August 24, 2024 Opinion, Success No comments
Consistency is Hard: connect periods of inspiration to achieve durable consistency
This is original content by Andriy Buday.
Inspiration doesn’t last
One of my observations both in myself and in others is that being consistent is hard, especially in starting something new or in high effort activities. Think about when you get inspired to go to the gym every other day only to discover it is hard to find time, or think about when people talk about yet another self-help book that promises success if you just follow some simple morning ritual and “x rules of success” only to realize following those rules is unrealistic, or think about someone who fell in love and puts effort into looking and behaving exemplary only to revert to the baseline after some time.
Arguably, it is in human nature to have waves of inspiration, attempting something, and abandoning it if it doesn’t pay off instantly or after it has paid off. Lack of time, competing priorities, procrastination, laziness, waiting for a better time, just not feeling like it.
In this post I would like to document for myself and to share some of the instances of things that worked for me and didn’t work for me. I will try to analyze my own behavior to see if any of this can be generalized and if there is a way to figure out a way to make things work.
Consistency fading away
Let’s start with some scenarios where I had success but then consistency faded away in a very long run:
- Consistent blog post writing
- I have 328 blog posts over here. The majority of posts are old ones from 2010-2013 with a monthly average of 5-10 posts.
- Inspiration: blogging was popular around 2010 (no gen AI, no insta, not much of twitter) and it paid off in terms of people getting to know me, building connections. I would have not done well in my career without this blog.
- Reason for less blogging? Anyone can use Gen AI to create a blog post a lot better than this one diminishing my enthusiasm, no one really reads posts these days, internet is just over-saturated. And frankly “I got tired” as was put by one of my early role model, Scott Hanselman, after 20 years of blogging. At the same time there are still benefits of developing the writing skill itself.
- Conclusion: blogging helped me in the past; it is still useful even now to organize my thoughts.
- Reading books
- I don’t know the number of books I read, but I had multiple annual goals of reading, say 24 books a year, 6 tech books, or 13 investment books, etc. and I succeeded in many of those annual goals or had partial success (hard to do a book every 2 weeks).
- Inspiration: eagerness to apply knowledge to advance in life, bright eyes thinking that books have all the answers, falsely thinking that book authors are another breed.
- So I don’t read books now? Well, I do, but a lot less. Over time to me many books became repetitive and boring, especially, if they are on the same topic (say, productivity) plus it becomes annoying to spend time listening to non-original content and authors citing all the same research over and over. Another issue I have is that I don’t have a proper mechanism for remembering things, so often it is wasted time. You read a book and a week later you have a hard time recalling what was there.
- Conclusion: no doubt reading books is beneficial, everyone should do it, but is it so hard to continue to find inspiration, time, and satisfaction in reading them.
Cyclic consistency
Now let’s look at some of the cyclic scenarios when I returned to the old consistency for some periods of time:
- Interview prep
- Arguably one would say that everybody prepares for interviews when they change jobs, but I went through a few instances when I was preparing for half a year or so without any interviews lined up or even thoughts of changing jobs. Yeah, just doing some 5-10 leetcode every week for fun.
- Motivation: sense of importance of advance preparation and always being ready, but also I just like coding a tiny bit of something and feeling completeness.
- Conclusion: cyclic approach worked great for me in the past, but after multiple months it becomes less fun I start to question my sanity.
- Waking up in the morning
- I’m likely an evening person (if there is such a thing). I had many periods of being an early morning person. You know “new you” waking at a crazy morning, “deep work”, and all of that, but it doesn’t always work like that, very often I feel like a zombie and after multiple “zombie” periods I gave up on the morning thing. Ironically, I started this blog post 6:30AM and am almost done by 9AM.
- Inspiration: there is like a barrage of books, articles, gurus, whatever telling that if you claim morning to yourself you will have done more till noon than most people in a week. Lol, I wish that was true.
