Tenets for career moves (unless you know better)

This is not meant to be a leadership blog. Go to LinkedIn for those. I’m not going to discuss how we defined and used tenets in my last organization or wax lyrical about their utility. All I’ll say if you’re not familiar is that these are meant to be taken seriously, and used as a guide for decision making day to day.

The purpose of writing these down is to call my shot for my next move and subsequent. I expect to come back and update these as I get smarter.

The tenets

• Lead with your strongest superpowers. The >20 years worth of experience as a software engineer give you a lot of leverage that would be wasted if you chose, for example, to start an entirely new career as a professional chef.
• Follow your curiosity. Your unconscious brain will guide the way by bringing your conscious brain back again and again to the same topics. Avoid spending your time working on tasks that never or only rarely incite joyful chains of thought.
• Be sure it matters. You should be convinced that your work will have a net positive impact across the metrics that matter to you. Seek to invalidate this conviction and be wary of motivated reasoning.
• No lamps under bushels. Seek a wide impact that extends beyond organizational borders. Stay connected with the people who are impacted by outcomes of your work.

Discussion

I think these are pretty obvious other than perhaps the last. That one doesn’t feel quite finished yet. There’s multiple thoughts there. One is that most of what I’ve done in my field is locked behind corporate firewalls and deep in infrastructure and security management processes rather than customer facing. The tenet is about getting closer to the outside world and having more control over how my work touches that world.