What I Wish Someone Had Told Me 4 Years Ago | Amir Khella
There’s so much good tucked into this one small post, but I have to at least mention a few things:
The magic moment really happened when I made peace with the fact that I’d just wasted a good deal of time learning things I didn’t really need, believing there was a magic word someone would utter that would launch me into action. Every event, every conference, and every blog post was just another excuse to postpone action one more day. I made peace with it and moved on with a beginner’s mindset, believing that I will figure out what I need along the way.
Just start work and learning will follow.
I taught myself through small projects. I broke down ideas into small manageable chunks, and gave myself deadlines to finish each of them. Projects and experiments are amazing teaching devices, because you learn as needed, and you learn first-hand.
Small projects are how I learn, I need to take a small steps towards my goal that aren’t necessarily my goal at all.
I first got things done, then I got them done right. I learned (the hard way) that momentum mattered most. If I can’t take action right away on my idea, chances are I never will. Whenever I get an idea nowadays, I do something to pin it to my reality, and to make it tangible. I do it in a quick and ugly way, then figure out how to do it better, and learn only what I need for that.
Start with something, anything because I know I’ve spent far too much time spinning my wheels with what if’s. Try something, take a look at the result, refactor, and move on.
The secret of success turns out to be so incredibly simple: Work your ass off. Really care about what you’re creating, not the fame or fortune you’ll get. You’ll succeed.
Wes Baker
A little heads up here: I have a new blog, one where I’ll be writing in longer form than what you find here. Also, this blog—-my Tumblr blog—-will be more of a gathering point for the longer articles I’m planning on writing. As such, the domain and title will be changing, but the content should remain roughly the same.
Dunning–Kruger effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
If you’ve ever wondered why that beginner thinks they know more than you do, the Dunning-Kruger effect is in play. It comes from the amateur not knowing what they don’t know and the expert knowing that there is a lot they don’t know. Combine those two and you have overconfident beginners and self-deprecating experts.
Hat tip to Nathan.
John Cleese on Creativity (by zeekomkommers)
Good writing experiences are self-discovery. Each word pulls back the veil a little more.
Tweeting and Writing and Deflating Like a Balloon
This is the reason why I’m writing these days.
Listen to your customers, but don’t let them tell you what to do. Let me explain. Consider a feature request such as “GitHub should let me FTP up a documentation site for my project.” What this customer is really trying to say is “I want a simple way to publish content related to my project,” but they’re used to what’s already out there, and so they pose the request in terms that are familiar to them. We could have implemented some horrible FTP based solution as requested, but we looked deeper into the underlying question and now we allow you to publish content by simply pushing a Git repository to your account. This meets requirements of both functionality and elegance.
Steve Martin And The Steep Canyon Rangers LWJH Jubilation Day (by MrGtmouse)
After that fateful first meeting, it didn’t take too long for me to figure out one key characteristic of Jim’s: he didn’t like stupid people. And by stupid, I mean people who don’t think for themselves, end up asking dumb questions, and are more into creating excuses for not getting work done instead of just doing it.
SHAM (the Self-Help and Actualization Movement) takes advantage by cleverly marketing the dualism of victimization and empowerment. Like a religion that defines people as inherently sinful so that they require forgiveness (provided exclusively by that religion), SHAM gurus insist that we are all victims of our demonic “inner children” who are produced by traumatic pasts that create negative “tapes” that replay over and over in our minds. Redemption comes through empowering yourself with new “life scripts,” supplied by the masters themselves, for prices that range from $500 one-day workshops to Robbins’s $5,995 “Date with Destiny” seminar.
