independent developer – all things that I loved hearing. So I decided to give it a try and upon doing some additional research, I settled on utilizing a $5 Digital Ocean droplet to serve it up.  [If you use this link, you'll get a free $100 credit]

Fast forward to 3 months later and my blog has seen over 100k pageviews with the Ghost and Digital Ocean combination totally holding up. It’s safe to say that I’m happy with my choice.

More recently, a couple readers have reached out looking for help in setting up the same publishing duo. The process is relatively quick, but not necessarily intuitive, so I thought I would compile the instructions into one easy blog post!

PS: This blog post is not sponsored by any third parties.

PPS: If you would prefer to write your own front-end, I would suggest Butter, a tool that I stumbled upon during my research which allows you to easily integrate into any backend. I actually implemented Butter into my Node application in a matter of minutes since their documentation is pretty solid, but ultimately wanted the Ghost front-end.

Ghost Premium?

Ghost is a “full-stack” publishing platform that allows you to set-up the front-end and back-end of your blog. Ghost also provides server support should you choose, which you can easily opt into with Ghost Premium. It’s simple and can be set up quickly, but costs $29/month for the most basic plan and as far as I know, most other features in Ghost Premium are available in the non-premium option, including integrations, code injection, and themes. The main differentiator is the lack of server set-up.

[Edit: Ghost now offers a starter plan for $9/month and if you want to save the headache of running your own servers, although it's minimal, now you don't have to break the bank! After 3 years of using Digital Ocean myself, I plan to migrate there for simplicity. Check it out here.]

So, this article assumes that you don’t want to choose Premium and would prefer a cheaper server option like the $5 Digital Ocean Droplet One Click setup. Although not quite “one-click”, the following steps should also enable you to install Ghost with a private server, so that your new blog is up and running in a matter of minutes. Let’s jump in!

Ghost Setup with the Digital Ocean Droplet

Please note that this section will go through a step-by-step process of setting up self-hosted Ghost for domains (ex: domain.xyz) or subdomains (ex: blog.domain.xyz), but not subdirectories (domain.xyz/blog). There are additional steps that will not be covered in this article related to subdirectories.

Setting up the Digital Ocean Droplet (Server for Ghost)

• The first step to setting up Ghost is hopping over to the Digital Ocean Marketplace. Search for “Ghost” and navigate to the Ghost droplet page. If you’re signed in, you can also find this in the platform by navigating to “Marketplace” in the left-hand navigation.
• Click “Create Ghost Droplet”. This is the “Digital Ocean One Click” setup that will build and launch a server just for you!
• Prior to creation, Digital Ocean will bring you to a page where you need to choose your droplet size. I would recommend that you start at the lowest tier which is: Standard $5/month. Note that this option doesn’t show up immediately, so you’ll need to navigate to the left to find it. Unless you already have a huge blog, I would not be concerned about traffic or the server holding up. My $5/month droplet held up with an article trending across the top of Hacker News for over 24h with hundreds of active readers and absolutely no glitches.
• As for the other setup conditions, you can enable these at your discretion and are mostly optional. You will need to choose your datacenter region, which should be closest to where you expect most of your users/readers are. I did not select any additional add-ons or SSH key, as it’s not mandatory for set-up and my routing is done through Cloudflare which provides my security layer.
• Once you’ve selected a name for your droplet (this can be anything), Digital Ocean will take a couple minutes to create the droplet. Once the droplet is created, you should see an IP address (for example: 134.209.253.151).

• If you navigate to that IP in your browser, you’ll see the below view of the Ghost Installation page, which means the droplet is set up and hosted by Digital Ocean at that IP address. If you don’t see this page, the droplet has not been set up properly. If you do see this page, you’ve set up your droplet and can now connect it to a domain!

