Author: Tony Tam
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Thank You For Your Feedback
This week I practiced what Lyn Campbell recommended during our interview on Impactful Engineer (read here). I asked for feedback from someone I work with. I asked her how she thinks I can improve in meetings. She generously took the time to give me the following feedback During one of our meetings about a previous…
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Book: How to American: An Immigrant’s Guide to Disappointing Your Parents
This YouTube video really cracked me up. An immigrant kid from Hong Kong, born in Shanghai, immigrated to L.A, went to UC San Diego, majored in economics, told his parents he would rather disappoint them for a few years than disappoint himself for life, did standup, drove for Uber, auditioned 100+ times for small parts…
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Single Tasking Time & Attention
So Far I’ve deleted all my infinite scrolling apps (FB, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter). I’ve stopped reading online news and only read a printed Sunday paper. I’ve paid for products to remove ads (Cruncy Roll, YouTube, Pandora). Call To Action To Take Back Attention & Time Today, I listened to the founder of Center For Humane…
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Talk About Your Frustrations
Dear future self: Today, you were frustrated at your teenage daughter that she was 10 minutes later in leaving the house for high school. Even though she is the only one affected, you felt that it reflected on your personal value to be early or on time. You expressed to your daughter that you were…
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Take The Journey As a Team
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…
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Reading – Thinking – Writing
I have recently started a media detox program of not reading online news, online blogs, social networks (Twitter, LinkedIn, FB, Instagram). Instead I am focusing on listening to interview based podcasts and reading physical books. During this journey of reassessing how I spend my attention and time, I also started powering off my cell phone…
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link: Ask First!
Seth Godin writes with the smallest number of words to convey the clearest of messages. Here he explains GDPR and the market’s dilemma “Talk to people who want to be talked to. Market to people who want to be marketed to. Because anticipated, personal and relevant messages will always outperform spam. And spam is in…
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link: maximum leverage
The myth of ‘good timing’ from Seth Godin http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2018/04/the-moment-of-maximum-leverage.html
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Affecting Change
Systemic problems in our society, by definition, seem impossible to fix. Part of the reason is that systemic problems are rooted in how our lives are structured and it’s not under the control of one person, one organization or sometimes even one government. When I was doing a bit or searching around Google, there was…
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podcast: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners of the Turing Award 2018
In June, the two engineers will formally accept a Turing Award, the computer science equivalent of the Nobel Prize, in recognition of their work. Hennessy later became president of Stanford University and is now the chair of Alphabet; Patterson is a professor emeritus at U.C. Berkeley and a distinguished engineer at Google Listen to the…