Find Your Tribe

Another great topic from James Altucher’s Skip the Line is to: Find your Tribe.

This means going out and find peple that have similar goals to you, essentially - your competition.

Coop-etition??

Why would one do that? You want to have less competition, not more.

When you are friends with your competition, you can talk about your goals or problem space at a higher level, at a deeper level. You don’t need to always “translate” or dumb down your thoughts.

When you are working with your competition, they push you to be better and you push them to be better as well.

Programmers??

What does this mean for a programmer? It means finding meetup groups or similar gathering. Something with a high human interaction component. Network, make new friends. If you’re looking for a job, they’re definitely your competition, at the same time, you can help each other improve as well.

For me, I did this when I got back into programming after a failed career change. I was fortunate enough that the community was open and accepted me. They definitely made me better and lead to successes. I did this by accident before, mainly because I wanted free pizza and beer.

Embrace

Now, as I focus on being an engineering manager, I am finding a new tribe again, this time of technical managers (or managers in technical companies.) Knowing James’ advice, I embrace my new tribes and work with them to improve their experience as manager and for me to learn more as well.