- This one is painful. I had so many failures after attempting this that. Something that also bothers me is that I was extremely productive at some of my previous jobs when I would come to the office like 11:30AM after barely waking at 10:30AM but then would work till very late.
Consistency on the raise
And now I want to examine two cases where I consistently improve consistency if that makes sense.
- Physical exercises
- One of the things I did not pay attention to in childhood and early adulthood was health and physical exercising. I was healthy for the most part, I didn’t care how I looked. In 2016 I started having periods of running, then I discovered rock climbing, and in 2021 I went nuts and worked out 365 days, including 148 rock climbing gym visits (my climbing stuff), 78 runs, 87 hours of weight training, and many other activities.
- Inspiration: this came naturally, originally motivation was establishing challenges with friends, later I found it could be fun to beat personal records and socialize in a bouldering gym, a also noticed how it helped dealing with mental stress and my back pains are gone.
- Conclusion: consistent payoff and little downside made this ever more consistent activity. I might not hit 366 days this year, but will be very close to it.
- Financial goals
- As a disclaimer, I work for FAANG company but I work in Canada and started fairly late, so I’m not one of those multi-million net worth guys advising on life. Instead, while making regular (still high) software engineer money in Europe, I’ve been very consistent and deliberate in management of money. I have a custom spreadsheet I update every month since 2012. I read multiple books, tried a bit of more active trading and switched to super-simple strategies. All-in-all just grinding a consistent approach to money. Not that I didn’t make mistakes, purely from financial perspective I should have moved to the US, I bought a townhouse in Vancouver at the worst time possible and some other mistakes.
- Inspiration: I guess sense of security and thoughts about the future are a great driving factor, but a lot of actual inspiration came from reading popular financial books, like those about Warren Buffett.
Conclusion
It is great to get inspired and I recommend deliberately looking for sources of inspiration: read books, look for mentors, create plans for yourself. With that having said, inspiration lacks durability and this is where work to build and maintain habits starts, it is hard and often results in failure. In my experience, starting something and then failing is OK as long as you start the cycle again and again, pushing the time of a failure further and further away in any given cycle. It is critical to ensure that your cycles are the right ones (another topic), but eventually your cycles will connect into one uninterrupted wavy line that takes you to your goals. Don’t give up!
Quick thoughts on Conflict Resolution Styles
February 12, 2024 Leadership, Opinion No comments
Hopefully a short post. As always opinions are mine.
I always figured dealing with conflict was something you just…did. You know, no need for fancy theories or structured approaches. Recently I was asked what my conflict resolution style is and how it matches to style of other people. So I did a bit of research, I mean, in a lazy way:
Andriy: > Give brief list of conflict resolution styles as bullet points:
Gemini: > Absolutely! Here’s a brief list of the most common conflict resolution styles:
- Accommodating: Prioritizing the needs of others over your own and seeking to maintain harmony.
- Avoiding: Sidestepping or postponing dealing with the conflict.
- Compromising: Finding a middle ground; each party gives up something to find a solution.
- Competing: Focused on winning and advancing your own needs above all else.
- Collaborating: Working together to find a solution that fully satisfies everyone’s needs as much as possible.
Andriy: > What’s the origin of these conflict resolution styles?
Gemini: > The primary origin of the framework for these conflict resolution styles comes from the work of Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann in the 1970s.
Ok. That kind of makes sense and I have a hunch I have read about those at some point in my life. Now I have an exercise for you, which I’m doing myself along the way as well. I promise it will get more interesting:
- Determine your own conflict resolution style by either taking a quiz online or by just thinking through those. I’m kind of combination of Collaborating, Compromizing, and a bit of Competing with complete intolerance to Avoiding style.
- Now try to determine the styles of people you have to deal with, say collegues at work or people in your personal life. For myself, I created kind of a map of few of the stakeholders at work.
- Now try to think of pros and cons of each of the styles and how they might impact you, other person, or what would be the best situation to use a style. Yeah, internet has lots of these, and I generated some stuff below, but it is more interesting to think about this while having context of yourself or others you know. Think of maybe 2-3 people, not to overwhelm yourself.
