Ego

When I think about my biggest mistakes, they all seem to share one theme: I let my ego get the best of me. Staying humble is easier said than done, and it’s hard to appreciate how good things are until they’re gone. There’s a fine line between keeping your ego in check and sacrificing so much self-respect that you become a doormat. In most cases, you don’t realize you’ve crossed that line until it’s too late.

When it comes to personal growth, if that’s something you care about, it’s worth thinking about your blind spots, your biases, and anything else that might be holding you back. I tend to have a lot of conversations with strangers, and lately I’ve been making more of any effort to listen rather than speak. It’s quite a simple yet powerful way to learn about others, and yourself too, in the process. People will reveal a surprising amount if you simply give them space and keep your mouth shut. A few questions here and there to move things along helps, but the questions matter less than giving others time to speak (and you’ll find that people will often fill the gaps themselves).

Software engineers tend to be smart people. Writing software is hard, and it’s entirely a discipline of exercising your brain cells to write the correct commands to make the computer do what you want it to do. Add in the layers of complexity that come with dealing with humans who want software to do something without necessarily knowing or understanding precisely what they want, and what you end up with is a fairly complicated practice.