Work stuff

This week I had a meeting with our company’s advisors where we discussed what I’d accomplished over the month and future plans.

Overall, the meeting went fine, but something happened that I’d forgotten about from working at a company where women held all the leadership roles: men don’t hear or register your ideas until they arrive at them themselves and decide they’re their own ideas.

It’s incredibly frustrating, but I have zero energy right now to change this situation. Maybe that’ll shift over time.

I was pretty anxious before and during this meeting, so the next day I was completely incapable of productive work, only managed to get through a few almost mechanical tasks. I expected this would happen, but I was still really annoyed with myself.

The magic formula

There’s one phrase that always helps me when I’m feeling overwhelmed and like everything’s going wrong. I found it back when I was a team lead, and that phrase is “This IS my job.” It’s saved me from unnecessary emotions countless times:

• Team conflict isn’t something getting in the way of your work, but dealing with it IS your job;
• Negative user feedback about the product isn’t something preventing you from working on the product according to plan, working with that feedback to make the product better IS your job.

As soon as you arrive at this thought and accept it, you stop being angry that things are going wrong and “interfering” with your work. You start doing the important things more calmly instead of just the familiar and comfortable ones.

The value of practice

I wrote “as soon as you arrive at the thought and accept it…” but honestly I’m simplifying. You can’t start doing something differently just because you learned about it, you need time for new knowledge to turn into a skill, to integrate into your way of doing things, for neural connections to form.

And practice (as a process, as opposed to results and achievements), not knowledge, is what makes you fluent at something. It’s basic, but I was a kid who found a lot of things easy, and for a long time I was convinced that knowledge alone was enough to excel at anything.

Books

Listened to “The Shortest History of Music” and it’s nice. From time to time I make attempts to understand how music works, and generally they’re pretty unsuccessful, but with each attempt I understand that world a little better, and this book is a good brick in the foundation of that understanding. Not sure if it’d be interesting to people familiar with music theory and history, but for me it had lots of interesting facts and discoveries.