The introduction

Engineers are a very likable group of people who are obsessed with technology, smart, hard working, outspoken, focused, very hardcore, and Show me the code if you disagree. A hard core is important, but there are a lot of things you need to learn to live your life well, not the least of which is the “soft skill” everyone talks about, an ability that takes more time to develop than technology.

Reading books is the best way to learn, and deliberate, systematic learning works better, so let’s look at how you can build your soft power with book lists.

Knowledge map

The Knowledge Map mainly refers to the book Soft Skills: A Survival Guide Beyond Code and consists of four parts:

• The Bible: These books are designed to outline and are considered the bible for personal growth
• Basic skills: These are basic skills, listening, speaking, reading, writing, thinking, which is not basic, but in fact, most people do not do well
• Work: including career development, how to learn and improve personal productivity
• Life: Including finances, fitness and parenting

The bible

• Soft Skills: A Survival Guide Beyond Code
• “The principle of”
• 7 Habits of Successful People
• How to Win People

Soft Skills is a book written for engineers outside of code, and the knowledge Graph in this article is a reference to this book. It has a lot of constructive advice, and reading through it will help you understand the world outside of code.

The principle is ray Dalio’s book about life and work, which has had the biggest impact on me in the last year. Dalio was the most successful private equity investor in history. He advocated a princips-based lifestyle, wrote down the principles he stood for, and showed his most rational side. Dalio became a god.

The seven Habits of Highly Effective People was first published in 1989 and, 30 years later, is still considered one of the greatest personal development classics of all time. Be proactive; To begin with the end; First things first; Win-win thinking; Know yourself; Integrated comprehensive effect; Constantly updated; Start from the cultivation of inner character, open the door of change from the inside out, from personal success to interpersonal success, and then achieve the realm of holistic life.

As the first successology book, Human Weakness is a veritable encyclopedia of personal growth and training that can be found in every self-help book on the market today.

Basic skills

• Read how to Read a Book
• Writing The Pyramid Principle, Talking in Charts
• Communication, Nonviolent Communication, Key Conversations
• Speech “Impromptu Speech” the Power of Speech
• Thinking, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Learning to Ask Questions

Basic skills include listening (communication), speaking (speech), reading (reading), writing (writing) and thinking (thinking). These are basic abilities for personal growth, but most people lack systematic training.

Reading is not reading a book word by word. Do you know the levels of reading? Do you know how to read a book efficiently? How to finish a batch of books?

You don’t need flowery words to write, but you do need rigorous logic. The pyramid will tell you how to organize logic and write in a total-points-total order. People are visual animals. A picture is worth a thousand words. Speaking with diagrams helps you understand how to express yourself using diagrams.

The biggest problem with communication is that people assume it has been communicated, but it often isn’t. Through the way of observation, feeling, need and request to communicate, misunderstanding can be largely avoided, and empathy and trust can be greatly enhanced. It takes understanding, it takes listening, it takes genuine expression, it takes humility.

Speaking is a key way to express yourself and motivate others, and as impromptu speaking is becoming more and more common in today’s society, following the grab-opinion-structure-argument call-to-action approach can help you organize your speech quickly in a short time.

Do you understand how the brain works? Have you heard the difference between thinking too fast and thinking too slow? People rely on reflexive quick thinking 90% of the time when making decisions, and people often don’t know it and think they’ve thought it through. Learn to Ask Questions is a critical thinking classic that allows you to challenge yourself by asking questions to clarify real facts.

work

• Planning vision
• Management Grove’s First Lesson for Managers, The Effective Manager
• Learning cognitive Nature, Deliberate Practice, Lifelong Growth
• Productivity, The Pomodoro Technique, A Strange Life, This is OKR, the List Revolution.

Work takes up at least a third of our time, and for engineers, technology is the foundation of your job and determines the lower limit of your career development, while other work-related soft skills determine the upper limit of your career development.

Plan: A career may not be planned precisely, but it is unlikely to be successful if it is not planned. Most people walk with their head down instead of looking up at the road. Keep your eyes on the road ahead and talk to experienced friends and colleagues to get an idea of what’s going on.

Management: This is one of the decisions engineers make as they reach a certain point in their career, whether or not they need to move into management. Can you understand that “management is about getting people to do what you want”, that it’s not about black and white, it’s not about programs predicting inputs and outputs, it’s about trust and motivation, it’s about goals and visions, it’s a completely different world from technology, maybe a separate book list.

Learning: Now is an era of lifelong learning, learning ability determines the length of your career, technical students are actually a group of very studious people, for the pursuit of new technology tireless. There’s more to it than 10,000 hours. There’s more to it than growth thinking. There’s more to it than deliberate practice.

Productivity: Time is limited, and how you use your time is often the biggest difference between people. Do you want to surf Douyin or read a book for a while? Most of the time, it is difficult to achieve high efficiency by relying solely on willpower. After all, anti-human ways are painful. How to manage your time effectively, how to set goals clearly, and how to use checklists to improve your chances of getting things right can greatly improve your productivity.

life

• Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Poor Charlie’s Book
• Fitness fitness without Equipment
• Parenting “positive discipline” “How to say children will listen, how to listen to children will say”

Besides work, there is life. How to lead a good life, I think there are three main directions: financial management, fitness and parenting.

Financial management: there is no need to repeat the importance of financial management. There is also a list of books that we can refer to: build investment financial knowledge system through reading. I wish you all the early access to asset income and wealth freedom.

Fitness: the body is the capital of revolution. In the middle and later stages of career, the quality of the body and the exuberance of energy directly determine the future career development. Lu Qi, who holds the highest technical position among Chinese in Silicon Valley, worked more than 10 hours a day and ran 10km at 5 am. He kept his energy throughout his 50s. Kai-fu Lee also wrote “Living to Death” after suffering from cancer, constantly reflecting on the importance of health.

Parenting: as a dad code farmers, nature in life needs to hold a responsibility, for me is the first time as a parent, for children is also the first time as children, we are the first time to need a lot of natural run-in. How to communicate with children firmly and kindly, how to guide curiosity, how to help set good habits, how to set good examples for children and so on.

Write in the last

When talent isn’t enough to support your dreams, read. The cultivation of soft skills sounds very like chicken soup. It is impossible to see obvious results in a short period of time. It is better to learn a technology and a new framework and see immediate results.

Some people ask is reading so many books really useful? I don’t know. It is impossible to remember every word in every book, and many times when we see a book, we have to wonder if we have ever read it. Reading is just like eating when people are young. We can’t remember every meal we have eaten, but these meals have been integrated into our bodies and become muscles and blood.

Boys, start reading

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