- Now the fun part: mix and match yourself to these people and recall how your interactions where with them. For myself I found that:
- We spend to much time in “analysis-paralysis” when another person is collaborating as much as I am.
- There is a lot more compromizing on my side when dealing with a competing or avoiding person, which is probably detremental for me and leaves a bit of resentment.
- Things get solved very quickly with an accomodating person, but then do I lose some of my credit with them just because they haven’t spoken?
- … and many more…
Andriy: > Add one pro, one con, and one recommendation under each conflict resolution style bullet point.
Gemini: > Absolutely! Here’s the list expanded with a pro, con, and recommendation for each style:
- Accommodating:
- Pro: Maintains relationships and reduces tension.
- Con: Can lead to neglecting your own needs.
- Recommendation: Use strategically in low-stakes situations or when preserving harmony is crucial.
- Avoiding:
- Pro: Allows time to cool down and gather your thoughts.
- Con: Doesn’t actually resolve the conflict, which can build resentment.
- Recommendation: Employ only as a temporary measure, ensuring you return to address the issue later.
- Compromising:
- Pro: Can lead to finding a quick and somewhat fair solution.
- Con: May limit creativity and not fully address everyone’s concerns.
- Recommendation: Best when finding a temporary fix or when issues are of moderate importance.
- Competing:
- Pro: Can be useful when immediate, decisive action is needed.
- Con: Damages relationships and may not lead to the best long-term solution.
- Recommendation: Reserve for emergencies or when power dynamics are heavily imbalanced.
- Collaborating:
- Pro: Leads to solutions that genuinely satisfy everyone involved.
- Con: Can be time-consuming and requires everyone to be fully invested.
- Recommendation: Aim for this style whenever possible, especially for high-stakes conflicts or building deep trust.
This self-invented exercise helped me realize I need to be more mindful of the situation when handling conflict. I should explore styles that feel less natural, like strategically using avoidance when emotions are high – as long as I remember to revisit the issue later or that occasionally I need to compromize less in favor of achieveing better quality.
What are your thoughts?
On Mentorship
October 4, 2023 Leadership, Opinion, Personal 2 comments
Ever watched a martial arts movie? There is always a Sensei behind the main character – usually a much more experienced, older, and wiser person willing to share their knowledge. Career, life, or software engineering isn’t exactly the same (maybe metaphorically?), but in the very same way, it is always a great idea to be inspired by and learn things from someone who has already been through the journey you are embarking on.
I don’t think I can give justice to the topic of mentorship holistically (go search the internet for that or ask Bard to generate bullet points for you), though I can share my own experiences. In part this is what mentorship is all about, see if there is anything for you below:
In my early career back in Ukraine I was lucky to get direct exposure to our clients from the USA as this helped with my English but I was also lucky to work with talented and highly energetic technical leader and a Microsoft MVP (most-valuable-professional). He was a lot of inspiration for me and probably was the reason for starting this blog and effectively jump-starting my career (tech blogging was very popular back in ~2010). Moving through my career I met many engineers who were highly skilled, had diverse technical backgrounds (think software for Ferrary F1, or for British military, or high frequency trading, or nuclear energy, etc). So I tried to challenge myself to learn from them. Very specifically, one of the annual goals I had in 2016 was “Learn 12 simple skills from other people. To achieve this goal I will first identify 12 people from the community and those surrounding me and chose some characteristic I admire.” I might not have been exceptionally successful in achieving that particular goal but at least I learned to appreciate that others know cool things I don’t. Once I moved to work for big tech (Amazon & now Google) I normally tried to maintain “official” mentorship relationship(s) via internal mentorship programs/platforms.
