Jekyll2022-10-01T21:41:07-06:00http://www.effectiveengineer.com/The Effective EngineerTime is your most limited and critical resource. Learn powerful mindsets, strategies, and tools on how to spend it on what matters most.Edmond LauHow to Stay Happy, Healthy, and Productive During a Pandemic2020-03-24T00:00:00-06:002020-03-24T00:00:00-06:00http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/stay-happy-healthy-productive-during-pandemic<a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/stay-happy-healthy-productive-during-pandemic"><img src="https://d3oj8nq9p0q26f.cloudfront.net/blog/assets/images/posts/floating-leaf-42970d4cf557a8e4ed50711eda93946b587d34f810ab02aef60e1d27fc8fd7b1.jpg" /></a><p>I felt the tension bottled up in my chest, my entire body holding tight. I was eager to be done and to leave Whole Foods, but I kept telling myself that I just needed to power through to get the groceries I needed for the week. I could feel in my body the collective tension in the air.</p>
<p>The signs that said to social distance and stand at least six feet apart, the masks that covered people’s faces as they carefully navigated the aisles, the gloves that the employees wore to avoid germs, the bulk aisle containers completely stripped of everything — they were all physical manifestations of the fear, worry, and panic left by a pandemic spreading throughout the world.</p>
<p>45 minutes later, as I walked back to the car, I needed to scream into my hands several times in the parking lot just to shake off and release the trapped energy in my body. And, even as I was driving home, I just wanted to curl up into a ball and cry.</p>
<p>The GPS said it would be a 55-minute drive, and I wanted to power through until I got home, like I usually do. But at my friend’s encouragement, I let myself pull off the next exit and take a few moments to allow the tears that wanted to flow.</p>
<p>I felt so much happier and at peace afterwards — as if I had let go of all the efforting I was doing to hold everything in — and I felt lighter and more equipped to take on the rest of the day.</p>
<hr>
<p>I used to believe that I needed to power through everything. That I always needed to stay strong and hold it all together. That letting my emotions show, whether it’d be anger or sadness, wasn’t acceptable.</p>
<p>Growing up, my mom powered through things. Even when she was sick and with a fever, she’d still be expected to be up and in the kitchen cooking dinner for the eight people living in my household. There was no time or space for emotions to be felt or for any self-care she would have wanted.</p>
<p>And as the oldest of three children in an immigrant family, I also knew I didn’t want to be the one adding more stress and anxiety to parents who were already working six days a week, ten hours a day, at our family store in San Francisco Chinatown. And so I powered through too — not bringing up emotions and wants and needs that felt like they might be a burden for them.</p>
<p>When we power through things, we don’t acknowledge the emotions and needs that we’re feeling. That actually drains our energy because our bodies and minds expend energy trying to suppress and hold back what’s there, and having less energy hurts our long-term effectiveness, health, and happiness.</p>
<p>With quarantines, shelter-in-place, and work-from-home orders happening all around the world, the level of tension in the air has been much higher. Emotions are elevated — it’s easier to feel angry, annoyed, frustrated, sad, depressed, and more. Things that wouldn’t have ticked us off before might now trigger an avalanche of emotion — just like that 45-minute Whole Foods shopping trip unleashed a wave of emotion for me.</p>
<p>It can be tempting to just try to hold everything in and power through things on our own.</p>
<p>A few years ago, when I was making a guest appearance at a book club meeting for <a href="/book"><em>The Effective Engineer</em></a>, someone had asked me how I dealt with situations where the highest-leverage activity wasn’t something I felt excited about doing. I didn’t have a good answer back then. I just shared that sometimes you have to balance the things you enjoyed with the things you didn’t and that you just had to power through the things you didn’t, for the sake of effectiveness.</p>
<p>I imagine that situation might resonate with many of us — it might be hard to focus and get excited about work when there’s so much uncertainty in the air.</p>
<p>Since then, I’ve spent a significant amount of time studying emotion — the science behind it, its psychological impact on our behavior, the art of processing it, the language to express them, and tools to release them.</p>
<p>And here’s what I now know.</p>
<p>Unexpressed emotions are energy that gets trapped in the body. The longer we hold onto them, the longer they impact our behaviors in unconscious ways — often hurting our health, productivity, and happiness. The most effective path comes from healthily expressing and releasing them in the moment, so that we can consciously choose how we show up going forwards.</p>
<p>Because effectiveness isn’t just about getting the right things done, as I used to think — it’s also about getting ourselves in the right emotional state so that our bodies are effective at doing the things our minds and hearts want them to do.</p>
<p>And there’s no more important time to learn this lesson than now.</p>
<p>Some of us might be forced to work from home and struggling to stay happy, healthy, and productive — perhaps feeling isolated or lonely or not used to feeling so disconnected from the world.</p>
<p>Some of us might be worried or concerned about the health of friends and family members — particularly elderly members or those in countries where the virus is worse.</p>
<p>Some of us might normally be positive and optimistic and find it uncomfortable to be ourselves when we’re surrounded by people who might be feeling tension and fear and panic.</p>
<p>It’s easy to not take time for yourself, to believe that you need to power through the emotions that might come up.</p>
<p>And, in these times, it’s important to remember that you don’t always need to power through, and that it’s not only okay, but critical, to prioritize self-care. Make sure you’re still eating healthy. Get fresh air every day. Do exercise to take care of your body. Call people to get your needed dose of connection. Meditate to clear your thoughts. And take the time you need to process what’s happening.</p>
<p>In the past week, it’s become clear to me that I want to spend more of my creative energy figuring out more ways to help supporting the people in my community.</p>
<p><strong>This Thursday, March 26th 9am PST, I’ll be holding my first-ever Facebook Live event, focused on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/235859387816880/">How to Stay Happy, Healthy, and Productive During a Pandemic</a>.</strong></p>
<p>I’ll be sharing some of the highest-leverage and life-changing personal practices that I’ve learned in the past few years that help me perform at a high level — while staying happy, healthy, and productive — even during a time of pandemic. I’ll also be taking any real-time questions you might have about how to not just power through — but to thrive — through this time.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/stay-happy-healthy-productive-during-pandemic">Continue reading "How to Stay Happy, Healthy, and Productive During a Pandemic »"</a></p>Edmond Lau<a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/stay-happy-healthy-productive-during-pandemic"><img src="https://d3oj8nq9p0q26f.cloudfront.net/blog/assets/images/posts/floating-leaf-42970d4cf557a8e4ed50711eda93946b587d34f810ab02aef60e1d27fc8fd7b1.jpg" /></a><p>I felt the tension bottled up in my chest, my entire body holding tight. I was eager to be done and to leave Whole Foods, but I kept telling myself that I just needed to power through to get the groceries I needed for the week. I could feel in my body the collective tension in the air.</p>
<p>The signs that said to social distance and stand at least six feet apart, the masks that covered people’s faces as they carefully navigated the aisles, the gloves that the employees wore to avoid germs, the bulk aisle containers completely stripped of everything — they were all physical manifestations of the fear, worry, and panic left by a pandemic spreading throughout the world.</p>
<p>45 minutes later, as I walked back to the car, I needed to scream into my hands several times in the parking lot just to shake off and release the trapped energy in my body. And, even as I was driving home, I just wanted to curl up into a ball and cry.</p>
<p>The GPS said it would be a 55-minute drive, and I wanted to power through until I got home, like I usually do. But at my friend’s encouragement, I let myself pull off the next exit and take a few moments to allow the tears that wanted to flow.</p>
