Attend to deep impact. Most of your impact will be on the "leaves" of your impact tree. Not in the people you directly affect, but in those they then affect, etc. Magnitudes, branching factors, scale. Force multipliers.
Be fruitful. Like when planning a research career, choose appropriate problems. Good sized, well timed, well formed and motivated. You don't strictly need to be first, but you only get credit for things done earlier or better than if you had not participated. And only for that marginal improvement. Just being there doesn't count.
Leverage. If your not leveraging your strengths, you are waisting your time. The entirety of your strengths. Relative to other people. The world is full of important things which are not getting done because the warm bodies with the odd required mix of capabilities are busy doing other things, or sometimes haven't noticed. Different people have very different sets of low hanging fruit. Attend to yours.
It's a project. Requirements, analysis, outside review, planning, testing, management, postmortems. Engineering, science, academia, all have things to do which increase the likelihood of a successful outcome. You can skip all the ones you don't like. Not. Some of your low hanging fruit will require visits to places you really don't want to go, but are good for you.
Opportunities exist. And often go unnoticed. It seems 10 million primary school children in the developing world either will or won't have laptops in 2008, depending on whether order 100 python good programmer months choose to spend time on it in the next half year.
Attend to deep impact. Most of your impact will be on the "leaves" of your impact tree. Not in the people you directly affect, but in those they then affect, etc. Magnitudes, branching factors, scale. Force multipliers.
Be fruitful. Like when planning a research career, choose appropriate problems. Good sized, well timed, well formed and motivated. You don't strictly need to be first, but you only get credit for things done earlier or better than if you had not participated. And only for that marginal improvement. Just being there doesn't count.
Leverage. If your not leveraging your strengths, you are waisting your time. The entirety of your strengths. Relative to other people. The world is full of important things which are not getting done because the warm bodies with the odd required mix of capabilities are busy doing other things, or sometimes haven't noticed. Different people have very different sets of low hanging fruit. Attend to yours.
It's a project. Requirements, analysis, outside review, planning, testing, management, postmortems. Engineering, science, academia, all have things to do which increase the likelihood of a successful outcome. You can skip all the ones you don't like. Not. Some of your low hanging fruit will require visits to places you really don't want to go, but are good for you.
Opportunities exist. And often go unnoticed. It seems 10 million primary school children in the developing world either will or won't have laptops in 2008, depending on whether order 100 python good programmer months choose to spend time on it in the next half year.