Category: Skill Improvement

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Have a Farmer’s Mindset

“The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.” – Nelson Henderson

Farmer working in a field
Photo by Jed Owen on Unsplash

One of the great success factors is to adopt the mindset of a farmer. This is the idea that some things cannot be rushed. It takes time to grow a crop. We’ve all heard the quote, “You can’t have a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.” Trying to force things to happen more quickly than they should will just leave you frustrated with poor quality results.

If you try to cram all of your learning before the final, you may past the test, but you won’t have learned anything that you will be able to use long term. To learn something well you need to put in consistent effort over time. Consistency beats intensity every time.

This farmer’s mindset is important and to make the consistent effort more effective, it’s critical to be strategic about it. The farmer plants at the proper time of year. The farmer plows up the ground to soften it up before planting. The farmer harvests when the fruit is at the proper ripeness.

In the same way, you need to be strategic about how you learn a new skill. And about how you practice it. There is a time of day when you are most effective. Often it is about two hours after you wake up. There is an online test you can take here to help you determine when your most effective time is. Use that information to be strategic about how you learn. You’ll learn faster and retain more if you do it at your most effective time.

Also plan out the things you want to learn. It’s fine to learn for the sake of learning, but if you have a specific goal in mind, you’ll want to learn the most important things first so that you can quickly get started. Then fill in the details as needed.

Finally, choose the proper learning approach. Will taking an online course be the best use of your time, or would it be better to get a book on the topic so you can pick and choose the topics and order you want to learn? Should you poke around on YouTube looking for a useful tutorial, or would it be better to find a tutor or mentor to streamline your approach?

In the same way that a farmer gets a jump on spring planting to get the most out of his crops, you’ll want to maximize the effectiveness of your learning. What do you want to learn, and how to you plan to do it?

If you’re considering a mentor, I can help with that. As we are halfway through the year, let’s take stock and see how to finish strong. The last two weeks of June I will open my calendar for strategy sessions. If you want to spend an hour with me strategizing your goals, you can schedule some time here.

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Keep Your Big Goals Secret

Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash

“The goal is not to be perfect by the end. The goal is to be better today.” – Simon Sinek

You’ve probably heard that if you want to achieve an important goal you should announce it to the world so that they can hold you to it. This makes sense logically: if I tell others I’m going to run the marathon, and then I don’t do it, I’ll be embarrassed and I’ll lose credibility. That will ensure that I do it!

But in practice, announcing your big goal actually undermines your chances of achieving that goal. Why would that be? By telling others that you’re going to do something big, you feel like you’ve already taken that first step. You can visualize it happening and you can see yourself having already achieved it. Your friends will congratulate you on taking this important step. That all feels great!

Then the hard work starts and you realize it’s not going to be that much fun. You’ve already gotten a good feeling by announcing it. And the achievement is a long way off. And that’s probably not enough to carry you through to the end.

But if you keep your big goal to yourself, and just start doing the work, you haven’t gotten any validation yet. No good feelings. No dopamine. It’s all just heads-down and taking that next important step. Once you’re a few days or weeks down the road, you can look back and see your progress. THEN that great feeling of accomplishment is truly earned! And it pushes you to continue!

I like how Derek Sivers explains it in this TED video. It’s short and clear.

What big goal are you pursuing? (DON’T TELL ME!) 🤪 Have you achieved a goal that you kept secret? What was the result?

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Develop Grit

Photo by Lucas Myers on Unsplash

“What is grit? Grit is refusing to give up. It’s persistence. It’s making your own luck.” – Peter H. Diamandis

Grit is the ability to overcome difficulties in pursuit of an important long term goal. The more grit you have, the more successful you will ultimately be in your life. Grit helps you to weather the storms and keep moving forward.

We admire people who have True Grit. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. But he refused to give up, and eventually became one of the greatest athletes of all time. Thomas Edison was sent home from school for being a slow learner. He went on to become one of the most successful inventors in American history. Helen Keller lost her sight and hearing early in her life, but with the help of Anne Sullivan, she became the first deaf-blind person to earn a bachelor’s degree. She became an influential author, activist, and educator.

What if we don’t have grit? Or what if we do and want to develop it even more? According to psychologists, there are a few habits you can develop, some reframing, and refocusing you can do to develop your “grit muscle.”

First: Clarify your purpose. What kind of person do you want to be? What do you want to achieve? What do you want to be remembered for at the end of your life? Think seriously about this, write it down and refer to it often.

Focus on growth rather than results. Make some small progress every day, and celebrate that. Don’t keep focusing on what you haven’t achieved yet. Keep your eye on the prize and keep moving forward. That’s the sign of a true winner!

Be consistent. Consistency beats intensity. Have a farmer’s mindset. A little bit every day. You can’t grow a field in a week. Consistency is your greatest ally on your road to success.

Face your demons. Don’t give up when you run into challenges. Turn it into a game and figure out how to win. Usually those monsters we fear so much turn out to be tiny lizards.

Develop resilience. We all get knocked down from time to time. Have a plan in place to get back up when it happens to you. Have supportive friends, or keep a journal, or go work out. Do something. Keep moving. The quickest way to overcome a setback is to get back up and start doing something.

Discipline beats motivation. Don’t wait for the muse to inspire you. Do the work. Now. Get started. If you have writers block. Fill a page with a nonstop stream of thoughts. The motion is what matters. Are you noticing a pattern here?

Find a support community. Often times your friends will hold you back. Find friends who will call you forward. If you want to get in shape, go to the gym. If you want to improve your technical chops, join, or form, a group of like-minded developers and help each other grow.

Keep score. Keep track of measurable improvements. How much time did you spend practicing this week? How many pages have you read? How many programs have you written? The scoreboard doesn’t lie. And if you’re honest with yourself in keeping track, you’ll notice when things are not working and be able to make the necessary changes.

For more information, I recommend Angela Duckworth’s book Grit or her TED Talk.

What do you do to develop grit?

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How to Get Unstuck

Photo by Jeremy Bishop: https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-on-blue-hammock-2710128/

“The way to get unstuck is to start down the wrong path, right now.” – Seth Godin

We all get to that point. We’re cruising along, firing on all cylinders, making great progress. Then something happens and we can’t seem to get back on track. Or we reach a level of achievement, but just can’t get to that next level. We’re stuck at a plateau. Now what.

The danger is that we either just stay there and resign ourselves to the fact that we’re about as good as we’re going to get, or, worse, we give up and just stop doing anything. But what is the alternative? How do we start moving forward again?

The most important thing is to start moving. Do something, even if it’s wrong! Motion creates energy. You can’t drive a parked car. You have to be doing something in order to make a change. Just do something different.

Make a change. Any change. Try it backwards. Go for a walk. If you’re stuck on an algorithm, try implementing it in a different language. If you can’t find a bug, change some of the parameters. Or comment out a piece of code in the middle. Just change something randomly that forces you into a different perspective. Go from dark mode to light mode. Write it in Visual Basic. Call functions out of order.

I can’t count how many times a good night’s sleep got me unstuck. This is an idea explored brilliantly by Rich Hickey who calls it “Hammock Driven Development.” Hammock Driven Development – Rich Hickey

The important thing is first to notice that you are stuck. Then do something to step out of it. Take a walk, meditate, take a nap, eat an apple. Just get out of the stuck mindset. Then change your perspective in some way. It doesn’t have to be big, but it has to be different.  If that doesn’t work, shelve it for a while and do something else. When you come back you will likely come up with some great idea you hadn’t considered before.

What do you do to get unstuck?

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Give Yourself Eight Weeks to Learn a New Skill

Photo by Eric Rothermel on Unsplash

“The only skill that will be important in the 21st century is the skill of learning new skills. Everything else will become obsolete over time.” – Peter Drucker

Earlier we discussed how it takes deliberate practice to learn a new skill.