<p>I felt so much happier and at peace afterwards — as if I had let go of all the efforting I was doing to hold everything in — and I felt lighter and more equipped to take on the rest of the day.</p>
<hr>
<p>I used to believe that I needed to power through everything. That I always needed to stay strong and hold it all together. That letting my emotions show, whether it’d be anger or sadness, wasn’t acceptable.</p>
<p>Growing up, my mom powered through things. Even when she was sick and with a fever, she’d still be expected to be up and in the kitchen cooking dinner for the eight people living in my household. There was no time or space for emotions to be felt or for any self-care she would have wanted.</p>
<p>And as the oldest of three children in an immigrant family, I also knew I didn’t want to be the one adding more stress and anxiety to parents who were already working six days a week, ten hours a day, at our family store in San Francisco Chinatown. And so I powered through too — not bringing up emotions and wants and needs that felt like they might be a burden for them.</p>
<p>When we power through things, we don’t acknowledge the emotions and needs that we’re feeling. That actually drains our energy because our bodies and minds expend energy trying to suppress and hold back what’s there, and having less energy hurts our long-term effectiveness, health, and happiness.</p>
<p>With quarantines, shelter-in-place, and work-from-home orders happening all around the world, the level of tension in the air has been much higher. Emotions are elevated — it’s easier to feel angry, annoyed, frustrated, sad, depressed, and more. Things that wouldn’t have ticked us off before might now trigger an avalanche of emotion — just like that 45-minute Whole Foods shopping trip unleashed a wave of emotion for me.</p>
<p>It can be tempting to just try to hold everything in and power through things on our own.</p>
<p>A few years ago, when I was making a guest appearance at a book club meeting for <a href="/book"><em>The Effective Engineer</em></a>, someone had asked me how I dealt with situations where the highest-leverage activity wasn’t something I felt excited about doing. I didn’t have a good answer back then. I just shared that sometimes you have to balance the things you enjoyed with the things you didn’t and that you just had to power through the things you didn’t, for the sake of effectiveness.</p>
<p>I imagine that situation might resonate with many of us — it might be hard to focus and get excited about work when there’s so much uncertainty in the air.</p>
<p>Since then, I’ve spent a significant amount of time studying emotion — the science behind it, its psychological impact on our behavior, the art of processing it, the language to express them, and tools to release them.</p>
<p>And here’s what I now know.</p>
<p>Unexpressed emotions are energy that gets trapped in the body. The longer we hold onto them, the longer they impact our behaviors in unconscious ways — often hurting our health, productivity, and happiness. The most effective path comes from healthily expressing and releasing them in the moment, so that we can consciously choose how we show up going forwards.</p>
<p>Because effectiveness isn’t just about getting the right things done, as I used to think — it’s also about getting ourselves in the right emotional state so that our bodies are effective at doing the things our minds and hearts want them to do.</p>
<p>And there’s no more important time to learn this lesson than now.</p>
<p>Some of us might be forced to work from home and struggling to stay happy, healthy, and productive — perhaps feeling isolated or lonely or not used to feeling so disconnected from the world.</p>
<p>Some of us might be worried or concerned about the health of friends and family members — particularly elderly members or those in countries where the virus is worse.</p>
<p>Some of us might normally be positive and optimistic and find it uncomfortable to be ourselves when we’re surrounded by people who might be feeling tension and fear and panic.</p>
<p>It’s easy to not take time for yourself, to believe that you need to power through the emotions that might come up.</p>
<p>And, in these times, it’s important to remember that you don’t always need to power through, and that it’s not only okay, but critical, to prioritize self-care. Make sure you’re still eating healthy. Get fresh air every day. Do exercise to take care of your body. Call people to get your needed dose of connection. Meditate to clear your thoughts. And take the time you need to process what’s happening.</p>
<p>In the past week, it’s become clear to me that I want to spend more of my creative energy figuring out more ways to help supporting the people in my community.</p>
<p><strong>This Thursday, March 26th 9am PST, I’ll be holding my first-ever Facebook Live event, focused on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/235859387816880/">How to Stay Happy, Healthy, and Productive During a Pandemic</a>.</strong></p>
<p>I’ll be sharing some of the highest-leverage and life-changing personal practices that I’ve learned in the past few years that help me perform at a high level — while staying happy, healthy, and productive — even during a time of pandemic. I’ll also be taking any real-time questions you might have about how to not just power through — but to thrive — through this time.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/stay-happy-healthy-productive-during-pandemic">Continue reading "How to Stay Happy, Healthy, and Productive During a Pandemic »"</a></p>Help Me Celebrate My Five-Year Anniversary2020-03-19T00:00:00-06:002020-03-19T00:00:00-06:00http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/help-me-celebrate-my-five-year-anniversary<a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/help-me-celebrate-my-five-year-anniversary"><img src="https://d3oj8nq9p0q26f.cloudfront.net/blog/assets/images/posts/fireworks-4af1288b67a2adcbbdaa58fb32ff211f560f6e3c26d7a085c41c214d7657ce12.jpg" /></a><p>“I love your book!” the stranger shouted as he ran past me with his dog.</p>
<p>I smiled, feeling joy at the serendipity that appeared on my walk to the neighborhood coffeeshop. Most days, it’s easy to forget that I spent two years of my life bringing <a href="/book"><em>The Effective Engineer</em></a> into existence, and the small interaction was a delightful reminder that the book continues to make its way through the world impacting people’s lives.</p>
<p>That interaction happened just a month ago, and it’s surprising how much has shifted since then. The world feels like it’s at war with an unseen force. Quarantines are being enforced around the globe to slow down the coronavirus. San Francisco just put in its own shelter-in-place orders this week.</p>
<p>I’m social distancing and staying at home, heading outside only for nature and for groceries — certainly not the circumstances that would support that type of serendipity today.</p>
<p>It’s in this global environment that I’m celebrating the five-year anniversary of self-publishing my book, <a href="/book"><em>The Effective Engineer</em></a> — a book that I’m proud to share has sold over 12,000 copies since its inception.</p>
<p>A part of me hesitated on celebrating today, for two reasons — one personal and one coronavirus-related.</p>
<h2 id="struggling-with-celebrating-success">Struggling with Celebrating Success</h2>
<p>The first reason for hesitating is personal. I’ve struggled with celebrating and sharing success for much of my life and have only recently started to make breakthroughs.</p>
<p>I got straight A’s in school, even through MIT, and had always felt isolated and alone from doing well academically. I was the guy who scored 157 on a biology exam graded out of 103 and would be called annoying for breaking the curve. And I’d feel guilty for succeeding. My mom would look down on other Asian tiger moms bragging about their children’s test scores or schools they got into — contributing to a feeling that it was wrong to celebrate success.</p>
<p>Those experiences, plus a deep desire to fit in and belong, created a belief that if I wanted to succeed, I had to do it quietly. It was as if I could succeed — but not too much.</p>
<p>And so, I didn’t hold a celebration for my book when it launched — despite feeling proud of the two years of energy I put in to make it happen.</p>
<p>I wanted to increase the reach and impact of my book — but I felt guilty and sheepish whenever I told friends about it.</p>
<p>I felt excited to be invited to give talks at tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Pinterest — but I would be uncomfortable letting my co-workers know, sometimes just telling them that I’d be out of the office for a few hours.</p>
<p>My intention this year is to root into a deeper sense of my purpose, and it’s become super clear that this historical behavior doesn’t serve who I want to be in the world.</p>
