We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful JJ Wittrock-Roske. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with JJ below.
JJ, we’re so excited for our community to get to know you and learn from your journey and the wisdom you’ve acquired over time. Let’s kick things off with a discussion on self-confidence and self-esteem. How did you develop yours?
I’ll admit my confidence and self-esteem have always been a work in progress. I use self-deprecating humor, I overthink, and constantly doubt myself. What has helped has been pursuing a life of calculated risk-taking.
I’ve found that many of life’s events involve either happy moments to be cherished or terrible ones you can learn from. You ultimately get to choose how you respond to a decision. But being able to block out the over-analysis and doubt just long enough to answer the question “What’s the worst that can happen?” can lead to valuable connections, conversations, and adventures.
Most of the best things in my life; my travels, my relationships, even my work opportunities, have all been born out of tiny pebbles of courage in a mountain of doubt. Being able to look back at the positive outcomes or learning experiences from each decision and see how they’ve gotten me to where I am today gives me more confidence in the decisions I’ll need to make tomorrow.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I’m a former middle school teacher. Luckily, although from a small town, I’ve been fortunate enough to teach in three countries and travel to five continents, and I’ve met some amazing people who have opened my eyes to a world of possibilities. I’m also a lifelong learner and I love puzzles. I enjoy taking things apart, and occasionally putting them back together.
Currently I’m a software engineer in the retail space, working specifically on technical SEO and website performance. In short, my team makes sure people find what they search for online and can get there as fast as possible. Ever visit a website and things feel so laggy you give up and go back to find a different website, or there are ads, images and videos loading late that push things around to the point you feel disoriented or click something you didn’t want to? That’s what we work on fixing.
The problems are challenging, and I will never know all there is to know about it. It was daunting at first, and often still is! But after my first few jobs in college, I learned that I get bored real quick if I feel I’ve reached my ceiling. Unending learning opportunities are what initially drew me towards a career in education, and they are what currently engage me in engineering.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
The first skill that’s helped me is humility. I won’t pretend to have mastered it, my wife will agree. But the willingness to ask questions, to ask for help, and understand that I won’t know everything has helped me learn a lot more much quicker than if I had pretended I knew everything.
The second skill is to make mistakes. I’m very good at this one. Again, kind of harkening back to the calculated risk-taking. There’s a popular phrase in tech called “fail fast.” Some places define it differently, but basically it’s a mindset to make mistakes early in the process of something, and work out the kinks as early as you can. I guess I’ve just been doing that my whole life.
But that leads to the more important third quality, which is the ability to learn from those mistakes. It might be the over-thinker in me, but maybe like everybody, I’ve said and done some things in my life I wish I hadn’t. I’m still grateful for the cringey moments, though, because they inform and improve the things I say and do today. And all the seemingly serendipitous events in my life can likely be attributed to hard work, a positive outlook, and applying the teachings life has rebounded back at me.
What would you advise – going all in on your strengths or investing on areas where you aren’t as strong to be more well-rounded?
I think focusing on your strengths will get you further quickly, but investing effort in areas where you need improving will get you furthest in the long run.
I’ve found focusing on my strengths gets my foot in doors and my face in meetings. Obviously that’s not enough. You then need to continuously convince people you deserve to be there and that will usually require being more well-rounded.
When I first started my journey into engineering, I hardly knew the first thing about software, coding, or even tech. Now that I maybe know my third thing about it, I know I am farther in my journey than I would be if I hadn’t first played to my strengths.
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