YEAR IN REVIEW

In 2020, I spent hundreds of hours creating personal and professional development articles and podcasts to share with you. If my writing has enriched your life this year, helped you find a job, or given you more confidence at work, please consider subscribing to my newsletter. Thank you!

🎧 If you want to hear me talk about this story and go into more detail: Listen now

It’s hard to see the forest for the trees with all of the articles I’ve written. So, I wanted to do an end of the year wrap-up to categorize and summarize everything for you.

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HEALTH

A few months ago, I noticed that I was feeling completely burned out. I don’t often talk about my struggles or feelings of anxiety and depression. In my role as a coach, I try to maintain an upbeat attitude to help my clients feel positive and energized to conquer their personal challenges.

But I’m going to open up and be more vulnerable here than I normally feel comfortable doing. I’m lowering the walls and admitting that the burnout was hitting me pretty hard.

I’m sharing this because I think many of you might be feeling this…

JOB INTERVIEWS

My guest for this episode is Dayna Wu. She is the proud mom of two, Hawaii born and raised, and now residing in the San Francisco Bay Area.

She’s a Senior Recruiter for Nvidia Corporation while being a distance learning teacher, short-order cook, housekeeper, physical fitness activity coordinator, and parent/wife all at the same time.

Over the course of 13 years, she’s worked at stealth and early-stage startups being the sole recruiter handling everything from sourcing candidates, setting up recruiting processes, negotiating and closing candidate offers, and working as a member of…

WRITING

Writing is one of the most important communication skills that can future-proof your career. Yet, it remains one of the biggest skill gaps that employers see in job candidates.

“People jump to all kinds of conclusions about you when they read documents you have written. They decide, for instance, how smart, how creative, how well organized, how trustworthy, and how considerate you are. And once they have made up their minds, it is hard to get them to see you differently. Research…

PODCAST

My guest for this interview and podcast episode is Jeremy Baker. He is the co-founder and CTO of Retail Zipline, an enterprise SaaS company that provides communications software to some of the world’s largest retailers.

He is a seasoned developer and entrepreneur who has been involved in web design, online product development, and technology startups since 1997.

Prior to Zipline, Jeremy co-founded MightyHive, an enterprise software startup acquired by S4 Capital for $150M. Before that, he worked as a Senior Prototyper at Yahoo! …

WORK

“ I had to let half of the team go. They didn’t have the right skills and attitude for the strategic new direction the company is heading. “
— Anonymous leader

The leader I was talking with wasn’t happy about this situation. They had inherited a team that was no longer performing well. The company was in the middle of a significant transformation into a new space and business model.

While some employees could be coached to adapt and stay with the company, others weren’t so lucky — for various reasons. If you…

Life is so much about balance. We can't live today as if there will be no tomorrow. But, we also can't live today as if there will be infinite tomorrows.

PODCAST

My guest for this episode is Caroline Tsay. Caroline is the CEO and co-founder of Compute Software. Their Cloud Cost Optimization platform delivers the deepest cost savings for your cloud infrastructure running on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. Caroline was also one of the most talented Product Leaders that I worked with in Silicon Valley.

In this podcast episode, you’ll hear about how she started down her tech path with a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University. She went on to receive an M.S. in Management Science & Engineering from Stanford…