<p>For a while, I’ve been quiet on this newsletter. And that’s because after spending a decade learning about how to be an effective engineer, I’ve been heads down the past few years focusing on how we can be effective outside of the engineering arena — and in the rest of our lives.</p>
<p>One aspect is still work-related: What does it mean to be an effective leader at work? I started my company <a href="https://coleadership.com">Co Leadership</a> two years ago to focus on that question, and we’ve made huge strides in our ambitious dream to create the most effective leadership training for engineers.</p>
<p>But there’s so much more to life beyond just work. How do we effectively communicate our emotions? How do we effectively break out of people’s expectations of us so that we can create the lives we want to live rather than the ones we should be living? How do we effectively create deep and meaningful relationships — whether it’s at work, at home, with friends, or even romantically? How do we effectively discover our life’s purpose?</p>
<p>For the past few years, I’ve been diving deep on all these fronts — exploring and integrating modalities as wide-ranging as coaching, dance, embodiment, authentic relating, breathwork, tantra, and more. And being the engineer that I am, I’ve been developing frameworks to distill the essence of them — frameworks to bypass small talk, frameworks to create intimacy and trust in powerful moments, frameworks to break past limiting beliefs we hold about ourselves, frameworks for creating more freedom in our lives — and practicing and sharing them with the people in my life.</p>
<p>I know that I feel called to share everything that I’ve learned — and you’ll hear about some of it soon — so that we can all engineer the lives we want to live. And I know that owning my story and my success will be part of that journey.</p>
<p>And so today, I choose to celebrate.</p>
<p><img src="https://d3oj8nq9p0q26f.cloudfront.net/blog/assets/images/posts/candle-410746f7f61c96db156c599676dfc310bdc2dcba9f79e12bf23c00025a246947.jpg" alt=""></p>
<h2 id="celebrating-in-times-of-darkness">Celebrating in Times of Darkness</h2>
<p>The second reason for hesitating is the belief that it’s wrong to celebrate when there’s something big and bad and frightening happening in the world.</p>
<p>The world is being hit by a pandemic unlike anything that we’ve seen in our lifetimes.</p>
<p>People are being quarantined at home, schools and businesses are being forced to close, stock markets are crashing, and hospital systems even in first world countries are being overwhelmed.</p>
<p>I feel concern for the health of my friends and family. My parents own a family herb store in San Francisco Chinatown — where there is big elderly population — and while they’ve closed the physical store to customers, they’re still letting customers slip in prescription orders through the store’s locked gates so that they can continue to provide people the medicine they need.</p>
<p>I struggle to strike the balance between keeping myself responsibly and healthily informed without letting the news significantly impact my mood during the day.</p>
<p>I’ve been getting into — and moving through — more arguments with loved ones, with all the collective tension in the air.</p>
<p>And in these times, here’s what I know.</p>
<p>The tendency of conversations about COVID-19 is to instill scarcity instead of abundance, fear instead of hope, and uncertainty instead of groundedness.</p>
<p>And in these critical moments, we have a choice.</p>
<p>We can choose to get swept up by the panic and fear and let it consume our entire days. We can choose to lament the situation we’re in and let bad news taint the lens we use to view the beauty in our lives.</p>
<p>Or we can choose to live the fullest lives we can, given the reality of what’s happening. We can choose to grieve and acknowledge and feel the fear and pain that shows up and still choose to celebrate and appreciate what is.</p>
<p>In fact, it’s even more important during these times to find the joy and calmness and appreciation in the moments we can. I’ve been doing a morning ritual of taking a cold shower, warming my body through dance movement, and grounding myself through an active breathing meditation every day for the past three weeks — and it’s reset my body to freshly take on each day.</p>
<p>And so today, I choose to celebrate.</p>
<p>I choose to celebrate that in the past five years, I’ve sold way more copies than I had dreamt of for of a book that I wrote and self-published and even learned to lay out my own typography for.</p>
<p>I choose to celebrate quitting my job to become an entrepreneur who built the sales and marketing systems to turn the book into a financially successful business — the book actually earned more revenue in its first year than my startup salary at the time.</p>
<p>I choose to celebrate that I’ve contributed something to the world that continues to impact people five years later and to see it as a starting point for all that I want to create in the world.</p>
<p>And if you’re willing to celebrate with me, what’s one thing you’d choose to celebrate today? I’d love to hear it.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/help-me-celebrate-my-five-year-anniversary">Continue reading "Help Me Celebrate My Five-Year Anniversary »"</a></p>Edmond Lau<a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/help-me-celebrate-my-five-year-anniversary"><img src="https://d3oj8nq9p0q26f.cloudfront.net/blog/assets/images/posts/fireworks-4af1288b67a2adcbbdaa58fb32ff211f560f6e3c26d7a085c41c214d7657ce12.jpg" /></a><p>“I love your book!” the stranger shouted as he ran past me with his dog.</p>
<p>I smiled, feeling joy at the serendipity that appeared on my walk to the neighborhood coffeeshop. Most days, it’s easy to forget that I spent two years of my life bringing <a href="/book"><em>The Effective Engineer</em></a> into existence, and the small interaction was a delightful reminder that the book continues to make its way through the world impacting people’s lives.</p>
<p>That interaction happened just a month ago, and it’s surprising how much has shifted since then. The world feels like it’s at war with an unseen force. Quarantines are being enforced around the globe to slow down the coronavirus. San Francisco just put in its own shelter-in-place orders this week.</p>
<p>I’m social distancing and staying at home, heading outside only for nature and for groceries — certainly not the circumstances that would support that type of serendipity today.</p>
<p>It’s in this global environment that I’m celebrating the five-year anniversary of self-publishing my book, <a href="/book"><em>The Effective Engineer</em></a> — a book that I’m proud to share has sold over 12,000 copies since its inception.</p>
<p>A part of me hesitated on celebrating today, for two reasons — one personal and one coronavirus-related.</p>
<h2 id="struggling-with-celebrating-success">Struggling with Celebrating Success</h2>
<p>The first reason for hesitating is personal. I’ve struggled with celebrating and sharing success for much of my life and have only recently started to make breakthroughs.</p>
<p>I got straight A’s in school, even through MIT, and had always felt isolated and alone from doing well academically. I was the guy who scored 157 on a biology exam graded out of 103 and would be called annoying for breaking the curve. And I’d feel guilty for succeeding. My mom would look down on other Asian tiger moms bragging about their children’s test scores or schools they got into — contributing to a feeling that it was wrong to celebrate success.</p>
<p>Those experiences, plus a deep desire to fit in and belong, created a belief that if I wanted to succeed, I had to do it quietly. It was as if I could succeed — but not too much.</p>
<p>And so, I didn’t hold a celebration for my book when it launched — despite feeling proud of the two years of energy I put in to make it happen.</p>
<p>I wanted to increase the reach and impact of my book — but I felt guilty and sheepish whenever I told friends about it.</p>
<p>I felt excited to be invited to give talks at tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Pinterest — but I would be uncomfortable letting my co-workers know, sometimes just telling them that I’d be out of the office for a few hours.</p>
<p>My intention this year is to root into a deeper sense of my purpose, and it’s become super clear that this historical behavior doesn’t serve who I want to be in the world.</p>
<p>For a while, I’ve been quiet on this newsletter. And that’s because after spending a decade learning about how to be an effective engineer, I’ve been heads down the past few years focusing on how we can be effective outside of the engineering arena — and in the rest of our lives.</p>
<p>One aspect is still work-related: What does it mean to be an effective leader at work? I started my company <a href="https://coleadership.com">Co Leadership</a> two years ago to focus on that question, and we’ve made huge strides in our ambitious dream to create the most effective leadership training for engineers.</p>
