Reading Notes of Soft Skills
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:
- Career
- Marketing Yourself
- Learning
- Productivity
- Finance
- Fitness
- 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.
Also, this play stage can explain another thing: the scholar may be dull to the common life feeling. I think this is due the over much knowledge makes scholars unable to judge which part is root and intrinsic in daily life. Too much knowledge but too less life experience can only give you the incorrect direction and hallucinated problem. You may struggle to solve one fake problem you image unless the real bottleneck. How to avoid it? Go head to the play stage, and get your ideas into shape based on your real life experience.
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.
Another important method to enhance your learning is by teaching others. As the book states, the process of teaching is a magical way to force you reorganizing your fractional knowledge into systematical blocks. Lots of hidden weak points will be exposed in your teaching.
Of course, most of us don’t have the opportunity to teach others directly. But we can also get the same benefits by writing your blog posts, record your video, and give your presentation in conference, which is the same as the process of marketing yourself. In my experience, even when you feel blur about the concepts and knowledge you’re learning, the process of writing can help you make your mixed thoughts straight. If you have rigor standard for yourself, you’d better add one more step, teaching, after you learning the materials.
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.
