2015_Lessons_Learned.md

# 2015 Lessons Learned

It’s a huge burden to hold a secret from people you care about (like changing jobs). That’s probably why a lot affairs, scandals, secrets eventually come to light. It feels good to get it off your chest.

Don’t be afraid to start over. Anything is a potential loss — your job, your friends, your partner, your business, your home, your health. Be prepared for the worst and you’ll never be caught off guard.

Don’t be ashamed of what you like, especially if it’s something you’ve liked for a long time. Video games, epic music, making silly websites.

People have patterns and themes that follow them throughout their lives.

It’s a huge asset to be a good-looking and charismatic guy. In part because no one ever brings it up. They would for a good-looking woman, but not a man.

You never know when you hang out with someone for the last time. And yet, you also never know when “goodbye” turns into a new “hello”.

Once I decide I’m going for something, it’s hard for me to feign interest in something else, and/or pursue it. I like to explore, but once I’m doing it, I commit.

I am afraid of receiving too many favors or acts of kindness because I have a strong sense of guilt and obligation and I like to avoid taking that on if possible. When Olivia covered my room in photos, the first thing I thought was how awful it was that I had made a shitty coffee mug for her. This feeling probably stems most closely from my mother.

Until you a ship a project or product, your primary deliverable is communication. 

You’ve got to do multiple things at the same time if you want to be a player in Silicon Valley. There is no rest.

It’s hard to fault someone who knows what they want and is clear about communicating that to others.

Know what you want to get out (learn, achieve, meet) of an experience before you go in or else you may be disappointed.

When you have a strong employer brand (people want to work at your company) you have a huge advantage with hiring - getting applications, converting, and lower salaries.

A sign of a true nerd / intellectual is someone who is curious and willing to explore and try new things, who wants to understand how something works, who can think of new applications for some ability.

Without engineers, the thing will never work. Without marketers, no one will invest the resources necessary to build the thing.

Just like it is easier to write new code than it is to read someone else’s code, it’s easier to appreciate why your ideas are better than someone else’s, mostly because people are bad at communicating their ideas.

When you are feeling down, it is important to be with people who you don’t think are judging you, or who at least have known you long enough to know that you are a kind, industrious, intelligent, creative person who is going through a rough patch.

At Etsy I want to: understand how to build a roadmap for a product, see how a big product team plans together, see how roadmaps are best communicated internally and externally, ship product and see how it reacts with users, learn how to pull SQL queries, make friends, work on side projects at the same time,