The Long Game of Professional Growth
Last week, I passed the two-year mark of publishing this newsletter every week.
I’ve written more than 100 issues. I’m sharing that not because the number itself matters, but because it represents a habit that changed how I think and communicate about my work.
When I started writing MoreThanCoders, I wasn’t trying to build momentum or grow something quickly. I wanted a consistent way to work through ideas about professionalism, communication, and growth in technology roles. Writing became a forcing function. It required me to slow down, decide what I actually believed, and explain it clearly enough that someone else could follow the reasoning.
Over time, that repetition did what repetition tends to do. My thinking became more structured. The way I talk about growing beyond technical execution sharpened because I kept revisiting the same ideas and working them through.
That experience reinforced something I’ve seen repeatedly in my career:
Skill growth comes from sustained practice, not intensity or talent, and most of the practices that matter look boring while they’re working.
Why Consistency Beats Talent & Intensity
Consistency is where a lot of professional growth breaks down.
The skills most technology professionals want to improve rarely provide fast or obvious feedback. You can spend months working on how you communicate, run meetings, or make decisions, and still feel like nothing is changing. From the outside, your work looks the same. You still have the same role, the same title, the same responsibilities.
That gap between effort and visible progress makes it easy to abandon the practice. Not because it isn’t working, but because it doesn’t feel like it is. We’re used to improvements in technical work showing up quickly. Code compiles or it doesn’t. Tests pass, or they fail. Professional skills don’t behave that way.
Instead, they compound quietly. People start to trust your updates. Conversations get shorter because you’re clearer. Decisions move faster because your reasoning is easier to follow. None of those things shows up all at once, and they’re hard to attribute to any single action. You usually only notice them in hindsight, when someone treats you differently than they used to.
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Where can AI save you time?
My friends at Big Creek Growth put together a quick survey to spot the repetitive work you can hand off to automation.
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Where Value Shines Through
Looking back over the last two years, the most valuable articles I wrote were the ones that focused on how our actions affect the people around us, what it really means to finish something, and how we decide where our effort belongs.
The articles below capture that line of thinking and the kinds of skills that tend to compound over time.
Are You Creating Lift or Drag?
I chose this because it shifts attention from individual output to collective impact. Over time, how you affect the people around you matters more than how much you personally produce.
When Is Your Work Actually Complete?
This one captures an important change in maturity. Finishing tasks is visible. Taking responsibility for outcomes develops more slowly and compounds trust.
How to Avoid Moving the Mess
I picked this because staying busy is easy. Improving systems is harder. The difference often comes down to whether you’re willing to slow down and solve the right problem.
How to Pick Work That Moves the Needle
This article reflects how judgment about where to invest effort often outweighs execution speed. That judgment is built through repetition, not instinct.
Looking back, none of these ideas felt especially profound while they were forming. They emerged slowly, through repetition and minor refinements, as most skills do. The articles are just artifacts of that process.
If there’s anything worth taking from the two-year mark, it’s that progress in this kind of work rarely announces itself. It shows up quietly, in how people experience working with you, in how clearly you think, and in the judgment you build over time. Those changes are easy to miss while they’re happening, but they tend to compound whether you’re paying attention to them or not.
Thanks for reading, and for sticking with this long enough for the patterns to take shape.