William Viana

  • Powerful questions #1

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    William
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    How am I complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?

    Jerry Colonna–Reboot co-founder, coach & facilitator.

    The critical part here is being complicit and not responsible. Another way to answer this question is to consider how those conditions benefit you.

    Jerry follows up presenting three more questions:

    What am I not saying that needs to be said?

    What am I saying that is not being heard?

    What is being said that I’m not hearing?

    Jerry Colonna

    I first heard these questions on an AMA about influencing without authority, which Jerry Colonna did at Automattic over Zoom. I found those questions incredibly powerful, and I’ve been obsessing about them. That obsession took me to find out more about Jerry’s work, and I ended up buying his books and listening to two interviews on the Tim Ferris podcast:

    The first one has become one of my all-time favorites on the Tim Ferris podcast. And I realize it is probably because of perfect timing. I happened to be going through stressful events in life, and the material resonated at a deeply personal level.

    I can’t recommend the books yet–I’m still waiting for them to arrive–but I’ll try to write about my impressions once I do:

  • Unveiling My Blogging Journey: Embracing New Beginnings and Exploring the Influence of AI

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    William
    in

    Starting a new blog has been on my to-do list since I joined Automattic–the company behind WordPress.com, Tumblr, Jetpack, and many other products–almost four years ago. To push me to finally doing it, I decided to include it in my New Year’s resolution for 2024. Then, I saw Matt’s Birthday Gift post asking readers to write a blog post before January 10th, his birthday, and a link to his post. Matt Mullenweg is Automattic’s CEO, so what better way to accelerate my 2024 blogging goal? On the other hand, research says that publicly announcing your goals makes you less likely to achieve them–maybe keeping this blog hidden from my close friends might help balance things out with my goals 🤷‍♂️. We’ll see.

    In this blog, I’ll try to find a style, my own voice, and a recurring theme. I’ll share my thoughts and experiences on leadership in a distributed tech company, but I might explore other, perhaps tangentially related, topics as I go–like AI-related news or books I’m reading. 

    Speaking of books I’m reading, AI, and topics I’d like to explore, I’d like to close this post with an excerpt and a reflection. I started reading On Writing Well, which in the Introduction section of the 30th Anniversary Edition has a paragraph that got me thinking:

    That condition was first revealed with the arrival of the word processor. Two opposite things happened: good writers got better and bad writers got worse. Good writers welcomed the gift of being able to fuss endlessly with their sentences-pruning and revising and reshaping without the drudgery of retyping. Bad writers became even more verbose because writing was suddenly so easy and their sentences looked so pretty on the screen. How could such beautiful sentences not be perfect?

    On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition – Zinsser, William

    Are AI assistants like ChatGPT, the new word processor? As the lead of the team in charge of the Jetpack AI Assistant product, I feel this is an important question to have in mind, and I wonder how we can create a tool that not only makes it easier to create content but also helps bad writers become better ones.