Author: Jonathan Szeto

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Following Your Passion Is Horsesh*t

Last week, a classmate from high school reached out to me. He’d been a journalist for about thirty years, but he was starting to see the writing on the wall. (Spoiler alert: print journalism is dying.) He was asking me for advice about jumping ship from journalism and going into technology.

I won’t go into details about what I told him, but I will tell you the principle I approached to his problem. I told him to start with what he was good at. While I’m sure he was looking for advice about getting into coding, what he really wanted to know was, how to reinvent yourself when you find you’re in a career dead end.

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Epic Fail

New England Patriots in the Super Bowl: then and now

I was in high school when the Patriots made their first Super Bowl appearance in 1986. The Pats finished 11-5 in the regular season under second-year coach Raymond Berry and veteran quarterback Steve Grogan. It was the best regular season finish by New England to that point. They then made an improbable wild-card run through the playoffs and beat Miami in the AFC championship to advance to Super Bowl XX and face the Chicago Bears. Having just “squished the Fish,” confidence was running high in New England that the Patriots would “Berry the Bears.”

Things didn’t go quite as planned.

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Get Up and Walk

Saturday was a shitty day.
Friday was supposed to be a day off, the first day of a three-day weekend. Instead, I ended up not only coming into the office, but working well past midnight. Saturday, I paid for it.
I woke up well after the sun had risen and spent most of the day mindlessly doing useless crap. I’m at that age where if I have a particularly late night, it takes me about 3-4 days for things to settle back to normal. So, a three-day weekend where I was hoping to work on my side hustle, has become one day back at the office, followed by two days of recovery.

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The Map is Not the Territory


Watson Park – Merrimack, NH. This used to be an abandoned factory when I lived here.

Earlier in September, I flew back to New Hampshire for my high school reunion. It had been a full decade since I was back in my home town, and altogether I have only returned back to New Hampshire only six times since graduating college, with the gap in time between each successive visit growing longer than the previous one.

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Clothes Make the Man

“Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.”
There’s more truth to that saying than many believe. The conventional wisdom interprets that saying to mean that the way you dress sends an unspoken message to others about yourself that may actually raise or lower your status in their eyes. There is a lot of truth in that.
However, it also sends a message to yourself.

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How to Negotiate Your Salary

The best time to negotiate your salary is right when your future employers make an offer of employment. After you’ve been hired, it’s rare to get a raise beyond a yearly cost of living increase (typically around 3 percent). In over two decades of employment I have I only received a raise higher than cost of living once, and that was due to a change in job responsibilities. (Another engineer in the company had just left, and the engineering manager assigned me his product line, a high-profile product they were trying to grow.)
Here are some guidelines to follow when negotiating salary:

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Military Operations Orders for Civilian Planners and Leaders

One of the first things a military officer learns is the five-paragraph operations order. The operations order, or OPORD, provides a common format for communicating an upcoming mission, what soldiers can expect, and how to carry it out.  The format is the same no matter the size, from a squad of a dozen men to a division exceeding forty thousand.
If you plan projects, or you manage a team, department, or organization of any size, the OPORD can be a useful tool to have in your proverbial toolbelt. As with any tools, there are times to use them and times to try something else. But having the right tool for the right situation is better than improvising with something less effective.
All OPORDs have five major sections: situation, mission, execution, service/support, and command/signal.

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The SURVIVAL Acronym

When I was in the military, my instructors taught me the SURVIVAL acronym as part of wilderness survival training. The acronym went like this:

  • Size up the Situation
  • Undue Haste Makes Waste
  • Remember Where You Are
  • Vanquish Fear and Panic
  • Improve Your Situation
  • Value Living
  • Act Like the Natives
  • Learn Basic Skills

At some point I may do a deeper dive into these points, but here are some quick takeaways:

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Complexity

Complexity rises at an exponential rate to the size of a project. This applies whether your project is business or personal in nature.
The corollary to that is that the risk of failure (of any scale) also rises at an exponential rate to complexity. And when you apply the first rule to the corollary, this means that the odds of something going wrong on a large project are near certain.
There’s also another corollary, that time to work on even the basic tasks increases with complexity. (How fast sometimes depends.) Which means that a big project is almost certainly late and buggy.
The conclusion is obvious: keep your projects small, with very short lead times. You are more likely to deliver on-time, and with less mistakes.
Please note that big projects are not the same as big goals. You can have big goals — but it’s going to take you a long chain of small projects to get to that goal.
This will also allow you to change course relatively quickly in case your goals change. And the likelihood of that also rises with the size of your goals.
An added side benefits of having a chain of small goals is that it teaches you to build a system. Because inevitably you’ll find yourself doing the same set of tasks from one small project to another.
Because you’re working towards your goals in a chain of small projects, make sure the links are approximately the same size, whether in terms of money or time.
For example, many companies that implement Agile software often have a two week scrum cycle. It’s long enough to get any meaningful work done, but also short enough to limit time delays and complexity bloat.