Henry Suryawirawan

One important but often difficult job for leaders in any team/organization is to build and nurture a healthy culture.

Looking back at my journal, here are my 6 key lessons learned in 2022:

1. Consistency is underrated but crucial for compounding growth.

We overestimate what we can do in a short term, but underestimate what we can do over a long term.

Great things in life grow in a compounding manner: health, wealth, relationships, knowledge, etc.

2. Healthy body is the foundation of optimal life experience.

This year, I recovered from my long-term muscle injury with proper treatment and better habits.

Physical pains are not signs of old age and are likely symptoms of past injury, bad posture, poor recovery & strength.

3. Mental well-being builds resiliency, especially in uncertain times.

Mental well-being is a silent pandemic.

Amid the uncertainties lately, we should consciously watch out for signs of burnout, stress, anxiety, apathy, and decreasing level of energy.

4. Empathy is an underrated skill, especially for leaders.

We should always remind ourselves to exercise our empathy and be kind towards each other.

Especially for leaders, empathy is the foundation for building trust & psychological safety.

5. Nothing beats personal interactions in real life.

Though remote working & virtual communication work, they are not as effective in building strong personal relationships.

We build better trusting relationships through personal face-to-face interactions.

6. Engagement is the cornerstone of thriving culture.

According to Gallup, only 21% of employees are engaged at work, resulting in great resignation and quiet quitting trends.

Beyond OKRs & KPIs, leaders should keep a pulse on employee engagement and create a thriving culture.

Over to you, which of these lessons that resonate with you?

Any other lessons to share from your 2022 journey?

Wish you Happy New Year 2023!

Passion is overrated. Discipline is underrated.

Passion and inspiration are important, but they are never enough for massive success.

“Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.” ~ Bill Gates

We overestimate the change we can do in the short term and underestimate the change we can do in the long term.

Many great things in life grow in a compounding manner.
Knowledge, career, finance, relationship, personal brand, entrepreneurship, etc.

While we crave for the shortcuts and hacks for instant results, those who have made it would point out at self-discipline and consistency as the major factor of success.

Tiny efforts applied consistently over a long time can bring massive results.
We can make a lot of progress in the long run with focus and self-discipline.

Gentle pressure, relentlessly applied.

What is your one passionate thing you are willing to work on with discipline for a long run?

What I thought would make an accomplished career:
- Earning higher salary & benefits
- Assuming bigger titles & roles
- Working in big reputable companies

What I find actually makes an accomplished career:
- Problems that challenge me for growth & sense of accomplishment
- Working culture that is healthy and psychologically safe
- Leaders who act as coaches and drive me for high performance and personal transformation

Many of us chase the first list—but beware, it usually ends in less career fulfillment.

Amid goals, processes, and busyness, sometimes we forget we are all human beings, not human doings.

This is a reminder for us not to emphasize too much on the doing and forget about the being.

Treating others as you want to be treated.
Treating others with respect and empathy.

Treating yourself with kindness and gratitude.

"People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." ~ Maya Angelou

What can you do today to focus more on the being rather than the doing?

Being laid off and retrenched sucks.
Working at a failing company equally sucks.

I have experienced both in my professional career.

Amid the recent layoff trend, I'm sharing my lessons learned how I went through these tough times.
I hope this may help some of you who are currently going through this challenging moment in your career.

1/ Decouple the failures from our identity.
The most important thing is to understand that these failures do not define us as a person.
They do not make us a permanent failure.
It is just a phase of life that sometimes we can’t control.

2/ Acknowledge our negative emotions
When I was going through this moment, I felt really negative and utterly disappointed.
I felt like a loser, and sometimes with a feeling of no way out.
Acknowledge these emotions before they lead us spiraling down further.

3/ Find support
Share our feelings and emotions within our trusted close circles.
Either family and friends whom we can be vulnerable and authentic about our actual situation.

4/ Take a pause and reflect
Though challenging, this moment provides a proper time to reflect and retrospect.
Learn from past mistakes.

Celebrate past accomplishments.

Note down our likes and dislikes.
They will serve as valuable inputs to decide for our next career.

5/ Bring back our enthusiasm and joy
Learn new things.
Try out new experiences.
Connect with new people.
Embrace new opportunities and possibilities.

6/ Understand it's just business, nothing personal
No employee is bigger than the company.
No matter how hard we worked, how many things we achieved, we are merely numbers on the company's balance sheet.
If we're at the wrong side of the equation, it could happen to any of us, even high-performers.

7/ Diversify going forward
Reduce our future risk by diversifying ourselves.
Build a personal brand.
Help communities.
Get connected with more people.

