Presentation: Attitude Determines Altitude- Engineering Yourself

What makes a 10x engineer, or designer, or leader? It turns out that it is a surprisingly small part aptitude -- our skill at a particular task, and a surprisingly large part attitude -- how we go about it. It is far less the contributions of genetics, or education, or circumstance, than it is how we approach challenges, limitations, and opportunities in our work.

Weaving together diverse threads from Carol Dweck's growth mindset, to Daniel Pink's work on motivation, to modern DevOps culture, we will explore the outsized power of attitude. A wonderful consequence is that our ability to make an exceptional impact is more malleable than we often believe, and it is therefore more amenable to our own influence -- to being *engineered*! This talk will particularize these ideas in a software development context -- from focus and attention, to drive and motivation, to honesty and empathy, to trust and forgiveness.

You will take away a number of concrete suggestions to improve and optimize your approach to your own work -- to make yourself a more effective engineer, designer, or leader. You may be surprised at how quickly improvements in your teams, your products, and your systems will follow.