10 things that I have learned in 2021
5 years ago I promised myself to document everything that I learned throughout a year and then publish those “lessons learned” by the end of the year in a form of a blog post. Going over my notes every year always leaves me surprised by how much we change in a course of a single year.
It would be hard, to sum up, 2021 in one word. It was a year of achievements, exciting ventures, a year during which I met a lot of great people, but at the same time a year that caused me a loss of loved ones. That being said, the easiest way to sum up the previous year would be going over the lessons learned, so here we go.
1.The Superman mode
It is not uncommon for leaders to go into a superman mode in critical situations — trying to accomplish everything on their own, do all the heavy lifting themselves. It has to be said that this is one of the worst approaches of leading out there, it is not scalable, it robes your team of their ownership, you’ll never know what your team is truly capable of, and to be honest most of the times it does not provide good results.
2. Delegate properly
We all know that we need to delegate stuff, but what we don’t realize sometimes is that we do not delegate things properly. In case your delegation is resulting in close monitoring and an extensive decision-making process at the end of you are probably doing it the wrong way.
3. Don’t be quick with your answers
Do not feel obligated to answer questions right away. There is nothing wrong with answering right away in case you already know the answer, in all the other cases coming up with the correct answer requires time. The people who have asked you their questions have probably already done their research, you can take time of your own to do the same.
4. Stick to your processes
There is one thing we know for sure at AOByte, we only stand a chance of delivering successfully in case we stick to our processes, we might still fail sometimes, but we are definitely going to fail if we disregard our processes. Establish your processes, stick to them, move forward, in case they don’t work out, revisit them, re-establish, and stick to them again.
5. The “if” statements
Closely examine all the cases when you are writing the “if” statement in your code, you’ll be surprised how many OOP design failures are hidden behind those statements. A number of those “if” statements can be eliminated resulting in a lot better codebase.
6. Pick your battles carefully
There are two things to keep in mind when taking on the next challenge. First, always ask yourself “why”. What’s the gain vs the risk? Is it worth the effort? Second, carefully examine whether you are setting yourself up for failure. You’ll be surprised to learn how carefully all the legendary boxing champions that claimed to be eager to take on any opponent, were picking their opponents throughout their entire careers.
7. Always question the worst outcome
We tend to doubt and carefully question all the positive outcomes in our life, but suddenly when it comes to the negative ones we turn into believers thinking of them as something more realistic than the positive ones. The truth is both negative and positive outcomes require the same amount of proof.
8. New ventures
Always leave some space for new ventures — NFT, metaverse, DeFi, etc. Don’t be that person who’s always late for the train.
9. Be nice on the road
Give way when driving as much as possible, you never know where and why the other driver is rushing.
10.Wizdom from J. K. Rowling
The loss of our loved ones is never easy, and it always turns into a pivoting point in life. No matter how painful the loss might be, there are always lessons to be learned. The quote by J.K. Rowling is probably the most important lesson I’ve learned.
I definitely know that love is the most powerful thing of all.