My experience with “official” mentors so far has been mixed. As always, it all depends on the person and how two of us connect, but in all of the cases mentors have always provided something of a value to me. It was never-ever time wasted. At the very least, a mentor will help you get an outsider perspective on you situation and answer your questions from different perspective other than your manager might. There is no guarantee that you will agree to what they say or that their recommendations will be ideally applicable to you but it is your job to work through those and figure out the best you can get out additional point of view.
I worked with few of my mentors on my promotions. It is always great to get a mentor one or two levels higher as they have a lot more understanding of what it takes to get promoted to the next level and they might actually be part of promo review process for that level. In fact, I feel like I got a lot of information from one of my mentors I otherwise wouldn’t be able to get from my manager.
Other than promotions, the other area I worked on with my mentors was understanding of my next career moves. For instance, one good advise I got was to always get most out of any situation before making any radical decisions. At the same time, I also got “never moving fish is a dead fish” and other types of advise, all of which have had their impact on me.
Third area of engagmeent with my mentors was in building vision/strategy and presenting it to leadership. A very specific advise (and, maybe, a bit weird) was to actually visualize that I’m that leader I’m going to present the strategy to and try to understand what would that leader pay attention to when listening to the presentation. I was actually asked to role play during mentorship discussion, which felt really weird, but I wouldn’t have tried this if I didn’t have this “weird” mentor.
I know that I’ve been a bit of an inspiration for some engineers in the past and this realization was a great source of energy for myself as well as a motivation to self-improve further. Regretfully I’ve lost a lot of drive to be an example or an inspiration to others. I’ve also find it more difficult to be inspired by someone. Don’t take me wrong, not that there are not enough great people around (if anything, my collegues are one of the best and truly remarkable people), it is probably just me getting older and grumpy. In a way I miss those times but on a higher note writing this blog post helped me recall good times I had and motivate myself to be a more active individual in this regard. I currently have a mentee and keep in touch with few former collegues which whom I exchange career advise.
Looking back at my past mentorship relationships I can confidently say that they helped me. Go ahead and get yourself a mentor and if you have the opportunity, don’t hesitate and take a moment to teach someone something you know, chances are you might benefit in the process as well.
My Home Office Setup
October 18, 2020 Opinion, Personal, RandomThoughts 11 comments
First things first, this is not a “how-to” post explaining you the “one right way” of setting up your home office. I am a Software Engineer (you are likely to be one as well) and like yours, my home office setup is probably somewhere in between coding on sofa and science-fiction command center. In this post I’m just sharing what I’ve done to improve my home office situation and what I’m thinking might be worth to improve it even further. I will be glad to hear any feedback or advice you might have on this.
Location
Reducing noises, keeping kids from fighting for your immediate and undivided attention, avoiding kitchen temptations, dog barking or whatever else is applicable to you, might be one of the most important factors for your home office, yet it might be the one you have the least control of. I do not pretend to have a batcave for work from home either. In fact, I started working on sofa when COVID first hit in March and then quickly realized this wasn’t a good idea. Step by step I improved my WFH situation and currently have something reminiscent of an office. I’m renting a relatively large apartment, though it obviously wasn’t designed with a workspace in mind, so I’m using a bedroom. Yeah, a bedroom! I have rearranged the furniture in a way logically separating the room into office and non-office halves. In this post, I am going to show pictures of my office half. (Not too eager to post photos of my bed, especially when it is not made up :)).
Desk and equipment arrangement
I’m in favor of simplicity and minimalism when it comes to my desk. Even when I was going to the office I would usually keep it empty from anything non-essential. So here is my arrangement:
On the left you see my work laptop with two cables. First cable goes to a docking station serving as a power source and connecting the laptop to 300 Mbps internet (seems to be enough ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) as well as to external camera which you can see on the top of the laptop (I will touch on this again later on). Docking station has enough ports to add more peripherals. Second cable connects my work laptop to KVM. If you see, there is a small button in front of the keyboard – that’s KVM switch allowing me to share 34″ monitor and keyboard between laptops on the left and right. Laptop on the right is my personal laptop. I intentionally don’t login with my personal account on my work laptop for multiple reasons (will touch on this later as well). There is also a desk lamp and desk power source located in the right corner mostly for charging devices (2 USB-C, mini-USB, Garmin). I might keep few different sets of headphones on the desk, but usually prefer to keep them in the back of my “office”.
