career, work & ambition

If your ambition fades with age, you don't really have it in your blood. - That's an "interest," not a passion. - It's a "…

What success looks like to me? Success to me is being in a position that I can continue working on and building great products alongside a team of obsessed and passionate individuals who love doing it as much as I do. And a great product to me is a product that is useful, delightful and I’m proud of building. A product that solves a pain with the help of a new technology that simply wasn’t possible before because of the limitations of the older technology.

Career advice nobody told you: You have to demonstrate excellence in everything you do. Your income scales proportional to…

Jony Ive on Steve Jobs’ definition of success:

What a Nobel Prize winner's chauffeur taught me about hiring! True story that happened in Munich. #hiring #Resume #interview

My boss reverted my code and said this… A story about the worst boss i had. #leadership #coding

my new year’s resolution: learn the three core communication skills: • storytelling • copywriting • video making

i like this to be said in my funeral: — he was a maker. an engineer. a designer. a marketer. he was a leader. a visionary. a strategist. an executor. he was an innovator. a technologist. a simplifier. a change agent. — i’m working backwards to make each statement true by then.

“I'd tell men and women in their mid-twenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don't know what that means, seek it. If you're following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you've ever felt. I'd like to warn the best of them, the iconoclasts, the innovators, the rebels, that they will always have bullseyes on their backs. The better they get, the bigger the bullseye. It's not one man's opinion. It's the law of nature. Entrepreneurs have always been outgunned, outnumbered. They've always fought uphill. And those who urge entrepreneurs to never give up, charlatans. Sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius. Giving up doesn't mean stopping. Don't ever stop.” Phil Knight (Nike)

nice challenge! here is mine: in 10 years - i will be working on building another great product just like i do now. - i will know 10x more about design and marketing while still be a cutting edge engineer like i’m now. - i will hang out with some friends, the same people who i respect and love to work with. - i will still hit the gym 3-4 times a week just like i did in the past 12 years. - i will be driving the same car that i have now: a black mazda cx-60 plugin hybrid - i will own an apartment with high ceilings and a nice view of a city. - i have read at least 30% of my library by then.

naval says, the best jobs are neither decreed nor degreed. they are creative expressions of continuous learners in free markets.

noted: work on what you care about yourself

@packyM work on excitingly ambitious projects. -pg

last year (32) had a long list of goals which were achieved (in replay) this year (33) have only ONE goal: improve my skills, health & product 1% everyday. learn one good idea. implement it. do a walk/workout. eat a healthy meal. delete, delight, simplify. tell a better story. last year’s goals: - got my german driving license - bought my first car: a gorgeous suv: black mazda cx-60 plugin hybrid - spend more than 100 hours learning about bitcoin from different angles - cashed out previous investments with around 350% profit - made my next investment move - got a reputation as the best leader in the company. got a raise and more recognition as a doer, go-getter. - got my b1 german language certificate - started the german citizenship process - had regular visits to the gym 25-30% days of the month - kept my friendships alive by hosting and visiting them - got more clarity by writing > 1k posts on x about product/innovation/motivation

next skills to master: communications: - storytelling - advertising - marketing design: - user experience design

if you do manage to do great work one day, it will probably be on a project of your own. what should your projects be? whatever seems to you excitingly ambitious. pg

1. choose a field you are interested in 2. learn enough to get to the frontier 3. notice the gaps 4. explore promising gaps this is how practically everyone who has done great work, has done it, from painters to physicists. pg

following your interest usually means following them past rejection and failure. it does take a good deal of boldness. in most cases the recipe for doing great work is work hard on excitingly ambitious projects and something good will come of it. pg

make no small plans.

if you’re interested, you’re not stray. pg

i wondered, some day around 10 years ago: am i from the same rare breed of innovators as steve jobs was i was naively overestimating myself and favorable probabilities to say the least but it was an honest question that i started exploring and it led me to a path of failures, migration, learning new skills and some small wins. the failures: - dropping out of my master degree 2 years into the program and not finishing it - never work in a job related to the 7 years of study in university - failing three different startups/products but in the process i also had some small wins like becoming a software engineer and moving to a great city like Munich, Germany and being able to live a decent life. the failures never stopped me from learning more about how innovation works and how great products come to be. i keep swinging at it because i love building products even though i haven’t hit any ball so far. champions keep playing until they get it right and in business you just need to hit the ball once. i like the odds of this game. it’s a game i like to play. innovation is what made humans flourish and dominate the world so, a worthwhile mission to have for me is simply to: upgrade the world

@ycombinator @bobmcgrewai this position is also called “Solution Developer” in many b2b companies since decades

great article! that’s why 2-4 weeks sprints works really well in software development and agile teams. it’s about achievable goals that slightly stretch the team and then showcasing everyone’s work in the “sprint review” in front of the whole company. i have been doing that for more than 10 years now and I never felt demotivated. It’s very simple but works really well.