<p>But there’s so much more to life beyond just work. How do we effectively communicate our emotions? How do we effectively break out of people’s expectations of us so that we can create the lives we want to live rather than the ones we should be living? How do we effectively create deep and meaningful relationships — whether it’s at work, at home, with friends, or even romantically? How do we effectively discover our life’s purpose?</p>
<p>For the past few years, I’ve been diving deep on all these fronts — exploring and integrating modalities as wide-ranging as coaching, dance, embodiment, authentic relating, breathwork, tantra, and more. And being the engineer that I am, I’ve been developing frameworks to distill the essence of them — frameworks to bypass small talk, frameworks to create intimacy and trust in powerful moments, frameworks to break past limiting beliefs we hold about ourselves, frameworks for creating more freedom in our lives — and practicing and sharing them with the people in my life.</p>
<p>I know that I feel called to share everything that I’ve learned — and you’ll hear about some of it soon — so that we can all engineer the lives we want to live. And I know that owning my story and my success will be part of that journey.</p>
<p>And so today, I choose to celebrate.</p>
<p><img src="https://d3oj8nq9p0q26f.cloudfront.net/blog/assets/images/posts/candle-410746f7f61c96db156c599676dfc310bdc2dcba9f79e12bf23c00025a246947.jpg" alt=""></p>
<h2 id="celebrating-in-times-of-darkness">Celebrating in Times of Darkness</h2>
<p>The second reason for hesitating is the belief that it’s wrong to celebrate when there’s something big and bad and frightening happening in the world.</p>
<p>The world is being hit by a pandemic unlike anything that we’ve seen in our lifetimes.</p>
<p>People are being quarantined at home, schools and businesses are being forced to close, stock markets are crashing, and hospital systems even in first world countries are being overwhelmed.</p>
<p>I feel concern for the health of my friends and family. My parents own a family herb store in San Francisco Chinatown — where there is big elderly population — and while they’ve closed the physical store to customers, they’re still letting customers slip in prescription orders through the store’s locked gates so that they can continue to provide people the medicine they need.</p>
<p>I struggle to strike the balance between keeping myself responsibly and healthily informed without letting the news significantly impact my mood during the day.</p>
<p>I’ve been getting into — and moving through — more arguments with loved ones, with all the collective tension in the air.</p>
<p>And in these times, here’s what I know.</p>
<p>The tendency of conversations about COVID-19 is to instill scarcity instead of abundance, fear instead of hope, and uncertainty instead of groundedness.</p>
<p>And in these critical moments, we have a choice.</p>
<p>We can choose to get swept up by the panic and fear and let it consume our entire days. We can choose to lament the situation we’re in and let bad news taint the lens we use to view the beauty in our lives.</p>
<p>Or we can choose to live the fullest lives we can, given the reality of what’s happening. We can choose to grieve and acknowledge and feel the fear and pain that shows up and still choose to celebrate and appreciate what is.</p>
<p>In fact, it’s even more important during these times to find the joy and calmness and appreciation in the moments we can. I’ve been doing a morning ritual of taking a cold shower, warming my body through dance movement, and grounding myself through an active breathing meditation every day for the past three weeks — and it’s reset my body to freshly take on each day.</p>
<p>And so today, I choose to celebrate.</p>
<p>I choose to celebrate that in the past five years, I’ve sold way more copies than I had dreamt of for of a book that I wrote and self-published and even learned to lay out my own typography for.</p>
<p>I choose to celebrate quitting my job to become an entrepreneur who built the sales and marketing systems to turn the book into a financially successful business — the book actually earned more revenue in its first year than my startup salary at the time.</p>
<p>I choose to celebrate that I’ve contributed something to the world that continues to impact people five years later and to see it as a starting point for all that I want to create in the world.</p>
<p>And if you’re willing to celebrate with me, what’s one thing you’d choose to celebrate today? I’d love to hear it.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/help-me-celebrate-my-five-year-anniversary">Continue reading "Help Me Celebrate My Five-Year Anniversary »"</a></p>What Does It Mean to Be an Effective Tech Lead?2018-03-09T00:00:00-07:002018-03-09T00:00:00-07:00http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/what-does-it-mean-to-be-an-effective-tech-lead<a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/what-does-it-mean-to-be-an-effective-tech-lead"><img src="https://d3oj8nq9p0q26f.cloudfront.net/blog/assets/images/posts/compass-08e0caba455829f61ef826c2723894fdcaddcb36ff204cb5138ab3a4a3e44084.jpg" /></a><p>The first time I took on a tech lead role early in my career, I had little clue what I was doing.</p>
<p>Overnight, I found myself suddenly responsible for the technical and project output of a team of four engineers at an underdog startup — even though I had no more training, mentoring, or tools for my new role than the day before, when I was still just a senior individual contributor.</p>
<p>My two options were to sink or to swim. I hustled to figure things out with 60- to 80-hour weeks. And I made a lot of mistakes.</p>
<p>One time, I was taking a much-needed vacation in Hawaii. During a hike on a volcano with my wife, I received a text message from the CTO: “The logs processor is down.” The logs processor was a critical but legacy piece of software that analyzed all of our customers’ logs data and generated the analytics reports they used for business decisions. And I was the only engineer familiar with the code — partly because the team was spread thinly on many projects and partly because I didn’t want to burden anyone else with it.</p>
<p>Apparently, there’s no WiFi on volcanoes. And so the expectations from customers and from my team weighed on my mind the entire day until I could fix the issue later that night. I learned a hard lesson that day about not being the single point of failure on a team. I’ve learned many more since then, both from my own experiences and from conversations and interviews with hundreds of engineers and leaders across Silicon Valley as I wrote <a href="/book"><em>The Effective Engineer</em></a>.</p>
<p>It’s clear that everyone goes through similar struggles of tech leadership, and these stories aren’t just my own.</p>
<p>That’s why I was excited last week when Dropbox hosted me at their San Francisco headquarters as the keynote guest for their internal tech lead training event. For 90 minutes, I fielded questions from roughly 50 first-time and experienced Dropbox tech leads on a wide range of topics: how to define your role, how to prioritize individual versus team work, how to experiment with new team processes, and more.</p>
<p>One theme, however, threaded through most of the questions. And that was:</p>
<p><strong>“What does success as a tech lead look like?”</strong></p>
<p>In this longer post, I share a general framework for thinking about success as a tech lead.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/what-does-it-mean-to-be-an-effective-tech-lead">Continue reading "What Does It Mean to Be an Effective Tech Lead? »"</a></p>Edmond Lau<a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/what-does-it-mean-to-be-an-effective-tech-lead"><img src="https://d3oj8nq9p0q26f.cloudfront.net/blog/assets/images/posts/compass-08e0caba455829f61ef826c2723894fdcaddcb36ff204cb5138ab3a4a3e44084.jpg" /></a><p>The first time I took on a tech lead role early in my career, I had little clue what I was doing.</p>
<p>Overnight, I found myself suddenly responsible for the technical and project output of a team of four engineers at an underdog startup — even though I had no more training, mentoring, or tools for my new role than the day before, when I was still just a senior individual contributor.</p>
<p>My two options were to sink or to swim. I hustled to figure things out with 60- to 80-hour weeks. And I made a lot of mistakes.</p>
<p>One time, I was taking a much-needed vacation in Hawaii. During a hike on a volcano with my wife, I received a text message from the CTO: “The logs processor is down.” The logs processor was a critical but legacy piece of software that analyzed all of our customers’ logs data and generated the analytics reports they used for business decisions. And I was the only engineer familiar with the code — partly because the team was spread thinly on many projects and partly because I didn’t want to burden anyone else with it.</p>