List of Equipment and details
Except of work laptop and few small things, all equipment is something I bought with my own money before I knew my new employer is so generous to give 1000$ to its employees to improve WFH situation [public info]. Below is the list of the equipment I’m using with links to Amazon for reference only – those are not referral links (I’m not trying to make money on your clicks, and this post is not written for that purpose).
Monitor: Dell UltraSharp U3415W 34-Inch Curved LED-Lit Monitor (Older Model) It is a nice wide curved 34″ monitor I can easily use as if I had two with tools like Spectacle on mac or built-in shortcuts on chomebook. The only regret I have is I should have probably went for newer version with more aggressive curve and USB-C support.
Monitor Stand: AmazonBasics Premium Single Monitor Stand This allows me to bring the monitor forward/backward, up/down or change the angle. This is so much better than having monitor placed stationary. It also allows to free up some space on the desk.
Keyboard: Filco Majestouch 2 Ninja Cherry MX Blue Switch 87 Key Mechanical Keyboard Black This is compact super-loud faceless mechanical keyboard. I love this keyboard and find it to be beautiful. It might be too loud to use if you are sharing space with others, so keep this in mind.
Mouse: Logitech® MX Anywhere 2S Wireless Mouse A nice precise mouse, though I often don’t like how it behaves on Chomebook. Not sure if this is an issue with the mouse itself or ChromeOS (and yes I tried to play with the settings).
Logitech MX Master 3. This is a full size and precise mouse. I am glad I replaced the old small one with this one.
Docking station: Dell WD15 Monitor Dock 4K with 130W Adapter, USB-C While docking station is definitely something to have I do NOT recommend this particular one as it is not fully compatible with newer Macs. My monitor flickers when I connect it via this docking station. Here is DELL’s support page on this. I’m using this station for power, internet connection, web-camera, and any further peripherals I will need to add to my work laptop.
KVM: Sabrent 2-Port USB Type-C KVM Switch with 60 Watt Power Delivery After much of extensive search I gave up looking for a docking station that has TWO usb-c power delivery outputs and also works as a KVM. This seems to be non-existent device. So instead, I bought myself a dedicated KVM. It is simple and it works. Power delivery is not always detected on my Pixelbook, so I skip PD option and use another cable to power my personal laptop on the right.
Power: BESTEK Power Strip with USB for charging devices, powering lamp, and occasional plug-in of things at top of my desk. I also use conventional power extender for low-power things under my desk and directly plug into the wall outlet more power demanding devices (monitor, docking station).
Desk Lamp: Swing Arm Lamp, LED Desk Lamp with Clamp, 9W Eye-Care Dimmable Light, Timer, Memory, 6 Color Modes, JolyJoy Modern Architect Table Lamp for Task Study Reading Working Home Dorm Office (Black) Super happy with this lamp – it can be bent in so many ways. I can recommend this one.
Vertical Laptop Stand: OMOTON Adjustable Something to hold my personal laptop vertically and save even more space. Anyway it is so much more pleasant to work on a large monitor (something I’m doing right now).
External Web Camera: Logitech C920S HD Pro Webcam with Privacy Shutter External webcam has its advantages of providing higher quality image with active focus. Unfortunately I probably need to add some swinging arm or a holder to it as right now I’m placing it exactly where laptop’s camera is and don’t think that my coworkers have even noticed a difference. I’m yet to test if mic is better on it in comparison to built-in one. Some people use dedicated external mics and their sound quality is noticeably better.
