Category: ISMW

Leadership comes more naturally when you’re able to find alignment and flow between career and values.

Much of this comes down to how well you understand yourself and your own motivations.
What does your definition of success need to look like?
Is there a driving purpose and/or intrinsic motivation at the core of what you do?

Intrinsic motivation is doing an activity for its inherent satisfaction rather than for some separable consequence. In other words, doing something you love …

Being CTO is much easier (or at least less challenging) when working on something you love, rather than a motivation driven by less intrinsic factors, pressures or prestige.

Paul Graham wrote a wonderful essay How to Do What You Love including a passage about the “false friend of prestige” …

“What you should not do is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don’t even know?

This is easy advice to give. It’s hard to follow, especially when you’re young. Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.

That’s what leads people to try to write novels, for example. They like reading novels. They notice that people who write them win Nobel prizes. What could be more wonderful, they think, than to be a novelist? But liking the idea of being a novelist is not enough; you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you’re going to be good at it; you have to like making up elaborate lies.

Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That’s the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn’t suck, they wouldn’t have had to make it prestigious”

When involved in tech you’re always learning something new.

New language, new version of a language, new frameworks etc.

But as you move into managerial and leadership roles then the learning process shifts from the technical to the personal, from a more natural comfort zone into the sometimes un-chartered waters of soft skills and people management that make the difference in senior roles.

So it helps when managing this transition if you’re already instinctively curious, motivated by constant learning and development.

And let’s face it … constant learning should be at the core of what drives our personal development.
Above and beyond the rigours and demands of work and ambition, setting aside time to set new goals and achievements is all part of building a toolkit for both personal and professional fulfilment, and they tend to go hand-in-hand.

Give yourself space to learn and grow outside immediate work requirements …
Maybe a different form of language, hobby, musical instrument, drawing.

The more you explore, the more passions you discover and creative tools you can bring into the work environment.

“The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.” — Eric Ries

For sure, those who lead also read, their curiosity sated by reaching outside their immediate world.

Warren Buffett and Bill Gates famously consume huge amounts of reading material to maintain their edge and it’s a consistent theme that leading entrepreneurs spend a significant amount of their working time, reading.

When asked “How to become a good CTO” it’s almost always the soft skills and that endless thirst to learn, grow and be curious that makes a key difference.

But we’re all “time poor” and no-one can deny that curiosity and learning takes time.

Which is why the art of delegation becomes so important …. to give you the space to lead, learn and be forever curious.