How do you apply engineering discipline to the thing that matters most: yourself? We’re software engineers or systems engineers or network engineers. We have learned lessons the hard way. These lessons boil down to immutable laws; some things work and some things don’t.
Successful engineers apply these hard-won lessons to their professions. We use the same techniques day in and day out to create systems to make other people’s lives better. But few of us apply the same kind of systems thinking to our own lives, careers, jobs, or organizations.
Let’s start thinking of our daily lives and work as a system, just like a system we would create or maintain in our professions. How would you approach your life differently if it were a system you were creating for a client? How do you define success? How do you measure it? How do internal and external quality differ?