<p>Apparently, there’s no WiFi on volcanoes. And so the expectations from customers and from my team weighed on my mind the entire day until I could fix the issue later that night. I learned a hard lesson that day about not being the single point of failure on a team. I’ve learned many more since then, both from my own experiences and from conversations and interviews with hundreds of engineers and leaders across Silicon Valley as I wrote <a href="/book"><em>The Effective Engineer</em></a>.</p>
<p>It’s clear that everyone goes through similar struggles of tech leadership, and these stories aren’t just my own.</p>
<p>That’s why I was excited last week when Dropbox hosted me at their San Francisco headquarters as the keynote guest for their internal tech lead training event. For 90 minutes, I fielded questions from roughly 50 first-time and experienced Dropbox tech leads on a wide range of topics: how to define your role, how to prioritize individual versus team work, how to experiment with new team processes, and more.</p>
<p>One theme, however, threaded through most of the questions. And that was:</p>
<p><strong>“What does success as a tech lead look like?”</strong></p>
<p>In this longer post, I share a general framework for thinking about success as a tech lead.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/what-does-it-mean-to-be-an-effective-tech-lead">Continue reading "What Does It Mean to Be an Effective Tech Lead? »"</a></p>My New Adventure: Leadership Development for People in Tech2018-01-30T00:00:00-07:002018-01-30T00:00:00-07:00http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/my-call-to-new-adventure<a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/my-call-to-new-adventure"><img src="https://d3oj8nq9p0q26f.cloudfront.net/blog/assets/images/posts/adventure-ff135f8ed901da22d8260a958517ffb2e4f61c9245fdb56b05eb706d81e97dfa.jpg" /></a><p>Last week, I shared with you <a href="/blog/farewell-letter-to-quip">my personal, farewell letter to Quip</a>.</p>
<p>This week, I’m really excited to announce my new adventure. I am partnering with <a href="http://jeanhsu.com/">Jean Hsu</a> — a good friend and an engineering-manager-turned-coach — to embark on an ambitious quest.</p>
<p><strong>We’re joining forces to build a new brand, <a href="http://coleadership.com/">Co Leadership</a>, into the pre-eminent, leadership development brand for engineers and other leaders in tech.</strong></p>
<p>Here’s why you should get excited about this, too.</p>
<p>Last year, I sent out a survey to my readers to better understand the dreams you have and the challenges you face as engineering leaders. Hundreds of you responded.</p>
<p>I read through every, single response and ended up with pages and pages of notes. It’s clear that many of you would find it helpful to have more resources in engineering leadership development, and I’ve been itching to work on it all last year.</p>
<p>There’s SO much I wanted to do. Courses on how to be an effective tech lead and how to have effective one-on-ones. Guides on how to communicate effectively and how to build effective teams. Interviews to collect the best practices from the strongest teams around Silicon Valley. And those are just the tip of the iceberg.</p>
<p>For the past few years, I’ve always aspired to become one of those successful solopreneurs — an engineer-turned-entrepreneur who would builds a strong brand and business on his own around The Effective Engineer. I followed people like Tim Ferriss, Ramit Sethi, and others who had built multi-million dollar brands around themselves.</p>
<p>But one thing that’s always held me back from going all in is how <em>lonely</em> it would feel.</p>
<p>When I quit my job to work on my book full-time back in 2015, working solo every day was by far the hardest and scariest part. The experience was rewarding, and I have no regrets about doing it. But whenever I fell into a pit of despair — maybe I had a bad day and everything I wrote just sounded terrible — it was very demoralizing and challenging to pull myself out. I could talk about my work with my wife and my friends, of course, but it wasn’t the same as having someone being <em>in</em> it with you.</p>
<p>You’ll know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever worked solo on a multi-month engineering project before. There are those days when you feel so discouraged and hopeless because you hit a wall or because you crawled too deep into a rabbit hole or because things just aren’t working like they should. And you wonder to yourself, “WHY am I doing this? When will I ever be done?”</p>
<p>When I thought about who I might partner with, the one person who came to mind was Jean. I had only met her maybe two or three times. But she’s been working at a few well-known companies in Silicon Valley, including Google, Medium, and Pulse, and she was someone I respected from her thoughtful online writing on engineering leadership.</p>
<p>I sent her a email in early September to see if she wanted to explore joining forces. And then I waited. I was excited at the possibility of having someone to work with whose values seem to align with my own. I was also nervous because I had no backup plan of who else to ask.</p>
<p>I distracted myself but kept checking my phone for the next two days waiting for a response. When she finally replied that she also thought our missions were aligned and that she’d interested in exploring, I was delighted and giddy. We’ve been meeting up once a week ever since to invest in our relationship and to dream big about the things we want to create around tech leadership.</p>
<p>What you can expect going forward is <em>more</em>, <em>faster</em>, and <em>better</em> resources on how to grow yourself into leaders that people love to work with.</p>
<p>More — because I’ve now quit my job to focus my energy on this full-time and because now there’s two of us working on it.</p>
<p>Faster — because we’re both pushing ourselves to figure out the minimal viable products of what we’re creating so that we can validate our work and get you access to what’s valuable sooner.</p>
<p>Better — because when you have two people challenging each other, you end up with better and more creative ideas than either could come up with alone.</p>
<p>In fact, if there’s one lesson you can take away from my past few months, it’s that many things you’re leading by yourself will be easier, faster, and more rewarding if you can find someone to co-lead with you. Asking can be scary and nerve-racking — it certainly was for me because it meant giving up some control — but the results can be astounding. It’s amazing how much more clarity I’ve developed about my mission in the past few months.</p>
<p>I’ll continue to write about effective engineering on this blog, and I’ll be shifting more energy toward writing about engineering leadership and effective teams. If you’re a leader in tech (or aspiring to be one) and would like to get more of the best resources Jean and I build for leadership development, <a href="http://coleadership.com/">let us know here</a> — I’ll take care of adding you to our new Co Leadership list so that you don’t miss out.</p>
<p>Our quest to shift the leadership culture in tech is very ambitious, and we’re well aware that we can’t do it alone. We’re only successful if we create real, transformative value for you.</p>
<p>You can be confident that we’ll be listening to your input about the biggest gaps in your own leadership that you want to close, and taking your feedback seriously to shape our course.</p>
<p>The more you empower us, the more we’ll be able to create resources and experiences that empower you. <a href="http://coleadership.com/">Join our quest, and let us know how best to help you.</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/my-call-to-new-adventure">Continue reading "My New Adventure: Leadership Development for People in Tech »"</a></p>Edmond Lau<a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/my-call-to-new-adventure"><img src="https://d3oj8nq9p0q26f.cloudfront.net/blog/assets/images/posts/adventure-ff135f8ed901da22d8260a958517ffb2e4f61c9245fdb56b05eb706d81e97dfa.jpg" /></a><p>Last week, I shared with you <a href="/blog/farewell-letter-to-quip">my personal, farewell letter to Quip</a>.</p>
<p>This week, I’m really excited to announce my new adventure. I am partnering with <a href="http://jeanhsu.com/">Jean Hsu</a> — a good friend and an engineering-manager-turned-coach — to embark on an ambitious quest.</p>
<p><strong>We’re joining forces to build a new brand, <a href="http://coleadership.com/">Co Leadership</a>, into the pre-eminent, leadership development brand for engineers and other leaders in tech.</strong></p>
<p>Here’s why you should get excited about this, too.</p>
<p>Last year, I sent out a survey to my readers to better understand the dreams you have and the challenges you face as engineering leaders. Hundreds of you responded.</p>
