10 things that I have learned in 2020

I have a habit of documenting everything that I have learned throughout the year, and I do it in a form of letters to myself, I send an email to myself with each lesson that I have learned. At the end of each year, I do a little exercise of going through my lessons learned and picking the best ten out of the list. I know that this year has been full of learning for all of us, so please share your lessons learned in the comments. Also, you can check out my lessons learned from previous years 2019, 2018, 2017. So here we go.

1.The balance of experience

Hiring inexperienced people might be a luxury you can’t afford. It is totally fine to hire employees with less or no experience at all, and there is a great deal of advantages to having them in the workplace, but be careful with your expectations. The time that is going to be allocated from the experienced members of the staff to support the inexperienced ones might be a luxury you can’t allow yourself.

2. Have you got an idea?

You’ll never know if you had a good idea unless you start working on it. I’ll put it this way, if you never worked on it you never had a good idea in the first place, you might have had a good spark at best.

3.Patience

Do not confuse laziness with patience. Patience is a deliberate act of waiting for a particular set of signs or results and in no way a random act of doing nothing.

4. There are solutions to your problems

So far, my biggest mistake was thinking about my problems as something unique. The difficulties that we are facing today have been experienced and solved by others. Thinking that our problems are unique leaves us pretty much alone in the fight against them, meanwhile, by acknowledging the opposite we open ourselves to the opportunity of employing the wisdom of the entire mankind for solving our problems.

5. The cost of maintenance

Each time faced with a dilemma of purchasing an existing solution vs developing it in-house, our team used to estimate the cost and timeline of writing software, until our CTO offered to take into account the effort of the maintenance too. These days we purchase 3rd party solutions a lot more, and actually come to appreciate others’ work far more. I know this sounds very simple, but maybe you’ve been as naive as we were at some point.

6. Keep showing up (yes, again!)

The lesson is as old as Ancient Greece, and as Socrates said “Speak, So That I May See You”. Keep showing up, keep making people notice you. There are no good horses in a barn, all the good ones are on a racing track.

7.Superpowers come with a cost

There is a vulnerability at the other end of each superpower. People who are extremely strong at focusing on the large picture usually lack attention to details, highly organized people may lack creativity. Make sure your team covers your vulnerabilities!

8. Accomplishing a lot

The secret of accomplishing a lot throughout a day is dead simple — ToDo list. Just put everything you have to do in your ToDo list, even the smallest things. There is a quote by Albert Einstein “Never memorize something that you can look up.” Never memorize anything you have to do, put it in your ToDo list and prioritize it, you’ll be surprised how much more you can accomplish in a day.

9. Make a room for some adventures

Make sure there is a piece of adventure in your life. There is a beautiful scene in “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” when Gandalf sets off Bilbo on an adventure. Just like Bilbo we all need a Gandalf every once in a while, to set us off on a new adventure. Don’t say “no” when Gandalf comes knocking at your door.

“Yes. Well, that’s decided. It’ll be very good for you… and most amusing for me. I shall inform the others,” said Gandalf.

10. Lessons learned are not written in stone

The lessons you have learned previously might turn out to be outdated or straight out wrong. It is important to put your stubbornness aside and embrace the changes. When AOByte had just started out it was a small group of people, at the time it was justified to keep processes very light. Later as we grew bigger it took us some time to learn that the previous approach does not work anymore.