🧠 Four Cs for counter-convention success

3-MINUTE UPGRADE

🧠 Four Cs for counter-convention success

Four traits to push against the grain.

These are not concepts you’ve never heard. Yet I suspect you’re under-indexing on at least one.

💪 Confidence

In my humble opinion confidence is, on the whole, misunderstood, and in that misunderstanding overrated.

Confidence are those people that speak a lot and sound smart. Right? Wrong, in my view. This is the “fake it til you make it” fad. Over-stretching puts you “out of position” in Chess parlance, and usually catches up with you. It ruins trust in the long term.

The kind of confidence you want to embody should come from experience. You should be confident walking a path you recognise. When you have a legitimate point of view (rather than speaking because you think that will make you look smart), back yourself to put it forward.

This is valuable confidence. It is fuel for a honed engine. Not gas on a wood fire.

Just as confidence lets you trust yourself, confidence gives you the self-assuredness to admit openly when you are wrong. We can be assured that we are good and not perfect. Like the sword of Gryffindor (🪄⚡️nerd) confidence takes on that which makes itself stronger.

In fact, getting good at admitting when you are wrong, and being willing to be wrong humbly, is a good pathway to confidence. If failure can be positively embraced, there is very little to fear.

😬 Courage

Sometimes used as a synonym for “confidence”, it is in fact importantly different.

While confidence is behaviour in situations where we feel assured, courage is a behaviour when we are legitimately unassured. In other words, courage is required when we are on new ground, unknown terrain.

The reason courage & confidence are mixed up is, as we discussed already, confidence is often mistaken for bluster masking uncertainty. Instead, when we are uncertain, we should have the courage to push ourselves forward, with honesty and open eyes.

Courage means challenging ourselves when we have no idea what we are doing, while not concealing that fact. Courage is the first & most important quality for rapid growth, because without it we never extend beyond our comfort zone.

Courage is a muscle we can exercise by saying “yes” to trying things we have no confidence we can succeed at.

💬 Communication

Everybody has heard this advice, and yet the majority of fantastic engineers I know still under-value this skill, because it’s soft and feels like PR.

Your ideas may be empirically right but human minds don’t absorb empirical ideas like they absorb human communication.

You don’t need to be Obama. You just need to be able to share your ideas succinctly with a framing appropriate to your audience. More than half of this problem therefore is knowing from what angle to share your message.

Think very carefully about what they care about. In particular, if they are not engineers, what is their goal, and how can you work backward from their goal to your thing. Whether written or spoken, audience is key.

If you can do that you will light a fire under your progress.

♠️ Curiosity

Curiosity is not a quality that many engineers lack. They probably got into this job because they were tinkerers. They wanted to know how things worked. Yet as they enter the corporate world, most keep technical blinkers on.

In a corporate setting, to succeed you should have strong narrow expertise, and then broad awareness. Such people, in corporate speak, are “T-shaped”. But engineers usually guardrail that breadth within technical domains.

My advice would be to go much wider than that. Understand accounting challenges, marketing problems, sales, HR & Ops. Not deeply, of course. But knowing even a little about every part of the company not only gives you a much stronger mental model for how the money is made, but exposes you to opportunities and problems you would have missed otherwise.

Curiosity killed the cat but bolsters the working mode of a software engineer.

TECH TITBIT

📁 Localhost HTTPS

I’ve always been squeamish about setting up localhost HTTPs, imagining it to be complex, with detail I just didn’t care about. But the time came this week when not being able to test local TLS outweighed that fear.

And it turns out it’s quite easy.

• mkcert -install

• mkcert localhost

And then in Go:

certFile := "localhost.pem"
keyFile := "localhost-key.pem"

http.ListenAndServeTLS(":8081", certFile, keyFile, nil)

This proved so upsettingly easy I couldn’t believe I’d never done it earlier.