Book Notes - Soft Skills

Career

• The biggest mistake you can make is to believe you are working for somebody else.
• When you start to think of yourself as a buisiness you start to make good buisiness decisions.
• Buisinesses are constantly revising their products and improving them. You should too.
• As a software developer looking for a job, you only need to land one client.
• Track and update the goals you have set for yourself and adjust them if needed.
• Set regular intervals for checking up on your goals.
• Every single person wants to feel important
• The negative side to being an employee mainly involves your freedom and your income is capped.
• Specialization will close some oppurtunities and open up many more.
• Learn as much as you can and become as flexible as possible.
• Don't forget to share what you're learning.
• Overcome your vices so you can produce the best work possible.
• Apply quality to every detail of your work.
• Professionals need to have continious self improvement.
• You need to have an actual plan if you want to work for yourself.
• Start with a buisiness on the side, and only transition when you generate enough income to support yourself.
• Working for yourself is rewarding, it's also a lot of work. The first buisiness is likely to fail.
• Train yourself ahead of time to handle a much heavier workload.
• The best way to do inbound marketing is to offer something of value for free.
• Most developers should have a blog.
• The bigger your reputation the more you can charge.
• Not only can you create a software product, you can also create an information product like a book or video.
• The audience must be identified before the product is created.
• Instead of trying to find an audience, build one.
• A good amount of your education is going to come from trying and failing.
• We can't trust ourselves not to be distracted or to manage our time wisely.
• Self motivation is the single biggest killer or remote workers.
• Remove as many distractions and temptations as possible from your working environment.

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Marketing Yourself

• Talent will only take you so far in life.
• The better marketing you have, the more it magnifies your talents.
• The right way to market yourself is to provide value for others.
• Marketing doesn't guarentee success but it's an important element you can control.
• By learning how to market yourself you can stand out from the crowd.
• Success isn't something that's achieved overnight.
• If you attempt to do constant self promotion without bringing value to others, you won't get far.
• A blog is a cheap and easy way to market yourself.
• Organising your thoughts and putting them down into words is a difficult but valuable skill. Regular writing helps to hone that skill.
• Learning to write might actually help you write better code.
• Make sure your writing quality content.
• Publish the highest quality you can and you'll get better and better overtime.
• Commit to keeping your blog up for at least a year. It takes time and commitment to get results.
• Try and pick a niche small enough that you have at being the number one best in the world at that particular niche.
• Just jump and get started.
• 90% of your content should be completely free.
• You'll find the most success when you're giving people solid value mostly for free.
• Think of working for free as in investment in your future.
• You need to have some sort of presence on these social networks.
• You want to get people from follower to fan.
• You should have a presence on all major social networks, especially the ones that tend to be more tech/career related.
• Words are a powerful canvas to carry your voice to another person.
• If you want to be seen as someone credible in your industry, you should write a book.
• You don't write a book to make money. You write a book to increase your reputation.
• More and more authors are finding success by self publishing.

