Systematize Success #11 - Happiness, Career & Habits
Happiness, Career & Habits
Hi Friends,
Happy Monday!
An enlightening testimony to help us live a happy and fulfilled life. It strongly resonates with Jeff Bezos’s mental model of making all decisions in a way that will minimize future regret:
Top five regrets of the dying (3min)
I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
This was the most common regret of all.
I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
This came from every male patient that I nursed.
I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish that I had let myself be happier.
This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice.
An exceptional article on selecting organisations that will help you most in your career, or at least won’t make you waste 2-3 years of your life. I personally have been reasonably lucky on that front, but I would definitely have loved knowing more about this framework 10 years ago:
Using Head Fake Questions To Achieve Your Career Goals (8min)
The question is this: “how do you disqualify bad companies that won’t help you towards your career goals?”
With a head-fake question, an interviewer cannot lie to you, because they don’t know what you’re really asking for.
In American football, a ‘head fake’ is a technique where a football player turns their head to look in one direction but runs in another direction instead. A head-fake question, then, is a question that purports to ask about one thing, but is in reality asking about something else.
Here’s a concrete example. When interviewing with a sales-driven B2B product company, one of my most important vetting questions is about the tension between product and sales. My question usually takes on the form of: “In my experience, some clients demand extensive customisations. How do you balance client customisations that you need to do to close sales deals, against spending engineering time on features that are more generally useful for the rest of your users?”
My interviewer will usually see this as a question about the company’s practices or processes. But what I’m actually trying to find out is the amount of power the product organisation has in relation to the sales organisation. A healthy tension between the two — expressed in a give-or-take relationship — is a good sign that a lot of things are going right in the company. Conversely, a company where product consistently overrules sales considerations, or where product is overruled by excessive client customisations in the service of closing is a highly dysfunctional company to work in.
Now don’t get me wrong: a dysfunctional company may well be a successful company. But the specific type of dysfunction matters for you when you plan your career. A company that prioritises product over sales may die against its more aggressive competition; a company that prioritises sales over product strategy will be an incredibly limiting place to work in as a member of the product organisation. As a software engineer, the former scenario might find you laid off; the latter scenario would cause your growth to be severely limited as the company whiplashes between servicing very different clients.
All good head-fake questions contain a small number of similar properties:
The question is about concrete examples or specific details.
The question is open-ended, and is expressed as either a ‘what’ or ‘how’ question.
The question is drawn from your experiences in a similar company, industry, or problem domain.
Some excellent examples in this Twitter thread:
Ending this issue with a timeless quote by James Clear:
New goals don't deliver new results. New lifestyles do.
And a lifestyle is a process, not an outcome.
For this reason, your energy should go into building better habits, not chasing better results.
Hard not to agree…
Please don’t forget to share if you think this type of insights can help others:
Thanks for reading, and have a week full of happiness and life-changing habits,
V