Connecting to Custom Domain to Ghost

• If you haven’t already purchased a custom domain for your Ghost blog, you’ll need to do that first. Remember, this process will work for either a completely new domain that you hope to use (ex: blog.xyz) or adding a subdomain to an existing domain hosted elsewhere (ex: blog.domain.xyz).
• First, you’ll need to add the domain to Digital Ocean and set up your Digital Ocean DNS records. To do so, click the right-hand toggle to “Add a domain”.

• Type your domain name in the input field and then click “Add Domain”. You should see DNS records populate similar to the below.

• Once you’ve set up your DNS records on the Digital Ocean side, you’ll need to configure the A-record within your external domain settings. Depending on how you’ve set up your domain previously, but may be found within your domain registrar (ex: Namecheap, GoDaddy, etc.) or if you’ve already re-routed your DNS to a third party like Cloudflare, you would be updating the DNS records there. Within your non-Digital Ocean DNS records, you’ll need to direct your A-record to the IP given to your droplet with the “name” being the domain or subdomain where you hope to host your blog home.
  
  For example, if you wanted blog.domain.xyz to house the blog, you would set up the A-record for “blog” that to point towards the IP (ex: 134.209.253.151).
  
  Use the examples below as an example, but note that you should only set up one or the other.

• Once you’ve set up your DNS records on both ends, they may take some time to propagate. Some third parties indicate that it can take up to 48 hours, but normally this happens within minutes.
• Once the DNS records have propagated, you should once again see the same Ghost installation page at the domain or subdomain that you just configured. For example, this page would now show up not only at 134.209.253.15, but also makerstats.com. If you do not see this page, you may have to investigate whether the DNS settings have properly been set up and propagated.

Installing Ghost

• The final section of this 3-step installation process is to install the Ghost software. To do so, hop back into Digital Ocean and open the console over on the right-hand side. This should open the console in a new tab that is requesting a login.

• Enter your username (always “root”) and then the password sent to you by email from Digital Ocean, when you initiated the droplet.

• The terminal will then prompt you to update your password immediately. This is mandatory.  It’ll first prompt you to enter your current UNIX password (same as password in your email) and then add a new password twice. If this is done correctly, you should see the installation initialize and after a few seconds, you should see the below screen.

• Press enter to begin the installation to which you should see the program downloading.

• The program will prompt you to enter your domain (in this case - make sure it’s your actual domain or subdomain and not the IP) and your email address. The email address can be any of your emails and is just used for the SSL process.
• If everything is done correctly, this is what you will see!

• To ensure that everything is set up properly, you can now go to your domain or subdomain and you should see a basic blog template from Ghost (example below). Note that if you’re routing through Cloudflare and you’re getting problems related to routing or too many redirects, you may be having problems related to your SSL. I was able to fix this in the Crypto tab, by setting SSL from Flexible to Full.

• Now, if you navigate to yourdomain.xyz/ghost or the subdomain.domain.xyz/ghost, you should see the setup page.

• Once you go through the steps of the sign-up process, you should get to this page! This is your Ghost portal where you can customize, upload content, add integrations, and more.

Congrats! You’ve successfully set up Ghost. You will be able to access your editing platform at anytime through your link yourdomain.xyz/ghost or subdomain.domain.xyz/ghost. It’s time to get your blog up and running!

Getting Started with Ghost: Customization

In your portal, there are multiple tabs in the left-hand sidebar which allow you to further customize you blog. I’ll be going through some tips across each one of these below.

General

In this tab, you’ll enter a pretty standard set of information including your publication name, cover, logo (favicon), timezone, and more. Don’t forget to update your social accounts! I forgot to do this at first and had the Ghost social accounts as my default for over a week.

Another thing worth noting is that Ghost automatically adds a filter over cover images that are on the lighter end, in order for the text to show up clearly. You can edit this later in the code injection section.

Design

Navigation

The navigation section is pretty straight-forward and allows you to set up your navigation bar, which is present on all pages of your blog. You’re able to set up links to any pages, whether internal or external to your blog, but most people utilize this to navigate to tags/category pages.

