What would Boz do?
Be kind, plainspoken, humble and focussed to build a successful career
Tell me in a sentence
Be kind, plainspoken, humble, and focused to build a successful career
Tell me in an image
Tell me more
I will let Boz introduce himself.
“Hi. My name is Andrew Bosworth but most people call me Boz… I’ve been working at Meta since 2006 where I am currently the CTO.”
He has a fantastic blog. He is a busy man. But why is he blogging? Boz is very clear about his intentions.
“I started this blog with the goal of sharing a few of the lessons I’ve learned in my career. As I have been writing I’ve found myself fighting a desire to make myself look better. A big part of me wants to present myself as some kind of sage who has always been wise. But that isn’t true. I learned most of these lessons the hard way. … Maybe by me talking about these things, people will think less of me. But someone else will connect with it and maybe avoid the same mistake, or maybe even share their own.”
His blog is filled with wisdom. Below are some of my highlights with quotes directly from Boz.
Be Kind
Being kind helps you to maximize your professional impact
“Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on the people around you. It requires you to be mindful of their feelings and considerate of the way your presence affects them.
Being kind hasn’t hurt my effectiveness at all...Being invited to more conversations has allowed me to scale my impact”1
Be Plainspoken
“That means communicating in an unadorned manner. It means having the conviction to be honest with one another so we can all improve.”2
Theory of Mind
Explain your reasoning when you communicate your decisions as a leader. Over time, your team members will be able to make a good enough approximation of what your decision would be. This in turn allows for faster and more decentralized decision-making.
“it’s so important as a leader not to just communicate your decisions, but to communicate the context around them.”3
Focus
The only productivity hack that you need is Focus.
The key to an impactful product is Focus.
“Each individual digression from our core competency like this can probably be measured positively on ROI when considered locally. But I believe they collectively add up negatively. There are hundreds of them, each individually reasonable, but they take people and money and altogether they start to outweigh the core and create drag.”
“We have a core feature offering that is very strong. A small feature idea comes up that serves a subset of the market, but it isn’t too hard to do and it isn’t a bad thing, so we indulge. Repeat that thought process a hundred times and you have a cluttered UI, a large team, a slow product, and no obvious path forward.”4
On Humility
Be humble to develop a psychologically safe environment for your team.
“It is an argument to keep an open mind when we come across ideas we disagree with. It is an argument in favor of speech itself, as that is how we parlay our humility into a better understanding of the world around us.
But it is also an argument for civility, without which speech suffers. In a room where someone is shouting loudly enough, nobody else will speak even if they are free to do so.”5
Know Thyself
Self-knowledge is the most valuable knowledge.
If you think of yourself as a kind person, you are more likely to act with kindness.
Knowing yourself will help you set the right goals.
“keep your identity small
… observe what makes you happy as dispassionately as possible.
… interrogate your identity on a regular basis.”
There is a lot more from where these came from. But that is for another time!
https://boz.com/articles/be-kind
https://boz.com/articles/be-plainspoken
https://boz.com/articles/theory-mind; this idea inspired the title of this post
https://boz.com/articles/focus
https://boz.com/articles/humility