Also:

- Exercise regularly

- Maintain a regular sleeping schedule

- Eat healthy (recognize when you are self-medicating with food)

- Make an extra effort to groom yourself (wear cologne, shave daily, clip your nails)

They are definitely teachable. I had to learn them. I won't say I'm great at it, but there was a drastic difference between my effectiveness as a leader early on vs. later on.

Just like technical acumen, you have to start with building low level muscles, and then you build on top of that to develop increasingly complex, integrated skills.

Here's an example breakdown of how to build communication skills from a set of low level skills. I've seen adults (including engineers) improve dramatically with direction and practice:

1. Learning to tell when you are getting angry and building the habit of stepping away instead of escalating

2. Learning to tell when you are reacting in the moment vs. analyzing, and practicing the habit of moving to analysis during tense conversations

3. Learning to stop automatically attributing bad motives to things other people say that you dislike

4. Learning the formula for conflict handling: (1) acknowledging their point, (2) repeating it back with a charitable interpretation, then (3) responding with your point

5. Learning to make exploratory statements and ask questions to establish common understanding

6. Learning to identify and not make overconfident/dismissive/glib statements

It does strike me as odd though that there is almost no recognition or reference to the vast world of case study and literature about leadership, and technical leadership to boot.

For example, Siebel talks about "Level 2" thinking as well as self awareness as important attributes to being a good leader. These attributes can be found discussed in great detail with well worn concepts like "Servant Leadership"[1] and "Referent Power"[2].

Further, actively seeking high consequence/stress situations like Siebel discusses is a well understood way of learning leadership.

So my question is, if it is important for tech CEOs or other tech people to understand and embody these leadership principles, why not seek out the huge amounts of training and learning on this - and to that end seeking out people who have gone through a lot of it, rather than trying to start from first principles?

Let me be clear too, I'm not suggesting you can learn this stuff from a book. Far from it. What I am saying is that there are a lot of great people out there with tested leadership experience, that are overlooked by the tech world because it does not specifically select for it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership

[2]http://www.communicationcache.com/uploads/1/0/8/8/10887248/t...

Do I regret? It would be a lie to say yes. I almost dont reject any more connections since 2016, I hardly have any. I saved all the messages Ive been writing to anyone during the last 2 years. Its refresging to read them and see how much time you invested in taljing to someone who you have hard time remembering at all. I think Internet opened my eyes to this fact. Communication is worthless.

You know one other thing Ive benn thinking about last week? AVOID humans. I didnt write that anywhere back then. The essence of the idea is that networking is worthless. Waste of time. Talking to machines may spread your words 100x more than talking to humans. Just make a bot taljing on your behalf.

You may say that I will become self absorbed and self righteous for nothing because no one can correct me. Thats untrue. Occasionaly I can write like i do now, in a completely alien space. If i feel like it, i will return for answers and critique. But I dont want that, I will not return.

I read a lot of what others write and post and make and that keeps my thought going and helps me prevent it from becoming stale. The thing is, they are not writing or posting that TO me. But still I know what they think.

Honestly, I hugely dislike real life talking anymore. What a waste of everything. I wont lie, I can interrupt anyone who approaches me with a talk and say directly "I am not interested". Or "Dont talk to me". I dont care how they feel. Remember, they all are a passing substance, an ephemera, a hallucination. Dont get me wrong, they are real humans. But theres no need in caring about what they feel. There are too many humans. Today these, tomorrow others. Caring for what they think or what they want from you when you dont want anything from them is a waste of capacity.

You know whats funny. When you need something from them in return, you just come to them and ask. That easy. Funny bit is they, been rejected, still often do what you ask for. They are afraid to break the thousand-year-old lie saying "what you give is what you get". No such thing.

I stop saying I "should" do this or I "should" do that, and just let life run its course.

Not sure if that helps you, but I've been there man. Email me if you want to talk.

Only ever measure yourself against yourself. As long as you make sure you are a better programmer today then yesterday then you have nothing to worry about.

Seems like an opinion piece from the title, anyone care to share a summary?

edit nvm guess its only a paywall on mobile