What I Learned From Playing "Spelling Bee" – Dan Moore!

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I’ve been playing Spelling Bee for a few weeks now, where you guess words from a selection of seven letters, one of which must be used in every word. The letters are arranged in a hexagon with that primary letter in the middle. If you want to learn more about how to play it, follow the directions here:

For information on how to play, select the More in the top right corner of the game and then select How to Play .

It has surprised me. I have learned that "oleo" is a word and that you can tell how hard the puzzle will be by looking at the rankings.

But what I really wanted to talk about is the lessons I’ve learned from playing and how they can apply to your career.

Switch Things Up

There is a button that can flip around the arrangement of the letters around the hexagon. The primary letter remains in the center, but all the others are moved around randomly. When I first saw that, I thought it was silly. But I found it to be super useful over time. When I’m looking for words, I get stuck. Pressing the rotate button reveals new words because it changes my perspective. Just moving the letters around makes new words visible to me.

In real life, when you feel stuck, you can sometimes make progress by flipping things around. I’ve done this in my career.

I quit my first head of engineering job where I was trusted by the CEO, had loads of autonomy and worked on software that helped people find homes they loved. After, I enjoyed the freedom of lucrative contracting and learned a ton about other tech stacks.

I took a quarter life sabbatical when I was around 25. After months of leisure, I learned that, yes, I really did like reading about parsing XML.

I left the food-focused startup I’d co-founded (an area I’d dreamed of working in) which had just raised a seed round. Departing led me to an entirely different area of the software industry that I love and never would have explored at the startup.

There are of course other ways to gain new perspective than quitting jobs: changing routines, asking friends for advice, or even taking a new route to work. Before you give up on something, flip the script and see what the results are.

Just Try Something

Sometimes you just have to try things. I will often put in words that I know are not valid, just mashing different combinations of vowels and consonants, like "manu". This is not an English word, nor will it ever be. Spelling Bee also disallows proper nouns and three-letter words, but I’ve definitely put in plenty of those. Even though these are all invalid moves, they are movement. This helps me not feel like an idiot just staring at a phone screen. Even better, it can trigger other ideas. It’s a lot easier for me to visualize a full English word when I see part of it, rather than staring at those seven letters in a hexagon. After typing "manu" I found "manual".

There is value in just taking a step forward if you aren’t sure what to do. If you have some kind of goal in mind but aren’t sure how to get there, do something. Take a step towards that goal.

If you are trying to get a job in the software industry, especially right now, it can feel overwhelming: so hard, so difficult. But you can take concrete steps towards that goal that are smaller. These steps, when you’re looking at them, may not make 100% sense and won’t make you money. But they are helping you on the path towards employment, and will lead to other steps to take that will get you closer to the goal.

I’ve written before about how attending meetups is a fantastic career move. Doing so doesn’t have an immediate payoff, which is super frustrating when you’re trying to find a job, when your bills are piling up and your savings are draining. It’s super hard to think "I’m going to take an hour out of my day and go hang out with geeks talking about ruby". But joining a meetup can open up other doors.

Just like typing "manu" reveals "manual," going to a meetup repeatedly can help you get a reputation in a community, offer contract opportunities, let you understand the market, and may help you get a job. This is just one example. There are a thousand different steps you can take towards your goal. It can be hard to determine which step is the right step, but the lucky thing is that there are many right steps. You just have to start.

Double Down On What Works

I like to double down when I have a pattern that is working. In Spelling Bee, if you see a pattern of "ull" being a portion of a word, you should double down on that while you’re thinking about it, and make all of the "ull" words you can. Same with suffixes like "ed" or "ing". When I see that, I know that I can spell both the initial word like "mint" and get more points by adding "ing" to get "minting".

Even though I have 100% been guilty of a grass-is-greener outlook in my life, where I think, "oh, I’m frustrated with this company, or in this position, or with this...