We see the world through stories. We communicate about the world through stories. So, the stories we tell turn out to be incredibly important to the way we operate in the world.

If you wait until your tank is empty, you've created an urgent situation you could have avoided. Keep your tank full, early and often. This applies to almost everything in our lives, but so often we sacrifice a full tank for some marginal gain. This leads to a scarcity mentality and a lack of flexibility. What can you do to fill your tank?

The most critical career mistake you can make isn't a secret. Are you in control? If you aren't driving your career, who is? Is your career being driven by someone else, or worse - no one at all?

The romance of endless success is a broken picture of reality. Instead, focus on inviting failure and taking advantage of the opportunity it brings: the opportunity to take responsibility.

What are your ideals? For many people, ideals are fragile. The moment we see a hero fall, our own lives are immediately thrown into a state of confusion. Instead of having fragile ideals, we should explore the underlying motivations, and set ourselves up for dynamic ideals that don't break easily.

Great questions trigger thought and further questions. In this episode, I pose 4 questions (and a bit of homework) to help you get a handle on where your career is headed. Whether you are in a transition point, at the beginning of your career, or in a senior role, these questions can help point you down the pathway to better understanding and clarity for where you stand today.

Joel Beasley is the host of Modern CTO, a podcast with guests coming from IBM, Microsoft, Nasa, Reddit, and hundreds of others. Joel and I have wanted to have this discussion for a long time, and we finally found the right overlap to do it! You can learn more about Modern CTO at https://moderncto.io and listen to this episode in the alternate podcast universe here. Thanks for joining me on Developer Tea, Joel!

Happy Friday everyone! Today we talk about fighting the inertia of the daily slide into habits. How many days have seemed to slip through your fingers? One way to combat this is to develop a "meta-behavior" that short-circuits your other habits. Write advice to yourself from today, for tomorrow. This is best done at the end of the day, or in preparation for the week ahead.

Joel Beasley is the host of Modern CTO, a podcast with guests coming from IBM, Microsoft, Nasa, Reddit, and hundreds of others. Joel and I have wanted to have this discussion for a long time, and we finally found the right overlap to do it! You can learn more about Modern CTO at https://moderncto.io and listen to this episode in the alternate podcast universe here. Thanks for joining me on Developer Tea, Joel!

What if the best thing you could do was nothing? Not indefinitely, of course - but often, we intervene in the world when the right choice is to do nothing. This is uncomfortable because it is unfamiliar, but might be the most critical change you can make in your thought process.

Comparison is an incredibly important tool. But most of the time, the comparisons we are making are imaginary - even the ones that seem real. In this episode we'll talk about why we should be mindful of this, and in some instances, take measures to debias our decisions.

Are you acting on impulse? How would you know? One door to understanding this "acting without thinking" is to investigate our hypotheses. Implicit hypotheses are expressed as instances of our beliefs. What implicit hypotheses are you relying on today?

Model Manager episodes of Developer Tea are dedicated to helping engineering managers find models of thinking that improve their approach to management. Great managers don't attempt, in vain, to control the actions of others. Great managers take advantage of the unique parts of being a human: that they can self-improve through learning and change, and they can create environments that encourage others to do the same.

What are you waiting on? What are you replaying? It doesn't have to only be anxiety that takes you out of this moment. You may be looking forward to something exciting, or remembering a positive experience. But what are you missing right now?

Discipline is not about punishment or punctuality. It's about perseverance in the face of changing circumstances. And it's critical to your success as an engineer.

Model Manager episodes of Developer Tea are dedicated to helping engineering managers find models of thinking that improve their approach to management. Processes create uniform approaches and uniform outputs. But what is the output you should care about the most? In this episode, we'll discuss why human behavior is the primary and most critical output of any process.

You don't have to choose to be a generalist to have career security. If you pursue mastery, you will be building skill-acquisition at the deepest levels, and picking up skills that are ancillary to that master-set. Don't follow the latest trend - develop mastery.

We all have 24 hours in a day. How can you compound your time? In many ways, this is what "spend it wisely" means. In this episode we classify different types of decisions and actions, and provide a reminder that direction is ultimately the most critical thing to align.

If you are progressing slowly in your career, it might be because you are working in the bowl of mediocrity. This is where you are taking very little risk, but are also disconnected from the fundamentals of your business or role. In today's episode, I challenge you to work on the edges of this bowl instead of the middle.

The execution phase of any work you do is where you find the most satisfaction. But it's possible that you aren't finding flow because you have a broken working process. It's difficult to stop working and fix the process, and especially difficult to balance fixing process with actually being productive. In this episode, we'll discuss this dichotomy and the practice of staying mindful during execution.