8 ways you'll distinguish yourself and achieve more

8 tips for outperforming and excelling in everything you do — learned from a lifetime of working in tech, living, and being human.

Statue of Alexander the Great (photo by Nikos Vlachos on Unsplash)

Here’s a collection of 8 short ideas and actions that, in a nutshell, sum up some of my key strategies for achieving more and standing out. Each one connects to a more in-depth article that I’ve written during the past year.

Be uncompromising about your craft

Steve Jobs was notorious for rejecting products that were nearly complete if they didn't meet his exacting standards. He would send teams back to redesign products multiple times, sometimes scrapping months or years of work.

The iPhone launched without a physical keyboard when BlackBerry dominated with keyboards. Jobs believed in making hard choices about what to leave out, saying “innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

He believed that true craftsmanship meant caring about every aspect of a product, not just what was visible.

“If you are working on something that you are excited about, you don’t have to be pushed. The Vision pulls you.” — Steve Jobs

Caring about your craft matters. It gives you passion. It drives exceptionalism.

Your customers care about what you build, too. They want to be delighted. Delighted customers become evangelists (just like Apple customers and the “cult of Mac”). This is your “value stream.” Understanding what really matters, and sticking to it.

Making compromises won’t lead to delight. Compromise leads to mediocrity.

Instead, be uncompromising. Seek excellence, say “no” to 1,000 things. Choose the best possible path forward — even if it takes longer, even if it’s the harder path.

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Have really deep conversations with people that matter

It’s hard to build a shared understanding of a tough problem. But, only in-depth mutual understanding makes learning and joint decision-making possible. It how we discover better paths forward.

Where many teams go wrong is not understanding how important this is. They lose patience, try to explain a technical necessity with hand-wavy jargon, or tell their customer it’s “best practice.”

That creates opaque dependencies where your customer, your boss, your coworkers have no power. The only way forward would be blind trust. It’s just not realistic to believe anyone enjoys those conditions.

Plus, what if they know something you don’t?

No matter how experienced I think I am, I always have enough self-doubt to ask, “wait, am I missing something here?”

Have those deep conversations. Explain the tough problems. See if there’s a better way forward.

It means sharing decision making, because you’re opening yourself up. Admitting that maybe, there’s a better solution. At first it feels like you’re giving up control — but you’re not. You are sharing control by having those important conversations.

Test your assumptions

It’s not always easy to know if we made the right decisions, especially when we casually make assumptions. We make assumptions all the time. This feature will be great. That security policy is good enough.

Fortunately, in software, it’s pretty straight-forward to test those assumptions: establish your key results, and then measure them.

Pick the results you care about. Choose a metric to measure, like number of failures, latency to reply, or anything else that proves your feature does what it’s supposed to do.

Then, measure. That just means test the results. In software, I love Test Driven Development (TDD). I wouldn’t code any other way.

But what if we’re talking about doing what’s right? Cutting through the nonsense and deciding if this or that will leave our planet or our society in a better place, or a worse place?

The same strategy applies. Choose your key results and measure. Check the facts.

Maybe you’ve heard the argument, “we’re in a cooling period, the earth is actually cooler now than any time in 485 million years!” That sounds great. But don’t assume it is. Being cooler now than ever before could be a sign of fragility, a statistical anomaly. Outliers become normalized — plus, if you look closely, you’ll see other patterns. The sudden, rapid uptick in temperature that’s been happening for about 100 years? It happened once before, almost 250 million years ago — just before a mass extinction event that wiped out about 90% of life.

In the real world, don’t blindly accept some numbers you hear, instead check to see if they add up. Measure your results, and see if you were right.

It can be hard though. We’re basically trying to catch ourselves in making a mistake. Nobody likes to make mistakes — but at least this way, you catch it first.

Anticipate mistakes

I assume I’m going to make mistakes.

In fact, I assume I’ll make more mistakes when I feel more comfortable, more knowledgeable about something. Because it’s easy to get lazy.

But I don’t actually make that many mistakes. Why?

Because I’ve put systems in place to protect against them.

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Those systems are my secret weapon. My personal edge that makes sure I don’t make mistakes — while sometimes, it seems like everyone else is figuring it out as they go along.

All it takes is stopping yourself from charging blindly ahead: