Excellent Reference Materials December 12, 2010
Posted by hoitomt in Education, Observations, Programming, Self Improvement.add a comment
I have recently encountered two excellent resources:
1). Michael Hartl’s tutorial on Rails3. This is an excellent overview of Rails3, Test Driven Development, and the most popular tools for developing applications in Ruby on Rails. This tutorial is really for anyone that is involved with producing applications for the Internet. If you are a graphic designer it will help you learn to start adding database functionality to your sites. If you are a developer the tutorial will introduce you to the best language/framework available for creating web-based applications (Ruby on Rails). And if you already know Ruby On Rails the tutorial is truly like “looking over the shoulder of an expert RoR programmer” as the quotes claim. Fantastic and well worth the $95 for book and videos.
2). The Intelligent Entrepreneur by Bill Murphy Jr. I came across this book accidentally when my wife brought it home from the library for herself. I picked it up and started reading and couldn’t put it down. The title of the book sounds stuffy and the quotes don’t make it seem like it is going to be an inspiring read but this is an excellent book for anybody that has entrepreneurial dreams. The stories are inspiring and show you 3 ways in which businesses can be started. They also form an anecdotal account of the business climate of the late 90′s early 00′s, most notably the Internet boom and collapse. It is fascinating to read about actual entrepreneurs dealing with the challenges of that time.
One particular line prompted me to write this blog post. On the second to last page of the book he refers to a book written by a Harvard Business School professor that tries to “show readers how to juggle … the four key elements in work and life: happiness, achievement, significance, and legacy.” That line nailed it for me for that is exactly what what I’m searching for. I have asked myself the question often: Why do I want to run my own business? I have a great life with a well-paying job and low stress. After reading that line I realized that I only have 1 of the 4 (happiness). I want them all. In my opinion those four factors define complete self-fulfillment.
Entrepreneur thoughts – Albom Column November 11, 2009
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It’s been a long time since my last post. It’s funny, right about the time I want to start posting every day, I end up not posting for over two months. I started my third Java class and transferred over to a new position at work as a developer so needless to say, it has been a busy Fall.
Mitch Albom inspired me to write today. His column today about fame was excellent and it pertains to business and entrepreneurship as well. The best part of the column is when he states “Didn’t you once have to DO something to become famous? Now being famous IS doing something. The most important currency in this country is not measured on green paper. It’s measured by how many people point at you and say, “Aren’t you …?”"
To me this is almost the same thing as Twitter and Facebook and their ilk being considered businesses. The comment could easily be re-written to say: “Didn’t you once have to make money to be considered a business? Now having “customers” is being in business. The most important currency in this country is not measured on gree paper. It’s measured by how many people point at your website and say, “I’m with them…”"
The whole premise of their business is to attract more customers. Just like Albom’s column where the whole premise of Fame is to be seen by people, not necessarily to have any talent, skill, or other exceptional quality. They don’t make money (enough to justify their valuations), nor do they have any concrete plans to make money. Yet the fact that they have tons of users makes them “Famous”, which in this sense means that they are great businesses which attract millions of dollars in investments.
At the core of these businesses is a single person that was in possession of one key element: TIME. Evan Williams sold Pyra Labs (Blogger) to Google for enough money to buy him all the time in the world. With that time he created Twitter. Mark Zuckerberg was a student at Harvard when he created Facebook, with enough free time on his hands to create a cool app for his friends to stay in touch with one another. In both of these cases, and many others, the founder was wealthy with either time, or enough money to buy time. Take a look at the stories in Inc. magazine once. Most of the founder stories are about people that were successful before they were successful.
Back to the Albom point: With time, and in most cases money, the business doesn’t need to make money. The founder is just fine with banging away on it until something better comes along or until enough people find his cool time-killer. This is a sobering fact for a lot of us wanna-be entrepreneurs with day jobs and families. Time is something we don’t have.
Make a plan July 31, 2009
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When you are entering college and you say: “I want to be a computer programmer” a smiling college counselor hands you a sheet of paper with steps A-Z that tells you exactly what to do. When you are in the real world and you say: “I want to be a computer programmer”, nobody tells you what to do. You have a strong feeling that you don’t need a full degree program, but you don’t know what you can skip. Do I just need A, D, J, M, and Q? What happens if I miss H, will I still be able to get work? And if Q requires 3 months of time, do I really need it? You need a plan.
One of the keys to learning a new task to do it professionally is staying focused. It takes time to acquire the requisite knowledge. Over that time there are many other priorities that will compete for your attention. Laser-like focus is required to see it through and a well-defined path is required to maintain focus.
