Developing Skills - No. #1
Developing Skills - No. #1
Be Curious To Be Successful
Welcome!
Welcome to the first issue of Developing Skills!
This week we have:
Tip of the week: Be Curious To Be Successful
Book of the week: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
Finds of the week: Improve your CV, value writing and negotiate your salary.
Tip of The Week: Be Curious To Be Successful
Success is a byproduct of learning, and learning is a byproduct of curiosity.
Ultimately, if you are curious about something, you will be successful at it, and the more curious you are about it, the more successful you will be at it.
Here are 9 ways to be stimulate your curiosity and accelerate your learning:
Ask great questions - questions that are open and that seek to understand the why. Be sure to ask in a friendly conversational tone, don’t make it an interrogation.
Follow your passion and interests - whatever you are interested in you’ll enjoy learning about.
Teach and be taught - being open to learning from everyone you meet will open up the ideas and concepts you are exposed to. Teaching others will help you internalise the knowledge and ensure you really understand it. Read about the Feynman Technique to dig into this more.
Make connections - there are patterns everywhere in our lives, making the connection between things can help you quickly learn a new topic or spot a way to apply a technique from one field to another.
Step away from it all - go outside, have a walk, get a coffee or read something unrelated. Often that time and some fresh air/exercise can give your subconscious mind a chance to make connections and formulate interesting questions for when you return to the subject.
Get uncomfortable - push yourself out of your comfort zone. Ask yourself, honestly, what’s the worst that can happen? This will expand your comfort zone and lead to you learning more.
Try to consider issues from all sides. If you have a strong belief, challenge it. Ask yourself, how would I prove I am wrong, then work to make the case. You’ll either strengthen the validity of your current view or convince yourself you were wrong - either way you’ve learned. You’ll also learn to see things from other people’s point of view and become more empathetic through this.
Change your environment. If you live it a city, go to the countryside and vice versa. If you work in an office try working remotely or in a coffee shop or shared working space. Talk to different people from your usual social circle. You don’t know what you don’t know and you don’t know who you’ll meet or what experience you’ll have that might change your views.
Make time for self-reflection. Every som often find some quiet time to reflect on your day or week and consider what you’ve learned, what went well and what didn’t. Look for learning opportunities and consider what you can do to improve your life.
Want to Level Up Your Coding Skills?
I believe the best way to do this is to build real-world applications. For that reason I write a weekly newsletter sharing Coding Challenges.
The coding challenges are all designed to walk you through the process of creating an application and to be less than 8 hours work.
Each challenge has you focus on building real-world software rather than toy applications or algorithms and data structures.
You can tackle the challenges in the programming language of your choice. You can even tackle them in several different languages if you prefer.
You can see the challenges and subscribe on the Coding Challenges SubStack.
Book of The Week: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck is focuses on living a better life by caring about fewer things - or as the title puts it, not giving a f*ck.
The key idea theme is there are a lot of things to fill modern life. Therefore many of us experience dissatisfaction because we concentrate on the wrong or too many things.
We’ll be happier and more productive if we find out what is important to us and focus on that, and stop giving a fuck about anything else.
Easier said than done - at least for me. So that’s why I read this book. For some insights and techniques to help me stop caring about things that aren’t worth it and focus on the things that are.
Here are my three key learnings:
Life is a struggle, so find the struggle that matters to you. As a developer you can apply this to focusing on the key areas of your work that matter and letting go of little issues, like formatting.
Pick your values carefully, good values won’t be money, material possessions or happiness. Instead they will be things you can control, like honesty and caring for others. As a developer this might translate to being a good mentor to less experienced developers.
Positive change can only happen when we stop being a victim and take responsibility for our lives. For us as developers that usually means taking ownership of the challenges our team faces and resolving to be part of the solution instead of blaming others for the situation.