<p>I read through every, single response and ended up with pages and pages of notes. It’s clear that many of you would find it helpful to have more resources in engineering leadership development, and I’ve been itching to work on it all last year.</p>
<p>There’s SO much I wanted to do. Courses on how to be an effective tech lead and how to have effective one-on-ones. Guides on how to communicate effectively and how to build effective teams. Interviews to collect the best practices from the strongest teams around Silicon Valley. And those are just the tip of the iceberg.</p>
<p>For the past few years, I’ve always aspired to become one of those successful solopreneurs — an engineer-turned-entrepreneur who would builds a strong brand and business on his own around The Effective Engineer. I followed people like Tim Ferriss, Ramit Sethi, and others who had built multi-million dollar brands around themselves.</p>
<p>But one thing that’s always held me back from going all in is how <em>lonely</em> it would feel.</p>
<p>When I quit my job to work on my book full-time back in 2015, working solo every day was by far the hardest and scariest part. The experience was rewarding, and I have no regrets about doing it. But whenever I fell into a pit of despair — maybe I had a bad day and everything I wrote just sounded terrible — it was very demoralizing and challenging to pull myself out. I could talk about my work with my wife and my friends, of course, but it wasn’t the same as having someone being <em>in</em> it with you.</p>
<p>You’ll know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever worked solo on a multi-month engineering project before. There are those days when you feel so discouraged and hopeless because you hit a wall or because you crawled too deep into a rabbit hole or because things just aren’t working like they should. And you wonder to yourself, “WHY am I doing this? When will I ever be done?”</p>
<p>When I thought about who I might partner with, the one person who came to mind was Jean. I had only met her maybe two or three times. But she’s been working at a few well-known companies in Silicon Valley, including Google, Medium, and Pulse, and she was someone I respected from her thoughtful online writing on engineering leadership.</p>
<p>I sent her a email in early September to see if she wanted to explore joining forces. And then I waited. I was excited at the possibility of having someone to work with whose values seem to align with my own. I was also nervous because I had no backup plan of who else to ask.</p>
<p>I distracted myself but kept checking my phone for the next two days waiting for a response. When she finally replied that she also thought our missions were aligned and that she’d interested in exploring, I was delighted and giddy. We’ve been meeting up once a week ever since to invest in our relationship and to dream big about the things we want to create around tech leadership.</p>
<p>What you can expect going forward is <em>more</em>, <em>faster</em>, and <em>better</em> resources on how to grow yourself into leaders that people love to work with.</p>
<p>More — because I’ve now quit my job to focus my energy on this full-time and because now there’s two of us working on it.</p>
<p>Faster — because we’re both pushing ourselves to figure out the minimal viable products of what we’re creating so that we can validate our work and get you access to what’s valuable sooner.</p>
<p>Better — because when you have two people challenging each other, you end up with better and more creative ideas than either could come up with alone.</p>
<p>In fact, if there’s one lesson you can take away from my past few months, it’s that many things you’re leading by yourself will be easier, faster, and more rewarding if you can find someone to co-lead with you. Asking can be scary and nerve-racking — it certainly was for me because it meant giving up some control — but the results can be astounding. It’s amazing how much more clarity I’ve developed about my mission in the past few months.</p>
<p>I’ll continue to write about effective engineering on this blog, and I’ll be shifting more energy toward writing about engineering leadership and effective teams. If you’re a leader in tech (or aspiring to be one) and would like to get more of the best resources Jean and I build for leadership development, <a href="http://coleadership.com/">let us know here</a> — I’ll take care of adding you to our new Co Leadership list so that you don’t miss out.</p>
<p>Our quest to shift the leadership culture in tech is very ambitious, and we’re well aware that we can’t do it alone. We’re only successful if we create real, transformative value for you.</p>
<p>You can be confident that we’ll be listening to your input about the biggest gaps in your own leadership that you want to close, and taking your feedback seriously to shape our course.</p>
<p>The more you empower us, the more we’ll be able to create resources and experiences that empower you. <a href="http://coleadership.com/">Join our quest, and let us know how best to help you.</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/my-call-to-new-adventure">Continue reading "My New Adventure: Leadership Development for People in Tech »"</a></p>My Farewell Letter on What Working at Quip Meant to Me2018-01-17T00:00:00-07:002018-01-17T00:00:00-07:00http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/farewell-letter-to-quip<a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/farewell-letter-to-quip"><img src="https://d3oj8nq9p0q26f.cloudfront.net/blog/assets/images/posts/letter-3cc75070387b1fe0c151bc53b7e34207440a359de6ee0e4e11e350a4539563a2.jpg" /></a><p>Last Friday was my last day working at Quip.</p>
<p>I joined Quip as the 13th employee over three and half years ago, and today the team has grown to over 100 employees. I’ve never grown more or felt more supported working at any other company.</p>
<p>Before I left, I wrote a personal letter to the company that I’m sharing publicly, below. It captures the behind-the-scenes qualities of Quip that made it an exceptional and rewarding place for people to work and that I hope to see in teams everywhere. The letter also captures what I’m excited to focus on in <a href="http://coleadership.com/">my next adventure</a>.</p>
<p>On my last day, the team shared a stack of little personalized cards with me, about the impact that I’ve had on them. I left that day with a feeling of “I know I’m doing <em>something</em> right if this is the impact I’ve had.”</p>
<p>Here’s the letter.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/farewell-letter-to-quip">Continue reading "My Farewell Letter on What Working at Quip Meant to Me »"</a></p>Edmond Lau<a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/farewell-letter-to-quip"><img src="https://d3oj8nq9p0q26f.cloudfront.net/blog/assets/images/posts/letter-3cc75070387b1fe0c151bc53b7e34207440a359de6ee0e4e11e350a4539563a2.jpg" /></a><p>Last Friday was my last day working at Quip.</p>
<p>I joined Quip as the 13th employee over three and half years ago, and today the team has grown to over 100 employees. I’ve never grown more or felt more supported working at any other company.</p>
<p>Before I left, I wrote a personal letter to the company that I’m sharing publicly, below. It captures the behind-the-scenes qualities of Quip that made it an exceptional and rewarding place for people to work and that I hope to see in teams everywhere. The letter also captures what I’m excited to focus on in <a href="http://coleadership.com/">my next adventure</a>.</p>
<p>On my last day, the team shared a stack of little personalized cards with me, about the impact that I’ve had on them. I left that day with a feeling of “I know I’m doing <em>something</em> right if this is the impact I’ve had.”</p>
<p>Here’s the letter.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/farewell-letter-to-quip">Continue reading "My Farewell Letter on What Working at Quip Meant to Me »"</a></p>The Most Intense Year of Growth in My Life — What I’ve Learned2018-01-03T00:00:00-07:002018-01-03T00:00:00-07:00http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/the-most-intense-year-of-growth<a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/the-most-intense-year-of-growth"><img src="https://d3oj8nq9p0q26f.cloudfront.net/blog/assets/images/posts/skydiving-c33ed947fd6c8a27c36dfbe3fed7d36d5dfa58540b8b67ef2da04fb50011c692.jpg" /></a><p>“I am jumping into new possibilities!” With those words, I threw myself out of the plane and hurtled 14,000 feet toward the ground — screaming for my life.</p>
<p>I lost my sense of up and down as my body tumbled in the air for a few seconds. The first thing I noticed as I finally barreled earthwards face-first was that my mouth dried almost instantaneously from the wind blasting into my face. I had to close my mouth and stop screaming.</p>
