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I am definitely somewhere on this spectrum. If you find yourself in this bucket, try to add 1 more trick to your repertoire: Patience. For me, this has proven

I am definitely somewhere on this spectrum. If you find yourself in this bucket, try to add 1 more trick to your repertoire: Patience. For me, this has proven to be a far more difficult lesson than anything in the actual computer system. Sitting quietly and waiting for others to deliberate something important, often across days and weeks, feels like torture to me. Especially, when the answer is so obvious in my own mind and the implications of bad decision making are severe. People are irrational and unpredictable. Waiting for them to see things your way can sometimes take longer than expected. This is not something to be fixed. It is something to be tolerated. Unless you are running a one-man startup, this is unavoidable - Do you want to do the jobs of all your teammates? If you cannot get your way on day 1, do NOT send that salty email right away. Type out a draft, send it to yourself, and then read it the next morning. Consider other perspectives as often as possible. I'd say the most impactful wildcard is one who is also very good at salesmanship. If you can come up with crazy ideas and also convince everyone on the team they are amazing, you are going to be unstoppable. The #1 trick in my estimation is to turn one option into a few options. A carefully-crafted illusion of free will can make a huge difference.

leros 4y ago
Patience is a good advice. I'll also say, it's often important to let people in various functions add their input, even if you can operate all those functions yourself. My super power is being able to understand many aspects of the business (engineering, product, marketing, sales, etc) and hold it in my head all at once. At least to a degree. But enough of a degree that I can make decisions just about instantly in my head that would require most people to have numerous meetings to bring the various stakeholders together to figure out all the related components. It works really well and I can do things very quickly and effectively, but it does often bother people that they're not involved in the process because they're used to having their inputs asked for. Usually what I is parallelize the process. I'll make a preliminary decision in my head, start executing it on, and then in the background, I'll also have conversations with the various stakeholders. Usually, nothing comes out of it, but they get to feel included, and sometimes they do provide valuable input, so it is beneficial too.

leros 4y ago

Patience is a good advice. I'll also say, it's often important to let people in various functions add their input, even if you can operate all those functions yourself. My super power is being able to understand many aspects of the business (engineering, product, marketing, sales, etc) and hold it in my head all at once. At least to a degree. But enough of a degree that I can make decisions just about instantly in my head that would require most people to have numerous meetings to bring the various stakeholders together to figure out all the related components. It works really well and I can do things very quickly and effectively, but it does often bother people that they're not involved in the process because they're used to having their inputs asked for. Usually what I is parallelize the process. I'll make a preliminary decision in my head, start executing it on, and then in the background, I'll also have conversations with the various stakeholders. Usually, nothing comes out of it, but they get to feel included, and sometimes they do provide valuable input, so it is beneficial too.