> Organizing and iteration on thoughts is not trivial or easy, but it is very important!

Two of the silliest things that helped me in my career:

* I worked at fast food restaurants in high school. This instills a near pavlovian response to client requests; if at the age of sixteen you can deal with someone who's mad because there isn't enough cheese on their pizza, it goes a long way in the real world.

* My first I.T. job was in an office where the vast majority of the people who worked there had never used a computer at all. Just to stay employed, I had to resist the urge to explain things in a complex way. When I'm trying to sell an idea to a group of people, I do my best NOT to ignore the people in the room who may not understand that idea well. I think that engineers often have a bad habit of getting into engineering arguments with management in the room, where they take things to a level of complexity where management may not understand what's being talked about. Bringing things back down a few levels goes a long way towards getting management to sign off IMHO. Unfortunately, it's a double edged sword, and it can fall flat when management is especially well informed. Classic information asymmetry.