<p>I want to say that the next 60 seconds of free fall stand out as a pivotal memory — one that marked my commitment to a new and bolder life. But in all honesty, the brief moments before my skydiving instructor yanked the parachute’s rip cord happened so fast — it was a total blur. I needed to rewatch the video footage for it to really sink in that I had JUMPED OUT OF A FREAKING PLANE.</p>
<p>In some ways, I feel the same way about my past year — it’s been the most intense year of growth in my life. I completed five months of coach training and ten months of an intensive leadership development program through the <a href="http://coactive.com/">Coaches Training Institute</a> and turned my work at Quip into an arena for practicing leadership. The year has really challenged me on what it means to be a better leader, engineer, friend, and husband. So much has happened that I also need to slow down to let the lessons sink in.</p>
<p>Unpacking everything I’ve learned will take time and multiple posts. To start, I spent one day last week reviewing all my journal entries from the past year.</p>
<p>Here are the most powerful lessons I’ve learned:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/the-most-intense-year-of-growth">Continue reading "The Most Intense Year of Growth in My Life — What I've Learned »"</a></p>Edmond Lau<a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/the-most-intense-year-of-growth"><img src="https://d3oj8nq9p0q26f.cloudfront.net/blog/assets/images/posts/skydiving-c33ed947fd6c8a27c36dfbe3fed7d36d5dfa58540b8b67ef2da04fb50011c692.jpg" /></a><p>“I am jumping into new possibilities!” With those words, I threw myself out of the plane and hurtled 14,000 feet toward the ground — screaming for my life.</p>
<p>I lost my sense of up and down as my body tumbled in the air for a few seconds. The first thing I noticed as I finally barreled earthwards face-first was that my mouth dried almost instantaneously from the wind blasting into my face. I had to close my mouth and stop screaming.</p>
<p>I want to say that the next 60 seconds of free fall stand out as a pivotal memory — one that marked my commitment to a new and bolder life. But in all honesty, the brief moments before my skydiving instructor yanked the parachute’s rip cord happened so fast — it was a total blur. I needed to rewatch the video footage for it to really sink in that I had JUMPED OUT OF A FREAKING PLANE.</p>
<p>In some ways, I feel the same way about my past year — it’s been the most intense year of growth in my life. I completed five months of coach training and ten months of an intensive leadership development program through the <a href="http://coactive.com/">Coaches Training Institute</a> and turned my work at Quip into an arena for practicing leadership. The year has really challenged me on what it means to be a better leader, engineer, friend, and husband. So much has happened that I also need to slow down to let the lessons sink in.</p>
<p>Unpacking everything I’ve learned will take time and multiple posts. To start, I spent one day last week reviewing all my journal entries from the past year.</p>
<p>Here are the most powerful lessons I’ve learned:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/the-most-intense-year-of-growth">Continue reading "The Most Intense Year of Growth in My Life — What I've Learned »"</a></p>My Keynote Talk: What It Really Means to Be an Effective Engineer2017-12-28T00:00:00-07:002017-12-28T00:00:00-07:00http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/startcon-keynote-what-effective-engineer-really-means<a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/startcon-keynote-what-effective-engineer-really-means"><img src="https://d3oj8nq9p0q26f.cloudfront.net/blog/assets/images/posts/startcon-8b72894e0d4dae6322df599f6c2fd0feb054e81f83b247c479285e52c32d9b29.jpg" /></a><p>Earlier this month, I keynoted at <a href="https://www.startcon.com/">StartCon</a> in Sydney, to an estimated 1,000 people on the technical track. It was the biggest and most personal talk that I’ve ever given.</p>
<p>In the talk, I shared stories and lessons — some that I had never opened up publicly about before, even to friends and co-workers — about what it really meant to be an effective engineer. The conference organizers graciously made a video of my talk available, and I’m thrilled to share it with you today.</p>
<p>Preparing for the talk wasn’t easy. The lead-up involved long days of story crafting and practice; multiple dry runs with co-workers at Quip; a morning meditation session to calm my nerves the day of; and non-stop cough drops to survive a nerve-racking sore throat that emerged the morning of the talk.</p>
<p>Thankfully, all that work paid off. I’m incredibly proud of the positive reception afterwards.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Edmond Lau gave a great talk today at StartCon 2017. Best takeaway was the importance of balancing operational effectiveness with team communication.”<br>— Henry George, CTO</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>“Looking back over StartCon.com, I must say Edmond Lau’s talk really related to me! Recently I’ve been putting in a lot of hours in and in some cases the efforts aren’t always proportional to the results. Edmond’s framework for leveraging high level actions really was helpful! And it immediately clicked for me. Definitely one of the best talks I’ve seen. Thank you!”<br>— Mathew Burns, Lead Developer</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/startcon-keynote-what-effective-engineer-really-means">Continue reading "My Keynote Talk: What It Really Means to Be an Effective Engineer »"</a></p>Edmond Lau<a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/startcon-keynote-what-effective-engineer-really-means"><img src="https://d3oj8nq9p0q26f.cloudfront.net/blog/assets/images/posts/startcon-8b72894e0d4dae6322df599f6c2fd0feb054e81f83b247c479285e52c32d9b29.jpg" /></a><p>Earlier this month, I keynoted at <a href="https://www.startcon.com/">StartCon</a> in Sydney, to an estimated 1,000 people on the technical track. It was the biggest and most personal talk that I’ve ever given.</p>
<p>In the talk, I shared stories and lessons — some that I had never opened up publicly about before, even to friends and co-workers — about what it really meant to be an effective engineer. The conference organizers graciously made a video of my talk available, and I’m thrilled to share it with you today.</p>
<p>Preparing for the talk wasn’t easy. The lead-up involved long days of story crafting and practice; multiple dry runs with co-workers at Quip; a morning meditation session to calm my nerves the day of; and non-stop cough drops to survive a nerve-racking sore throat that emerged the morning of the talk.</p>
<p>Thankfully, all that work paid off. I’m incredibly proud of the positive reception afterwards.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Edmond Lau gave a great talk today at StartCon 2017. Best takeaway was the importance of balancing operational effectiveness with team communication.”<br>— Henry George, CTO</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>“Looking back over StartCon.com, I must say Edmond Lau’s talk really related to me! Recently I’ve been putting in a lot of hours in and in some cases the efforts aren’t always proportional to the results. Edmond’s framework for leveraging high level actions really was helpful! And it immediately clicked for me. Definitely one of the best talks I’ve seen. Thank you!”<br>— Mathew Burns, Lead Developer</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/startcon-keynote-what-effective-engineer-really-means">Continue reading "My Keynote Talk: What It Really Means to Be an Effective Engineer »"</a></p>Why It’s Important to Raise the Bar for Engineering Leadership2017-12-22T00:00:00-07:002017-12-22T00:00:00-07:00http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/raising-the-bar-for-engineering-leadership<a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/raising-the-bar-for-engineering-leadership"><img src="https://d3oj8nq9p0q26f.cloudfront.net/blog/assets/images/posts/leadership-workshop-cc3ac7df41fc5efccc25bdbe1cd8696145ba9559444640d491c908e46662cf5a.jpg" /></a><p>Last week, I co-led back-to-back workshops on engineering leadership.</p>
<p>The first was with my good friend and product manager <a href="https://dianaberlin.com/">Diana Berlin</a> for the engineering managers at Quip. The other was with another good friend and engineering-manager-turned-coach <a href="https://jeanhsu.com/">Jean Hsu</a> for engineering leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area – people who ranged from senior individual contributors to tech leads to managers to VPs.</p>
<p>Both workshops focused on the powerful conversations that we can have as engineering leaders to discover and share what’s important, build trust, and take responsibility for the impact we have on the world around us.</p>
