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My GoAhead & Startup Journey

— leadership & management, business — 8 min read

This is a collection of random notes and learnings from different sources about my journey to leadership. In no particular order any resource is more important than the other. I write this mostly to my current and future self for personal reflection, but feel free to learn from this post or the materials mentioned. This is a live document and will be updated (hopefully frequently) whenever i find something useful. The context here is leadership in software engineering, not necessarily applicable or not to other industries.

You may ask "why leadership?" and i ask myself the same question again, and again, too. To put it in another way let's take a more practical example: "I want to be rich". So everyone wants to be rich, maybe 50% of them want to know what it takes, maybe only 1% of them actually do the work needed, most probably only 0.1% of them succeed. On a similar note, I want to embrace the challenges and make good use of the work i do. I notice i find joy teaching exchanging knowledge and experience with people. I want to grow people, alongside building my own business, so all in all i have nothing to lose but everything to gain.

Professionally i have 0 prior experience as a full-time leader in any organization. However with the aspiration to become one, i have been paying attention to the surrounding environments, from my families how people interact, from schools where i notice different teaching styles that suit different learning styles and subjects: certain majors requires learning by heart/book the academic foundations like math, physics and chemistry, some others like engineering focuses more on the practical side where technology changes is almost always faster than most schools and teachers can adapt to.

I used to work as a part time English tutor, I love teaching, more like spreading good knowledge to others. There is a problem, however, is even when you're the best teacher in the world, if the students don't spend time and effort to improve themselves, there is little to no improvement after all. So all in all, leadership is similar in a sense that you spend your time growing other people. To make leadership effective, it's required to have good environment and culture, proper hiring process and getting great people in and constantly adapt to the team you grow.

Projects

Books

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Talent Management

Talent Management

Communications

Communication Skills

Conflict Management

Conflict Management

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Quotes

Start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology - Steve Jobs

Customers don't form their opinions on quality from marketing, they don't form their opinions on quality from who won the Deming award or who won the Baldrige award, they form their opinions on quality from their own experience with the products or the services - Steve Jobs

In some cases when the music stops there'll be some people that don't have a chair - Steve Jobs

You know who the best managers are? They’re the great individual contributors, who never ever want to be a manager, but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is going to be able to do as good a job as them - Steve Jobs

Great people when they have different opinions, they usually can convince each other that one of them is right, or pick one that's better than all of them within a very short period of time - Steve Jobs

If you work with people that aren't as good as you then you know you become a country of midgets. If you work with people that are better than you then you really grow - Steve Jobs

If you get the right strategy, if you have the right people, and if you have the right culture at your company, you'll do the right products, you'll do the right marketing, you'll do the right things logistically in a manufacturing and distribution. And if you do all those things right the bottom line will follow - Steve Jobs

You can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in the future. You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path, and that will make all the difference - Steve Jobs, Connecting the Dots

Sometimes life's gonna hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied, is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work, is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on - Steve Jobs, Love and Loss

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of the others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage tto follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary - Steve Jobs, Death

Productivity means the ability to use man and machines in such a cooperative way that you produce more products per man-hour of a superior quality than any other person can do, any group of person can do. That means cooperation not antagonism - Lee Kuan Yew, 1980

To the young and to the not so old, I say, look at that horizon, follow that rainbow, go ride it - Lee Kuan Yew, 1996

Quality is not an act, it is a habit - Aristotle

If you can dream it, you can do it - Walt Disney

If people aren't laughing at your dreams, your dreams aren't big enough - Robin S. Sharma

Strive for continuous improvement, instead of perfection - Kim Collins

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop - Confucius

It always seems impossible until it’s done - Nelson Mandela

In this life, you don't have to prove nothin' to nobody but yourself - Rudy

If you can't explain it simply, you dont understand it well enough - Albert Einstein

Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don't want to – Sir Richard Branson

Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you're climbing it - Andy Rooney

If you're going through hell, keep going - Winston Churchill

Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it - Ferris Bueller

Don’t ever get too comfortable, you can be replaced - Unknown

Keep your friends close; keep your enemies closer - Sun Tzu

When it feels scary to jump, that is exactly when you jump, otherwise you end up staying in the same place your whole life, and that I can't do - Abel Morales

If you’re good at something, never do it for free - The Joker

With great power comes great responsibility - Stan Lee

Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright - Stephen King

My mama always said, life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get - Forest Gump

Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present - Kung-Fu Panda

Don’t ever let somebody tell you… You can’t do something. Not even me. Alright? You got a dream… You gotta protect it. People can’t do something’ themselves, they wanna tell you you can’t do it. If you want something’, go get it. Period - The Pursuit of Happiness

Well Mr. President, I’m helping put a man on the moon - Mr Janitor