📣 Curious Quotes from the Author
“If you rely on finding time to do something, it will never be done. If you want to find time, you must make time.”
“The best thing that can happen to a human being is to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears.”
“The trouble comes when we confuse learning with skill acquisition. If you want to acquire a new skill, you must practice it in context. Learning enhances practice, but it doesn’t replace it. If performance matters, learning alone is never enough.”
“Make dedicated time for practice. The time you spend acquiring a new skill must come from somewhere. Unfortunately, we tend to want to acquire new skills and keep doing many of the other activities we enjoy, like watching TV, playing video games, et cetera. I’ll get around to it, when I find the time, we say to ourselves. Here’s the truth: “finding” time is a myth. No one ever “finds” time for anything, in the sense of miraculously discovering some bank of extra time, like finding a twenty-dollar bill you accidentally left in your coat pocket. If you rely on finding time to do something, it will never be done. If you want to find time, you must make time.”
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU”
“Many things aren't fun until you're good at them . Every skill has what I call a frustration barrier, a period of time in which you're horribly unskilled and you're painfully aware of that fact.”
“As much as I enjoyed yoga courses, it was hard to make time for them. Generally speaking, my work arrangements were flexible, so it was mostly a psychological problem: it was hard to convince myself it was acceptable to go twist my body into knots for two hours when there was work to be done.”
“Popper said many wise things, but I think the following remark is among the wisest: “The best thing that can happen to a human being is to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears.”
“Skill is the result of deliberate, consistent practice, and in early-stage practice, quantity and speed trump absolute quality. The faster and more often you practice, the more rapidly you'll acquire the skill.”
“Remember, I’m starting as a complete beginner, and I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Not being willing to jump in over your head is the single biggest emotional barrier to rapid skill acquisition. Feeling stupid isn’t fun, but reminding yourself that you will understand with practice will help you move from confusion to clarity as quickly as possible.”
“Choose a lovable project. 2. Focus your energy on one skill at a time. 3. Define your target performance level. 4. Deconstruct the skill into subskills. 5. Obtain critical tools. 6. Eliminate barriers to practice. 7. Make dedicated time for practice. 8. Create fast feedback loops. 9. Practice by the clock in short bursts. 10. Emphasize quantity and speed.”
📚 Cognition of the Book’s Big Idea:
It's never too late to master new skills. Simply keep the eight principles of quick skill learning in mind. Whether you want to learn French or play the ukulele, all you have to do is practice for the first 20 hours, and you'll be well on your way to mastery.
To schedule practice time, keep a logbook.
When trying to free up time for practice, keep track of how you spend your time for a few days. You'll be able to recognize patterns and, perhaps, find gaps in your routine that can be filled with practice.
🛠️Fixing the Tech Industry
If you try and dedicate 10,000 hours to anything tech related, let's say learning Python or Managing a VMware Server Environment, you would definitely become an expert in those systems. But most of us don’t have that luxury of dedicating ourselves to one system. We need to be at least good enough to manage multiple systems, different programming languages and multiple infrastructures. Luckily, most of our systems have common base threads that transfer to new languages and systems.
However, this makes us a jack of all trades as needed, and can cause us to be paid a lot less because we rarely have the 10,000 hours of practice in the one system that a potential job has. I call this the IT Worker’s Dillemma. We are bound to notice pattern in various systems, otherwise, we’d suck at what we do, and that is “managing systems at the level of good enough to keep running”
🤝Collaborate with others with this Social Media Prompt:
Why do you think it’s so hard for Techies to specialize or not?
My Software Stack: I use Skool for my Online Community Platform and ClickFunnels for my Landing Pages, Payments, and Email Sequencing. I use Substack for my Newsletter and Taskade for AI Note Taking/Second Brain/Project Management. I use my Personal Amazon Store for Tech and Book Recommendations.