8/ Save for a rainy day
Always have a rainy day fund in our liquid savings.
Aim to have at least 2-3x of our core monthly expenses.
Build a proper financial plan to avoid financial distress.

9/ Have an abundant mindset
When one chapter ends, find the next opportunities that excite us.
The world is full of possibilities.
Look forward to embracing them with a positive attitude.


Nobody likes to experience failures in life and career.
However, failure is a natural process towards progress.

To be successful, we need to be able to go from failure to failure without losing our enthusiasm (Winston Churchill).

Have a belief that this tough time shall also pass, eventually.

For many of us, since childhood, we are being taught by our parents and teachers to focus a lot on improving our weaknesses.

During my childhood, whenever I had poor grades on some subjects, my parents and teachers would ask me to put more efforts and time into improving those grades.
And for those subjects I did well, mostly they put little attention on and gave more emphasis and advice to improve my poor grades.

Over time, I grew with more awareness about my weaknesses.
Whenever someone asked what my top strengths and weaknesses were, I'd easily fill in my weaknesses with an endless list of attributes, while I'd often struggle to fill in and describe my strengths.

However, a paradigm shift started happening when I read the StrengthsFinder book five years ago.
The book strongly suggests that we should put a lot more focus and effort into improving our strengths and to manage our weaknesses so that they don't get in the way and hinder our growth.
It also cautions that if we spend our life trying to be good at everything, we will never be great at anything.

I took the CliftonStrengths assessment, and it revealed to me a few strengths I never associated myself with before.
I became more self-aware of my strengths and my weaknesses and always tried to look for opportunities and roles where I could exercise my strengths better.

By having more self-awareness and then self-acceptance to accept who I am, I build new skills, habits, and eventually confidence knowing that I can excel in areas where I am naturally good at.
I can also accept there are areas I am not good at and try to complement myself with people who are better than me.

All of us have our weaknesses.
And there are too many of them compared to our strengths.
But we only have so much time and energy in our life.
We should not spend our lifetime trying to improve our weaknesses at the expense of neglecting our strengths.

I believe we could realize our potentials, increase our confidence, and eventually live a more successful, fulfilled, and happier life by discovering and developing more of our strengths.

And if you have a similar experience like me, I'd highly encourage you to start exploring your strengths and live your life by aligning more towards your strengths.

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🔹 I recently discussed this strengths-based approach with Brandon Miller in Tech Lead Journal podcast episode 109.

Check out the episode to learn more about how to apply it to personal life, work, and parenting.
https://techleadjournal.dev/episodes/109

🔹 I recently did another assessment and here are my latest top 5 CliftonStrengths: learner, achiever, relator, intellection, input.

🔹 If you haven't done the assessment before, you can reach out to Brandon, referring to the podcast episode to get a free assessment discount code.

🔹 And if you have done the assessment before, share your top 5 strengths below.

When something doesn't work for you the first time, it doesn't mean that it will never work for you.

I didn't use to enjoy listening to podcast before I became a podcaster.
I would either fall asleep, lose my focus, or get distracted after a few mins of listening.
The way I consumed it was like how I read a book or learn an online course, which was to dedicate a focus time sitting and listening to it.

And I thought listening podcast was just not for me.

However, it started to change when I gave it another try, but in a different context.
I listened to it while doing my evening walk routine.
And I could finish listening to a full episode and found it very exciting.

Since then, I have been regularly listening to many podcast episodes while doing subconscious activities, e.g. exercising and commuting.

I find podcasts as my favorite source of learning and inspiration, which then made me decide to start my own podcast.

Lesson learned:
When something doesn't work for you, do not quickly assume that it is not meant for you.
Instead, try to find different ways of exploring it.
And one way is to change the environment in which you explore.

You'll never know what doesn't work for you today could actually become your new superpower.
And who knows, it could even become your new identity, similar to my experience with podcast.

PS: If you have a similar story like mine, I'd love to hear your story too.

“How could you manage to consistently produce podcast episodes weekly, despite working full time in a demanding role?”

This is a question I got often asked when people know me producing 100 podcast episodes weekly in the past 2 years.

As much as I would like to say that I've found the best productivity hacks, in truth, there's only one thing that actually matters.
And it is about how I choose to spend my time.

Time is the great equalizer for all of us.
We all have the same 24 hours every day.

Many of us regret of not having the time to do something we always want to do.
However, the hard truth is that we choose to do many other things apart from what we set out to do.

How we choose to spend our time shows how we prioritize.
And what gets prioritized gets done.