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Learning

• In this rapid world of change, the ability to learn is extremely important.
• Education is what remains after one has forgotton what one has learned at school.
• If your education stops with graduation. You're going to be at a distant disadvantage in life.
• One of the most important skills is to learn the skill of self teaching.
• Learning how to learn is a skill that you have to teach yourself.
• If you actually teach what you're trying to learn to someone else, not only do you remember it, but you get a much deeper understanding of it.
• You'll learn best when you take action.
• The best way to learn something is to jump right in and start doing, before you even know what you're doing.
• We tend to absorb more information and develop more meaningful questions about a thing when we're actively playing.
• Learn by playing, by actively doing without really knowing what we're doing.
• Before you read a book on the subject, skim the book and dive right in and start playing around.
• Once you've played around and you have all kinds of questions, only then go back and read the text.
• Then you can take what you've learned and reapply it to your play.
• Finally, seal it all in cement by teaching what you've learned to someone else.
• You have to figure out how to educate yourself in a way that works for you.
• It's important to at least understand a little bit about a subject before diving into it.
• State the reason for learning, it can help define the scope.
• Instead of reading a single book on a subject, try to gather many different resources to help you learn. Not just books.
• Gather as many resources as possible and filter them down.
• Once you have the resources, get an idea what you should learn and in what order you should learn it.
• You need to find the correct path that will get you from point A to point Z in the least amount of time.
• Learn just enough to get started, but not so much that you don't get to explore on your own.
• Write down the questions that you don't have the answers for.
• Curiosity is a critical component of learning, especially self learning.
• Take as much time as you need to throughly understand the subject.
• Only read/watch the parts that are relevant.
• If you really want to understand the subject, you have to teach it.
• You only need to be one step ahead of someone to teach them.
• Explaining to others is a great way to fill in the gaps of your own learning.
• When looking for a mentor, look for someone who is higher up the ladder than you.
• It's important to give back to the community.
• You only have to be one step ahead of a person in some area of life to help them.
• To be a mentor you just need to be observant and patient. Look for a person who truly has a desire to learn and is willing to work hard to do it.
• Everyone is capable of teaching.
• Teaching forces you to confront all the areas in your own knowledge that aren't deep enough to be able to adequently explain them to another person.
• Teaching also forces you to reorganise data in your brain.
• Realise that your job in teaching is to help someone else.
• A degreee isn't required to actually succeed.
• Always try to be aware of anything you don't understand.
• Anything you don't understand add it to your list.
• Keep a pad of paper, anything you don't understand, write it down.

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Producitivity

• Focus is hard to gain but it easy to mantain.
• It's pretty critical that you learn how to get focused.
• Before you begin a task, make sure you have done everything you can to protect yourself interruptions both internal and external.
• If you make it to 10 minutes, chances are you'll have enough momentum to continue.
• Break a big project up into smaller goals.
• Work on the most important things first each day.
• Interruptions are the biggest productivity killers.
• Chat programs can be a source of constant distration.
• Pmodoro technique takes some time to get used to.
• You only have so much time, it's up to you to choose what to do with it.
• The whole system falls apart if your commitment is weak, so you have to choose attainable and maintainable quotos.
• Internal motivation is much more effective than external motivation.
• Self mastery is the art of self motivation, and at the heart self motivation, and at the heart self motivation is self accountability.
• The more you switch between tasks, the more time you waste getting your brain ramped up to work on a task.
• Our brains can't do two mentally taxing things at once.
• The cure for burnout is to push through the wall.
• Because so many people never get past the wall. The other side of the wall is very sparse.
• If you make it to the other side of the wall, suddenly things will start to get easier.
• Pushing through the pain is the secret to overcoming burnout.
• Stop watching television.
• Watching TV provides no benefit to you or society.
• The problem with TV is that there's no actual benefit from the time you spend watching it.
• Not only is TV watching a time waster, but it also has the ability to influence you in ways that you aren't likely aware of.
• One of the best ways to stop letting meetings waste your time is to simply not go to them.
• Your phone or tablet is perhaps the worst time waster of all.
• The true secret to productivity: small things done repeatedly over a long time period.
• The only thing that's standing between them and their dream is routine.
• A routine is one of the most powerful ways to shape your life.
• What you do everyday defines and shapes wo you are over time.
• If you really want to be productive, you need to be even more control of you life.
• Shedule your work day so that you know what you're going to be doing each day and each week.
• The more structured your day is, the more control you'll have over your life.
• Be careful not to be too obsessed with your routine.
• The idea of forming habits is similiar to that of creating a routine.
• The bigger the tasks the more likely you are not going to do them. Break them down.
• Hard work was necessary for success and not something to be avoided.
• Everything worthwhile comes as a result from hard work.
• If you want to be effective, you have to learn how to work hard and smart.
• You can't cheat the system. You get out exactly what you put in.
• The more successful you are, the easier success will come.
• Any action is better than no action.

