Who Is On Your Team?
Taking a journey alone is not only difficult, lonely but also not sustainable. Starting with simple personal goals such as exercising. If I am only accountable to myself, I can skip a day, skip a week, skip a month, I only have to answer to my nagging self. If I have a team of friends who are waiting for me every day, every week, then meeting them to start exercising is what I look forward to and exercising is just part of what we do together. For example, I started https://sfbadminton and built up a network of people who love badminton and are competitive players. There are 80 people who are part of the SF Badminton social group. Having a team/group is why for 18 months I have been playing badminton consistently every week twice to three times.
Alone – So Easy To Give Up
For 19 weeks, I write an email newsletter that I sent out to 500 engineers every Friday sharing tips that I think they will find useful. I don’t have a team, it’s just me. I have made it happen every Friday, but it’s a difficult task to keep on going. I’m able to keep pushing because I know at the end, if I can keep this pace up for 3 years, my Friday Tips will be a habit and will be a great forum for a team I can bring around the weekly habit.
Team – So Easy And Fun
I am part of team of 5 people to find interesting topics for the company to hear about and we run a weekly tech talk series. We do logistics coordination for the speaker, we help the speaker to get setup, we run the Slack channel for questions during the speaker session and then we follow up afterwards with recording for people who couldn’t join. We provide a great service for all of our engineers as well as give the speaker a great experience. Doing this project is super easy because I have teammates I can lean on. We take our different roles in order to make this series of tech talks useful. I look forward every Monday to work with my team. None of us have to worry about going on vacation and the tech talks will get dropped.