To prioritize better, we need to have both clarity and focus.
- Clarity on understanding our WHYs based on what we value.
- Focus on saying NO to a hundred other things we could do.

Clarity and focus on choosing the things that matter to us, i.e. our mission.

For example, since I started my podcast journey, I choose to spend very little time doing the things I used to love doing:
- Watching TV series
- Following news and social media
- Reading physical books
- Doing online trainings
- Researching the next productivity hacks :)

Instead, I choose to spend my time doing my podcasting mission following the 4Cs framework.
And the rest is just pure work rate.
Consistently showing up week in week out, even when I don't feel like doing it.

In summary, there is nothing special about me being able to produce the results that I did.
If you want to produce similar results I've done, it all comes down to how you set your priorities right.

And realize that how we spend our time is actually how we spend our life.

Have you wondered how I apply the 4Cs framework for my personal growth?

Here is how I apply 4Cs through podcasting and by publishing 100+ episodes in the past 2 years.

Consume
- I read my guest's books, blogs, and resources before every podcast interview.
- I learn from various podcasts and books to improve myself as a content creator.
- I follow thought leaders on social media as my "mentors" to learn from their content creation journey.

Create
- I record and publish my interview on the Tech Lead Journal podcast.
- I publish a comprehensive show notes from each episode on techleadjournal.dev.
- I post insightful quotes from each episode on social media to inspire others.

Connect
- I connect with various tech leaders and interview them for my podcast.
- I create TLJ communities on social media and interact with them online. I even meet some of them in person!
- I collaborate with other podcasters, sponsors, and partners to elevate each other.

Consistency
- I publish a new podcast episode every week.
- I publish social media post about the episode (e.g. insightful quote) every day.


By following this framework, I have been growing tremendously and finding many new opportunities in the past 2 years, creating a flywheel effect every time I publish a new episode.

I hope this provides a practical example of how to apply 4Cs and inspires some of you to start your own journey!

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Note: This post is a bonus addition to the 4Cs series, my personal growth framework.

Follow me to get my next updates on personal growth & leadership.

One major struggle for many of us from achieving the results we want is the lack of consistency in execution.

All of us get inspired all the time.
But only a few consistently follow through our inspirations.

In the past couple of years, I learned that consistency is the biggest leverage for growth and results.

It is the ONE major differentiator between the good and the great, the amateur and the professional.

Few reasons:

- There is no shortcut to the real growth. To get really good at something, we need the repetition.

Similar to building muscle and fitness, no one gets strong and fit simply by doing a few rounds of exercises.

We need to apply progressive intensity consistently in order to be stronger and fitter.

- Repetition provides a frequent feedback loop for us to learn from.

As the old saying goes, practice makes perfect.

Practice allows us to learn from our previous mistakes and to adjust accordingly.

- Repetition builds momentum.

The more it hurts, the more we should do it often.
And the more we do, the easier it gets.

We need to continue showing up and do the craft, even when we don't feel like doing it.

- Repetition creates a new identity. We become what we do consistently.

Our mind is hard-wired towards familiarity.

By doing the repetition, we become more familiar with the process.

The more familiar it gets, the more we believe it is part of our identity.

In summary, there is no shortcut to growth.
I believe consistency is the major currency for success.

In order to grow and achieve great results, we need to take more actions and execute consistently.

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Note: This post is the last part of the series on 4Cs, my personal growth framework.

The best way to create is not to create for our own personal needs, but to create in the service of others and to make new connections because of that.

For example:

- Publishing contents on the Internet
- Teaching & sharing knowledge with others
- Co-creating & collaborating with other creators
- Being an active contributor to communities
- Creating communities with like-minded people

Few reasons:

1. When you publish and share your work with others, you gather valuable feedback.

You invite people to exchange ideas and allow them to strengthen the quality of your thought process.

As a result, you learn from others, too.

2. By putting yourself out there and giving value to others, you create your own opportunities.

More doors will naturally open and some could be opportunities you have never imagined before.

Some opportunities may even come to you without you seeking for them.


3. When you create in the service of others, you are creating an impact.

Your impact will inspire others, and importantly, it will inspire you back.

It creates a flywheel effect to serve a bigger cause and to create a bigger impact.


4. Nobody succeeds alone.

We are social creatures, and we thrive through collaboration with others.

And we become happier when connected to others.

In summary, stop accumulating and hoarding our knowledge.

Instead, we need to create more in the service of others.

Creating new connections and opportunities to serve a bigger impact.


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In my next post, I will write about Consistency, on why it is the biggest leverage for growth.

Follow me to get my next updates.

Note: This post is a part of the series on 4Cs, my personal growth framework.