Code 401 Prep: The Growth Mindset Reading Notes
Upgrade Your Technical Skills with Deliberate Practice
...Strong pianists drill the most difficult parts of their music, rarely, if ever playing through their pieces in entirety... - Carl Newport
Improving the hard technical skills makes the software we build better. It exposes us to more opportunities which will allow us to do more things with computers.
Push yourself beyond your comfort zone, repeatedly. Seek out feedback and make sure that what you are doing is difficult and requires good goals.
Once you get to a point in your career of writing out code and dealing with the same issues, you need to start implementing a deliberate practice.
The goals should be picked that when achieving them teaches you something new.
A great example to use is The Matasano Crypto Challenges. These are incredibly difficult for intermediate to senior level developers.
Start setting yourself a small, finishable challenge that teaches you something further outside your comfort zone.
Carol Dweck on the Growth Mindset
Power of Yet
The understanding that you are in a learning curve. Understand that your abilities can be developed.
Falling into the tyranny of now, one would cheat, look for people who did worse.
- Praise wisely
- Praise the process
Give greater confidence by using Not Yet.
Transform the Meaning of Effort and Difficulty. Put more effort into schoolwork, family, and coworkers, one will see improvement in all aspects.
Angela Lee Duckworth on Grit
Grit: The power of passion and perseverance
Iq is not the only difference between the best and worst people. Some of the smartest people, don’t really do so well. Everyone can learn anything, if you are motivated enough.
One characteristic reflected a significant predictor to success. That’s grit. Grit is passion and perseverance, for very long term goals. Grit is something that you stick with, not for days or weeks, but months and years.
The most shocking thing grit is, is what we don’t know about it, and how to implement it. There are many talented people, who do not follow through.
The best way to build grit, is the growth mindset. The ability to learn, is not fixed, that it can change with your effort. Don’t believe that failure is a permanent condition. Our brain grows, when it comes up against an obstacle. When we have to think. That’s when our brain becomes stronger. This is something I want to instill in my kids, but it’s so hard to get them to understand. So I have to be grittier in teaching them.
Take the best ideas, strongest intuition, and test them. Be willing to fail.
Alain de Botton on Redefining Success
A kinder, gentler philosophy of success
Career crisis happen on sunday evening. We live in an age with career crisis It’s harder than ever now, to have a career crisis and anxiety. That’s because we are focusing on ourselves with judgment coming from all angles around us, which only magnifies the stress and anxiety that we give ourselves. This stems from snobbery. We believe that we are defined by our job and it is confirmed when we share our job with others, to which others respond with fascination or are bored immediately.
What solidifies the above idea is that we have tied an emotional reward with material goods. When we buys something really expensive (a Ferrari, a big house, a nice vacation), we give ourselves validation that we are longing for. We long to be envied, which is a dominant emotion grasping today’s society. Because of this, we work harder to achieve more.
It’s harder now more than ever to feel calm. We are constantly being told that we can do anything and we can achieve anything as along as we work hard for it. The problem with that is, we then let that end result define us. Whether it be working long hours consistently to finally reach a successful level, then we think, “of course that person is successful, they worked hard and deserve this”. But when the opposite happens, and they are at the bottom of society, we believe that they deserve to be at the bottom”. The people at the bottom are viewed as losers in today’s society.
Back in the 17th century, the bottom of the society was looked at as unfortunate. One says that person is something and will always be that thing. The other says that person is something but can possible come into good fortune and change their trajectory in life. Looking at how we view ourselves today, people take things very personally. We own our success as well as we own our failures. Meaning, we let that embody us and define us.
When we define success, we see a person with lots of money and has respect. One major flaw in that is that person is definitely lacking in some other aspect in their life.
In order to turn this around, we should define our own idea of success. Own that and embody our own ambition. That is where success lies.
I love the quote that was passed in this lecture. It’s a reminder that, you are not defined by the position you have, but rather how you conduct yourself and others around you.
“It’s a sin to judge any man by his post” - St. Augustine in ‘The City of God’