I’m writing this in the days immediately preceding my 50th birthday. It’s common for people to engage in some self-reflection when they hit the decade birthdays. Usually mine revolve around my achievements. Did I achieve enough over the last 10 years? Did I change what I wanted to change? Am I proud of what I’ve done? Have I helped people? What comes next?

I’m writing this post, in part for me, as all blog posts are, but in part for the people younger than me. I want to share something with you that I think would have helped me as I approached 30 and 40.

Systems over goals

A key to my philosophy is systems over goals. Throughout my life I’ve found goals stressful and demotivating. I used to think that was a weakness in my character or a lack of discipline and I spent years beating myself up about that until I decided that they just don’t work for me. So instead if I need to achieve a goal I work backwards from that goal and ask myself what routines, systems, tools, teams, processes, etc. do I need to have in place so that if I work everyday that goal gets achieved as a natural consequence of my routines. That unlocked an enormous joy in achievement for me. So if you’re someone who hates goals consider that approach.

Job titles are less important than achievements

Job titles are less important than what you do. When I was 30 I wanted to be a CTO. I thought of my career as a ladder I needed to climb. I thought that the level of influence I wanted to have required me to achieve the highest position. At the time, in 2004, I saw that CTOs were often from a Telco background, or if they had done software engineering work it was usually in a pre-internet context and they weren’t focusing sufficiently on quality, system design and live service operations. This is why every launch was bad and organisations were optimising too late after they had already lost customers and damaged their reputations. Some things happened, I learned some things about myself and about what’s expected of a CTO and I realised that it wasn’t the right role for me. After a lot of soul searching and thinking I realised that I could achieve my goal of improving quality and systems in a company and across the industry without the need for a CTO title. The important realisation was that I focused on what I wanted to achieve as opposed to focusing on a job title that freed me to use my creativity to figure out how to have that influence that I wanted.

On reflection…

Having provided a little free advice allow me the indulgence of a little public self-reflection. Stop reading here if you’re allergic to cringe. I am really happy with what I achieved in my 40’s. I helped British Gas with their public launch of Hive, I helped the DWP with their DevOps journey, I helped Just Eat improve their reliability. I sold a few thousand copies of Next Gen DevOps (which is more trouble than it’s worth from a tax perspective but I hope I helped at least some of those people on their DevOps journeys). I switched my focus from DevOps to digital transformation and I helped Zoopla build their new tech stack. For the last 2 years I’ve built a team of permanent consultants here at 101 Ways and am mentoring and coaching my team, helping them grow in their careers faster than I did. It’s been a pretty good decade. Also I am thankful everyday for the NHS. Arthritis and diabetes hit me like a hammer during lockdown and thanks to the amazing NHS consultants, doctors and nurses I am pain free and fitter and healthier than I’ve ever been.