Category: Personal Growth
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![Dear: [insert employee id here]](https://johnstamford.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/c64fee0f-2dc2-4847-be08-e9ead2cab4df_846x676.webp)
Read more: Dear: [insert employee id here]To my kids I am Dad, to my wife, I am her husband and to my employer, I am Employee #14442. Sometime around 2006/2007 I was in a meeting with my old boss, who was the head of accounting. Halfway through the meeting, the managing director (MD) walks in, “how’re things?” he asks. My boss replied “not too […]
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Read more: The solopreneurI grew up in a family, a city and a time when ‘good’ looked like a ‘job for life’. I remember when I started at BAE SYSTEMS, which was 1 of the 2 major employers in the city at the time, people said to me “you’re lucky, that’s a job for life”. It wasn’t! They […]
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Read more: Luck = preparation x opportunityLuck, why do some people seem to have it and others don’t, and what can we do about it? Luck plays an important part in our lives and to our success. Imagine you are a happily married person, you probably met your partner by pure chance. You didn’t try to meet all 7 billion people […]
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Read more: 4 ways to gain experience (that work)There’s this meme out there which goes something like – “entry-level position, applicants must have 10 years experience”. It’s the chicken and egg scenario – you need a job to get experience, but you need the experience to get the job. So how do you get that experience without having the job first? Here are […]
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Read more: The original ‘big tech’Let’s set the scene, it’s 1997, I’m 18 years old and I’ve just started work in a high-tech industry, building military aeroplanes (I’m in the photo above). Before this, I was flipping burgers at McDonald’s. At that time you had a name badge, like the one below except my name wasn’t Vikky, and I never […]
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Read more: 1:1 (pronounced ‘one-to-one’)The 1:1 is a term given to a meeting between two people. Here we are talking about the 1:1 between a manager and a direct report – here is where the 1:1 becomes impactful. Impactful for both the people and the business. Since I’ve worked in big tech, both as an IC and as a […]
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Read more: The Learning CurveWe’ve all probably heard of the learning curve, perhaps we’ve even said something like “it had a steep learning curve but I got there in the end” when learning a new skill.