Day One Reflections:

The first thing on my calendar is a meeting with our project steward–we go through a number of questions/pieces of advice, but the one that sticks with me is: have fun learning. I take this as my intention for the rest of the day.

I’m able to go to my first client meeting, an action meeting. I have some familiarity here–my old team had listened to the Brave New Work podcast and had implemented our version of it–but it is cool to see it happen on this team. And…I would say I lightly understand about half of what was going on. I end up extremely grateful for the an acronyms google sheet, but even then the context for the discussion is tough. I want to be valuable, but I feel like my lack of context and understanding mean my opinion is probably not that valuable. There was a question about how to best use Slack, and while I have an opinion, it’s an opinion that’s informed by about 3 hours of work so far and that doesn’t seem too useful. As I write this, it feels a little too self-deprecating, but in my defense I’d say I’m just trying to be realistic about the value of that without much knowledge and familiarity.

I leave the meeting and my head is spinning a bit. All I could think of was the well-worn metaphor of drinking from a firehose–that this was a lot to try to pick apart very quickly. But, as I take a break and eat some lunch, I remember three things:

1. The firehose is self-administered. When I feel overwhelmed, I can take a break, as I was doing, and dive back in when I’m ready.
2. I don’t have to learn it all on day one. I was at my last job for eight years, and so part of me is expecting that level of familiarity on day one.
3. I remembered the earlier advice: have fun learning.

I spend a lot of the afternoon diving deep into the Onboarding Handbook, and as I read some of the pieces of the meeting started to make more sense (and, um, some still didn’t). On to day two!

Day Two Reflections:

One thing that’s helped me process my learning is thinking about it in (often overlapping) buckets. There’s the Ready-specific things in my onboarding checklist and prologue member asset board, and then there’s the project stuff. But as I was thinking about this I noticed a couple of other buckets as well, one kind of obvious and one less so.

One of those buckets is our work around DAOs/Web 3.0. At the risk of subtweeting that work, I’m Web 3.0-skeptical. But I’m also super-curious/fascinated. I learned about cryptocurrency as most people do, half-drunk in a pool in Florida around after midnight as my friend tried to describe the blockchain to me (I get it in the same way I got high school geometry). They helped me set up an account and a wallet, and I convinced my wife that we could gamble a small amount every month on crypto. I started listening to podcasts about crypto, going back to stuff that was released in 2014. I learned about Mt. Gox. I watched a bunch of Binance videos. I’ve tried to hear the good and the bad about crypto and NFTs. I got excited about DAOs listening to the Brave New Work DAO offshoots.  I got a little scared of DAOs after reading this. Now I’m digging through the content on OdysseyDao. I’m curious for those reading: what else would you recommend checking out? What convinced or intrigued you, one way or another, about crypto and Web 3.0?

The last, and perhaps most subtle bucket is around feel and intuition. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’m really excited for all of the learning I’m getting to do right now, and I’m trying to raise my hand for everything I can. Which works! My calendar is pretty flexible these days. And I also know that there will come a time when that’s less true, when I have more responsibilities, and I’ll have to get more discerning. I’d love to hear how people think about this for themselves.

Cool moment of the day: in a breakout room during a client call yesterday, I felt like I asked some good questions, and knew enough about what we were doing to help a few people get some clarity around a problem they were having. It was nice to feel like some skills I’ve built over time translated to this role.

Day Three Reflections (this one will be shorter, promise):
Today was hard, in that this place is full of brilliant people and I felt blockheaded. Nothing anyone did to me, to be clear, just my own shit. For instance, we got asked for feedback on a few things, and I felt like I couldn’t give anything specific, and was just giving generic word salad that wasn’t useful. As I write this, I know it’s pretty silly, so I’m letting it go.
Cool Moment of the Day: Connecting with another new colleague at the end of the day, learning more about him, and hearing about his experience thus far, which really validated how I’m feeling today.