Corporate Lessons Learned
These are a few little isms that I've come to believe during my professional journey here in Silicon Valley.

1. If You Don't Know What the Plan is, There Probably Isn't One.

Far too often in my career it has seemed as thought company leadership didn't have a plan to solve some well known business problem. I've found that, more often than not, it is because they do not have a plan at all, not that they have failed to communicated it.

Chances are, you know as much about the situation, if not more, than they do.

A clear indication leadership has given up is the overuse of well worn corporate speak such as leverage, align, and moving forward, in lieu of a clearly atriculated plan. Under these circumstances one should assume they are trying to snow you. It's time to start looking for another job. But that shouldn't be news to anyone who'se lived in the professional world for any length of time.

2. Never Turn Down a new Tool

Or at least, explore new tools before deciding if they are worthelss or not.
This comes from my early insistance that everything in the world worth doing can be done in assembly lauguage. This was a prior mis-lesson learned when I realized that BASIC was to slow to do anything useful. An early colligue, Bob Scott, once told me in 1988, "Processors are fast now (100khx), we don't have to kill ourselves anymore."
When I finally did learn C, it was like God had handed my the Holy Grail. Coding in C allowed me to get so much more work done in less time.
Needless to say, when Java came along I took to it early.

3. Don't Try to do Everything Yourself

There have been a small number of large projects where I should have tried to involve others.
MegaTalk, back in 1987, is the example that best comes to mind. We could have all written a nice mail system if I had involved Joe and David. I really wish I had.
OurHangouts is my current big project (2019 - 2023) and I'm trying to get help with it.

4. We are experts in the Last project we worked on

When interviewing, perhaps talk about your current project even if it isn't relevant to the proposed job. This will show the intervieer important soft skills, like the ability to finish things and manage yourself and projects.
This will also show technical expetise even if not the specific subject the interviewer is looking for.

5. Hurry up and Make Mistakes (Overcoming Stiction)

Its hard to start thigns, especially if they are different from efforts I have done before. So I feel I need to come up with a more exact approach before actually beginning whatever the project is. This can lead to long, prehaps infinite procrastination.

The solution to this dilema? Just start. Start pulling the thread and learn as you go. You first, second, nth attempt won't be anything close to the final product. But the sooner you actually start working on the project the sooner you will actually learn, grow, and turn the project into what you want.

That is the meaning of Hurry up and Make Mistakes.