background

I had heard of the book and put it on my shopping cart, but I bought it two weeks ago and finished reading it. I have been working for so many years that I quite agree with soft skills and have some thoughts about soft skills, so I am deeply impressed by many of the contents in the book, but I also benefit a lot from many of the contents.

There’s a lot of stuff in the book about careers, self-marketing, learning, productivity, finance, fitness, spirituality. This is certainly a topic of interest to programmers. I suggest that every programmer should read this book, not read it too closely, but take a look at the table of contents.

The author is a programmer, entrepreneur, training instructor, and real estate investor who has worked as a part-time model and bodybuilder. Compared with ordinary programmers, it can be said that it is rich in experience.

Here are some topics that impressed me deeply.

About Your Career

Your job belongs to the company, but your career really belongs to you.

The company only cares about how to get you to produce, not how to advance your career, after all, you will only be with the company for a few years or even a year. Otherwise, you’ll have to do what the company says you should do: do what you need to do today.

Your career is not about being a programmer and writing programs all the time. It’s about figuring out what kind of talent you want to be and what kind of value you want to produce.

About specialization

Don’t divide majors by technology stack, but by business area. As the author puts it: defining yourself as an “engineer specializing in printer driver software and printing language development” rather than a “C# engineer” or “Java engineer” is too broad.

For front end programmers, stop defining yourself as a “front end engineer” or even a “vue engineer” or “small program engineer” and find your own business area as soon as possible. For example, I am currently working in the field of rich text editors myself and leading the open source project wangEditor.

Understand that frameworks serve technology, technology serves business, and value and revenue are derived from business output. So be business-oriented, not purely technical, even if it’s an open source project.

Make yourself an expert and focus on one type of client. Some people may worry: Will this make it harder for them to find a job because there are fewer openings? B: Don’t worry about it at all.

• When you become an expert in this area, or have a small success, a job will come to you. Headhunters everywhere are not for nothing. As long as you have high-quality output of articles, blogs and Zhihu, they will definitely find you.
• Until you become an expert, you won’t be out of a job. You’ll still have to rely on your technical skills to work as you please.

【 Digression 】 I don’t trust people who know everything. Like Fan D, I nicknamed him “Fan Da Understands”. He would not teach me anything, and to my surprise, I could understand everything he said in seconds. First, I don’t believe he’s so good at everything. Second, I don’t think I’m good enough to know everything in seconds.

Self marketing

The right way to market yourself is to provide value to others.

Technical people, often disdained or ashamed of the word “marketing”, think that impact is advertising, but it is not. Change this idea. Think of yourself as a company, and the core competitiveness of a company: product + marketing. Without marketing, no matter how good the product is, it won’t sell or sell at a good price.

Programmers to build their own brand, the way is very simple, nothing more than: blog, video we media, open source. One of the simplest blog, register an account can write an article.

Here are some do’s and don ‘ts for building your own brand:

• The brand should have visual match, namely logo
• Brands need to be visible and produce content and topics on a regular basis
• Focus on a niche or drown in mass traffic
• Trademark the brand when appropriate

How to get traffic to your blog?

First, you should find the right blog site, just like selling vegetables means going to the wet market, selling meat means fresh market.

Second, you should try to produce high-quality content, after your own thinking, different content from others, not hydrology. One high-quality blog is better than 10 or even 100 regular blogs. So don’t be afraid to take your time. I’ve told people that the total amount of time your readers spend on your blog is proportional to the amount of time you spend on your blog.

Finally, stick to output, at least once a month. Don’t use the fact that you’ve been working long hours as an excuse. If you always think you’ve been working long hours, you’ll always be working long hours — because you haven’t changed.

When you’re new to blogging, you don’t get a lot of traffic at first. There are two ways to do it:

• Share it with the community, or submit it to popular blogs and accounts.
• Find a blog with a lot of traffic, comment on it, post good reviews, link to your blog, and attract readers to that blog.

But as for our domestic blog website, as long as you produce high quality blog content, it will be easy to be pushed to the website home page, there will be traffic.

How to promotion

When a person’s power and rank cannot meet his responsibilities, he needs promotion.

First of all, you should like your current work environment, whether it’s the work or the people you are working with, if not like it or at least hate it. If you’re sick of looking at everyone and have no interest in doing anything, you’re just trying to make money and pay your mortgage, it’s probably not a good idea to get promoted.

To take on more responsibility

Be proactive and enthusiastic about your work and take on more responsibility. If it’s not being done, you should claim it, not hide it. For example, I took the initiative to take charge of project management such as station meeting, weekly meeting, plan making and progress tracking by taking advantage of my PMP advantage. Over time, it will be mine, and everyone will come to me by default. The more you do, the easier it is to get promoted.

Solve your company’s problems, not just focus on technology. Promotion is judged by military merit + martial merit, with the former accounting for more. Therefore, you will find A lot of situations around you, A and B are promoted at the same time, A is not skilled but successful. Instead of being angry right away, think about what A is worth to the company.

In short, to let the leadership to rely on their own, feel that I can not. This is called “superior management.” The boss is in charge of you, and you should be in charge of him, too. I don’t mean in some way that isn’t part of the company’s business.

striking

Do contribution, must let the leadership know, otherwise so many people, how can the leadership remember you? So refresh your presence by periodically presenting your work to your boss as a form of marketing. Of course, we have to present it in a reasonable way, in a reasonable way.

