Tiny Thoughts of 2024 - Article 52nd

Including hidden perspectives on these articles that I've never shared before.

Here are the "tiny thoughts" extracted from articles I wrote this year. These parts are special to me and are not based on views, likes, or quotations.

This article marks the 52nd published this year, which was a goal for 2024.

For each “tiny thought” I put an italic comment on why I put it here.

This article marks the 52nd published this year.

Tiny Thoughts

It’s Fine Not to Work

It's perfectly fine to do whatever you want with your life.

Whether you work or don't work, change professions, or live abroad, it’s your life, so ignore what others think.

It’s important to prioritise your own happiness and goals over others' expectations.

An article summarising my gap year was the one where I had the most conversations and interactions with readers, and enjoyed every one of those! — You May Need a Gap Year - Five Reflections

Quiet Idea Generation

The core of Quiet Idea Generation for leaders is the following:

1. State clearly what you are going to generate ideas for and make sure that participants understand the context.

2. Set a fixed amount of time to concentrate. Also, set a minimum number of ideas to generate, not a maximum, as quantity beats quality in Quiet Idea Generation. This prevents overthinking.

3. Ask your team to work quietly for 10-15 minutes to generate and write down as many ideas as they can. Make sure that they cannot see each other’s ideas during this time.

4. When the time runs out, ask each participant to present their ideas one by one. You can group the ideas together as they are being revealed. Make sure that neither you nor the group judge the ideas as there are no bad ones. To prevent any authority bias I always preferred to be the last one revealing my own ideas.

5. Congratulations, the process of generating ideas is over

I wrote this article on my phone sitting on a bench in a small town in southern Spain, in 30 minutes. It still acts as a reminder that time spent rewriting, editing and polishing doesn't matter that much. This is one of the most popular articles with many backlinks around the Internet. — On Generating Ideas - Leadership & Work

Change Management

I’ve had my driving licence for 17 years, yet I almost entered a roundabout the wrong way.

It wasn't alcohol,
it wasn't sleep deprivation,
it was Ireland.

When implementing changes be sure to:

• Start small, if it doesn't need to be radical, make it iterative

• Set reminders, communicate frequently

• Follow people who already transitioned, focus on early adopters

• Repeat the behaviour until it becomes the default one

Even though it felt really scary the first time I entered the car from the passenger's seat. I was fascinated by changing my perspective on driving. I “wrote” this article almost entirely in my head while driving during the road trip to Ireland for my birthday getaway trip. — Driving Change

Write Simply

I’ve created a framework that will help you communicate clearly.

It consists of 3 steps:

1. Prepare

2. Write simply

3. Run a garbage collector

Simple words do not reflect a simple mind, it is the opposite.

One of the most practical and actionable articles. The only one that I open now and I don’t want to change a thing. It was published as a guest post on Anton Zaides‘s Leading Developers, with Anton’s feedback and comments — 3 steps to write messages that people will enjoy reading

Human-centered World

We operate in a human-centred world.

We often forget how many things would be unusual to aliens visiting our planet.

As social creatures, to cooperate together, we have learned to establish names, invent languages, and make concepts.

We truly believe in everything we have been creating.

My friend Adam shared with me an interesting story about time and space and I just couldn’t stop thinking about it until I wrote my take on it. — On Concepts of Date and Time

Inversion

I organised a workshop with our leaders on possible initiatives that we can implement internally. I started the workshop by stating that:

Today, we are going to look for any ideas on how to make our developers unmotivated and unhappy at work.

Imagine the look on their faces after hearing this rather surprising goal. To address the puzzled looks on their faces I began to explain the mental model called inversion.

To apply inversion, we invert the problem to look at the opposite perspective. This is valuable because we can list all the things that we should avoid.

Inversion is special for me, it’s the very first mental model I explained to anybody and the first I wrote about. It’s funny but each time I open my article I’m scared by that astronaut hanging upside down on a rope, I keep forgetting to change it into something less scary. — Inversion - Mental Model

On Being Positive

That's it — I'm going to be fired, I think to myself, right as I answer the phone.

It’s a C-level executive, responsible for the company's engineering structure, who's calling me. He’s on holiday and he’s using his personal number.

He starts the call by appreciating my work but then drops a bombshell — huge business cuts are happening and all managers will be affected.

I can hear my voice quivering. I had to let people go earlier this year, so I tell him that I understand this is a difficult conversation to go through. I ask him about the future of my teams, and what the next steps are, but he says it is still too early and that we'll get to it in a few weeks. The call is over after four minutes; I ask him about the weather over there in sunny Italy before we hang up.

It’s difficult to hear and I have a lot of emotions to process, but my calm response in that moment was typical of how I operate.

I wrote the story of my layoff right after receiving that call (the original version was 5x longer). I had been waiting for more than a year to finally use it. The delay wasn’t because I didn’t have articles where it could fit, but because of the emotions involved. A part of me kept holding it back until the article on being positive became the perfect place for it. — On Being Positive

The Name

The ability to take different perspectives is important and it deserves a separate name.

Therefore the new name I have chosen for the publication is:

Perspectiveship — the skill or ability to look at the world from different perspectives.

I was trying to figure out the best name for my newsletter for 3 months. I still love the name today. — On Naming Things - In Practice, with Brands and Products

Becoming an Astronaut

The basic NASA requirements are:

• a master’s degree in a STEM field (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)

• three years of related professional experience obtained after degree completion

• a high level of physical fitness

Below these requirements on the NASA website, there is a note: "Astronaut candidates must also have skills in leadership, teamwork and communications."

Astronauts are a great blend of multidisciplinary thinking and the ability to look at the world from different perspectives (defined as “perspectiveship”).

Astronauts were my companions in the images the whole year, and astronauts are not going anywhere. Trying to figure out the proper image is a fun creative exercise for each article. Maybe I should rather work on cool infographics that show the concepts I write about, but I just like these astronauts. — What Astronauts Can Teach Us About Leadership

Summary

You can expect 52 articles from me in 2025. To build proper social accountability I’ve hidden this in the summary section, so not many of you will see it. But if you do, thank you for helping me make it happen.

Have a great 2025!

Thanks for reading,

— Michał