Ghost Themes

I’d say the one minor pitfall of Ghost currently is that customization is limited from a design standpoint. You can go and download the entire template, make changes, and then re-upload it. I decided to opt out of that approach and I have a feeling that many going through this tutorial will do the same.

For those of you who also don’t want to edit an entire template, you do have the option to explore the Ghost theme marketplace. There are a couple dozen paid Ghost themes ranging from $19-$59, in addition to six free themes:

• Casper (this blog)
• Massively
• London
• Editorial
• Zvikov
• Attila

In the grand scheme of things, the cost of the paid themes is affordable and comparable to paid themes across other sites like Wordpress, but are much easier to install with Ghost.

Tags

You’ll need to select tags for your articles. These will be the categories which:

1. Articles are grouped by
2. Can be added to your navigation bar

You can add as many tags as you would like, along with a unique URL and description. For example, here is the Remote Work category for my blog. You’ll also be able to set up meta data, which is the information that will appear when the page is shared or shows up in search results.

I personally chose to select the same background image for all of my category pages. Instead of uploading them individually, I decided to set the image globally using CSS in the code injection section of the platform.

.site-header {
background-image: -webkit-image-set(
    url(https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1501769214405-5e5ee5125a02?ixlib=rb-1.2.1&ixid=eyJhcHBfaWQiOjEyMDd9&auto=format&fit=crop&w=998&q=80) 1x,
    url(https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1501769214405-5e5ee5125a02?ixlib=rb-1.2.1&ixid=eyJhcHBfaWQiOjEyMDd9&auto=format&fit=crop&w=998&q=80) 2x
)}  

Code Injection

Speaking of code injection, there are a few other ways to customize your design without directly editing the theme, but styling or adding scripts in your header/footer. Here are some things that I’ve chosen to do with code injection.

Google Analytics

Make sure that you add your Google Analytics tracking ID in your header. You can copy the script directly from Google Analytics.

<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-ID"></script>
<script>
	  window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
	  function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
	  gtag('js', new Date());
	  gtag('config', 'UA-ID');
</script>

Additional Scripts

I also added a script to my Mailchimp modal and I’m sure that you can use your imagination for other scripts potentially worth adding.

Trust Bar

I decided to add a Trust Bar of places I had been featured. In order to do this, I added a div that was at the bottom of the header (under the styling and script tags). Below is some basic HTML to get you started along with the styling which can be found underneath.

<div id="trustbar">
As seen in:
<a href="https://www.producthunt.com/@stephsmith" target="_blank"><img src="https://stephsmith.io/featured/producthunt.png" class="trust-img"></a>
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19163316" target="_blank"><img src="https://stephsmith.io/featured/hackernews.png" class="trust-img"></a>
<a href="https://hackernoon.com/a-year-of-sponge-3b4f48d00042" target="_blank"><img src="https://stephsmith.io/featured/hackernoon.png" class="trust-img"></a>
</div>

Additional Styling

Most elements can be styled with custom CSS. In order to determine what class or ID an element has, simply inspect the element and utilize that to modify with a style tag in the header.

<style>
/* Styling the trust bar */
    .trust-img{
        height: 20px;
        margin: 0 5px;
    }
    .trust-img:hover {
	height:22px;
	opacity: 0.8;
	}
    #trustbar{
        text-align: center;
        padding: 20px 0;
    }

/* Editing styles for description and nav bar */
    .site-description
    {
        font-weight: 500 !important;
    }    
    .site-nav {
        font-weight: 800 !important;
        text-shadow: 1px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.3) !important;
    }    

/* Editing colour of bottom footer */
   .site-footer {
       background-color: rgb(245, 248, 251);
    }
    .site-footer-content, .site-footer-content a {
        color: grey;
    }
    }
    
/* Editing filter over cover image */
    .site-header:before{
        background: rgba(0, 122, 237, 0.23);
    }
</style>

