Someone recently asked me for my top three personal development lessons that I learned in 2025. There were many this year, but these three stood above the rest.

Sustainable Leadership

Tech is full of people that overcommit for all the wrong reasons. I know because I am one of those people, now recovering.

Overcommitting is ludicrously hard to root out. You may be overcommitting and not even know it.

What are some of the signs you’re overcommitting in software?

• Working more but producing more bugs
• Taking pride in “how much” you work
• Estimating work as “easy” when there’s unknown complexity or bureacratic hurdles
• Ever using the word “just” when proposing an engineering solve, e.g. “Just rewrite the library.”

I gradually stopped overcommitting in 2024. Here’s what that looked like and here’s what happened.

I don’t check Slack after 5PM or before 9AM. People can call me which is a great reducing valve because it feels intrustive to call during “off hours”, and it should. If it’s worth overcoming the “intrusive” feeling then the issue truly was important enough to warrant a call. I have of course hopped online in the evening a couple of times due to truly urgent issues. This arrangement hasn’t caused any huge drama or upsets. I didn’t announce this, I just started doing it over the past year.

Paradoxically, by putting these hard boundaries in place, I am thinking more clearly and able to make better contributions at work. My family is supportive because I’m not half-paying attention to them while checking Slack in the evenings. My fitness is improving because I’ve made time to focus on it. I look back on how I was dividing my attention between my family and my work in the evenings and it truly disgusts me because it was bad parenting and bad husbanding at its finest.

Listening To My Body

I’ve been an avid weightlifter for over a decade. I love barbell strength training, it’s given me mental resilience and a strong body. As I’ve gotten into my mid-thirties though, my body told me that my current routine wasn’t optimal for me anymore.

Heavy weight training 5 days a week became really hard to keep up with, my mind was strong but my joins started to get stiff and I was racking up a bunch of small annoying injuries in the gym.

I combined scientific evidence and my own interests to restructure my workout routine. Now I do 2 days of weight training, 3 days of yoga, and 2 days of zone 2 incline walking. I feel more injury resistant, more in tune with my body, and even more engaged in all of my workouts. By the numbers, this has lowered my weight (down dog is hard when you’re chunky), lowered my bad cholesterol, and lowered my resting heart rate. Best of all, my joints aren’t feeling like crap any more so my weightlifitng days are enjoyable.

Empathy

I’ve never been one to motivate my reports with “the stick”, it doesn’t take any grand insight to see what a short term and temporary strategy that is.

The greatest leadership lesson I learned this year was to listen when people are speaking. You would be surprised (or maybe not) to learn how many leaders just push their people in a given direction instead of using them for their area of best contribution. Nobody can be everything.

Listening with your heart when you are having a 1:1 can unlock incredible opportunities and enable engineers to work at their optimal capacity. This usually takes place in the “non-work” portions of the 1:1. By becoming genuinely interested in a hobby someone has, or a book they enjoy, you understand their motivations, what inspires them, this has broad resonance and should be something that you can empathize with.

Once you have this information you can structure teams not just with complimentary skillsets but with complimentary interests. This is a fundamental skill when it comes to building teams that don’t just suceed today, but succeed for the long-haul.