Ep 14 – Being Mindful Of Your Life with Brent Holley, Senior Finance Manager, Data Center Construction, AWS
Finance Guys In Tech
English - February 14, 2020 00:00 - 43 minutes - 29.6 MB - ★★★★★ - 7 ratingsCareers Business Technology amazon amazon web services finance tech careers cloud computing mba inspiration business school creativity Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
“Be conscious of your tradeoffs…if you’re perpetually doing things not aligned with your priorities, that’s a recipe for unhappiness.”
Today Sid and I got to sit down with our friend Brent Holley, Senior Finance Manager of Data Center Construction here at AWS Infrastructure.
This episode was like a fireside chat (a campfire actually). Brent talked to us about adding value as a finance partner and shared his philosophy on being conscious about how you spend your days. He told us a about a recent vacation too – no, not Cabo. Try, getting dropped off in the middle of the Alaska wilderness by a plane.
We left much wiser than we came! This is truly valuable. Please enjoy!
2:40 | Getting dropped off in the wilderness above the Arctic Circle
5:40 | a chemist business guy makes his way to Malaysia
8:30 | Life in Malaysia
12:20 | Returning to the states, MBA at Texas A&M, a good fit for finance
13:30 | What does finance do? Act like a business person with a broad perspective.
16:00 | Brent’s Leadership philosophy – empowerment
20:45 | First years at Amazon (2016). Learning & scaling the finance team for AWS
23:15 | 4 years experience in the role – investing in understanding the business, thoughts on rotating versus staying in one position: what do you want out of your career?
25:30 | Long term view of career & post-career life – being deliberate about how you want to spend your time
29:00 | Making transitions – you’ll figure it out
31:00 | Career philosophy – work from the end backwards, think about the future. Don’t kid yourself, you can only be in one place at a time, prioritize and be conscious of your tradeoffs.
34:55 | Focusing on ‘what’s next’, not spending time dwelling
36:30 | A culture of humility at Amazon is really useful
37:50 | Consuming content outside of work – Altering between Intense & Goofy. History (A cool recent book, “Empire of the Summer Moon”), sports, funny movies (‘Shawn Of The Dead’, ‘Hot Fuzz’)
41:30 | Big groups vs. small? Small.
Brent on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brent-holley-357692/
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Theme music by Good Baby. ‘Rose Colored’ (instrumental version). You can peep the full music video here: https://www.goodbaby.band/musicvideos