Hyper-growth Humans: How to Find Growth Materials & Learn x2 Faster

I've shared more than 2,000 posts on SoftwareLeadWeekly.com in the past 5+ years. To share these posts, I had to read almost 14,000 posts during that time, which includes blog posts, videos, books and interviews (podcasts).

I want to share some of my lessons learned about:
* Which kind of "Growth Material" you should focus on to become a better software engineer / manager / product manager / QA etc?
* Where and how to find great content (good signal vs. noise ratio)?
* How to consume content x2 faster and retain more knowledge from it?

Are you're seeking for ways to up your game? If so, you'll enjoy this talk.

About Oren:
I'm a lucky man, working on things that are also my hobbies. Currently serving a great team of engineers as the VP Engineering at Forter. Also, the geek behind softwareleadweekly.com, leadingsnowflakes.com and managerreadme.com

Transcript

1. Hyper-growth Humans: How to find growth materials and learn x2 faster @orenellenbogen
2. “Software is eating the world” source: Recode Marc Andreessen, 2011
3. A new economical incentive: Millions of people are getting paid to learn for their entire career. An era of Hyper-growth humans.
4. “ I want to improve my skills around [X], now what? ” X: role, domain, practice or tool
5. “ Don’t let your schooling get in the way of your education ” – Mark Twain With a new abundance of content, learning how to learn is a challenge.
6. @orenellenbogen VP Engineering at About me?
7. I’m also the maker of: SoftwareLeadWeekly.com LeadingSnowflakes.com ManagerReadme.com ~6 years Read: 14k Recommended: 2K Sharing lessons I’ve learned from my journey so far
8. My 3 steps learning framework 1. Scout for relevant influencers 2. Consume content deliberately 3. Extract and retain more knowledge using growth material types
9. “Show me your friends influencers and I’ll tell you who you are”
10. Influencers as content lead generators Start with: - Who’s already kicking ass at this? - Unless prior familiarity, aim for companies
11. Q: “How can I improve my skills as a Data Engineer?” A: ”I heard a few great talks by Airbnb’s engineers last week.” A real life example:
12. The Twitters Where humans follow other humans and it’s totally fine
17. Should I follow them? My rule of to validate Signal vs. Noise ratio is to browse their last 10 tweets and look for - Activity for the past 3 months - 1 educational content/reference - 1 inspirational content
18. 1 educational ✅ https://twitter.com/awiedmer
19. 1 inspirational ✅ https://twitter.com/awiedmer
20. So…
21. How to get the names of relevant companies? source: TechCrunch
24. Or… a different way!
25. Weekly newsletters e.g. datascienceweekly.org iosdevweekly.com pythonweekly.com devopsweekly.com softwareleadweekly.com ß shameless plug, I’m bad In a way, you “follow” the curator
26. Weekly list! https://github.com/jondot/awesome-weekly
27. Bootstrap Follow 30-40 people around your area of interest. Tips: 1 Check who they’re following. 2 Start over every 12 months. New influencers? Ask questions, share thoughts (2 way conv.) 3
28. Okay, where were we? q Following relevant influencers à content leads q Consume content deliberately (x2 as fast) q Extract and retain more knowledge using growth material types
29. + learning == Procrastination will take over the bored mind
30. Read many books in parallel. Focus is overrated, having fun is underrated. Read only the chapters you find interesting. The author won’t know. Write inside the book. Write even more if your handwriting is ugly. Start at the end and go back. Nobody dies, it’s safe.
31. Technical reading contains a lot of White noise. Headline à 1st sentence à decide. Read less to read more.
32. Improve your vocabulary Fluent recognition of word / terms is critical to speed up the way you read or listen to content. Use Anki to apply ”Spaced Repetition” Right? 1d à 3d à 1w à 1m à 6m etc. Wrong? Back to square one.
33. Audio: Play with playing X2 speed (eventually) Start X1.4 for 2 min. Focus. Switch X1.2 for 2 min. Relax. Play this trick on X1.6 à X1.4, then X1.8 à X1.6 until you can do X2.
34. qFollowing relevant influencers à content leads qGreat content, double the speed q Extract and retain more knowledge using growth material types Step 3, learn > consume “Words per minute is a vanity metric” – @naval
35. Growth Material Types Technical content will usually help you to: (1) Gain new perspective OR (2) Learn a pragmatic tactic OR (3) Concisely frame an existing view
36. New perspective e.g. “ Chaos Engineering lets you compare what you think will happen to what actually happens in your systems. You literally “break things on purpose” to learn how to build more resilient systems.
37. Pragmatic tactics (Your next visit to StackOverflow) e.g. “ By wrapping time functions I can write tests that behave in a predictable way regardless of the actual system’s time
38. Framing (You: 2min talk. Them: 1 sentence) e.g. “ Applying Broken Windows theory on our system means we don’t tolerate even a single failure in our tests or alerts
39. “If there is a belief that the brain considers part of who we are, it turns on its self-defense mode to protect that belief.” – Jonas Kaplan Prime your for the expected growth type
40. Let’s try it together with this example: Airbnb Sunsetting React Native It’s not a surprise if you thought about it first ;)
41. e.g. - Did it remind me of something else? - Did it change the way I think? Why not? - Did I learn something new? Which type? Argue with the author. Argue with your beliefs. Seek new facts.
42. Anchor & Distribute • Capture takeaways, don’t summarize • Use Anki to increase memory recall • Make it applicable to your team (distributed memory)
43. Surround yourself with the influencers you want your future-self to be the average of @orenellenbogen Ask me anything! ß Join us, let’s work together!