Articles for category: Initiative

April 1, 2025

Greg Thomas

Embrace the Calamity

Everything can and will go wrong. Your plans will go sideways. The idea you had to build on a platform, that platform went bust. What you thought would work, will no longer work. The API interface you are building against will be deprecated in 3 months. You can either rant and rave about the situation you’re in, about everything going wrong, or you can embrace the calamity and chart a new path. Five years ago, many companies, organizations, and people charted new paths when calamity was all around them.

March 30, 2025

Greg Thomas

What Gets You Excited?

Writing Unit Tests? Making Lesson Plans? Making Crafts? Writing Code? Deploying Code? Making Food? Building Chairs? Designing Chairs? Then do that, do that thing that makes your heart skip a beat and gets you excited for what is to come next.  Do that thing that gets you out of bed in the morning and gets you driving into the office each morning, even if the drive is an hour long.  Or better yet, makes the 45-minute bus ride worth it. The issue isn’t how long it takes us to get into the office. The issue is whether we’re excited enough

March 25, 2025

Greg Thomas

The Work You Don’t Do

The Work You Don’t Do is always harder to see. The not complaining about others on your team. The not doing only what’s in your bug list. The waiting for work to be assigned before doing more. The not offering to help others. The begrudgingly doing the tasks that aren’t part of your job but someone has to do them. These are the work we never want to do, we never want to be a part of, we never deliver. Because these are not work.

March 24, 2025

Greg Thomas

The Work That You Do

The Work that you Do is more than the code that you ship, the words that you write, the articles you read, the invoicing, the testing, and, in essence, the tasks that you do. The Work That You Do is not your job description. It is how you lead yourself, and how you lead others. It is your ability to show up when things are not going your way. It is the extra 5 – 10 minutes you put into your work to polish your work. It is desire to fix the last bug before the product goes out. It

March 23, 2025

Greg Thomas

Where You Work Best

Where you do your best work is as important as the work that you do. The environment, the people, your surroundings, your knick-knacks that you fiddle with while on a call. These are all the things that enable you to do your best work. Your favorite mouse and keyboard (oh have I tried with keyboards) are what make you a success and take the “this feels awkward” out of everything you do and let you slide right into doing work, no matter where you are. Find the right place, get the right tools, and keep your space (somewhat) organized or