Learnings Are All Around Us
Hey!
Welcome back to another week of musings.
This weekend, we celebrated another year of marriage with my wife. We spent the weekend celebrating and reminiscing about the years.
I hope you had a great weekend, and were able to get some good rest!
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Things I enjoyed in the past week
- What even are distributed systems? A quick source for reading about distributed systems.
- The new One Piece Lego sets are amazing! Based on the Netflix series, not the anime.
- This Substack is for things to do instead of doomscrolling
Earlier in my career, I was that eager junior, thinking that I knew how to solve most problems better than anyone. I rarely listened to opinions in my code or solutions.
Over time, I gained a deeper understanding of my behavior, began to listen to advice, and gained more experience to comprehend the suggestions better. At first, the ego gets in the way, but you learn to reflect and improve gradually.
Tacit Knowledge
There's this fine line between standing by your choices and listening to other people productively. If you listen to everyone, you might never finish your work.
Sometimes, we have to make tough choices and stand by them. You learn from experience, so there's no easy way to teach this beyond sharing the learnings and the mistakes. It's tacit knowledge.
Ask Questions
After learning from mistakes, you also learn to listen to other people, even if they're not trying to teach you something.
I've also learned to "interview" people, even if they're not aware they're teaching me something. Everyone has something to teach, something only we know, or have learned. Over time, I've gotten better at listening to these tidbits of knowledge and getting a bit more from the people.
Non-Work Related
Another thing that has happened over time is that, if you open yourself to learning from anyone, you also learn to learn from anything.
You might be walking around and see a scene that might trigger another way to look at a problem, or to reuse something that people say or do to another problem you've had in the past.
That could be a side effect of walking away from your work and letting those thoughts take a backseat to your life.
Self-Awareness
The main point of learning from others is letting go of the ego and opening ourselves to ideas that can come from anyone. Over time, we learn to stand behind our ideas and decisions while considering the perspectives of others.
I keep a small note in my note app about the decisions I've made in a given day, and I review it on a Monthly or quarterly basis.
Your turn!
How are you with listening to other people's opinions? Or how are you with standing behind your own decisions? Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email!
Happy coding!
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