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Reading notes of So Good that They can't Ignor

2017-01-22

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Basically, it’s an interesting book to explore one question in career path, is it correct to pursuit the passion of work? At this freedom oriented era, the proposition of this kind of question is very interesting.

From my viewpoint, the topics and opinions in this book are not something new, it even can be considered as old stuff. But what amazons me is how the author organize these things in some new ways. And it does give us deeper understanding about those materials.

The whole book is devoted to expand author’s argument by 4 rules. But in my opinion, I’d like to summarize them in 3 aspects:
    1. You need to pursuit the work that makes impact on the world, and its value is accepted by people.
    2. In order to take this kind of job, you need to use deliberate practice to achieve this goal.
    3. In order to know if your work is what people are willing to buy, you need to use little bet to test and make experiments.

At first sight, these statements are harsh, especially the 1st item. Why should I have to pursuit the kind of work you said? Why can’t I just follow my heart and do what I want to do? For this part, I have the same doubts and arguments firstly. However, I’d persuade myself based on author’s interpretations. So, I’d like to talk about my own understanding.

For the slogan that do whatever you want, it’s attractive but easy to be misunderstood. It’s so simple that you may ignore lots of detailed issues in this slogan. It contains more information than your impression on it. The first thing I want to point out is, for this slogan, if you don’t have any further implied message, that’s okay and fine. In fact, this’s the definition of hobby:

the thing you just want to do whatever the opinions of the world are.

But mostly, we’re not. When we talk about do whatever you want, we’d include more hidden information in it. We’d like to automatically imply in whatever you want to do is:
    - it can provide wealth, or at least I can live on that
    - and it can bring the fame or respect from others.

But from here, once we consider these implied things seriously, the so-called whatever we want to do will be different. Because, the thing that matches above two properties is totally irrelevant to what you want. And why? Very simple: this world just does not care your opinion.

If we want the implied thing, we have to care: if the field has great impact to this world? Is it having market, i.e. is it compelling people to pay for what you do?

These things are so valuable that you need your career capital to exchange, which leads you to the concept of deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice is not something. It gets its own popularity by Malcolm Gladwell’s book, which introduces the concept of 10,000 hours practice accumulation. But what’s deliberate practice? Its definition contains two aspects:
    - You need to do the thing that beyond your comfortable zone, which means you need to devote only to your weak points instead of what you’ve mastered.
    - You need to get feedback immediately.

These two items are seemed normal. But once we give more considerations on that, you’d find the horrible part of it, especially the item 1. If you do need to do deliberate practice, item 1 ensures that you should be staying outside the comfortable zone. The direct corollary is if you do feel happy and confident about your stage, you’re probably not on the deliberate practice way. Is it reasonable? Of course! The whole deliberate practice is pursuing the high efficiency of improvement, which means you need to keep correcting your weak points and hard shaped pattern. It requires your painful efforts. The more intense you’re focusing on those correction, the more you’d get. It’s reasonable. However, it also means, if this day, e.g. today, you’d be happy and hopeful about tomorrow, you’d probably not get enough improvements.

And, if you want to embrace the price of deliberate practice, you need to accompany with the frustrations. Because only when you feel frustration and desperation about your time, you’re knowing that you are definitely on the deliberate practice way. Most of people would upset to get frustration and they’d think they must do something wrong to take the price of frustration. But for deliberated guy, the frustration is what he want. Because this is the only evidence to show he is on the right way!

And for the concept of quick feedback? It’s connected with the 3rd main opinion of this book.

In order to make huge impact and get money, you need to know the feedback of market. Just as you need to know how good you performance is when you’re doing deliberate practice. The point here is, you need to know if you’re on the correct direction. But how? Can I predict the market? Or do I just need to be confident with myself that the efforts deserved the reward? No. Nobody can predict the future, and we all are the slavers of history. So, if we can’t predict, but how about know the history earlier? Yeah, that’s a good workaround, and it introduces the concept of doing tiny experiment. You need to keep doing tiny bets experiment to check if you’re on the right direction. And how? By building and implementing your product, by showing your work to your customer, by writing your opinions to your readers, wrap up by your down to earth practice! If you’re able to win the market, you can recognize it by some traits like: it should be so remarkable that people’re compelled to transmit your contributions and willing to pay for you.

