I’ve spent years working alongside some very talented software engineers—the kind who squash bugs buried deep in codebases nobody wants to touch.
What always struck me wasn’t just their technical skill.
It was their relationship with being wrong.
Show an engineer a bug, and they don’t get defensive. They get curious.
“Interesting. Let me trace that back.”
They’ll tear apart their own work to find where the assumption broke down.
Because in engineering, reality has the final vote.
A bridge either holds or it doesn’t.
Code either compiles or it throws an error.
You can’t argue with a failed load test or negotiate with physics.
This mindset—this willingness to be proven wrong because being wrong means you’re about to learn something—is one of the most valuable things I’ve learned from the engineers I’ve worked with.
And it’s exactly what most of us abandon the moment we step outside technical work.
We often treat our marketing, our creative work, even our business models as matters of preference instead of assertions to be tested.
We defend our choices instead of examining them.
So this week’s Red Thread is a love letter to engineering thinking.
Not the technical parts—the mindset.
The part that says: “Show me. Prove it.”
“What would it take for me to change my mind?”
Because whether you’re building software, leading a team, or creating a business, that question changes everything.
You can read the full newsletter here.
~ Jaime