Footer

The only thing that I’ve put in my Footer is the script to my Disqus comments. It’ll look something like this:

<!-- disqus -->
<script>
    // Only inject comments if you're on a post page.
    var article = $('.post-template main article');
    var disqusSite = 'YOUR_ACCOUNT';
    if (article.length) {
        article.after('<div id="disqus_thread"></div>');
        // this is the code you get from disqus
        (function() {
            var d = document, s = d.createElement('script');
            s.src = '//' + disqusSite + '.disqus.com/embed.js';
            s.setAttribute('data-timestamp', +new Date());
            (d.head || d.body).appendChild(s);
        })();
    }
</script>

Integrations

Ghost is known for being developer friendly and that includes easy access to integrations. In the Integrations tab, you can find a suite of Integrations. Feel free to explore them yourself, but I would specifically encourage you to set up the Integration with Zapier, which helps you “zap” any new subscribers from Ghost straight to your third-party list (ex: MailChimp). Simply click to configure the Zap and you will be brought straight to Zapier to set this up. Once set up, your set of steps should look something like this.

Conclusion

And that’s it! Hopefully, if you went through each step of this process, you’ll have a fully set up Ghost blog app running on a kickass $5 Digital Ocean droplet. From here, it’s up to you to populate your beautiful new blog with some material. If any of the steps were unclear or did not work, feel free to send me a message - I’d love to help!

Happy writing!

PS: If you liked this article, you might enjoy my podcast or my latest project.

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• 3 Approaches for Using the Google Sheets API in Node.js: A Tutorial
• The 7 Myths of Learning to Code

It’s 2019 and it’s clear that remote work is here to stay. Each year, more individuals are opting to work remotely and more organizations are opening their minds to this trend. Countless remote trends and indicators are demonstrating that this is in fact not a fad, but instead the future of work.

As more of the population engages in this shift, we should consider that remote work often is not just a way of work, but a way of life.

“Remote work isn't just a different way to work – it's a different way to live... we need to acknowledge that isolation, anxiety, and depression are significant problems when working remotely, and we must figure out ways and systems to resolve these complex issues.” - Amir Salihefendic is CEO of Doist, State of Remote Work 2019

What comes with this new lifestyle are commonly-cited positive impacts, ranging from higher productivity to greater employee happiness, along with individual challenges of remote work as cited above by Salihefendic. Moving beyond the individual, we should also consider how remote work may more deeply influence the dynamics of our workplaces: more discretely, our teams.

Remote People

At the heart of any organization, distributed or otherwise, is its people. So naturally as remote organizations grow in number, I ponder the following questions:

• How does remote work influence how people interact with others?
• How does it impact the social fabric and culture of a company that decides to embark on a remote workforce?
• Perhaps most importantly, how do these considerations impact how leaders should operate at these organizations?

In this article, I’ll attempt to answer some of these questions. The purpose here is not to ascertain whether remote work is a net positive or negative, nor predict how ubiquitous it will be in coming years. What it is aiming to achieve is a new set of considerations or best practices for those managing remote teams. Moreover, it’s a thought piece that isolates dynamics which may be subtle, but can greatly influence the culture of any distributed company. Over the next few sections, I’ll touch on concepts like:

• How remote work may influence giving and taking behaviour
• How we can design systems to incentivize people to act in their best interest
• How we can try to make remote work sustainable
• The archetype of a remote worker

I attempt to address some of these through the lens of three of my favourite books and their frameworks: Give and Take, Algorithms to Live By, and the Four Tendencies. This article is also an extension of my original guide to remote work.

3 Years Without a Desk

Before jumping in, I wanted to address why I chose to write this piece. Through 3+ years of working remotely across multiple organizations, teams, and positions, I’ve observed a variety of dynamics. More specifically, I’ve seen how some parties completely thrive, while others have collapsed under the challenges that can come with a distributed team.