Finally, the corresponding personal courses based on this book are:
    - You need to be ready to jump into the pool of frustrations. If you do feel okay, it means you’re probably not on the correct way. You need to pick up your weak points to pursuit.
    - Get feedback: first implement and execute you work, the precondition, and then publish it to see if it’s correct, and if it can trigger people’s interest and willing to pay.
    - You need to get feedback as soon as possible, which is done by your implementation, replicate of your ideas.
    - You need to check the market orientation, the willing people want to pay for you to test your ideas by little bets and execution of your projects.

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GeekArtT

Reading Notes of Soft Skills

2017-01-22

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This book is dedicated to software engineers for their career path. But I think it’s also helpful for anyone to make their thoughts straight. Its perspective provides some interesting viewpoint, plus tiny skills to improve our daily life.

Unlike the common book, there’re so many chapters, in total 71 chapters! From the author’s explanation in the book, this is supposed to reduce the burden of reading book for readers. Most people will read books based on chapter partition. As a chapter is usually long, it’s frustrated for readers to finish one session at one time, which leads them to give up. So, this book is divided by multiple acceptable read chapters to make your reading journey manageable. Also, those multiple chapters make the writing journey much easier for author. In fact, that’s one of the topics discussed in book about how to manage complex task and make you productive.

The whole book divided in 7 sections, 71 chapters, they’re:
1. Career
2. Marketing Yourself
3. Learning
4. Productivity
5. Finance
6. Fitness
7. Spirit

For me, the most valuable parts are the first 4 sections, which I’ll give my understanding share.

**Section 1, career**

In this section, it mainly teaches you to treat your career in another perspective, the business concept model. Although for your employer, you’re just an employee to do dirty work without further bargain. But for yourself in macro scope, you’re always at a stage to do business. Mostly, you’re just the one to sell your own product, service to do dirty work, to your primary customer: your boss. Why is this concept model better? Because it can make you see the bigger picture and feel more freedom embedded in yourself. More important, from this business viewpoint, you’d plan better for your career. You’ll be motivated to improve your ability as much as possible. Because as a businessman, the product, here is your ability to do work, is the highest priority in your whole business. You may also pick up some ignored aspects that you’re supposed to care, marketing yourself. It’s easy to see the value to market a product in business, but it’s much harder to understand the necessity to market yourself. Why? Just you don’t treat your own career as serious business. Now, you should.

**Section 2, market yourself**

Just as the product need marketing technique, you also need to do some marketing to make your own future easier. The typical puzzle that you have to figure out is how to make your next interview easier? No matter how much experience you got, you’d still doubt yourself and want to refuse the interview process internally. The best situation you can image is, the employer of a wonderful company will come to provide you an offer without any interview, plus you can bargain your salary higher than provided. Sounds like you’re in the career heaven. Does anyone achieve that? Of course, yes. But how to make it possible?

The answer is make yourself very famous! How to be famous? Okay, that’s the problem of your own brand marketing. You need to be your own PR of me.Inc. You need to express your special opinion, and display how hard and deep you’re thinking in common life. In any interview, its period is too short to know you fully. You need to express your specialty in one way.

Concretely, the economic way to market yourself is write blog, record teaching video, take part in conference and make the presentation. All those activities make you devote your contributions to others, especially the community. In our daily life, people are always too busy to listen to you carefully, unless you can provide the solution for their trouble, unless you’re at the focus position of a formal meeting they take part in. Blogs and videos are belong to the first category. In those platform, you take the full charge. You have enough time to explain your ideas and shape your thinking. You can produce the most qualified thing for your community to prove your value. For the presentation you’re making, it’s always a chance to declare your authority and let others focus on you intensely. All those opportunities are definitely the efficient, economic way to market yourself, make your own brand famous.

In my opinion, marketing yourself is another form of monopoly. No matter if you’re the best expert in your field, as you’re the limited countable person that others know, you’re almost the only choice for your potential employers. You’re using others ignoring about marketing to build yourself a strong monopoly wall! How fantastic it is!

**Section 3, learning**

As a veteran of learning, I don’t believe I can get benefits from this section. But, I’m wrong. In reality, I got lots of benefits from this section. The most important part for me is the methodology of entering one new field: learn enough to start playing, but not too much to digest.

