Next topic: Checklists

I took a Russian history class in college, the professor prescribed the equivalent of 50 pages of read a day. I spent four hours a day reading and weekends.

Somewhere in between we were asked to draw a hand drawn map of Russia on an 8 1/2 x 11” paper.

This was clearly a joke so I spent five minutes on it.

Too much reading to do. Must read and memorize.

Well the crappy map of Russia was worth 40% of the grade. And the reading was like 20%.

That seemed very unfair but that lesson has remained true throughout my entire life.

The crappy map that takes ten minutes, 30 if you do it properly is always worth as much or more as the 90 hours a week coding project.

In many situations, your masters degree in electrical engineering is out on a checklist next to “spent three days equivalent playing around with REST APIs.”

The reason is the pervasive of checklist-think.

Every item on a checklist is a binary. It is a 1 or a Zero.

Checklists don’t care how long a given item cost to acquire or how much money or energy it cost.

And in many situations, 8 trivial checklist items can gang up one 1 very challenging checklist item and win.

“Well...they don’t have a masters degree in engineering from Stanford but they have the other 12 things we want.”

When I decided to quit my career as a software engineer, but didn’t know what to do next, checklists saved me a lot of time and energy.

It seemed I was miserable in every job I had, marketing, software engineering. Something was always missing.

So I made a checklist of all the things I enjoyed doing and was good at:

- writing
- programming
- organizing events
- strategy
- marketing
- building things
- public speaking
- organizing community

Then I systematically searched jobs to find which ones had all those

Only solution architect, FAE, Product Manager and technical evangelist matched.

I applied for my first evangelist role at Apigee and failed the interview process.

Why? Because I only had 6 of the 10 checklist items I needed for that job

I spent the next six months filling those holes:

- needed to show. A much bigger written portfolio of technical content
- needed a much more active GitHub with sample code and projects
- needed to support and attend multiple Meetups and Hackathons
- needed more REST API skills

And it worked, I was able to get my first evangelist role at Intel Mashery and the rest is history.

I have a great respect for the importance of checklists now.

People who understand how to use checklists to reverse engineer their life success are at a massive life advantage.

People not using checklists mostly score 60% on most tests they enter (career, job, startup etc).

If you don’t think on checklists you never going to get an A+