2 Traits of Highly Effective People

Hey all,

Trying out a new format for this week’s newsletter while still keeping with the “public journal” theme. Let me know if you like it by replying to this email with your thoughts! I promise to reply to every message I get.

A Conversation with a Superstar Engineer

A huge career accelerator of mine has been finding the right mentors to learn from.

This past week, I met with a mentor of mine who is widely regarded as a superstar engineer on his team. His throughput is high, his reach is far, and has a deep understanding of the highly technical codebase he works in.

We recently had a conversation, and I asked him what it means to be a great software engineer, since in my mind, he is one himself.

His answer surprised me.

Walking away from that conversation, I took an idea that had little to do with software, and more to do with being a highly effective person in any domain of life.

During our conversation, I brought up how I’ve been in my current role as a junior engineer at Google for over a year now. And I’ve had my senior peers tell me, “you’re overdue for promotion. You’re already thinking like a mid-level engineer. Hell, sometimes more like a senior.”

Which is great to hear and boosts the ego a bit. But that leaves me wondering, “why am I not being recognized by a promotion yet?”

They tell me, “what’s holding you back, though, is that you’re not executing at that level yet.”

You see, when you join the industry as a fresh-out-of-college junior software engineer, you’re put on training wheels.

• Your manager decides what projects are important out of a list of priorities and assigns them to the senior engineers.

• The seniors take on the big, hazy, ambiguous problems, and break them down into bite-sized tasks.

• And then you, the junior, are handed the responsibility of executing on a set of well-defined problems.

As a junior, you aren’t expected to do the hard thinking. You’re expected to execute.

And that’s where the two halves of today’s newsletter come into play:

Idea versus Execution

This is a quote that you’ll hear echoing in the halls of big corporate offices and college dorm rooms alike. It vividly paints the harsh reality of business. Million dollar ideas are easy to fantasize about. But building out a product, bringing it to market, validating your idea, all take real effort. Whereas an idea can flash into existence and disappear just as quick.

Especially now, in the age of AI. Million dollar business ideas can be generated in the hundreds of thousands. But none of the chatbots can actually execute on any of these ideas (or, at least not yet…)

So what’s there to do? I like this quote that I recently stumbled across on X:

Not only do you have to think and decide about what the next best course of action is, but you need to have the agency to execute on those tasks as well.

A highly effective person must be able to do both.

And since it’s far too easy to think about that proble we could ask ourselves this question: “if I had 10x the agency I have, what would I do?” And just do it.

Just last year, I ran my first two marathons. A grueling, painful twenty-six mile run through the city streets of New Jersey and New York. An achievment that only 0.01% of the world’s population can claim to have done.

And while the idea of running a marathon sounds enticing, executing on the training for hundreds of days is not easy.

Execution here requires discipline, planning, and drive.

It’s a perfect analogy for other domains of life.

Your Challenge This Week

This week, identify one area of your life where you have a great idea, but haven’t yet executed. Break down the immediate next 3 steps you can take today to move from idea to action. Reply to this email and let me know.

— Ricky

P.S. Special thanks to the first 200 readers of my public journal! In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t have this all figured out yet. But my goal is to share insights from growing my career in tech, optimizing my health, building a wealthy life, and more.

P.P.S. Oh, and if you’d like to behind-the-scenes look into these sorts of things, feel free to follow me on Instagram @rickpala_ .

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