<p>A year ago, if you told me that I’d be creating and leading workshops around engineering leadership, I would have looked at you in disbelief. Me? In front of a room leading a workshop? You have to be kidding.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/raising-the-bar-for-engineering-leadership">Continue reading "Why It's Important to Raise the Bar for Engineering Leadership »"</a></p>Edmond Lau<a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/raising-the-bar-for-engineering-leadership"><img src="https://d3oj8nq9p0q26f.cloudfront.net/blog/assets/images/posts/leadership-workshop-cc3ac7df41fc5efccc25bdbe1cd8696145ba9559444640d491c908e46662cf5a.jpg" /></a><p>Last week, I co-led back-to-back workshops on engineering leadership.</p>
<p>The first was with my good friend and product manager <a href="https://dianaberlin.com/">Diana Berlin</a> for the engineering managers at Quip. The other was with another good friend and engineering-manager-turned-coach <a href="https://jeanhsu.com/">Jean Hsu</a> for engineering leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area – people who ranged from senior individual contributors to tech leads to managers to VPs.</p>
<p>Both workshops focused on the powerful conversations that we can have as engineering leaders to discover and share what’s important, build trust, and take responsibility for the impact we have on the world around us.</p>
<p>A year ago, if you told me that I’d be creating and leading workshops around engineering leadership, I would have looked at you in disbelief. Me? In front of a room leading a workshop? You have to be kidding.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/raising-the-bar-for-engineering-leadership">Continue reading "Why It's Important to Raise the Bar for Engineering Leadership »"</a></p>Share Powerful Stories to Shift the Culture Around You2017-11-08T00:00:00-07:002017-11-08T00:00:00-07:00http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/share-powerful-stories-to-shift-the-culture<a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/share-powerful-stories-to-shift-the-culture"><img src="https://d3oj8nq9p0q26f.cloudfront.net/blog/assets/images/posts/edmond-3-year-81f5614846709421938989301ed22e4a38137f163a7941fcfba51cc4faac5ac1.jpg" /></a><p>A few months ago, I passed my three-year anniversary of working at <a href="http://quip.com">Quip</a>. It’s the longest I’ve worked at any company, and my experience here has also differed significantly from other startups I’ve worked at.</p>
<p>Many of us are either already in leadership roles, or we’re starting to wonder what our personal path toward leadership might look like. And part of leadership – whether you’re a senior engineer, tech lead, a manager, a director, or someone else – is <a href="/blog/shape-culture-with-stories">shaping the culture around you through the stories you choose to tell</a>. The stories you emphasize and pass along become the lore that form core values.</p>
<p>And so, I’m sharing a montage of my favorite stories from working at Quip because my experience here has dramatically shifted my own perspective of what’s possible in Silicon Valley startup culture. I originally posted these stories in response to a Quora question on <a href="https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-work-at-Quip/answer/Edmond-Lau">“What is it like to work at Quip?”</a> My hope is that you can find inspiration from these stories when it comes time to share your own.</p>
<p>Grab a snack and settle in for story time.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/share-powerful-stories-to-shift-the-culture">Continue reading "Share Powerful Stories to Shift the Culture Around You »"</a></p>Edmond Lau<a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/share-powerful-stories-to-shift-the-culture"><img src="https://d3oj8nq9p0q26f.cloudfront.net/blog/assets/images/posts/edmond-3-year-81f5614846709421938989301ed22e4a38137f163a7941fcfba51cc4faac5ac1.jpg" /></a><p>A few months ago, I passed my three-year anniversary of working at <a href="http://quip.com">Quip</a>. It’s the longest I’ve worked at any company, and my experience here has also differed significantly from other startups I’ve worked at.</p>
<p>Many of us are either already in leadership roles, or we’re starting to wonder what our personal path toward leadership might look like. And part of leadership – whether you’re a senior engineer, tech lead, a manager, a director, or someone else – is <a href="/blog/shape-culture-with-stories">shaping the culture around you through the stories you choose to tell</a>. The stories you emphasize and pass along become the lore that form core values.</p>
<p>And so, I’m sharing a montage of my favorite stories from working at Quip because my experience here has dramatically shifted my own perspective of what’s possible in Silicon Valley startup culture. I originally posted these stories in response to a Quora question on <a href="https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-work-at-Quip/answer/Edmond-Lau">“What is it like to work at Quip?”</a> My hope is that you can find inspiration from these stories when it comes time to share your own.</p>
<p>Grab a snack and settle in for story time.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/share-powerful-stories-to-shift-the-culture">Continue reading "Share Powerful Stories to Shift the Culture Around You »"</a></p>Breaking Out of the Stories We Make Up About Ourselves2017-10-24T00:00:00-06:002017-10-24T00:00:00-06:00http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/the-stories-we-make-up<a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/the-stories-we-make-up"><img src="https://d3oj8nq9p0q26f.cloudfront.net/blog/assets/images/posts/universe-76ee7c6e4b13e76dad90f2f1e8024e73f95da362280099ccf595d5276fb5e9a8.jpg" /></a><p>This is a story about a box that I’ve been hiding in and how I’ve been fighting to break free.</p>
<p>“What’s one thing you learned about yourself in the past year?,” a close friend asked during my birthday dinner.</p>
<p>It was a well-timed question. The past year has been one of intense personal growth. I’ve become more aware of my impact on people, my limiting beliefs, and my dreams, and I also feel more agency than ever to shape my own story. My journey has felt as disorienting as I imagine it must’ve been for Neo to learn about the Matrix, take the red pill, and discover the truths hidden in plain sight.</p>
<p>I’ve learned that I hate the feeling of being boxed in. And some of the most restrictive boxes we find ourselves in are actually ones we’ve created for ourselves. We feel safer in these boxes, but these boxes — these limiting beliefs — also hold us back from playing bigger and living fully.</p>
<p>Here’s one of the boxes I’ve been hiding in, where the light is finally starting to shine through.</p>
<p>For the past year, I’ve been struggling with the limiting belief that “success creates distance” — that if people close to me know that I am successful, I will isolate myself from them. And because what I really want is to connect with people, I have to limit how successful people perceive me to be. I have to be smaller than I really am.</p>
<p>And so I dodge the spotlight. I hide in my safe, little box.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/the-stories-we-make-up">Continue reading "Breaking Out of the Stories We Make Up About Ourselves »"</a></p>Edmond Lau<a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/the-stories-we-make-up"><img src="https://d3oj8nq9p0q26f.cloudfront.net/blog/assets/images/posts/universe-76ee7c6e4b13e76dad90f2f1e8024e73f95da362280099ccf595d5276fb5e9a8.jpg" /></a><p>This is a story about a box that I’ve been hiding in and how I’ve been fighting to break free.</p>
<p>“What’s one thing you learned about yourself in the past year?,” a close friend asked during my birthday dinner.</p>
<p>It was a well-timed question. The past year has been one of intense personal growth. I’ve become more aware of my impact on people, my limiting beliefs, and my dreams, and I also feel more agency than ever to shape my own story. My journey has felt as disorienting as I imagine it must’ve been for Neo to learn about the Matrix, take the red pill, and discover the truths hidden in plain sight.</p>
<p>I’ve learned that I hate the feeling of being boxed in. And some of the most restrictive boxes we find ourselves in are actually ones we’ve created for ourselves. We feel safer in these boxes, but these boxes — these limiting beliefs — also hold us back from playing bigger and living fully.</p>
<p>Here’s one of the boxes I’ve been hiding in, where the light is finally starting to shine through.</p>
<p>For the past year, I’ve been struggling with the limiting belief that “success creates distance” — that if people close to me know that I am successful, I will isolate myself from them. And because what I really want is to connect with people, I have to limit how successful people perceive me to be. I have to be smaller than I really am.</p>
<p>And so I dodge the spotlight. I hide in my safe, little box.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/the-stories-we-make-up">Continue reading "Breaking Out of the Stories We Make Up About Ourselves »"</a></p>