The Principles that I Live and Work by

In the process of composing a new engineering team, I thought it might be useful for members of the team to hear the principles that I live and work by. As I created the list I was mindful to only write those things that I can and have demonstrated, and avoided principles that I aspire to but have not been able to consistently demonstrate.

 

So here they are:

• I take risks.
• I think hard.
• I am humble.
• I am curious.
• I am creative.
• I am courageous.
• I do not sweat the small stuff.
• I take pride in the work that I do.
• I celebrate the victories of others.
• I live on the ground, not on the map.
• I make other people better at their jobs.
• I am honest, with myself and with others.
• I challenge my own most strongly held opinions.
• I am mindful of my own strengths and weakness.
• I am continuously improving my tactics and craft.
• I learn from the successes and failures of others.
• I am self-reflective and act on that self-reflection.
• I fail, and I learn from both my successes and failures.
• I am transparent with my team, leadership, and partners.
• I am authentic, and I give others the space to also be authentic.
• I always looks for ways that I and my team can do things better.
• I consider how the products that I build make people’s lives better.
• I take responsibility for the consequences of my words and actions.
• I tell the people I work with how I am feeling when it might impact them.
• I treat everyone with respect, even when I vehemently disagree with them.
• I support my opinions with data, or a model that can be communicated to others.
• I consider the consequences of my words and actions before I speak or take them.
• I respect and adhere to the values and policies of the organizations of which I am a part.
• I have cognitive empathy for everyone and build mental models of what it is like to be them.
• I say when I feel confident that I or my team can or cannot accomplish a task we have been given.
• I make space for everyone to have their voice heard, no matter what their preferred mechanism for communication.
• I communicate the confidence that I have in my estimates and am prepared to support that confidence with data or a model.

 

I am also a human, and I have bad days when I do not embody all of these principles. And I have compassion for myself, knowing that I am as subject to the limitations of my humanity as the rest of my species. It takes work to not fall back to pathological instincts, biases, heuristics and conditioned behaviours. It takes work to be your best self. I do and will do that work. If I have one principle that subsumes all these others it is that if I want to change the world, I first have to change myself. As above, so below.