In the last couple of years, I’ve taken a break from blogging. That was for several reasons, but most notably because I was going through some life changes and decided that stepping away could give me a better perspective to how I want to approach life and work moving forward.
A few things that I was deeply inspired by shortly before I stopped blogging were some books that I read and events that occurred in my life. Needless to say, books are going to be a major staple as I start to blog again and focus on the next steps for my career.
The relevant events to this blog post that occurred include:
- Time at Product School
- Reading Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio
- Reading The Mental Models 1/2/3 by Shane Parrish, Rhiannon Beaubien et al
- Re-reading The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge
Other things happened in my personal and professional life, most which are not are not relevant to the purpose of this blog, but I will be discussing some of them in subsequent posts. Since I’m keeping it focused on the philosophies behind my professional concerns, I don’t need to go into too much detail. I have chosen the framework from The Fifth Discipline as a viable backbone for writing since most organizations follow a similar framework for building teams that learn and evolve as technology changes.
The framework includes five items:
- Personal mastery
- Building shared vision
- Mental models
- Team learning
- Systems thinking
Peter Senge has definitions for all of these in his book and Google is a friendly companion, so I won’t define them again. I will slowly share my perspective to them in subsequent posts as I read more books.
Since this blog is focused on philosophies of work – ways of getting work done – rather than work itself, all the ideas that I share are open to new interpretation, experimentation, and free for discussion or reuse. Where I have actual data or anecdotes, I will share appropriately. You can look at the Books page to see what I’m currently reading, and I’ll be sure to leave footnotes on my posts linking to the sources of my ideas where derived.