Things I wrote

Beyond money and titles, what really drives people to do their best work? Understanding intrinsic motivation changes how you lead, manage, and collaborate.

This is a slightly edited version of the message I shared with my organization on my last day at Amazon. I hope you find something useful in it.

I’ve been thinking about whether to write this or not for a day or two. I don’t think it’s relevant to this blog, and it’s kind of personal. But here goes. When I was 21, I moved back from Berlin to my hometown. Let’s just say it was a complicated time.

Why perfectionism kills progress, and why shipping imperfect work beats waiting for perfect conditions.

I’ve done over 200 job interviews in just less than a decade, just as an interviewer. I’ve used for all of them the STAR technique. Here’s how that works, so you can ace your next interview. An job interview typically includes two parts: a skill assessment, and a person assessment.

I find math really interesting. Not just because of the real world implications, but because the mindset it gives you is empowering. You follow the trail of logical breadcrumbs following rules that are so intuitive they are clearly true, and see where that leads you.

You might have noticed at this point that I have two main note storage formats: an analogic one based on a good notebook and a fountain pen, and ’note files’. Here’s the secret: note files, for me, are just text files.

When I was in school, I was basically just told at some point to take notes. At some point someone probably clarified that it meant “write things down”. That, I think, is pretty useless advice.

Criminal Minds is enthralling: a bunch of gun bearing nerds with a private airplane fly to places to find serial killers by profiling their behaviour and personality. So cool. Maybe you want to be a profiler too.

I hear a lot of confusion around a bunch of words. These words are ‘mission’, ‘vision’, ‘strategy’, ‘roadmap’, ‘backlog’. I get it: it’s all a bit vague, and they all connect together somehow, but let’s put some clarity in, so that you can stop hearing them used interchangeably as much.

You might have heard of SMART goals. You might even have heard of smart working. Today, I bring you SMART projects: a five points mnemonic to ensure your next software project goes amazing! Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating. But it’s still solid advice, in my opinion.

Almost everything, in life, is some sort of game or choreography. Any activity you do every day has a purpose. It has rules, it has winning and losing to some degree. It is basically a game. Mindfulness is about exiting the games, standing on the sidelines for a bit.

Three counterintuitive ideas: why being first locally beats global competition, how regret minimization drives better decisions, and the power of small consistent actions.

Life happens. And it happened to me yesterday. I had to drive around all day for some urgent errand, got home late, had to deal with kids who didn’t want to sleep. This morning, I was tired and slept a little longer.

Let’s talk about todo lists. You know, those messy notes that live on some paper, your email inbox, a couple of note files, and mostly your brain. Basic lists are cool, but often don’t make the cut. Here’s how to build a system that actually works.

You probably write emails. Like, all the time. You also receive emails. A lot of them, probably. Most emails you read, and probably most emails you write, suck. Here’s some tips to make them suck less.

Someone I know wanted to talk because they were very confused. They had the problem of being somewhat successful with their side project, and now were getting overwhelmed by the million different directions they could drive things towards. Should they develop more cool features? Should they double down and make the existing features even better? […]

I’m always wildly curious about what people carry around to make their day easier, or just in case they need something in an emergency or in an unexpected situation.

I had a long day yesterday at work. This happens occasionally, when we need to have long meetings across multiple continents. So, I’ll keep it short. And about meetings. If you ask most people, they’ll agree: meetings suck so hard they could be patented by Dyson. Yet, we spend a ton of times in meetings […]

You might recall that exponential growth is really super crazy fast. This is true with rice on chessboards, with interest rates, and with pandemics among other things. Oh, and with computers. If you’re even slightly interested in computer stuff, you probably have heard about Moore’s Law. Gordon Moore turned 94 a couple of weeks ago, […]

You probably heard it a million times: ’this is growing exponentially!’. That’s often used to mean, ’this is growing really fast’. But most people struggle with getting the feel of how actually fast exponential is. There is a very old story you probably know in some form or another. Here’s my version. Once upon a […]

You can always summarize a job role into two bullet points. That’s it. There will be more nuance and complexity, but when uncertainty strikes, you can always refer back to those two points.

I’ve been managing teams on and off for more than 10 years. It came with a lot of lessons and brought a lot of humility. Here are 6 things I have learned about team leadership.

One Christmas morning – must have been more than 30 years ago – my dad produced a box. In the box, was a Commodore 64. The 8 bit home computer was the first computing machine that made it into our home, back in a pre-internet era.