Speaker Notes - Condensed2

Last updated Sep 4, 2022 Edit Source

• Map of content

We saw these four patterns, and mapped them to four books on the topic. They’re just the ones we picked to call out the topic, but we’re sure there are others. In fact, if you know of them, we want to hear about them.

Deep Work is a book by Cal Newport. The thesis is that high value, difficult work requires intense and intentional focus. Individual contributors can leverage this idea to build personal brand and accomplish the important things.

Eric Brooker is VP of Strategic Partnerships at Bluewave Technologies and gave examples of successful people he knew that only checked e-mail a couple of times per day.

Don Jones suggests we should quantify time spent doing different things, removing the items that are less valuable, and scheduling everything.

Speaking of time tracking, Chris Wahl, Senior Delivery Principal at Slalom, found he was spending hours per day on social media and decided to focus on solving cool problems and removing distractions. He even wrote a great blog post after reading Deep Work by Cal Newport.

Andy Syrewicze, Tech Evangelist at Hornet Security, mentions the skill required to do nothing, reminding us of Cal Newport’s charge to be OK with being bored. The dopamine hit of filling time with distraction leads to a dependence on distraction, the enemy of deep work. Evan Oldford often works on a problem right before bed, allowing his subconscious to work on it while sleeping (often resulting in a morning epiphany)

We’re showing our work here, right John?

That’s right. All our notes, including our speaker notes are going to be published at graph.nerd-journey.com. It’ll be live by the end of the conference. This is based on the ideas from Show Your Work by Austin Kleon.

Jon Hildebrand, Principal Technologist at Cohesity, mentioning how his manager saw his blogging as evidence of the potential to work on a bigger stage doing great things (our words, not his).

David Klee, founder of Heraflux Technologies, discussed how his blogging and community involvement helped build a reputation

Jonathan Frappier used blogging as a way to store knowledge and experience, then found that it brought some recognition and helped him make moves to bigger organizations. He was also a part of vBrownBag and the vExpert communities which boosted network connections and encouraged learning (started hosting some of the vBrownBag shows).

People want to learn from recent beginners as well as experts. Beginners can empathize with the frustrations and missing context that beginners face.

Don’t you have a saying about fear of being bad?

Oh right. Don’t fear being bad at something. You definitely will be. Embrace and accept it. Smart Kid Syndrome

Steven Murawski mentioned the willingness to be a beginner and asking dumb questions as a career enabler. Beginner doesn’t mean inexperienced. Bringing the depth of your experience and related experiences.

Scott Lowe mentioned the balance between discomfort while you’re learning a skill and waiting too long to discuss it, when it’s become passe.

Stephanie Wong is the Head of Developer Engagement at Google Cloud. She talked about the first pancake principle: It’s always going to be bad, but you’ve got to get it out of the way.

Chris Wahl ditched social media, focuses on solving cool problems, and removed distractions. We told him about the book and he wrote a blog post after he read it.

This idea is based on the book, How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens.

That’s right. He says that great output comes from great thinking. Great thinking comes from great writing. And great writing comes from taking smart notes while you’re consuming information. Smart notes are

• Atomic Thoughts
• In your own words
• Connected to other thoughts The graphs you see on these slides are examples of Smart Notes. We used a program called Obsidian, but there’s a bunch of tools out there that you could do this with.

Chris Wahl mentioned a note-taking system incorporating labels and color-coding to remember and find things.

• you won’t know what’s important until later
• writing in your own words forces deeper thought and understanding of the subject

Josh Duffney is a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, and was the one who originally introduced us to the Deep Work concept we talked about earlier. He was so galvanized by the idea of Smart Notes that he wrote a short book on how to implement the system with Obsidian.

Stephanie Wong discussed how real learning comes from not just reading something, but retrieving the information, processing it, and teaching it back to others.

Atomic Habits by James Clear

Improvement comes from small, incremental steps. Improving 1% every day has a compounding effect. So making tiny, easy changes that last and build upon each other can have a profound effect.

Joseph Griffiths mentions that there aren’t short cuts to iterate on one’s career. Learning and getting better takes time, and is an iterative process.

Steven Murawski and incremental changes over time.
It's not that I need to be perfect tomorrow.  I need to be a little bit better than I was today.

We had two people mention this idea for fitness as well. Blake Johnson discussed small, incremental change as the key to make lasting changes. Michael Levan talked about a series of iterative, modular changes, individually measured. But he’s also a DevOps consultant as well as a fitness guy, so that makes sense.