You have been trained your entire life to learn in private. You go to school. You do homework. You get grades. And you keep what you
learned to yourself. Success is doing this better than everyone else around you, over and over again. It is a constant, lonely, zero-sum race to get the best grades. To get into the best colleges. To get the best jobs. If you’ve had a prior career; chances are that all your work was confidential. And of course, you don’t share secrets with competitors!
LEARNING IN PUBLIC:
• The 1% Rule: “Only 1% of the users of a website add content, while Appendix: Why It Works 9 the other 99% of the participants only lurk.” You stand out simply by showing up.
• Cunningham’s Law: “The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.” Being publicly wrong attracts teachers, as long as you don’t do it in such high quantity that people give up on you altogether. Conversely, once you’ve gotten something wrong in public, you never forget it.
• Positive Reinforcement: Building in a social feedback mechanism to your learning encourages more learning. As you build a track record and embark on more ambitious projects with implicit future promise, your public activity becomes a Commitment Device.
• Availability Bias: People confuse “first to mind” with “the best”. But it doesn’t matter — being “first to mind” on a topic means getting more questions, which gives the inputs needed to become the best. As Nathan Barry observed, Chris Coyier didn’t start out as a CSS expert, but by writing CSS Tricks for a decade, he became one. This bias is self-reinforcing because it is self-fulfilling.
• Bloom’s Taxonomy is an educational psychology model which describes modes of learning engagement — the lowest being basic recall. Learning in Public forces you toward the higher modes of learning, including applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating.
• Inbound Marketing: Hub spot upended the marketing world by proving you didn’t have to go out in front of people to sell. Instead, you can draw them to you by making clear who you are and what you do, offering valuable content upfront and leaning on the persuasive power of Reciprocity and Liking.
• Productizing Yourself: By creating learning exhaust, you can teach people and make friends in your sleep. This disconnects your networking, income, and general Luck Surface Area from your time. Don’t end the week with Nothing. This is Portable Personal Capital that compounds over time and that you can take with you from company to company.
RESOURCES:
TO GET THE BOOK BY SHAWN SWYX WANG
https://www.learninpublic.org/
THE
CODING
CAREER
HANDBOOK
Guides, Principles, Strategies and Tactics
from Code Newbie to Senior Dev
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