This has been frequently requested of me ever since my earlier post about ‘The Six Month Conversation’ resonated with so many people. This follow up is about the framework Alexis and I devised with hopes of guiding our life journey together independently and as a couple. I know this post is arriving several years late, after tons of requests, so thanks everybody for your patience!
As I've been pushing hard on pursuing new opportunities lately and working through a handful of challenging projects, I've been pondering the question, "What is truly worth striving for?" in considering how to allocate my limited resources of time and energy.
This is the list of things I keep circling back to:
Excellence
Integrity…
This is a Shitty First Draft post that I never got around to completing. Coming back to it now cause I've been having mentoring calls every week for a while now. Same things KEEP coming up. So, here I am, writing a post about it so I can point to it.
Are you doing what you do to meet your personal expectations, or the expectations of your parents/society/tribe? It's your life, dude. Live it as you see fit.
It's great to be excited ("passionate") about a particular industry, but how much do you really know about it? I hear far too many people who were sold on the 'sexy' of a particular field of work, where the majority of their understanding came from marketing efforts by industry associations or people who've themselves been sold on an idea…
This weekend, I attended Product Camp Vancouver 2018 alongside hundreds of Vancouver's tech community. I walked away from the event feeling inspired and connected. What a great event and wonderful community!
I attended the event without a clear understanding of what is typically in or out of scope for the Product Management (PM) line of work. My perspective is mostly heavily informed by my firsthand experiences on the delivery and growth sides for high-tech and professional services companies. I learned a bunch that helped connect some missing dots of concepts in my mind - very thankful for this.
Below are some of my takeaways, whether new or old ideas, which I am mulling over. These points are mostly from talks by Chloe Morrow (of Vision Critical), Cory Ayres (of Pendo), and Steven Forth (of Ibbaka), as well as with fellow participants...
Digitizing a thought I had written in a journal back in 2010 around the idea of a Centre of Influence (COI). I had defined COIs as those people we have relationships with who possess a level of influence over our decision-making. The influence is exerted by virtue of their primary relationship dynamic with their network. These are people trusted & networked as an influencer, and their advice is often taken with little further thought.
It's apparent that my then knowledge of personal/professional relationship dynamics was much more limited than it is today, but interesting nonetheless...
This post is a follow-up to an earlier blog post, The Burden of Leadership. A lot of people have recently been laid off around BC, and being a friend to some people in this position, I've acted as a shoulder to lean on and an active listener for them to talk through their thinking.
It's a crappy situation all around, and definitely a terrible experience for the period following in life for those who are laid off. That said, I've come across an article that offered another perspective that I'd like to point out. Please see below for an excerpt from an article by Karen Althen, titled What 1,700 laid-off Target employees can learn (from someone who was downsized by the company 6 years ago), originally posted on BizJournal…
Past Joshua made note of some book excerpts. Can't remember why... but I'm typing them out here in case I remember, then Future Joshua can write the blog post he intended to :)
Edit: ohhh, these are from Drive, by Daniel Pink (link below)
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A startup engineer must be all things -- he (or she) is a full time software developer and part time product manager/customer support guru/internal systems maven. As a company grows, an engineer spends less time building the things he personally wants in the product. Our hope is that 20% time gives engineers back dedicated stack time -- of their own direction -- to spend on product innovation, features, plugins, fixes or additions that they think are the most important…
Having attended about dozen events as a guest speaker / professional delegate since 2017 started, I've noticed a pattern that feels like it should be talked about: people do not ask for what they want and do not follow up properly.
I am reminded of this quote, which I first saw at 14 years old on a poster in my highschool hallway, and which I have tried to live by ever since: You miss 100% of the shots you don't take in life...
I've recently taken to finishing up notebooks with incomplete pages that are strewn about the home.
The notebook I am currently using to chronicle my dreams was one that I used sporadically throughout 2011-2014. In this journal, I found to-do list I'd written in 2012 while pondering and planning the future. Reading this today, in 2017, I am surprised by how many of these items I have actually completed.
This is a re-post for an answer by Franklin Veaux to a question on the site, Quora. I'm sharing this because it provides a perspective that people often do not consider. Food for thought.