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Financial

• Think about money in the long term, not short.
• Having credit card debt doesn't give you any benefit.
• If you want to be financially successful, you have to learn how to invest.
• The better job you do at marketing yourself and building a reputation, the easier it will be to negiotiate.
• The first person to name a number is at a distant disadvantage.
• Real estate investment is by far the best.
• To learn how to recognise a good deal, you need to two things practice and market education.
• Real estate investment will keep up with inflation.
• Try to set up multiple streams of passive income.
• Start with small investments and work your way up to larger and larger ones over time.
• The lower your living expenses are, the more money you have left over to invest.
• The biggest financial mistake you can make is to go into debt.
• When you're in debt, you're usually paying interest on your money.
• The longer you carry a debt, the more important that debt is on your bottom line.
• Make sure to pay off the most expensive debts first.
• Debt can be good if you can use that debt to earn more money than the interest you pay on that debt.
• There is a huge difference between being rich and being wealthy.
• It is much more important to be wealthy than it is to be rich.
• Only when money is easy to come by, should you save it to actually invest.
• It isn't enough to get an oppurtunity. You have to make the most of it.

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Fitness

• Walking was able to substantially increase creativity by about 60%.
• Walking has a significant effect on creative power.
• It's going to take a lot of discipline if you want washboard abs.
• Before you can even think about running a marathon, you need to get to the point where you can run three miles.
• When you start running, the most important thing is commitment.
• If you push it too hard, too early, you're likely to become discouraged and not continue.
• The most effective way to lose weight - and retain muscle at the same time is to just not eat.
• Fasting has been shown to completely reverse type 2 diabetes for many patients.
• The basic idea behind OMAD (One Meal A Day) is very simple. You eat just one meal per day and that's that.
• Speaking of five/six tiny healthy meals, it's a huge amount of work trying to follow that typical bodybuilder diet.
• One good way to win at life is to minimize decisions especially tempting ones.
• Experiment with OMAD for at least a week of two.

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Mindset

• You have to learn how to harness the power of your mind, to gain mastery over it.
• You have the power to shape your own thoughts.
• If you truly want to shape the direction of your life and control it, you have to learn to harness the power of your mind, the power of thought.
• Positive thinking - being more than just an outward optimist - can improve your health, increase your lifespan, and provide all kinds of other benefits in your life.
• Thinking negativily can actually harm you and hamper your efforts to succeed in life.
• The root of positive thinking is this belief that you're greater than your mere circumstances.
• Regardless of the situation, you have the power to change and alter your own future.
• Positive thinking is all about choosing to think good thoughts rather than bad thoughts.
• Doesn't it feel better to experience positive emotions rather than negative ones?
• The key is to remind yourself that even though you might not have control over your immediate reactions to any situation, you do have control over how you consciously choose to think about the experience.
• You can train your brain to view things from a positive perspective rather than a negative one.
• Some studies have showed that people who meditate are more likely to experience positive emotions.
• Keep a thought journal this week. Every time you get a change write down what you're thinking about and whether it's possitive or negative.
• To truly be successful at what you wish to accomplish in life, you have to learn how to program your own brain to achieve your goals.
• If you can accept that you're able to change some of the core beliefs you hold about yourself, then you'll be able to alter your self image to your own liking.
• In general, we want what we can't have and also what other people find desirable. The more available you seem to be the more desperate, the less likely you are to be wanted.
• Most people when faced with a significant challenge or the immediate prospect of failure, will avoid that situation.
• Failure is temperary, defeat is permanent.
• When you fail at something, you learn from that experience and hopefully grow.
• Learn to embrace failure, to expect it, to accept it, and to be ready to face it head on.
• Accept failure as a part of you life.
• Experience enough failures and the fear of failure itself will over it's power over you.
• If you really want to succeed at growing in life, you're going to have to learn to overcome one huge fear that most of us have looking like an idiot.
• You have to learn to stop caring about what people think. You have to learn how to not be afraid to look like an idiot.
• Overtime the things that made you uncomfortable become second nature.
• You don't care that someone might laugh at you, because you're ready and willing to laugh with them.
• Be prepared for critism, but don't be afraid of it.
• The point is to always be moving forward.
• Stoic philosphy will also make you tougher - a lot tougher.

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