Articles for category: Growth

6 hours ago

Greg Thomas

You’re Halfway There

I wrote about this thing called Craptivity, many years ago. It’s when you’re past the point of having started something, and you’re deep in the learning, training, iterating, and failing. It’s when you’re falling over yourself to learn but can’t seem to get out. It’s the hardest part of learning, because at that ebb, is where many people abandon the path of learning – because why stay there when I don’t feel great. But if you hang in there, stay there, iterate, make adjustments, that’s when you will come out stronger and better for it. Lots of time is left.

1 week ago

Greg Thomas

Complacency is a Pain to Clean Up

For the past few years, I’ve waged a war with mice at our cabin, essentially trying to keep them out of our crawlspace storage area. It’s not a perfect setup, but it’s necessary, and for a few years, I thought I was winning the war – they were staying away, never coming back. But this year, they all ganged up on me, and they launched a counteroffensive (or at least I like to imagine they all had a huddle and got together to come at me). And did they ever, laying waste to everything in our storage area (emphasis on

Default to Team Patterns

When you’re tired, we fall back on what we know best, what works, what is solid, what has never failed us. These are our patterns of delivery, the tried and true, the never fail. They are the work that we can do in our sleep, that we can close our eyes and let our hands move over the keyboard, succinctly with minimal effort. Patterns are what we invest our time and energy in creating, and what become the backbone of what we do. Team Patterns are much harder to create; they require knowing each other’s strengths and weaknesses, who to

The Easy Metric

Tokens were our gateway to playing games. Now they are the measure of our work and efficiency. They don’t have to be, they shouldn’t be, but right now, many companies are looking at token consumption as a successful metric for adoption. Why? Because it’s easy, it’s one thing, easy to count, easy to add, easy to subtract, and it gives you a nice number. The easy metrics have always been eschewed by leaders because they only measure what is easy, and not what is right. Accountability. Value. Responsibility. Leadership. Commitment. These are the values that we have always wanted in