Thoughts For The Week - 2025.09.07
Being Taken Seriously, Consuming vs Creating, Intelligence vs Action!
1. How to Be Taken Seriously
Tessa Xie’s post focuses on “4 common mistakes of junior data scientists and how to fix them” However the advice is applicable to anyone working in tech.
Four behaviours that can increase your impact as a developer:
Don’t provide too much info
Have a concrete recommendation
Be clear about the “why”
Have the basics to hand
So if you want to be perceived as a trusted thought partner instead of a junior IC who can only help pull data, put yourself in the shoes of the decision makers and treat the decisions with the same level of rigor as the ones you care deeply about.
2. Consumer or Creator?
Never has there been so much tooling and support to make creation easier. Never has there been so much temptation to get stuck as a consumer and end up doom scrolling.
David Hobbs’ post explores this topic and provides a bit of nudge to help people think where they are and where they want to be.
My ultimate goal of this article is to shine light on the difference between being a consumer and a creator and how to encourage responsible consumption and limitless creation.
A quick challenge. How’s your creative energy? Now observe how you feel after half an hour of scrolling through your social media drug of choice? How does this feel compared to a short walk outside thinking about your project or after 30 minutes of consciously planning and executing on it?
3. Too Intelligent to take Action?
James Lim’s video “You’re too intelligent to take action (Why over thinkers can’t execute)”
As we get more experienced we can more easily think of risks and things that can go wrong. This can actually make us less likely to take action and move forward with our plan. A key piece of advice is to formally split you work:
Strategist mode: Target is creating the plan
Performer mode: Executing the plan
Take Away Question:
What is the time allocation between these two modes of work for you?
Here’s a good visualisation that breaks it down further…
Have a great week.