You and your career.

New experiment 👉 Listen to this email as a podcast

After his magnificent EuroPython talk, “JavaScript for Python developers”, my friend sent me this email. I’ll paraphrase…

I’ve been freelancing awhile, and I like growing in that area, but I feel like I’m investing a lot of time and effort into other people’s businesses, not my own. I want to invest more time into myself, but don’t know how to start.

After my talk at EuroPython, a junior developer walked up to me and said she’d love to read a whole book on the topic and how great it would be if I wrote one. I don’t know if a book is the right way to go about it, but she made me think.

He asked four questions 👇

1. What do you think is a good way to package a topic from a talk into a new format? Does that make sense at all?
2. Now that you’ve written a book, would you write another or would you go about it another way?
3. Where do I begin?
4. Any general comments on what I said?

I’m gonna answer, and I think you can benefit, too. Freelancer, 9-to-5-er, student, or business owner. Doesn’t matter where you’re at right now, this shit’s good to know.

NOTE: This is a cross-post from my newsletter. I publish each email two weeks after it’s sent. Subscribe to get more content like this earlier right in your inbox! 💌

But first, two things!

1. 👆 You should consider preordering React + D3 2018; next preorder exclusive workshop this Sunday.
2. ✌️ If you or your team want to learn the latest tips and tricks for React Dataviz in a hands-on manner, come to my Reactathon full day workshop

Your career progression

Starting out, you’ll be writing code. Shitty code at first, then better. Slow at first, then faster.

You’re going to doubt your decisions, second guess yourself, and spend a lot of time going down rabbit holes that prove unnecessary or turn out to be dead ends. Sometimes you’ll spend days polishing a turd, only to find out your PM (product manager) would be fine making that one small change to the spec that makes the project 2 days quicker to implement.

Oh if only you had asked…

As your skills improve, you’ll spend less time chasing rabbits and getting stuck. You’ll know when to ask for a change in the spec and when to reach for a library. You’ll know what’s worth spending time on, and when a quick prototype would do.

Your delivery will improve, and you’ll ship working code faster. You will spend less time in QA (quality assurance), and your code will be less likely to break in production.

This will reflect in your salary, your hourly rate, or whatever way you charge for your time. More working code faster means you produce more value in 1 hour, so you can charge more.

Step 2 — systems

The next level up often intertwines with the writing code level. Sometimes you don’t even notice you’ve reached it.

It’s when you move beyond writing code to a spec and start solving problems. You can take fuzzier and fuzzier descriptions of what you’re supposed to implement and design a system that solves that problem.

You require less hand-holding. You can take the current codebase and fit an improvement to the system, or some new features, or whatever. Point is you can design a system that solves a business problem from scratch. And you can implement it.

At very large organizations, this often becomes a completely different job. Something called an architect. But few companies are large enough to have those.

Most companies assume their engineers can do this system design part on their own. Or evolve one together as a team.

Your time becomes even more valuable.

You can not only implement new code correctly, you can also reason about the whole system and how components interact. Because you’re more producing more value per hour of work, you can charge more.

Step 3 — force multiplier

And that’s where things stop for most engineers. They can take business requirements and independently design and implement whole systems of components to solve the problem.

You can grind it out at this level making marginal improvements for the rest of your life. You can switch from having a job to being a freelancer.

But fundamentally, you’re selling time. No matter how good you get, building shit takes time. Even the best engineers sometimes lose hours to a typo.

There’s only so much of your time to sell. Stepwise growth becomes impossible.

You have to shift your mindset to become a force multiplier. This is what my friend is going through right now, whether he knows it or not.

So what’s a force multiplier?

A force multiplier is someone who gets disproportionate results for the time and effort invested.

There are a few ways you can do this:

1. You can lead a team. If you become responsible for the engineering output of 5 people, that’s 5x as much code getting done as doing it yourself.
2. You can go into management. Similar to being a team lead, but more emphasis on the touchy-feely stuff. You can make whole departments run smoothly.
3. You can build tools. If you invest 10 hours to save 5 minutes of effort per day for 5 engineers, that’s 11 hours of time saved per month. 130 hours per year. How much is 130 engineering hours worth? (hint: it’s a lot)
4. You can teach or mentor. If you help 10 engineers become more productive faster, how valuable is that? What if it’s hundreds or even thousands? Very valuable.
5. You can focus more on business stuff. How much value is there in improving your company’s sales by 1%? What about 10%?