Backup power and internet connection: I also have two 20K+ mAh external power banks (one of which is enough to jump-start my car) and 20Gb of mobile internet plan. Based on my 4 hour testing this should take me through a full day of power outage. I know this is not ideal, but I’m also not running a data-center at home nor I have a detached house to buy myself generator or a similar solution. In fact, I do not remember unplanned power outage in my building since I live here and a planned one only lasted 4 hours.
Cables: Well… Everyone is ought to have some wire spaghetti under their desk. Right? I didn’t do anything special about the cables. Just tied some of them together so I don’t hit them with my feet.
Desk and chair: Those are cheap IKEA ones. I’m considering to change the legs of my desk to make it height-adjustable standing desk. As of chair, I don’t think mine is great for 8+ hours of sitting in it.
As of 2021 replaced the chair with Autonomous ErgoChairPro.
Ok, back of my “office”
To complete the picture of my office here is what I have just behind myself:
It is another IKEA chair for mental breaks and a bookshelf which has few books but mostly serves for accessing things I would use time-to-time, like keyboard palm-rest, other headphones, cables and few toys (no, I didn’t reassemble and then assemble the Rubik’s Cube – I can actually solve it). I’m also using the most expensive alarm I ever had which supposedly should help me wake up more naturally during winter months but doesn’t.
Last but not least, pull-up bar (BODYROX Premium Pull up/Chin up Bar) which I occasionally use during breaks. I consider it to be part of my home office as I wouldn’t buy it if I didn’t have to work from home.
No Personal things on Work Laptop
As mentioned above, I’m not logged in with my personal account on my work laptop – this means I cannot open personal gmail, facebook, instagram, twitter, favorite news site, whatever. When I actually need to do something personal I have to specifically log-in into my personal laptop, which means pressing KVM button. This small physical constraint and a clear separation not only helps to be fully compliant with whatever policies there are on the use of work laptop, but also helps to be totally focused on work. I find myself almost not switching to my personal laptop at all during working day (I take breaks, though). Additionally I blocked myself out of all of those distracting social media apps on my phone for working hours and limited their use to 15min/day/app with digital wellbing tools on my phone. I’m super happy about this (thank you, Google). In fact, this also helps me close item #23 on my new year’s resolution.
Your Feedback and Advice
I would be enormously happy to receive any advice from you on what I might be missing in my home office setup and what you would recommend. I understand our situations might be different but we are all in this together and if you have something to share please do so!
Running a Book Club
October 4, 2020 Opinion, RandomThoughts No comments
This is not a “how to” on running a book club. In fact I know next to nothing about book clubs and to run my first meet I googled what it takes to run such a thing. All of my previous stereotypes of book clubs were of bunch of super-boring people sitting in a circle and silently sipping tea (not coffee). After reading few articles I realized that I still know nothing about book clubs as apparently they could be run in myriad of different ways.
If you follow my blog you would notice that book reviews are one of very common blog posts here (55 of them), probably as common as technical blog posts and posts on success for software engineers. So no wonder I’m interested in reading and discussing books. One other aspect I’ve always been keen on is knowledge sharing. I used to share my knowledge via tech talks based on books and discussions called “design sessions”. It is not that I didn’t want to discuss books directly, but issue was that my audience in majority of cases didn’t read the book and still was interested in a given topic.
Last week I found myself in a situation when probably half of my team has already read or is reading one particular book. With a hint from my colleague, I kicked-off a book club. First meeting turned out to be a really great, fast paced discussion with a lots of engagement. I wasn’t the most active participant and this is awesome. Took notes and spoke only few times.
We went through highlights people remembered from the first chapter and then tried to analyze those, thought of practical applications, shared our related past experiences, and just had a good discussion. I would even call this to be some kind of a team building event – all virtual (in case you are reading this in future and COVID-19 is a thing of the past).
Once in 2012 I tried to organize “Code & Beer” and miserably failed with two people showing up. Arguably I just didn’t make it very clear I bought the beer for everyone :) This time people joined with no snacks but with tons of interest. So, how to run a book club? Who knows… Maybe make sure you have a “critical mass” of people interested in same book.