Learning Journal | Nearsoft Academy | Week 1

September 29th - October 5th

Hello! 👋 This is my first-week takeaways being part of the Nearsoft Academy program, a space to learn, practice, and grow. I’ll post every week, all about the topics I’ve learned during this adventure.

I’m a visual and kinesthetic person, so you will see a lot of sketch notes here, I hope you enjoy them and also, feel free to share if they were useful for you.

Well, here are the sketches I captured this week:

📰 | Ideas 💡 are just a multiplier of execution

Derek Sivers wrote “Ideas are just a multiplier of execution” from his book Anything You Want and this is the core message of that article:

• The important part of an idea is when you actually execute it.
• An idea doesn’t have any value until someone puts effort into it.
• Ideas just help you to multiply the value of execution.

The next time you hear an idea, is better you put attention to the execution.

📰 | The most profound life lessons from John Ousterhout

John Ousterhout is a Computer Science Profesor at Stanford University, and I’ll share with you some of his most profound life lessons. You can read the whole information in Quora.

📰 | How to talk to anyone

Derek Sivers notes are really good to get all the advice from this book, it was so interesting to read all of these advices and techniques about how to talk to anyone.

📰 | X Workflow

📰 | Missing semester: The Linux shell

📹 | Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence

Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence is a Ted Talk by Jonathan Haidt, and it focuses on self-transcendence and people groups.

He uses a metaphor: climbing the staircase of a house you will find self-transcendence at the top of it.

These experiences are experimented by groups, like in religion.

He explains groups like the next image.

When an exploiter joins a group, it expands to the whole group. The solution is putting cooperators into a superorganism and put the whole group together, having the same ideas, goals, etc.

Now, how self-transcendence connects with cooperation?

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main

📹 | PEAK: How to Master Anything

How to Master Anything: PEAK is a book wrote by Anders Ericsson & Robert Pool, and Productivity Game Youtube Channel made a video about its core message.

Time doesn’t mean master, indeed what matters is how you visualize and condense information. Mental Representations is the way we know how to do something, and what helps us to solve problems.

Mental Representations

Just doing is not improving

Something that helps us to achieve mastering something is Purposeful Practice

Purposeful practice

• Have a specific goal
• Intense focus
• Feedback
• Get out of your comfort zone

Also, you have to find your unique mental representation about something, but having some help from an expert is part of the process.

Purposeful practice methods + Expert coaching = Deliberate practice

📹 | Making Badass Developers

📹 | How Progress Really Happens

📹 | Creative Thinking Hacks

That was it about the readings I read and videos I watched, now here are some bullet points I captured on onboarding classes and other general things.

Opportunities seagulls

• Don’t let opportunities go away because of fear
• If you love what someone has done, and you think it is useful for you, let them know.
• People and good contacts are better than big databases.
• Keep in touch with people.

Agile

• People over process
• Listen to people opinions and ideas
• Deliver high-quality software in small cycles

The Art of Feedback

• I’m at my best when you are at your best
• Active listening

All the things you think are gonna happen, actually are not gonna happen.

• Don’t get stressed for all the things you have in your mind, and the ones “you have to do for X day”, it always looks worse than they actually are.
• Don’t let your mind overthink the situation, capture your tasks, organize them (using what best fits you), and get things done.
• Focus on what you are doing right now, let the rest for your future you.

“Think about people first”

See you next week 😉