But what does it take to just be competent? What if I just need to know enough of a technology to solve an immediate problem? I don’t need to master it, and I don’t have time to master it anyway.

Many of the world’s leading schools divide up their programs into time spans of 8-12 weeks. US military boot camp lasts between 8 and 13 weeks. When preparing for a mission astronauts spend a few months to a year in training. The Bolshoi Ballet has 3-week and 6-week intensive training sessions. Why is this?

First, it takes time for your brain to establish the neural pathways that it needs so that it can recall the proper actions and processes that you are learning. This is also why Five Minutes a Day Beats an Hour a Week.

Next, complex skills take some dedication and grit to really understand, much less master. You need to have patience and grace with yourself. Allow yourself to work through the periods of ignorance and failure so that you can come out the other side really knowing how to do it. As my father used to tell me, “If it was easy, everybody would do it!“

So when you struggle to learn a new language or framework or technique, that’s OK. Remember, it’s supposed to be hard! The important thing is to accept this truth, allow yourself the freedom to do things wrong – until you can do them right!

What are you struggling to learn today?

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To Learn Better, Teach

Photo by Yan Krukau: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-teacher-and-a-boy-in-front-of-a-computer-8199610/

“People learn the most when teaching others.” – Peter F. Drucker

In his book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, Steven Covey recommends listening to a presentation or reading something as if you were going to teach it to someone else. It will help you to pay closer attention, and take better notes, and ultimately remember more.

This comes from his chapter on “Seek First to Understand, then to be Understood”. The point is to develop influence with others, they have to know that you care about them. “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” So as you look at something from the other person’s perspective, you develop trust and are able to have a greater influence in the world around you.

I have tried to take this approach throughout my career. I try to work with others – even (especially) the new people, as I can always learn something from a new perspective. And sometimes I can share a tip or insight. But I always come away learning at least as much as I teach.

As a speaker, I’ve learned the phrase, “Conference-driven learning.” Someone needs to learn some new technology, so they propose a session on it at an upcoming conference. Now they have a hard deadline to learn the new technology well enough to talk about it and take questions! It’s very effective!

When you have to learn something to use it, you only learn the parts that you need to solve your own problem. That is useful in getting some small task done. But if you have to teach someone else how to use this tool or technology, you need to consider their potential needs and concerns.

It’s like the difference between writing a quick script to solve a problem for yourself, and shipping a product for general release. You don’t care about the bugs in your little tool, and it may leave some things undone. But a released tool has to consider all sorts of edge-cases and security concerns, etc.

In the same way, you just have to know that much more when something is going to be made available for a broader audience.

If you need to learn some new technology, give this a try: Schedule a lunch-and-learn session at your work (or just with a few friends) where you will explain how something works. Estimate how long it will take and schedule it that far in the future. Then start researching and preparing for it. See how quickly – and deeply – you can learn this new technology! Let me know how it works for you!

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Break Bad Habits

Burning cigarette in front of a broken skull.

“The only way to break a bad habit was to replace it with a better habit.” – Jack Nicholson

Do you have a bad habit that you just can’t overcome? Maybe it’s procrastinating, or scrolling social media too much, or gossiping. You know you shouldn’t do it. You know your life would be so much better if you could just stop falling into that bad habit. But… you just keep doing it! It can be discouraging and frustrating.

But what to do?

As our friend Jack says above, you have to replace it with a better habit. But what does that look like? I mean, procrastinating means I’m NOT doing something I should. What do I replace that with? Something else that I WON’T DO?

Ok, smarty pants! What should we do about procrastination? That’s a tough one. Why do we procrastinate? Because we’re afraid of something. Fear of failure, or success, or doing it poorly, or maybe you just don’t want to do the thing! Fair enough. The only way to break a procrastination habit is to take some action. Some small action. Some action so small, that ANYONE could do it. So small that you’ll feel silly NOT doing it. What is the next tiniest step you need to take to do that thing you’ve been putting off? Maybe it’s take out the Turbo Tax CD so you can install it. Maybe it’s to put one small cup in the dishwasher. Maybe it’s to fold one shirt. You can do that!

