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PeopleGoal

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Goal setting is the seemingly simple process of committing yourself to a milestone in future. This is important both in professional and personal fronts. What we will see in this article: Defining Goals and Goal Setting​ Why don’t most people set goal​? Why Goals fail​ Why Set Goals?​ Types of Goals​ Understanding nuances of effective goal setting​ SMART Goals​ Facts of Goal Setting​ Defining Goals and Goal Setting Defining a goal means having a clear end point in mind. The goal is the outcome of the effort that you make, whereas goal setting is the process of deciding how you’re going to achieve your desired result. Why don't most people set a goal? Pessimistic Attitude​ Human beings have an inherent trait of being wary of changes. This is seen everywhere. We tend to be pessimistic towards doing something differently. For example, try convincing your family that you want to leave your salaried job to start your own business; an all-supporting family will suddenly become pessimistic. Fear of Failure​ This is somewhat related to the previous point. We are afraid of changes. And afraid to fail in the thing that we are trying to change. This is mainly because we are afraid of "what others will think?!!” Ignorance of importance of Goals​ If we do not have a goal, we will not reach anywhere. Whatever it is, have a destination in mind and work towards reaching that destination. This can be anything: going for a dream vacation, a promotion at work, completing a certification, learning a new language, a dance performance on stage. Anything. Lack of knowledge about setting Goal​ Many may very well have a goal but may not know how to attain it. Lack of Ambition​ People who are in their mid 30s usually have this problem of not having an ambition. This is partially because of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. They hit a plateau of success or a false feeling of fulfillment. That is the time when most lose their ambitions and find a comfort zone in what they are doing. This is the exact time for finding a new goal. Low Self Esteem​ Again, people who think they aren’t as good as their peers stop trying new things. One has to introspect, and if needed, forcefully realize that everyone has some or another superpower. We are all created from the same stuff: "Star dust.” Fear of Rejection​ This is a by-product of fear of failure. The thought of what will happen if I fail. Fact is, the world is not revolving around you. People have a thousand things to worry about. No one cares what you do. So, forget about failure and rejection. Put the boots on and start running. Why goals fail? Ok, you set the goal. But it failed. Most of the time, goals fail because of silly mistakes we do. Not Written Down​ Try writing down what you want to achieve. Not on a paper. Rather, you have to write it on a chart paper and stick it to the wall, where you and others can see. Every time you see the writing, it should keep reminding you of the goal. No Rewards​ Goals should be rewarding. You should not set yourself a goal which will put you in misery. If you are working a low-paying job, don’t set your goal to take a loan and buy a Mercedes car. It will put you into misery. Rather your goal should be to earn enough money to buy a luxury car. Reward - Not misery. This is very important. Not Realistic​ You have to set a realistic goal. You may want to go onsite. That may be realistic. But going to moon might not be. Choose your game wisely. Have realistic and achievable goals. That will be rewarding too. Keeps Changing​ Do not be adamant on your goal. Sometimes, your goal may become obsolete. For example, in late 1990s, buying a pager was a dream for many. But in early 2000s, pagers became obsolete and cell phones took over. If you had a goal to buy a pager, it would be of no use in 2000s. Point is, if your goal becomes obsolete, evolve it. Change your goal. As wise men say - Change or Perish. No Accountability You need to be accountable for your success and failure. We spoke about fear of failure and fear of rejections in previous section. Make it to your use. When setting a goal, let your inner circle of people (those who won't judge you) know that your goal is X and prove to the inner circle that you are serious about your goal. No Timelines​ Always have a timeline for your goal. If you do not have a plan, you do not have a goal. Failing to plan is planning to fail. Why to set goals? You need to set goals for: Taking control of your own life. To help focus on important things and ignore those unimportant ones. Focus on making good decisions. Focus on efficiency. So that you will be self-confident. Have better visibility to your goal. Types of goals Your goals should be classified into three (or as you wish - but consider this model). Short term goals - Those goals which can be achieved in a time box of less than 3 months. Medium term goals - Those goals which can be achieved in a time box of less than 2 years. Long term goals - Those goals which can be achieved in a time box of around 5-7 years. The trick is you should do the goal setting in the reverse order. You should know the big picture. Plan smaller achievable goals which incrementally will contribute to achieve your long-term goals. Effective goal setting First you need to decide what you want to achieve. Then, you need to identify how to achieve the goal. Here are a few tips to set effective goals: Set SMARTER GOALS The word SMARTER is the key here. SMARTER means: Specific - Goal should be specific than an ambiguous cross hair. Measurable - You should be able to see if the effort you put to achieve the goal is good enough or not. Action-oriented - Your goals should be based on your actions. Do not believe in other's action to help you. Realistic - Must be a realistic goal. Timebound - Set a time frame to achieve the goal. If it fails, reset the time frame and try different methods. Effective - Your goal should have some effect on you. A positive one. Relevant - Your goal should be relevant to you. Write your goals! Write your goal and make it visible for yourself and it should keep on reminding you about your goal. Identify your goal Ask three questions- WHAT? WHY? HOW? If you have satisfying answers for the above questions, chase your goal. Facts about goal setting Specific, realistic goals work best​ It takes time for change to become an established habit​. Repeating a goal makes it stick​. Pleasing other people doesn’t always work​. Roadblocks doesn’t always mean failure. If required, fail early. Also published . here

