What I Got Wrong from The Effective Engineer

An 8-year retrospective on my self-published book

Eight years ago this week, I self-published The Effective Engineer.

I’m proud to celebrate that since then, it's sold over 20,000 copies and generated over $500k in lifetime income.

Publishing a book has changed my life in so many ways.

It gave me the confidence to follow my own truth and show that I could create something of value on my own.

It taught me the skills to market and grow an online business.

And it unlocked a trust in myself to leave the Silicon Valley tech startup world and found my own leadership and personal development companies.

When I published the book, effectiveness in engineering was my world.

The central thesis of the book was simple: focus on the highest-leverage activities.

We only have a finite amount of time, and therefore we ought to focus our time on the things with the highest impact, I reasoned.

I lived and breathed books like 4 Hour-Work Week, The ONE Thing, or The Millionaire Fastlane — anything that helped me refine my perspective on how to best use my time.

The key question I posed to myself and to my readers was:

What are the highest-leverage activities you can do with your time? That was how we created the life and work we wanted, I believed.

That one question led to a very successful personal brand around effectiveness — to the point where people would walk up to me in coffee shops or stop on their runs to say hi or to ask, “Are you the effective engineer?” I smiled every time.

Even as my interests expanded beyond the world of engineering — to communication, leadership, relationships, and more — I still oriented toward that one question.

When I became fascinated by communication and leadership, for instance, I was focused on “What’s the most effective way to communicate and build alignment?” I turned that into the flagship offering at my first leadership development company.

When I started learning about authentic relating and relationships, I’d focus on “What’s the fastest way to create deep intimacy?” That’s what spawned my experiment to get into as deep of life conversations as possible with 350+ Uber and Lyft drivers — so that I could master the art and science of deep connection.

Even though I’m no longer working in tech, the concepts of effectiveness and leverage still run through my blood. It’s hard for them not to.

But looking back, I realize that I got one thing wrong when I published the book. The framework of leverage that I shared in The Effective Engineer missed one essential ingredient.

That essential ingredient was aliveness.

Aliveness: The Missing Key from the Leverage Framework

When I gave talks for my book, people used to ask me, “What if the highest-leverage things are things you don’t enjoy?”

The best answer I could give back then was that you just had to balance the things that you do enjoy with the things that you don't.

It was a nicer way of saying: suck it up.

I never felt satisfied with that answer. All the energy spent trying to convince ourselves to do something we didn’t want to do could’ve been spent creating.

Here's what I now know to be true:

Our capacity to create the life and work we want has as much to do with our choices to focus on life-giving activities as it has do with our choices to focus on high-leverage activities.

And that’s what the metric of aliveness captures.

Aliveness is a measure of how much life energy something gives you.

Yes, we all have one precious life with the same 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. The way to live the most meaningful life isn’t to optimize for leverage and impact. It’s actually to choose and optimize for your aliveness.

The problem is that even if we do the highest-leverage things — but we’re working on projects, teams, missions, or industries that we’re not fully aligned with and that drain us — we expend a lot of energy and willpower in an inner battle.

It’s like mastering your ability to swim — but then choosing to swim against the river’s current. No matter how hard you try, you’re still exerting much more effort than necessary.

Eventually, no matter how much we optimize, if we focus on things that drain us, the path no longer becomes sustainable, and we either get bored or burned out. That’s happened to me several times in my career.

We go so much farther when we swim with life’s current. When we follow what makes us feel truly alive. When our talents and passions are well-used, appreciated, and directed toward things we care about.

When we have days where we actually feel more alive from work, we end up having more energy at the end of the day. And that energy gives us the momentum to keep going — creating a perpetual motion machine for ourselves.

And so, decide what it is that actually lights you up, turns you on, and makes you excited to get out of bed every morning. And then, apply all the concepts on leverage toward creating your life’s work around those things.

So how do we do that? One framework for creating this in your life is to define your own container of aliveness.

Create Your Own Containers for Aliveness

Recently,

rob hardy

introduced a term “container of aliveness” to refer to an arena where we can pour the expression of our creative talents and energies into the world. He talks about it in the context of online creators, but it’s a concept that applies to anyone.

The key idea is this:

What are the burning, open-ended, curious questions that you want to devote your life’s energy toward exploring? Then, design containers for yourself to explore them.

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
— Author and Philosopher, Howard Thurman

In retrospect, I can see how on every step of my own journey, I’ve been defining, outgrowing, and then expanding my own containers of aliveness.

The Effective Engineer was my first major container. I explored the question, “What are the highest-leverage activities for engineers?”

I felt excited to learn and experiment with effectiveness strategies, to study how different teams worked, and to share about what I learned. But at some point, as people and relationships became more interesting to me than software and code, I outgrew that brand because it wasn’t a big enough container to hold what I wanted to create.

My next brand was a container that could hold my passions in engineering, leverage, and powerful relationship skills. The question I explored there was, “How can I build the most effective leadership training for engineers and others in tech?”

I thought I’d be building that brand for at least a decade. But even that container became too small when I realized three years later that I wanted to teach more than just tech leadership.

I wanted to weave in everything I was learning about the internal systems that drove the human experience — how emotions work in the body, how beliefs form psychologically from childhood, how emotions shape our decision-making, how to create deep connection quickly, how to heal triggers in partnerships, and more.

So now I’m exploring, “How do I effectively navigate the difficult emotions and reprogram the limiting beliefs that come up in the human experience, and how do I teach that to others?”

Every container is more expansive than the one before it, and this last one will be a lifelong journey of mastery. And so there’s a knowing that the brands and offerings that I create out of this new container — including one that I’m excited to announce later this month! — can hold anything I can foresee creating.

And so, as I celebrate the 8-year anniversary of The Effective Engineer — my first self-created container of aliveness — the inquiry I leave you with is this:

What’s the burning, open-ended question that you’re most excited to explore right now? And how can you create your own container of aliveness to fuel your work in that area?

That might be the highest-leverage decision you can make for yourself.

Thanks to David Matheson for reading an early draft of this post.