Of course, we can place blame on the individual or company when these things happen, but I’d like to imagine a better option; one where our systems progress alongside the workforce. In order to achieve this, we need a deeper understanding of the fundamentals of remote work and how we can better adjust to changing conditions.

When I search for terms like “remote teams best practices”, “tips for managing virtual teams”, or “flexible workforce tips”, I get articles back that tell me to “hire well”, “engage often”, and “trust my team”. While these points are valid, they’re incredibly unclear and indistinct. They leave me feeling just as lost as before my query.

So, instead I wanted to exercise some deeper thinking about the dynamics that are impacting our new world of work and present a new set of considerations﹣call them best practices if you will, for the leaders of this revolution to consider. I’m hoping that this piece gives thought to and provides actionable steps for us to enable a more intentional, healthier, and happier future of work.

Emerging Values

Let’s first cover values. Remote work is founded on specific core principles that govern this distinct way of operating which tend to be organization agnostic. They are the underlying foundation which enables us to believe that this approach is indeed better, more optimal, and thus the way we should live:

• Output > Input
• Autonomy > Administration
• Flexibility > Rigidity

These values do not just govern individuals, but also the way that companies operate and how processes are formed. And like almost anything in life, although they sound resoundingly positive, they have potential pitfalls if not administered with care.

Let’s jump into some examples using three well-known frameworks.

Give and Take: Who Are Your Team Players?

Givers, Takers, and Matchers

“Givers succeed in a way that creates a ripple effect, enhancing the success of people around them. You’ll see that the difference lies in how giver success creates value, instead of just claiming it.” – Give and Take, Adam Grant

Give and Take is an excellent book by Adam Grant which outlines 3 types of individuals defined by their reciprocity style: givers, matchers, and takers.

1. As their names indicate, takers visualize life as a zero-sum game and prioritize getting more value out of exchanges, compared to what they invest. Their ability to interact and work with others is hindered by this approach to life.
2. On the other spectrum, givers see the world differently and believe in mutually beneficial situations. They are happy to give without the intention of receiving something back.
3. Finally, matchers fall somewhere in between, with the key differentiator being that they expect reciprocity and operate in a domain of “fairness”.

In life, there will always be a distribution of givers, matchers, and takers, but it may surprise some to find that the most successful leaders are givers. Giving doesn’t just benefit the individual, but also companies that embrace givers, as they model their behaviours and create mutually beneficial situations across the organization.

Under this premise, I’ve considered how the giver | matcher | taker framework may translate into distributed or virtual teams. Is there the same proportion of each persona and does the act of working remotely sway people toward any particular behavior style?

While I don’t have data supporting this yet, I believe that there may be a sway in the taking direction while working remotely. This is not just in the case of freelancers, but across core teammates as well. Let me explain why I think this is:

Say that you work in an office. If we return to the unspoken values of said office, impact isn’t always king. There’s other factors at play, like facetime. Any office manager would like to say that impact prevails, but we all know from experience that you don’t want to be the first one out of the office. This in itself, supports the initial claim.

While everyone in an office has their own KPIs, they are similarly judged by the hours they clock in and their interaction within the community workplace. As most are, this community is somewhat self-regulating. For example, if someone chooses to spend some of their face time staying late and helping a coworker out with their problem, that’s “+5 bonus points”.

Everyone knows who the team players are in an office.

With no “face time”, remote companies naturally rely solely on “impact” and clear KPIs to judge their employees. This makes sense. But how does that impact someone’s natural inclination to support others, both within their function and across the company?