Lots of practitioners like to declare one concept: learn from practice. In general, it’s right. But personally, I don’t agree with much. Because I do learn a lot from books and my own research. I think your ignorance will delay your understanding even if you’re in the practice. On the other hand, I do get confused when I read a lot of books. For a long period of reading, I just feel dizzy and disgusting. Because of this bad feeling, I’ve given up lots of deeper exploration. I always struggled in those two situations, and this dilemma makes my life messed. Thanks to this section, my puzzle got solved.

From my understanding, there 3 stages of learning among reading materials and practice: read, practice and read. In the first stage, you need to do the basic homework to let you know the big picture of your exploring field. You need to know some basic concepts, purpose and partitions of your problem. This will give you the scope of your exploration. How much is it enough? When your domain knowledge is enough to enable you try some solutions or plans in your field, it means you’ve finished the first stage.

The degree between first and second stage is very tricky, especially the over knowledge situation. It’s a trap to make you keep absorbing knowledge to give you a fake impression of your improvement. Just like learn to swim or ride a bike, no matter how much theoretical knowledge you’ve gotten, e.g. physics, fluid mechanics etc., you can’t learn it unless you jump into the water or ride on your bike. So does learn any other field. The defect of keep reading is you can’t distinguish which part is really important, useful for practice. You can’t know understand why the knowledge should exist, and what problem it’s solving quietly. Also, you can’t judge which direction is correct when you face lots of discussions and literature to deal with one single topic. Those guidance or intuition can only be built in your practice. That’s how important to jump into play stage.

Only acquiring the experience of practice is not enough. Those intuitions are after not the systematic understanding. When you get some intuitions and know the real problem in one new field, it’s time to go back your reading to absorb the knowledge as much as possible. At this stage, your doubt will be little based on your practice experience. You need to learn materials systematically according to your formal reading. You also can treat this stage as building things from your predecessors.

**Section 4, productivity**

This is an old topic that has been addressed by lots of people. One famous treatise is contributed by Aaron Swartz in his blog “Be more productivity” (I’ll share it in the subsection of this post session.) For this book, the author’s method is: make plans for your routine work, and force it to be your habit to make the process automatically.

For the first part, make plan, it’s the way he used to generate so many chapters in this book. Like any complex task, you may get frustration at your first sight. The only way to eat an elephant is bite by bite. So do any other giant task. The classic engineering skill is always decomposing things to manage complexity. So, even just name the list of your task can hardly reduce your feeling burden of your commitment. Thus make plan is a process of decomposing task. Once it’s divided into small manageable part, you’ll get more motivation and efficiency to get them done.

For the second part, make your routine job into habit, it’s the workhorse to push your progress intrinsically. Especially for long period project, it’s more important to keep persistent tiny work flow instead of a flash giant work flow. Blogging and programming are two typical examples can be shown here. Lots of bloggers will just be weed out by themselves. It’s hard to get reward in a long initial stage of your blog journey. There’re so many quitters that the trick of being a successful blogger is just keep your blog updating persistently. Of course, it’s tedious to stick your writing. It can become one of your headache to construct your posts. Thus, in order to remove this burden, you should make it automatically as habit, e.g. 2 to 3 posts every week. So does the coding stuff. Most engineers know how important to maintain their own side project, but few of them get achievements. Most of side projects are died due to procrastination. One technique you can use is put your side project in GitHub, and keep your green contributions square being fired everyday. It’s the punch card for your coding life. And you do need to make it as your side project habit. According to my own experience, the method that great achievers use to deal with burdens of life is always ignore the bitter feeling of tough life to avoid the distraction.

Generally speaking, I do enjoy reading this book. Recommend for you.

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GeekArtT

简洁到位

2014-02-28

这本书初看不知所云，感觉没什么实质性内容。

后来配上在coursera上的视频，发现书中的见解相当精辟、简洁。

里面对于线程的讲解还有一些并行计算的方式都谈得很到位，作者实属苦口婆心将其原理一一道来。

看书还是讲求一个思维角度的问题。角度不对，则完全不能理解其中深意，觉得句句废话毫无价值。一旦角度正确，发现其是字字切中要害，读来酣畅淋漓，不得不佩服作者的功力。

建议看看Hwu在coursera上的视频再读此书，定会获益匪浅！

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