So make an appointment with yourself to do one small thing every day. One teeny tiny little itty bitty thing. So small you’ll feel silly for NOT doing it! Set an alarm to go off to remind you to do it. Then just do that one little thing. Put one fork in the sink.

Then celebrate! YOU DID IT! You kept that one promise to yourself! You took an important step on the road to personal integrity! Celebrate! Do a dance! Give yourself a high five or a fist pump! Your work here is done! The celebration is the important part. You are telling yourself that you deserve to be celebrated for keeping a promise to yourself. This will motivate you to take action again!

But what about the rest of the dishes or the laundry or the taxes? That wasn’t part of the agreement. If you want, since you’re already there, you can go ahead and do some more. But if you don’t do it all, no big deal. You never said you would. You’re a winner no matter what!

Now set an alarm for tomorrow when you’ll do ANOTHER small thing. Just one. And do it. Then CELEBRATE! Congratulations! You are on the road to replacing a bad, unbreakable habit by replacing it with a new GOOD habit!

What about those other things? Social media or eating too much, or gossiping? What would distract you from doing those things? If it’s a real problem for you, you need to take direct action. You could delete Facebook or Snapchat or whatever app from your phone. That or move it to a folder on the third page so you have to go looking for it. Add some friction. That gives you time to say, “Ah, maybe later.” Then do some small good thing instead. One pushup. One squat. One walk around the room. Pick up a good book.

Replacing a bad habit with a good one, gives you the same good hit of dopamine, and the extra boost of knowing you’re doing something good for yourself! Give it a try and let me know what works for you!

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For Every Hour in Competition, You Need Four Hours of Practice

“If you don’t practice, you don’t deserve to win.” – Andre Agassi

Wait, what? If we’re considering our work time as “competition”, how can I practice four hours for every hour of performance? That’s mathematically impossible!

Hear me out: The four-to-one hour ratio is mainly targeted at sports performances. But consider how much creative and new things you try – just to learn – when you are on the clock. Not much. Your employer isn’t interested in paying for you to “play around.” They want results. Quickly.

Have you ever heard of the guy who got one year of experience ten times – and called it ten years of experience. True experience is trying/learning innovative approaches to a common problem. The only way you’re going to be able to do that is by pairing with a more experienced developer, where you can learn new techniques and ways of thinking, or by studying on your own time. Reading books, working through training courses, going to user group meetings and conferences, watching training videos.

In short, you need to spend time expanding your knowledge and experience on your time away from the office. No one cares more about your career than you do. Not even your mom!

I once asked the most successful developer I know how he learned so much. I’ve spent much of my career reading and taking courses and going to meetings and conferences. But I’m constantly learning amazing new things from him – and he is much younger than I am. His response was very telling: “I don’t know that I’ve ever worked on anything by myself. I always make sure I’m working with someone so I can learn new things.”

All of this is to say that you can get 8 hours of new experience a day by working closely with someone more knowledgeable than you. And you can probably learn at least SOMETHING from everyone! So, maximize your time at the office to learn new things. Then, when you get home, take some time to learn from your other sources. The more you do this, the more effective your work will be.

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Be Hungry

Jaguar stalking prey
Image by Ian Lindsay from Pixabay https://bigcatfacts.net/jaguars-vision-hearing-and-smell/

When you see an elite athlete or performer, you may be tempted to say that they were born talented. And while there may be some natural talent, K. Anders Ericsson has done the scientific studies to prove that talent isn’t enough. In fact, children who think they are smart or talented tend to not take chances to avoid the risk of that label being disproved. It’s those who work hard who end up really shining in the long run. But to be an elite performer, it takes more than that. It takes hunger.

Continue reading “Be Hungry”
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