I believe the remote equivalent of “staying late”, perhaps helping someone complete a project or doing work that doesn’t directly impact your KPIs, is diluted and less likely for two key reasons:

1. With no set hours, "staying on for longer" is difficult to quantify. More importantly, any help that you do provide outside of your core responsibilities is represented only through personal [Slack] messages. Of course, people shouldn’t help others only to be “seen” as givers, but it’s only natural that as givers are not recognized for their giving behavior, they may inch toward something that Grant defines as “giver burnout”. I’ve seen this happen throughout my years working remotely and not necessarily to anyone’s fault, but perhaps the lack of systems in place to recognize and champion these hidden givers in distributed organizations.
2. Moreover, since individuals in remote organizations are more likely to have individual KPIs to meet, they must balance their ambition to help others with their performance. Working towards a quarterly raise versus helping another person who will be the sole witness for your actions isn’t an easy ongoing decision, even for the most giving individual.

In other words, regardless of your intentions, values, or morals, when you have the unconscious choice between your KPIs and helping another who will likely be the only one aware of your actions, I think less giving is naturally going to happen.

Give and Take: Best Practices

Since we can all testify that giving is not inexistent across remote teams, what am I really trying to say here?

I’m saying that remote workforces and particularly remote team leads should be hyperaware of this lack of “water cooler”, not just for community building, but for ensuring healthy collaboration dynamics.

Although I don’t have a comprehensive solution, here are a few starting points:

• Ask your team who helped them that particular week or month.
• Intentionally build KPIs that encourage teamwork or potentially can only be achieved through teamwork.
• Start a Slack #shoutouts channel to acknowledge the hidden givers at the organization  while also openly celebrating and therefore encouraging this behaviour

I’m sure there are numerous other methods (please let me know if you have them!), but I think the key here is that companies operating remotely need to intentionally design systems to acknowledge these hidden givers before they lose them.

We need to expose giving behaviour, since it doesn’t come automatically and it needs to be discrete; it needs to be tangible.

I would also encourage leaders and hiring managers to consider this framework during the recruiting process and actively seek givers. Grant has already identified which interview question that you need to add to your roster, in order to easily determine if someone is a giver:

“Can you give me the names of four people whose careers you have fundamentally improved?”

You can learn more here about why this question provides insight into a person’s giving tendency. Regardless, the core takeaway is to actively solicit more of givers into your organization as they will impact the social fabric of how others operate.

Remote Work Best Practice:

• Take steps to intentionally discover, hire, promote, and acknowledge givers in remote environments.

Algorithms to Live By - Where are the Boundaries?

Tragedy of the Commons

“The equilibrium for a set of players all acting rationally in their own interest may not be the outcome that is actually best for those players” - Algorithms to Live By, Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths

Algorithms to Live By has quickly become one of my favorite books. Gifted to me by a [remote] teammate, this book identifies various ways that we can learn and take insight from computer science in order to better our lives.

Among topics like caching theory, how to make unsolvable (intractable) problems solvable (tractable), or effectively utilizing the concept of annealing – this book closes out with some thoughts on game theory and its ramifications on life.

One particular example covered in this context is the concept of the “unlimited vacation policy”. While this “perk” is becoming more prominent across distributed companies, the authors point out that despite altruistic intentions, the policy ultimately fails to reach the intended goal of achieving additional employee satisfaction.

Why? There is a concept in game theory and economics called the Nash equilibrium. It is “a stable state of a system involving the interaction of different participants, in which no participant can gain by a unilateral change of strategy if the strategies of the others remain unchanged”. In simpler terms, it is the optimal outcome of a game when there is no incentive to deviate.

Perhaps surprising to some, the Nash equilibrium of an unlimited vacation policy is zero. Why? The natural tendency for employees is to want to take as much vacation as possible, while simultaneously taking slightly less than their peers in order to seem more dedicated.

“To be perceived as more loyal, more committed, and more dedicated, hence more promotion worthy”, as Christian and Griffiths put it, “They look to others for a baseline and take just slightly less than that.”

We can see this play out clearly in data, gathered by Buffer’s State of Remote Report, which quantified the difference between how much vacation was offered by remote organizations versus how much was taken. Despite 32% of companies offering “unlimited vacation”, you can see that most of the individuals with this option opted to take two weeks or less.