@MartinGTobias @snowmaker @bscholl purpose helps big time but this article was more about achievable milestones. like sprints in software development. it keeps people motivated to get to the finish line because the finish line is maximum 2 weeks away. it works incredibly well.

@snowmaker @bscholl great read thanks for the recommendation. it was a reminder to me why sprints in software development work so well… people stay engaged because the finish line is max 2 weeks away, and then you get to showcase your work in sprint review

you have to like what you do enough that the concept of spare time seems mistaken to be happy you have to be doing something that you not only enjoy, but admire you have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool

prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. if you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. that’s the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. it might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. if it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious. prestige is just fossilized inspiration. if you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first.

این چند مدت دارم مصاحبه میکنم برای پزیشن تیم لید فول استک با تجربه هوش مصنوعی، فقط روی مواردی که توی رزومه گفتن فوکوس میکنم. همه سوالام اینجور شروع میشه: توی رزومه اشاره کردی که فلان (رهبری، معماری، هوش مصنوعی…) چیزو بلدی / خیلی تجربه داری توش؟ درسته؟ میگه آره! میگم بگو ببینم <سؤال فاندمنتال در مورد اون فلان>… اکثرا خراب میکنن و نمیتونن جواب بدن… و نشون میدن خیلی سطحی بلدن یا هم اینقد کامیونیکشن ضعیفی دارن که بازم بد به نظر میرسه اگه بلد باشن… کاریشون میکنم که بگن غلط کردم چیزی رو که عمیق بلد نیستم با فنت درشت نوشتم 😅

how to be successful (according to sam altman)

If something that seems like work to other people doesn't seem like work to you, that's something you're well suited for. —pg

@richard_normal Confusing activity with contribution is an unforgivable sin for managers.

Don’t do what you love. Do what you are curious about. —pg

I got 2 very big offers from 2 interviews that I thought: "I will get rejected... for sure, 100%!!" In both interviews almost 60-70% of my responses were like: - "interesting! never heard of that", - "I don't know that! But I'm really curious to know, what is it?", - "never faced that problem before, can you tell me how you solve it?" - "Wow, it seems you guys are working on some cool technologies over there! I'm just doing CRUD operations at scale here!" Even after the interviews I did recently to hire 2 software developers, one important assessment criteria was like: "he was/wasn't bullshitting us"

My Developer Excellency Principles In short the most important things for me are the following: 1. Consistently delivering quality, timely and collective results while knowledge-sharing, collaborating and communicating effectively with colleagues. 2. Demonstrating a growth seeking mindset both personally and work-related with an ownership attitude. 3. Acting like a senior dev by taking initiatives to improve reliability, maintainability and scalability of the product/system. In long: check the visual!

@stats_feed When your career path and preferences are formed and set which normally happens in the early thirty’s.

Getting a leadership title doesn’t automatically make you a leader. Because leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less. Building influence within your team requires building meaningful relationships with them, creating success and result for the organization with the team, and supporting individual team members to develop more and better skills and grow personally and professionally. Leaders job is to add value to others. But before adding value to others, leaders must make themselves valuable. Because you can not give what you do not have.

“Invest in yourself. The one easy way to become worth at least 50% more than you are now is to hone your communication…

After wasting 7 years (4 years on a bachelor’s in Optics & Laser Engineering and 2 years on a master’s in Photonics) solving one equation problem after another—mostly proving this theory or that equation, problems that had been solved over 50-100 years ago in physics and engineering—I finally stopped and started learning some practical skills that actually paid and didn’t need much of that advanced equation knowledge, namely software development. But I still think this is good advice. In programming, solving every solved problem sharpens your mind and can get you a good paying job in big tech companies.

@stats_feed if by a better opportunity you mean 30% more money, more responsibility and a higher position with better culture, more flexibility and better path to grow personally and professionally, I need to have strong reasons not consider it.

I think a lot about what can make a person achieve so much like Elon or other billionaire entrepreneurs … One explanation I have for it is this: The achievements we see from these people are the byproduct of a combination of attributes: - being deeply curious, - having/defining a vision that moves you, - having huge bias for action - having a great deal of hunger for working on problems most of your waking hours

Why great leaders think like a farmer:

@IcyCortex موارد دیگه برای پاسخ به این سوال: علاقه به کسب تجربه در یه صنعت خاص(گردشگری، بیمه…)، تیم خوب مهندسی شرکت (که توی لینکداین دیدی)، ابراز علاقه به محصولات و سرویس هایی که شرکت ارائه میده، ارزشهای شرکت که فلان جا دیدین با تفکرات و تمایلات شما سازگاره… خلاصه چیزای خوب مرتبط به شرکت

@IcyCortex به نظرم این نکاتو وقتی تمام کردی تبدیل کن به یه پرزنتیشن و ارائه بده توی شرکت یا جای دیگه و فیلمشو بگیر بذار اینجا/یوتیوب/لینکدین و اضافه کن توی پورتفولیوت/رزومت.