Improving your hard technical skills is key to building better software. Deliberate practice, designed to push you outside your comfort zone, repeated often, with feedback on results and challenging goals is necessary to upgrade your skills. As we progress in our careers, opportunities for really pushing ourselves become fewer, and we cannot rely on our day job to continually challenge us. We need to set ourselves small, finishable challenges that teach us something new and push us further outside our comfort zone.
Carol Dweck talks about the power of “yet” and the importance of fostering a growth mindset in children. She explains how praising effort instead of intelligence can encourage resilience and perseverance. Dweck shares examples of how educators have used a growth mindset to transform students’ performance, and argues that a growth mindset can help address inequality.
Angela Lee Duckworth, a psychologist, left teaching to study what makes people successful. She found that grit, defined as passion and perseverance for long-term goals, is the significant predictor of success in challenging settings. Duckworth’s research shows that grittier kids were more likely to graduate, even after matching them on income, standardized test scores, and school safety.
In this talk, philosopher Alain de Botton discusses how we live in an age when career crises are a common experience due to snobbery, high expectations for our careers and envy. He argues that envy is the dominant emotion in modern society and that it’s linked to the spirit of equality. He suggests that instead of being contemptuous, we should feel sympathy towards people who acquire material goods as they are incredibly vulnerable and in need of love.
I improved my relationship management skills by actively practicing listening and understanding other people’s perspectives, pushing myself to engage in larger group settings, and intentionally investing time in building relationships with those around me.
I improved my empathy and curiosity by engaging in dialogue with people from diverse backgrounds, seeking out different sources of information, and being more aware of my biases.