Examples abound, but they all boil down to your time having a disproportionate impact on the business. Directly or indirectly. Either your employer’s or everyone’s in general.

You are now primed to scale your value exponentially.

Step 4 — monetize based on force multiplier

After you become a force multiplier, then comes the hardest step in your career. Making money based on value, not on time.

How you do that depends on the path you chose.

If you’re teaching and mentoring, you can create a product. Products sell even when you’re sleeping, on vacation, or making the next product. Make once, sell many times.

You’re either selling time or money. Sometimes both.

How many people can you help save time or make more money? The more, the better.

I have spent about 550 hours since 2015 writing and marketing various editions of my React + D3 book. It’s made around $110,000 in revenue over that same period.

That’s about $200 per hour invested. More than I’ve ever made just writing code. Yes, some people make way more than that by writing code.

But you know why?

Because they focus on writing code to impact business.

If you can write code that improves a billion dollar sales pipeline by half a percent, that’s $5,000,000. How much can you charge if you’re adding five million dollars to the bottom line?

A lot … that’s how much.

How do you start

Ultimately, your goal should be to create products, which completely divorces your time and effort from money making. Or you should focus on business impact, which means you can charge a lot of money for things that are easy for you to do.

Starting either path is pretty similar.

1. Identify a need
2. Find people who have that need
3. Talk to them, learn about their problems
4. Create a solution
5. Add a buy button

You can read business book after business book, and they all follow roughly the same outline.

You have to start with a problem or a need in the market. A group of people must be struggling with a thing, be that learning a popular new framework, making more sales, or something else entirely.

You need people who have money and a problem. The more expensive the problem, the better.

Then you gather these people. You learn about them. You talk to them and listen to their problems. You build an audience.

Once you have a solution, you offer it to the audience you’ve built, and you ask them to give you money in exchange for your solution. If you’ve found a legitimate problem, people will give you money to solve it. If you didn’t, they won’t.

It’s that easy.

People exchange money for solutions to problems. Welcome to capitalism.

I know this sounds hard and counterintuitive, but there’s really not much more to it than that. You can’t make money if you don’t ask for money. You can’t make money if nobody wants your thing. You can’t make money if the problem you’re solving isn’t big enough.

You already know how to make money! You’re charging your employer or clients how much per year for your time?

Would you do your job for free? Probably not. So why would you give your skills and knowledge away for free otherwise?

A professional doesn’t work for free.

Should you write a book or make a course or something else?

Yes. You know more than you think you do.

The best time to write a book or a course is when you’re first learning something. You still know what makes it hard and how you got over it.

Repackage talks?

Repackage everything.

Tweet all your ideas, see what resonates.

Turn stuff that resonates into blog posts or vlogs. See what resonates.

Turn that into talks. See what gets the most response.

Turn what gets the most response into paid materials. See what makes the most revenue.

Congratulations, you were building an audience this whole time. AND you found out what they want AND you have something to sell.

Brainstorm and iterate.

In other news…

58 people have preordered React + D3 2018. That’s validation enough for me. This thing’s happening 🤘

Now I gotta pull it off.

Here’s how I’m gonna do that:

1. Go on an internet diet
2. Retreat into my writing hole
3. Avoid doing all other shit

It’s gonna be hard, but I can do it. Just gotta get the momentum started.

Learn While You Poop will have to go on hiatus for a month or so. I’ve fallen off the wagon anyway and I need to figure out if the format is resonating with anyone. It’s not quite where I want it to be yet…

Also, I wrote a quick guide about a quick little thing that I did: Creating a perfect rounded edge with D3 curves and React.

And I wrote up some of my initial impressions of ReactVR. It’s cool, but kinda hard to use still.

You got an email with this, but I answered some common questions about React + D3 2018.

I am now filling out the design brief for a new cover.

Also someone recommended my stuff to a person learning D3 for the first time, and I thought that was just the coolest.

Google a dude called Swizec Teller

❤️

A few cool things…

A lot of cool stuff happened on the internet this week. Perhaps I spent a little too much time on Hacker News.

• Addy Osmani published this great article on The Cost of JavaScript in 2018
• Someone made mermaidjs, a library that lets you write charts in markdown. 🤯
• Alok Menghrajani published a script that fits into a tweet. It unpacks to a bootable CD, that contains a full retro game
• You should give js13kgames a shot, if you have time. It’s a competition to build games that fit into 13 kilobytes.
• And Justin Jackson tweeted an old post about starting small. Start small, you gotta make the first step first.

Cheers,

~Swizec

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