The Secluded Mindset for Becoming an Elite Leader from an Everyday Engineer
Art of doing different things, differently!
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The Secluded Mindset for Becoming an Elite Leader from an Everyday Engineer.
Quote: How do you get lucky?
2 Fascinating facts
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The Secluded Mindset for Becoming an Elite Leader from an Everyday Engineer
You may have heard this a few times:
Winners don't do different things, they do things differentlyWhen it comes to achieving higher goals in life, I partially disagree with this statement.
In reality, in any career or business track, you are dealing with many different domains:
1/ engineering, 2/ design, 3/ product, 4/ business operations, 5/ marketing and the most difficult one….6/ Human Psychology
The key lies in embracing a diverse set of learnings and doing multiple different things; differently.
This applies to almost every domain or career stream, but Software Development and Engineering are close to my heart, so I can speak to you about that.
Let’s dive right into that.
It’s your life, you can change it!
You own your life, you can run it, destroy it, create it, or change it.
Are you the person who wakes up in the morning - checks LinkedIn or company email and gets surprised that your colleague’s getting apparently an “undeserved” promotion, leaving to start their own startup, becoming an Angel Investor, or simply publishing a book?
Despite being excellent in Software Engineering, Coding, Testing, and DevOps:
you feel you are stagnating in your job, under-appreciated or underpaid, or both.
You might be stuck in the promotion loop wanting to grow to
Senior/Staff/Principal Engineering, or
Senior Manager/Director/VP levels
… and wondering why this toxic culture exists in the first place hindering your growth.
The fact is that Software Engineering is one of the most flexible, highly paid, skill-in-demand careers. We really can do just about anything we want. But for some reason, developers seem to resist change and stick to typical coding. They hunker down and hope things will get better.Let’s change that! 🚀
The following sections assume:
you are a great software developer yet stuck in your career
want to grow towards Seniority levels of either Independent Contributor (Senior, Staff, Principal) or Engineering Management (Manager, Director, VP, CTO).
doing everything that you know you should be doing…(well, sort of…we’ll see).
These sections would take you on a different learning path, which at first would seem unrelated, but is almost guaranteed to invoke your curiosity, would make sense once you read it, and possibly help you achieve your goals.
Secluded Mindset - Art of doing different things, differently!
This section is divided into two parts: what and how to do? (previous section covered on why)
What to do do?
Let me now reveal the “Secluded Mindset” that many great leaders around the world have encompassed to grow to leadership levels. I call it Secluded because it’s generally untold and practiced by only a few people.
‘Product & Design First, Engineering Later’ Mindset: Ever noticed how your favorite apps just get you? That's not just good code; it's a sprinkle of user-friendly interface and a lot of A/B testing on design. Great engineers foresee the product market fit and work towards creating a great competitive product, putting their engineering toolkit in the back pocket.
Sundar Pichai is a great example here.After graduating from IIT with average grades in Engineering, he worked at the engineering and product management department at Applied Materials, before joining Google.
After starting in Google's toolbar and search engine department, foresaw the potential threat of Microsoft creating its search engine. In response, he proposed the Google Chrome project to then-CEO Eric Schmidt, a strategic move to secure Google's position in the evolving web browser landscape. Eventually, climbed up the ladder to become Google’s CEO.
Action ItemThink of your software as a gift to users…It's not just about HTML or JavaScript buttons backed by microservices architecture; it's an experience that feels like a warm hug from your favorite app.
Human psychology - people first marketing: Sure, your code is readable, extendable, and all that…but can you explain your product to your neighbor?
“Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart — and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them,” Steve Jobs said.
“Tools are just tools. They either work, or they don’t work.”Success happens when you blend coding skills with a dash of human psychology and a pinch of marketing magic. Why?
Both customers as well as employees/colleagues are humans.Engineering practices are different tools to create a product but psychological storytelling helps you turn those complex algorithms into stories that everyone can enjoy – not just fellow tech wizards.
Action Item
Spend some time building great human relationships and trust within your organization (details in my previous post) and secondly, learn the human psychology behind how people buy things (btw, this is a great book to read).Business-driven Innovation: You are working to support a business and not to embrace any technology. Period. Thinking and learning about business-related economics could help you innovate on behalf of your customers and solve real day-to-day problems.
Rohit Prasad, creator of Alex and SVP at Amazon, said -
”Touch is inefficient, says Prasad. In home automation, it means if you have to turn on the garage light, you have to find the phone, then open the app, then click on it, find the right light, and then take action…those are too many steps…rather just say: Alex turn on the garage light.”
On the business front, Alexa is considered an extraordinary success for Amazon. It is by far and away the leader in the US with an estimated 66 percent of the virtual assistant market, according to Insider Intelligence.
Action ItemPicture tech problems as business puzzles and think hard about the impact of what you are doing on ordinary people. Reach out to top stakeholders and project managers to understand business motivation, and revenue opportunities and innovate with a CEO or board member mindset.
How to do?
Having understood what those successful people have been doing, let me tell you a little secret:
Those who are achieving things beyond your thought-process are actually doing a lot of learning in their time after or before work.
They are investing in themselves, so doing it off-the-clock is only reasonable!
They sacrifice netflix, instagram and other cheap dopamine sources; they consume less and create more..
Action Item
Wake up in the morning, do it late at night, or after kids go to sleep, or by taking some time off from work - You have to learn new skills, and ‘just do it’.
I personally feel most productive as a solopreneur in the early morning hours before starting office work. I shared my morning routine here.
When it comes to resources, you are already blessed with a lot of podcasts, newsletters, books, and online resources that are more than abundant for you to get started.
But don’t fall into the trap of the “digital resources curse” - a pretty common phenomenon where we enjoy collecting resources/materials/gears/equipment but never do the practice or the hard work.
set a fixed time to study and implement new skills.
Do practical exercises. For e.g., if you want to be better at coding, use “Coding Challenges” from
’s newsletter!Go through the pain of getting stuck - that’s where most learning happens.
Apply it to real-life tests.
Repeat…
Quote: How do you get lucky?
If you could just start doing wonderful things that you want to succeed at, you have greater chances of being noticed and appreciated, increasing your odds of realizing your dream.
If you do exercise daily, there is a greater probability of you losing fat and increasing muscles.
Funny enough - If you say hello to every stranger, you have greater chances of finding your dream partner!
Your actions decide your luck. So does your lack of actions.
Luck isn’t a good fortune.
Luck is what eventually happens when your hard work yields results.
2 Fascinating Facts
The first text message was sent in 1992 by Neil Papworth, a software engineer in the UK. The message read “Merry Christmas” and was sent from a computer to a mobile phone.
The programming language Python was created by Guido van Rossum in the late 1980s. He named it after the Monty Python comedy group, of which he was a big fan. Python has since become one of the most popular programming languages in the world.
In case you missed my previous articles…
How to remove political roadblocks to grab your well-deserved promotion?
Secret to become a Staff+ Engineer swiftly
How earth's rotation caused Software Systems to go down?
Why do we fall short Despite Intelligence and Skill Excellence?
The Art of Empowering Others with Influential Leadership: Spreading Joy and Happiness
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Gourav Khanijoe