The same concept is similarly true for office hours. Employees truly want to leave at a reasonable hour, but certainly do not want to be the first to depart. So naturally, this psychology converges at some number (the Nash equilibrium) that each office thinks is acceptable, but often past what employees truly want.

Game theory teaches us that when all players act independently on their best course of action, this does not always result in the best course of action for the group: commonly known as the tragedy of the commons.

As “players” of the game, we can’t always do much to change the way the system operates, as you only have control over a single “player”. Instead, we must look to those defining the game to change it, through mechanism design. While game theory focuses on asking which behaviours emerge from a given set of rules, mechanism design does the opposite. It seeks to understand the rules that need to be developed to generate the behaviour that is being sought out.

Algorithms to Live By: Best Practices

The above information begs the question once more regarding how remote leaders should consider setting their KPIs or policies. We cannot simply copy and paste the set of rules from a typical workplace and just assume they’ll produce the results we’re looking for, especially since remote work can be integrally more vague.

For example, the same Buffer study indicated that the #1 difficulty for remote workers is not being able to unplug, topping things like loneliness, motivation, and even the lack of vacation time which we discussed above.

Remember, if we don’t intentionally design, we start to see the Nash equilibrium of virtual work hours become abnormally high, where remote workers essentially don’t know how or when to switch off. Currently, individuals are left to define these limits for themselves. So, I would opt toward mechanism design and ask those leading remote teams this question:

• Are you actively designing KPIs or rules to encourage a life-work balance outside of the “freedom” given to define your own?

Instead of looking for the best ways to “manage” distributed teams, perhaps we should think about the ways that we design beneficial outcomes instead. Leaders should think backwards and intentionally design rules that not just encourage, but cause those actions. In this case, intentionally setting up structures that cause an individual to act in ways that are beneficial to both themselves and the commons.

This is where, contrary to the autonomy which is so welcomed in the remote world, it may be beneficial to consider adding back some more administration. Positive administration of course, to ensure that you’re truly designing the remote workplace to foster positive outcomes.

For example, implementing:

• A “minimum vacation policy”
• A mandatory set of holidays to take off
• A system that allows employees to “take back their calendars” and avoid calendar tetris
• Facilitating open discussions about how to work remotely effectively and successfully

I recently saw one great example of this, where a leader made it mandatory for his team to take off a particular Friday and rewarded them with $50 to go to their favourite restaurant.

The point here is that things cannot always be enforced through carrots and as our workforce becomes less binary, intentional “mechanism design” becomes more important. Consider that even Wall Street, of the most capitalist hubs, has mandatory “off hours” so that brokers don’t push towards the infinite, sleepless Nash equilibrium.

With few restrictions, remote work has the potential to be productive, healthy, and optimal, if the right game is designed. So let’s actively design it.

Remote Work Best Practice:

• Design systems which enable people to easily act in beneficial ways. This may mean some degree of positive administration which did not exist before.

The Four Tendencies: Do You Know Your Team?

A Hypothesis

“The happiest, healthiest, most productive people aren’t those from a particular Tendency, but rather they’re the people who have figured out how to harness the strengths of their Tendency, counteract the weaknesses, and build the lives that work for them.”

Gretchen Rubin has developed an insightful framework called The Four Tendencies, which effectively captures how people respond to expectations. Ultimately, these tendencies have a close relationship with how we make decisions.

The framework’s tendencies include the Upholder, Questioner, Rebel and Obliger, with overlap between adjacent tendencies. The allocation of a particular tendency is represented by one’s response to inner and outer expectations.

Although the Four Tendencies framework itself is certainly not scientific or even quantifiable, I do believe there are some takeaways that permeate into remote environments. As a questioner, I’ve found great value in understanding that I’m motivated by internal expectations, while struggling to meet external expectations.

Naturally, I questioned whether there was a trend across remote workers, based upon self-selection. Since there is rarely someone pushing you to work remotely, I suspected that those who are less externally accountable and more internally accountable may more often work remotely.

