Upgrade your technical skills with deliberate practice

• “The mistake most weak pianists make is playing, not practicing.” - Cal Newport

• The key ideas behind deliberate practice is that it:

Pushes you just outside your comfort zone Repeated often Feedback on results in continuously available It’s highly demanding mentally It’s difficult It requires good goals

Improving your hard technical skills makes all the software you build better. It exposes you to new opportunities, expands your knowledge into multiple fields and ultimately allows you to do more things with computers.

challenge sources:

Crypto: The Matasano Crypto Challenges
bioinformatic: Rosalined

The power of believing that you can improve

• The power of yet.

• give kids greater confidence, give them a path into the future that creates greater persistence.

Grit: The power of passion and perseverance

• Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality. Grit is living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

• The best ideal about buliding grit is “Growth mindset”.

A kinder, gentler philosophy of success

• A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you, and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.

• The opposite of snob is your mother.

• The next time you see somebody driving a Ferrari, don’t think, “This is somebody who’s greedy.” Think, “This is somebody who is incredibly vulnerable and in need of love.”

• The closer two people are – in age, in background, in the process of identification – the more there’s a danger of envy, which is incidentally why none of you should ever go to a school reunion, because there is no stronger reference point than people one was at school with.

• meritocracy

• One thing about modern society and why it causes this anxiety, is that we have nothing at its center that is non-human. We are the first society to be living in a world where we don’t worship anything other than ourselves.

• You can’t be successful at everything.

• Any vision of success has to admit what it’s losing out on, where the element of loss is. And I think any wise life will accept, as I say, that there is going to be an element where we’re not succeeding.

Citation sources:

http://www.happybearsoftware.com/upgrade-your-technical-skills-with-deliberate-practice https://www.ted.com/talks/carol_dweck_the_power_of_believing_that_you_can_improve?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_grit_the_power_of_passion_and_perseverance https://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_a_kinder_gentler_philosophy_of_success