Soft Skills by John Z. Sonmez

Apr 2, 2015 · 4 minute read · Comments

Post Tag: bookitcareer

It’s English version of my article on megamozg.ru.

It happens rarely, but the title of the book fully describes the content - it’s a very detailed guide for programmers. How to build a successful career? How to start your own business? How to get fit effectively? Even how to find a soul mate.

The author’s honesty is a fascinating part of the book. Sonmez gives advices only about what he tries and tells straight about his results. For example, he said that could “retire” at 33 and explained in details how it happened. He was able to live on rental income from property, which he bought for investment purposes. And he saved much money for long time, leading a modest life.The book is almost without “water” - all chapters are short and clear. This is its main disadvantage. If you want to go through detail - you need to read the other books, but the end of the book has one chapter fully devoted to the recommended literature. But as a motivator, it’s amazing. After this book, I started blogging quite differently.

Notes:

Career

• Thinking of yourself as a business. What do you have to sell? How to improve your offering?

• Focus on being specialist who provides a very specialized set of services for a very particular type of client.

• You must have to set goals. Goals should be short and specifics, corresponding to - days, weeks, months.

• Ever software developer spends the majority of a time dealing with people, not with computers. You need to learn how to deal with people.

• Think about what other person wants. Avoiding arguments, we’re all very emotional creatures.

• The quickest way to pass an interview is to get the interviewer to know about you before the interview. Start blogging, talking with developers, comment there blogs.

• Being professional - takes your responsibilities and career seriously and is willing to make the tough choices that have to be made for the purpose of doing what they know is right.

• The trouble with working for yourself is that you can’t really get an idea to how much work it’s going to be until you’ve already quit your job, and by that point it’s too late.

• Fake it till you make it - you should act as if you’ve already succeeded in accomplishing a task or feat before you even begin it.

Marketing

• One of the best social media that you can use to market yourself is a blog.
• Being consistency, writing quality content, think about your readers
• Your primary goal: add value to other.
• Don’t be afraid to look like an idiot - if you want to be successful in your efforts, you have to learn to stop caring about what people think.

Learning

• Active learning (by doing) the best way to learn.
• Finding your mentor. Suggest him your work free. His more likely to accept your proposition.
• Being a mentor helps to organise your knowledge.
• Finding gaps in your knowledge. 
• It would be simpler to learn 10-step process of learning:
• Get the big picture
• Determine scope
• Define success
• Find resources
• Create a learning plan
• Filter resources
• Learn enough to get started
• Play around
• Learn enough to do something useful
• Teach

Productivity

• Most important part of productivity - focus.
• No plan - no result.
• Pomodoro technique - 25 minutes of work, then 5 minute break, after every four repeat you take a longer break, usually 15 minutes.
• Make your repeating task into a routine.
• Enter quotas - for example 5 pages per day.
• You need to rest.
• Any action is better than no action. Because after your starting, it would by simply change plane. If you can’t start it might be too late.

Financial

• First of all - your income must be bigger than your outcome.
• There are two types of investing - stocks and real estate.
• With inflation, the loan is beneficial because the purchasing power of money falls.

Fitness

• Getting in shape helps you to feel good about yourself, substantially increase creativity.
• Best way calculating how many calories your burn - using the table of BMR.
• If gaining strength is your goal, you’ll want to have reps that are in the one to six range. To achieve maximum muscle size, you want to try to hit rep ranges between about 8 and 12. To achieve endurance - rep ranges above 12.
• Abs are made in the kitchen.

Spirit

• Being an optimist is very helpful in life.
• We must learn to meet trouble “face to face”.
• Love is a game. It’s not enough interest in one, it must be mutual. It should be of interest to partner and engage him in the game.

Part about relationship, especially with the opposite sex, reminded me a wonderful article.