Why Goal Setting is Important and How to Set Goals

Business people can fire off the of goal congruence with ease — it’s the alignment of individual goals with the goals of an organization. And no one can really argue against it, because employee-company alignment definition simply makes sense. Why? Because congruence is a fancy word for ‘least resistance.’ There is no friction between teams and departments when their goals are in sync. Everyone is clear on their objectives and the direction of the business, and their actions reflect that understanding. I often think about the idea of congruence on a personal level. Looking at ourselves closely, we aren’t dissimilar to a business or organization. We are made up of moving parts. Our physical being can fall out of alignment with our mental, emotional and spiritual selves. When we are in congruence, however — when our various parts are connected and working together — we find the space of least resistance. And when we break this process down, it’s simpler than you might think. Let’s talk about it. We All Have Implicit Motives I started down this congruence rabbit hole after reading a published in 2017: “Enhancing Congruence between Implicit Motives and Explicit Goal Commitments.” It was a controlled study of German students; the idea was to see if increasing goal congruence improved well-being. fascinating study But we’ve got a few terms to sort out before I go further. First, we need to understand what it means to have . You’ll find an excellent breakdown , but the idea is this: implicit motives are the unconscious drives or proclivities that lead us to take action. We might be motivated by a desire for power, autonomy, intimacy, or achievement — and these can all work in harmony with our conscious goals. implicit motives here Explicit goal commitments, on the other hand, are those goals we’ve set for ourselves consciously. They’re often career-oriented: what job do I want? What salary am I aiming for? How will I get there? But we set these goals across all walks of life. When both sets of goals (implicit and explicit) align in congruence, it creates a strong sense of identity and clarity of purpose. We know what we want, and why we’re doing it. Congruency in Practice Since a lot of these terms come straight from psych theory, it’s hard to picture exactly what I’m talking about. So let’s bring it back to the everyday. Take a moment and consider your life right now. Do you wake up in the morning with enthusiasm, or dread? Are you doing what comes naturally to you? Are there any areas of your life where things don’t quite fit together — like pieces of a jigsaw that just won’t go into place? As humans, we tend to lean more toward one of : power, affiliation, or achievement. We develop these in the very early stages of our development. Maybe your childhood was particularly turbulent, so you’ve leaned into power as a way of protecting yourself. Or maybe your parents were particularly nurturing, so you’ve found solace in affiliation. three implicit motives Whatever the case, these implicit motives form the foundation of who we are and what drives us forward. Now, imagine your main implicit motive is affiliation or intimacy. You’re going to be best suited to a job where you can nurture and help others — and therefore, the most congruent career goal you can set is one that gives you the opportunity to do just that. Why We Misalign It’s fair to ask — if our implicit motives are so integral to us as people, why don’t we always align our explicit goals with them? The answer is simple: we form implicit and explicit motives at different stages. Explicit motives are much more affected by the way we’re socialized; the societal pressures we feel, the stories we hear, and the beliefs we internalize. So imagine you’re someone who deeply values control. You gravitate toward problem-solving, autonomy, and a sense of mastery. But since you were a child, you’ve been told that the only way to guarantee success is to become a lawyer or an accountant — so that’s what you set out to do. The issue here is obvious. Even though these are noble professions — and people can absolutely thrive in them — they require completely different skill sets than those inherent within problem-solving and control-oriented careers. You’re not even starting from the same place as someone who has chosen their career consciously with congruence in mind. (Keep in mind that we can talk about any aspect of life when it comes to congruence. I’m just using career paths as the most obvious example.) Why Do We Need Congruence? I hate putting any human in a box, and sometimes, topics like this can feel a bit prescriptive. Of course, there will be control-oriented people who are drawn to the medical field or affiliate-oriented people who thrive in a WFH job. What , though, is that — for the most part — people who align their goals with their implicit motives are going to experience more satisfaction. research has suggested Why? Put very simply, it’s because our implicit motives determine what success and happiness mean to us in different situations. Studies by , among others, can back this up. An achievement-oriented person is going to find satisfaction in the completion of a task, while an affiliate-oriented person may find the same level of satisfaction in being part of a team. Brunstein, Schultheiss, and Grassmann Think of these motives as the compass for how you measure success in different aspects of your life. The compass was set a long time ago. It’s not moving. What you need to do is orient your goals in the same direction. If you don’t, the risk is that you run out of resources — both physically and emotionally — to continue pursuing your goals. We’ve only got a limited amount of energy. that incongruent goals will drain our resources, while congruent ones energize us. Research shows Finding Your Motives The interesting thing about implicit motives is that they’re unconscious. You don’t decide what to value more or less — you just , and it stems right back to your childhood experiences. do But psychologists — as they do — have been brainstorming ways to measure and understand these unconscious motives. One of the most popular methods is the Pang & Schultheiss (PSE), where you’re asked to construct stories based on different images. The themes that come up in the stories give an indication of what you value in life. Picture-Story Exercise Then there’s the trial and error approach. I think this is what most of us spend our lives doing; we try a relationship or a job or a hobby, and if it doesn’t fit our motives, it becomes clear pretty quickly. We’re drained, and unfulfilled, and we’re itching to try something else. I’m guessing you’ve pursued your fair share of goals at this point. What I suggest is that you take out an old-fashioned pen and paper, and sit down to reflect using these prompts: Of the goals you’ve set for yourself over the years (personal, business, relationship, etc), which energized you? Which took effort, but became second-nature after a while? Are there any common themes between those goals? Which goals made you feel drained, uninspired, or pressured? What do those goals have in common? You’ll quickly find out that — despite our unconsciousness — we do have motives that affect which goals work out and which don’t. For example, you might realize through this exercise that all of your people-based goals were the ones that energized you, while all of your recognition-based goals were the ones that drained you. Every time you worked to strengthen a relationship, you found it not only enriching but motivating. It’d be fairly safe to assume that your main implicit motive is affiliation. Aligning the Goals You Set Once you understand what success and happiness mean to you, setting goals becomes much simpler. You won’t be wasting energy on something that isn’t congruent with who you are. Because that’s what incongruency does — it wastes your resources. In the study of German students I mentioned early on in the piece, it was found that the more these students were educated on their implicit motives, the more their goal congruency increased. Their satisfaction indicators increased as a direct result. The Bottom Line At its heart, goal congruence isn’t a new concept. It’s just reminding us to stay true to ourselves while also striving for what we want out of life. When you can align your goals with your implicit motives, you’re going to experience higher levels of satisfaction due to efficient use of resources both physical and emotional. I’m setting myself a goal in 2023 to spend a lot more time in self-reflection about the past goals I’ve set. I think it can tell us a lot about what works and what doesn’t. Goals are rarely easy to meet, but there’s such a thing as too much resistance; it usually means we need to step back, re-assess, and re-align. Also published here.

