Lessons from my failures

Abstract

This paper highlights mistakes that have helped shape my professional career. I use examples of personal, as well as technical failures to explore some guiding principles that I have found useful when navigating my professional journey. It is only the rarest of technical gurus who can afford to ignore the limitations of their personal interactions: to be impactful, the rest of us need to give as much, if not more, attention to soft skills than we do to our technical ones. I thus discuss the qualities that I think are needed to leverage technical strengths, and I outline some professional behaviours that I think are required to be effective. I also outline some high level technical themes tha..