The Weekly Review: Vol VI Issue 22
TWR Vol VI Issue 22
Happy 14th of December to you,
One of my year end tasks for the holiday period is to catch up on some reading. I’d like to make a decent dent in my Instapaper queue!
So this issue is going to be almost completely recommended reads. I hope you have some quiet time to dig in and enjoy.
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Items of note
Shawn, Isaac, and the team at The Focus Course created this lovely resource for planning your next year. You can get a 700 page PDF, or a digital version for the iPad. It includes a lot of the little things I do in my notebook or in a specific app, but all in one place.
Overall, it looks like a great resource to work out the concepts they teach in The Focus Course itself.
I love this explanatory site from Mackenzie Child. Not only is it a helpful guide to working with colour, it’s a perfect example of how side projects can help your career.
Side note: it’s built with Webflow, one of these new fangled tools that I still haven’t taken the time wrap my head around. Remember when we used to build things with vanilla html and css?
The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information
Related to some of the links I shared in the last issue, PARA is the method advocated by Tiago Forte as part of his Build a Second Brain course. It stands for Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archive.
I dug into this article and I appreciate how he’s put this together. But if you’ve spent time using the concepts of GTD over the years, as well as something like a Zettelkasten or a commonplace book (especially a digital one), you’re likely going to be familiar with most of what he advocates.
Eugene Federenko, my colleague from Wildbit and someone I admire very much, had his 15th anniversary with the company this week. That’s a crazy number in our current times. He took the time to share a few thoughts about the idea and it’s a great read.
On what makes Wildbit such a great place:
15 years in the same company is rare, but tech companies that old are unicorns by themselves. Unlike traditional businesses, most of them come and go with a new wave of hype. Wildbit is product agnostic, privately owned, and built to be sustainable in the long term — that’s key to being in the business for 20 years.
In discussing professional growth, he talks about how he tries to make even mundane tasks more enjoyable and concludes with this nugget of gold:
It’s my responsibility to make work interesting for myself — no one else will take care of this.
Ask an expert: How do you interview an engineer?
Remove “engineer” from the title and just add whatever position you’re hiring for and you’ve got an article with some good advice that can help.
Hiring is a long, often tedious process. Finding good talent is the goal, but also should aim to find people who help your current team members grow. As Lena Reinhard points out, finding people who think like you is an easy trap to fall into.
Now, let’s talk about one of the most pervasive biases in the tech industry: similarity-attraction bias, often referred to as “culture fit.” Making hiring decisions based on culture fit is problematic for many reasons. It perpetuates a lack of diversity, exacerbates network effects, and is often, as an undefined term, used to easily disregard someone or their experience. It can mask all manner of interviewer biases.
How can we address this?
I encourage my teams to seek culture-or-values add, instead of culture-or-values fit. Hiring for culture-or-values add means looking to increase and diversify the kinds of perspectives and ideas that get into the company, the ways in which teams collaborate, and the possible outcomes of those teams’ work. Seeking culture-or-values add will also increase the challenges that come with moving from homogeneous teams to diverse ones, but this is a good thing. I want people in my organization who challenge me. I like (respectful) disagreement. Adding cultural and contextual perspectives that aren’t already present within an organization will help you make better decisions as a company and become better at what you do.
The article includes some philosophical points, but also some great practical things you could start doing immediately.
The Secret to Enjoying a Long Winter
You may have seen this one already, but Jason Kottke shares some ideas I have to preach to myself each year. He talks about how he experienced depression last two winters and what’s been helping so far this year.
But this quote he shared from Matt Thomas nailed for me:
Fall is a time to write for me as well, but it also means welcoming — rather than fighting against — the shorter days, the football games, the decorative gourds. Productivity writer Nicholas Bate’s seven fall basics are more sleep, more reading, more hiking, more reflection, more soup, more movies, and more night sky. I like those too. The winter will bring with it new things, new adjustments. Hygge not hay rides. Ditto the spring. Come summer, I’ll feel less stress about stopping work early to go to a barbecue or movie because I know, come autumn, I’ll be hunkering down. More and more, I try to live in harmony with the seasons, not the clock.
This is key for me. I try to remember to view winter as a chance for a little more rest, as well as do some things that I never have time for in the spring and summer months.
You have likely heard about this one as well, but it’s worth revisiting if you have. Batya Ungar-Sargon tells the story of two churches coming together and the two men who were largely responsible for it happening.
To many religious people, there’s no such thing as coincidence: Pastor Jay and Pastor Derrick felt acutely the prophetic nature of their union taking place just the day before the shooting. It felt as though, in the midst of the chaos and the confusion, God was using them to write a better story. The Lord had guided them to their merger at exactly the right time to redirect the anger and pain in the community to a higher, holy purpose.
In a time where division is keenly felt, we need more stories of overcoming differences and finding unity. Ungar-Sargon finishes by asking what a healed America looks like.
“Valuing each other. Loving each other. Appreciating each other’s backgrounds and differences,” he said. “It doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything. But it means that we have to embrace and accept and walk in love. That’s what a healed America looks like.”
But healing also requires taking ownership of the past and acknowledging the injustices that persist. “We have to call it what it is, and embrace it, and heal from it,” Pastor Derrick said. “But understand that sometimes, walking and healing, you embrace pain. It doesn’t mean that you’re not healing.”
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Quote of the week
The opposite of faith ain’t doubt, it’s when I got it all figured out.
Andy Mineo, Clarity
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Currently
Listening: We’ve been having a reading night over the past several months with our family. We do this on a night when there are no sports or church events happening so that everyone will be here. The issue is that we have two kids who love to read and two who most definitely do not. So we often go with the audiobook option of reading.
We’re currently enjoying Restart by Gordon Korman. It’s an easy listen about a boy who loses his memory, discovers he doesn’t really like who he was before his accident, and changes his life. It’s a good option for a young family.
Playing: Not Fortnite (mostly). I’ve been fasting during Advent, but I’d be lying if I said it’s been easy. A clear sign it’s needed.
Eating: All the Christmas things. Most recently, sugar cookies with butter icing, thumbprint cookies, and Toffifee.
Watching: Merry. Happy. Whatever, a new Netflix original series focused on the struggles of a musician visiting his girlfriend’s family for the holidays. It’s a lot more like the sitcoms of my childhood than anything I’ve watched of late, but the kids all enjoyed it.
Reading: Trying to catch up on all the newsletters I have backed up in Stoop. I’m leaning towards having these come back to my inbox rather than use an app — they tend to get ignored more here.
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Until next week, enjoy the last days of work before the office quiets down (or gets noisy, for us work from home folks). Merry Christmas!