Lead Kindly by Writing
9th edition
Welcome to the 9th edition of Lead Kindly! I finished my first one off article, and I’m just going through editing now. I will release it before the next iteration of the weekly! If you don’t normally comment, I would love any feedback you have for it so I can help make future one-off articles better!
📚 Read This Week
The Coach and the Fixer by
This week Michael takes us through a master class of story telling, meta story telling, and three mistakes he’s made as a manager for each of the three hats he wears: Leader, Fixer, and Coach. There are so many good takeaways here so instead of trying to pick them, here is a really solid quote to get you in the mood (though just go read it, it’s very good and not that long):
Management isn’t a promotion; it’s a new job. Leadership isn’t management; it’s a set of principles you continuously and consistently demonstrate to your team to show what you believe is important. Leadership is how they learn what to expect from you. Managers tell you where you are. Leaders tell you where you are going.
Why user empathy is a product engineering skill & five tactics how to gain it by
Ilija teaches us that your team is not a wish fulfillment machine. Your job is not to give everyone what they want, but to build what they need and to ultimately solve their problems. My team builds the Design System for Yelp, and I have this conversation a lot. If we spent our time only giving our users what they asked for, we’d never build what the company actually needs.
Fun Ways to Use the Meeting Scribe Role for Leadership Development by Jimmy Ho
Jimmy gave me a completely new way to think about the role of a note taker! In particular, as a way to help develop future leaders. As a manager I have many conversations with folks who are interested in being a leader/manager one day. What I really liked about Jimmy’s take here was his mindset on seeking out and developing leaders and developing talent. It was a new way for me to think as a leader, and a valuable insight!
🧠 Productivity Tip of the Week
When you’re 95, you would give anything to be the age you are today
Today I am living the days I will one day look back on fondly, and I want to make them count. I don’t live to avoid regret, but I do want to live a full life. I want to be an active part of my kids lives. I want to always be learning and growing as a person. I want to enjoy the journey, and not just focus on a destination.
Thinking about my later years is a powerful way to refocus my goals and remind me that these days matter. Assuming I make it to 95 and I’m lucid, I hope I’ll still be living my life in a way I’m proud of and thinking “well, when I’m 110 I’ll give anything to be 95 again, let’s make this count!”
How are you going to make your days count? Are you going to make an impact on your team? How are you going to elevate those around you to be better versions of themselves?
💡 Quote of the Week
Writing is the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about.
- Shane Parish
I don’t know if Shane (author of Clear Thinking) is the originator of this quote, but he’s who I stole it from.
This is one of the many factors that led me to writing this newsletter, and boy is it true. I’ve learned so much by writing articles on various subjects. It turns out that it’s really easy to think I know something well, until I sit down and face the blinking cursor. I thankfully don’t experience writers block the way others describe, but I do experience “crap, I have written 1500 words on this subject, and I have no idea what I’m talking about”. And I love that.
That realization is such a gift. It means I have something to learn! It means I get to deepen my knowledge. It means I’ve uncovered a blind spot that I can patch. The return on investment (ROI) on writing is easily 10x that of reading something someone else wrote on average for me. I might come across a gem where every chapter of a book is a new insight into how things work, but I know every time I write I’m going to learn about myself, about my weaknesses and my strengths.
If you don’t write, go do it. You don’t have to share it. You don’t have to do it well. Take whatever fire burns deep in your soul and put it into words. Or rant about what’s bothering you. Pretend to teach something to someone. It doesn’t have to be an entire book or starting a weekly newsletter. It can be a thoughtful comment on someone else’s book, article, or even some YouTube video. If you’re looking for a place to start, pick any of my articles and:
Who knows, you just might learn something.
📖 What I'm reading
I am still reading Millionaire Fastlane, but I’m almost done now. It’s…a book. It has words in it. I don’t know, it’s highly repetitive. The author has good underlining messages, but it’s wrapped in something that I struggle to enjoy. It lacks kindness? It feels like the author is very bitter, and thinks the best way to reach people is by being harsh and scathing. Maybe I’m just bitter that I’m spending more time writing than reading so it’s taking me longer to read books?
🏋️♀️ What I'm working on
Shortly after publishing last weeks article I actually got the whole “Destination Host Unreachable” thing working. It was a physically unplugged ethernet cable! I had to fix the DNS as well but everything worked after that. In my defense for the cable problem, I have 5 ethernet ports in each server and 3 of them were in use. I had the R610 direct lined into the other two R610’s and the NAS, but it was not lined into the switch :P. I don’t know if directly patching them together will do anything but I wanted to test it out so I wired them together a long time ago. Anyway, the main point is that I was able to add the R610 to the cluster! It was a great moment of triumph. I haven’t bothered to add the other two servers.
Interestingly when I turned the server off, my Proxmox node basically locked up. I couldn’t even use the root terminal. I guess the way Proxmox clustering works, is that each node gets a default 1 vote as part of the quorum, and you need 50%+1 vote to do something. So when that server was off, my root node did not have enough vote power to take action! I fixed it by turning the server back on, and giving it vote power of 0. I don’t know enough about Proxmox to know if this is a wise decision, but it solved the immediate problem. To save power I will have the R610 off most of the time until I want to tinker with it, so I don’t want its lack of vote to count.
I continue to Gym 3 times a week, and I am very proud of my hack slide progress. I have not added weights, but it’s getting very stable! Still working on my breathing. The most interesting new exercise we did were seated rows on the cable machine. I was doing 100lbs which I found very hard, but I am not convinced I was doing them correctly. I mostly felt it in my triceps. More learning required!
📈 State of the Newsletter
We’re at 57 subscribers as of writing. I’m actually still in shock that we broke 50 last week. Thanks for sharing the newsletter and helping it grow!