Questioners and Rebels

According to Rubin, the two most common tendencies across the wider population are:

• Questioners
• Obligers

“Of the Four Tendencies, my research shows that most people are either Questioners or Obligers — and Obliger is the largest Tendency of all (for both men and women). Of the Four Tendencies, Rebel is the smallest category, and Upholder is also a small category. Not many people are Rebels or Upholders.”

I decided to conduct this research myself, through a Twitter poll of over 400 remote workers.

The results?

By far, the two most prominent tendencies were:

• Rebels (40%)
• Questioners (37%)

What went from the least common tendency skyrocketed to the most common across remote workers. And perhaps more interestingly, over ¾ of respondents fit into the two categories with a common thread: resisting outer expectations. If we take this data at face value, that means that there are more than 3x as many rebels and questioners as compared to upholders and obligers in the remote workforce.

To me, this wasn’t surprising at all. Those who actively self-select, identify that “there is a better way”, and then proceed forward to go and redesign their way of living. I hypothesize that they choose this out of:

1. A misalignment with the outer expectations of society at least in terms of work norms
2. An internal vision and motivation do find something better

For these reasons, while there is no doubt that all four tendencies are represented in distributed teams, this disproportion seems to “add up”.

The Four Tendencies: Best Practices

I recently published an article which touched on this analysis lightly and got some backlash from Upholders and Obligers who were successful remote workers. To be clear, just like any type of job, I think that all four tendencies can be successful in nearly any work environment. I simply think there is a greater distribution of questioners and rebels as they actively seek this environment out. In other words, I don’t think upholders and obligers feel the same “pull” into remote work as they can satisfy external expectations in more typical work environments.

So what are the core takeaways here? Remote employees seem to fall within certain tendencies more frequently. With that knowledge, leaders should be able to tailor their leadership styles to understand and motivate their employees more effectively. For example, instead of instilling outer accountability through deadlines or repercussions, emphasize why a task is important to a questioner.

On a wider scale, if companies want the "best talent", they should embrace that significant chunks of the workforce operate better when they can design their own lives. In many ways I feel as though this data validates that working remotely is not about relaxing, but questioning or rebelling from societal structure and then looking to redefine/optimize.

Remote Work Best Practice:

• Learn about the motivation styles of your team members and tailor your leadership to be most effective for them

Onward and upward

With the workforce evolving quickly, it’s not enough to just remove the office and CTRL+C, CTRL+V the existing approach. While embracing remote work with open arms, we should also have a critical eye for ensuring that we truly create the best possible outcomes for both individuals and companies. Perhaps if we were more open to address some of these problems at the root instead of putting perk bandaids on top, we’d have to worry less about how to motivate, keep, or engage remote employees.

To summarize, if you’re building a remote team or company, consider how you can introduce more givers or encourage giving behavior. Consider how you can design flexible working practices or rather, restructure the “game” so that its oriented to achieve the best outcomes that are best for all (ie: find the right Nash equilibrium). Finally, consider that everyone is unique, but your remote team or company may over-index in certain tendencies. Acknowledge this and enable your team to thrive by supporting their affinity to specific expectations or assisting them to harness their unique strengths.

The values of remote work: output, autonomy, and flexibility are powerful. Let’s make sure to embrace them with care and build stronger, yet more self-aware organizations.

If you’re interested in learning more about the frameworks described in this article, I would recommend the following books:

1. Give and Take
2. Algorithms to Live By
3. The Four Tendencies

If you liked this article, I have a feeling you'll enjoy this podcast episode about traditions, including the 40-hour workweek:

PPS: If you liked this article, you might enjoy my podcast or my latest project.

Related posts about Remote Work:

• Finding Top Talent: Stop Looking Inside a Box for People Thinking Outside of One
• A New Age: Finding Non-Tech Remote Jobs
• The Guide to Remote Work That Isn't Trying to Sell You Anything