First, write a weekly report and report the work every week. Not only do you report your work, but offer to take on projects in your area (if it’s not being done otherwise you’ll be out of work). Any leader wants to keep track of the status and progress of his members and projects, so feel free to write.

PS: Interject. It is found that many people do not like to write weekly newspapers, feeling formalism, feeling that leaders supervise their work. This is that they have not recognized the nature of the workplace and management, and lack of experience in the workplace.

Second, do technology sharing within the team. This is a way that leaders like very much. They all want active sharing, active communication and a technical atmosphere within their team.

How to “get free” – freelancing

It seems that freelancing is very attractive to programmers, because they work overtime every day, so they envy this kind of free life. I’ll tell you, it was free, but not that free.

If you want to be a freelancer, you must have something to do, such as opening your own studio, outsourcing, we media and so on. Of course, if you move out of technology, then this article is not for you.

These things shouldn’t start when you quit your job. If you want to ease your way into freelancing, you should either work part-time or start looking for part-time work. Freelancing is basically impossible without a side hustle.

Do part-time, do sideline, will be more tired. But don’t worry about getting tired. Because everyone knows that while you work overtime, you don’t actually work that many productive hours in the company.

Last but not least, you should do market research when you have a side job or a part-time job. What you think is reasonable, even helpful to yourself, may not be what the public needs. Learn to look for the pain points and needs of the public, not the minority.

About the book

Consider writing a book to raise awareness in your community. But don’t expect to make much money writing a book unless you happen to publish a hit, which is a long shot.

Writing a book takes a lot of effort and takes a long time. If you do write about it, don’t write about it on a fast-changing topic. For example, the authoritative Guide to Vue was written based on Vue 1.x and was not finished yet. Vue 2.0 was released…

Write your blog before you write your book. If your blog gets more traffic, you’ll get a publisher. Here I have several publishers wechat, if you are confident that you can publish a book, you can also find me to recommend, just leave a message here.

Ten step learning

In this book, the author summarizes his own experience on how to effectively teach yourself a new technology in a “ten-step learning process.”

Do the first six steps only once

• To understand the global
• Determine the scope of
• Define the target
• Looking for resources
• Create a Study plan
• Screening resources

For the next four steps, repeat

• Start learning and dabble
• Hands-on, learn and play
• Fully grasp and apply what you have learned
• Music as a teacher, integrated

When I finished reading it, I felt like the 10 steps were so long that I couldn’t even remember them. But the key point of summary is:

• Study is not blind, comprehensive research, scope, system
• Have goals, plan, and execute
• Put this to use
• Share, output is very important, can explain others clearly, oneself also understand

Focus on work

Lack of focus should be a common problem for most people. Pick up the phone and you can brush for half a day. I feel this is not easy to solve completely, can only slowly overcome their own, such as remove the tiktok on your notes. I don’t have Tiktok or any games on my phone.

In freelancing, in particular, focus is a big hurdle, and it’s all about self-awareness. Therefore, the above mentioned part-time job, but also to observe and exercise their concentration. Otherwise, if you just quit, you won’t really be able to focus on one thing.

The Pomodoro technique mentioned in the book can be used as a reference. It requires the same regularity and concentration as a class. One tomato cycle every 30 minutes, working for 25 minutes and resting for 5 minutes. Rest for 15 minutes every 4 tomato cycles.

On salary Negotiation

Salary is something to negotiate, not just accept what the company offers you.

Salary negotiation is also a skill. If you suddenly find yourself with a colleague who is earning a lot more than you but with similar skills, it may be because they negotiated better. Don’t get off balance.

The focus of salary negotiation still lies in his core competitiveness. Interview multiple companies, get multiple offers, or find a senior manager to push you, these are the advantages of salary negotiation.

Be careful not to bid first. Just say “no” without any reason. Of course, if you are sure that you are completely at a disadvantage and have no power to negotiate, there is no way.

According to the book, when you get an offer and plan to go, you can renegotiate the salary. Since the company has already spent a lot of money on your behalf (the silent cost), he would rather give you more than give up and look for someone new. This way I have never tried, always feel a little bad, maybe American thinking and we are not quite the same. Just as a reference.

About the business

There is now a mass entrepreneurship environment in China. When I quit my job in the spring of 2020 and didn’t have a job, many of my friends thought I was going to start my own business.

The book doesn’t recommend starting a business, or starting one right out of college, because the odds of success are pretty low.

I agree with the author that I will not start my own business unless there is a very good opportunity. Because I felt like the only thing that would make my startup successful was something that happened once in a while.

Financial freedom for programmers

Financial freedom is a bigger goal and temptation than freelancing.

In the book, the author mentions that he was already financially free at 33, so I thought he had been bought out. No, by financial freedom, he didn’t mean retiring and fishing by the river or traveling around the world. It means that you don’t have to do something you really don’t like for money. I do agree with that.

After all, we are all young and energetic people, and if you spend every day without producing value, you won’t be happy. For so many years, I always remember when I was a freshman, my English teacher told us that Work hard and enjoy your life are indispensable.

About fitness

Pay attention to your neck, waist and, of course, your hair. Even if you’re fresh out of college, start paying attention.

I myself recently this half year many, often go running half an hour in the afternoon, at least feel cervical vertebra, shoulder better than before. So whatever it takes, get yourself moving and get your butt out of the chair.