Now that I’ve convinced you that you need a plan, here is how I got started. First I evaluated the way I learn. This took a long time, mind you. I spent at least 3 years getting books from the library and trying to teach myself Java, PHP, SQL, etc… with no luck. Will Hunting got his education by spending “$1.50 in late charges at the public library”, but that wasn’t going to be me. I needed somebody to teach it to me. Next post – finding a teacher
Degree or not Degree, that is the question… July 31, 2009
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One obstacle to learning a new task well enough to do it professionally is creating a plan to acquire the knowledge. The first time you learned to be a professional in something it was much easier. When you graduated from high school and enrolled in college/tech school, everything was planned out. You said: “I want to be an engineer” and they said, here is what you need to do. After you completed items A-Z you were an engineer with credentials (i.e. your Bachelors degree).
At 18, the degree that you were going to receive was equally, if not less, important than many other tasks. Leaving the house, making new friends, maintaining a full social calendar, making enough money to stay in Ramen noodles, and determining where you’ll be spending Spring Break were critical tasks at this point in your life. Heck, you’re going to change your major 5 times before graduating anyway so you didn’t even know what your degree will be.
After you graduate from college everything is different. You weigh two factors before you even consider going back:
1). Is the reward big enough?
2). Is there an easier way to get the reward?
Graduate degrees or advanced degrees such as MBAs, Law, and other degrees can only be obtained by going back to an accredited institution. Therefore point 2 become moot. However, there are many other professions that do not require University credentials in order to obtain employment. For those instances point 2 becomes very important when considering that you need to acquire these skills while maintaining the rest of your life.
There is one huge paradox to making things easier: there is no plan, therefore it can actually be more difficult. Once you’ve decided that a degree is not required to meet your goals then you’ve also given up that nice tidy degree plan that is critical to maintaining focus. My next few posts will discuss how I created a plan with credential checkpoints to help maintain focus.
Time – Getting Started July 23, 2009
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From my previous post I mentioned the need to add more hours to the day. I know what you’re thinking: “Yeah Mike, getting up earlier, that sounds wonderful… I’m getting way too much sleep these days”
I know, I know getting up early sucks. But Self Improvement is not going to come without sacrifices. In Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin talks about how Abraham Lincoln, and all of his rivals, took to heart Benjamin Franklin’s theme of continuous self-improvement. Lincoln would rise early and work late so as to acquire the knowledge that he missed by not having the formal education of his rivals. He did this through most of his adult life.
You are going to have be like Honest Abe if you want to get serious about learning a new skill (i.e. self improvement). Here is some information to get you started. Tim Ferriss wrote/excerpted an excellent post from Leo Babuta regarding changing your habits.
Getting started is the key. Start small to make getting started easier
Where did the time go July 23, 2009
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I’m sure we’ve all had this feeling as we are laying in bed, exhausted from another day that finished with 3/4 of your mental to do list incomplete. At that moment you’re thinking “I could never learn something new. I didn’t even finish what I had to do, much less wanted to do”. Unfortunately, I do not have an easy answer for you.
However I do have a difficult answer for you: Create more hours in the day. This is not one of those time management, gimmicky, use tools X, Y, and Z to save more time type of approaches. I mean get up earlier.
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell offers an a great comparison and proverb for work:
In east Asia the primary crop is/was/has forever been rice. Rice, as it turns out, is a very time-consuming crop. The typical rice farmer works 3000 hours/year. Compare that to your schedule. If you have a long commute, you may be “working” that number of annual hours. But if you live within 1/2 hour of work, 3000 hours is a lot of time. Even if you are bragging about your 10 hour days, that’s still roughly 2500 hours in a year. 3000 hours equates to 60 hour work weeks. Apparently yields must be good, or wages poor, because Chinese food is pretty cheap.
As part of the story Gladwell relays the following Chinese Proverb: “A man who can rise before dawn 360 days a year, never fails to make his family rich” This ended up being my new year’s resolution: as of 1/1/2009 I get up before the sun every day. Full disclosure: I couldn’t beat the sun from early June – mid July. However I did wake 15 minutes earlier and now I’m back ahead of Apollo. After relaying this story to our friends, I am now officially known as the “rice farmer”.
Next Post – a trick to getting started
Welcome to the Blog July 15, 2009
Posted by hoitomt in Self Improvement.add a comment
Hello,
I don’t know how you found this place but welcome!
I’m writing this blog to provide a road map to acquiring new skills which can be applied professionally. Specifically I’m going to be talking about Computer Programming.
Note the use of the word “professionally” (i.e. paid). New skills, particularly, it seems, computer programming, can be learned at any level. You can learn something just enough to perform a task such as building a garage sale website to sell your old stuff. Or enough to pass a class like that required Fortran class (yes, I’m that old) for your engineering degree. Or you can learn it well enough to do it as well as somebody that has acquired credentials and is paid to apply their knowledge (i.e. professional)
In this blog I’ll give an overview of how I obtained the skills and credentials in Java programming for the purpose of becoming a professional developer/software engineer/programmer. I’ll address some of the difficulties of learning new skills, at a deep enough level, while juggling all of life’s obligations.
For those of you that share my life circumstances (me) you know that your most precious resource is time. Hopefully I can help out with some time management ideas that you can use. My goal is that you will be able to take pieces of my story and use them to write your own story.
Thanks for reading