Goal Congruence and The Importance of Aligning With Who You Are

How Much Does it Really Cost to Create a Successful NFT Collection?

Goal setting is one of the most important ways to foster growth, let’s look at some key concepts and frameworks. Performance vs. developmental goals There are basically two kinds of goals in a work setting – performance goals and developmental, a.k.a. growth goals. The key difference, in theory, is that performance goals focus on end results while developmental goals are learning & growth-oriented. In reality, most companies use performance goals in a very narrow way, e.g. to incentivize the sales team. This created a bad rap for performance goals and a shift in terminology. Don’t let this ruin your goal setting plans, though! I am strongly biased goals for software engineers. The reason is that I find that most engineers are highly motivated to grow and are also intrinsically motivated to perform in their roles and are just fine without “the boss” telling them how to perform. In fact, after working with cca. 200 engineers, I’m yet to find a single one who doesn’t want to perform well in their job. in favor of developmental Helping your engineers with good growth goals and coaching/mentorship can add a lot of value for them, though. It helps them focus since there are always just too many things to learn next, it helps them feel they’re progressing, it helps with the alignment with the company’s expectations of their career – which is ideally what the market wants already – and last but not least it makes them feel they’re at the right company. I find that growth opportunities are just as important to engineers as an exciting product to work on, great colleagues, good company culture, and of course, fair compensation. I had engineers leave solely because they felt they’re not growing anymore. There are some rate situations in which performance goals do make sense. One I can think of is when there’s already a gap between your expectations and the engineer’s performance. Closing that gap might require very narrow, outcome-focused goals, but note that this should only be temporary (until closing the gap or deciding to part ways). An example for a place for performance goals is a PiP (Personal Improvement Plan). I’d also like to have an argument against ‘by default’ performance goals. Setting performance goals feel like micromanagement and mistrust for your engineers. General expectations should be set by the levelling system you hopefully have in place, your company and team culture, and your shared values. If none of these inspire and define good performance, then you have a problem there. Setting individual or team performance goals is a band-aid solution. will Your HR department might try to push your goal setting agenda towards performance goals for your engineers for multiple reasons: They don’t deeply understand each department’s field They want a uniform process and set of training materials across the company They want an easy way to decide on promotions and compensation My advice is to be proactive about this, reach out to them and make sure you give context about why you believe performance goals don’t fit your department. OKRs, KPIs and SMART goals, oh my OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are two frameworks and concepts for goal setting. There are a plenty of articles about this topic, some very confusing. There’s also a false dichotomy floating around. No, it’s not an either-or situation. OKRs The best way to describe this framework is with this ‘formula’: I will (Objective) as measured by (this set of Key Results). You start out with high level Objectives which might be hard or impossible to measure by themselves then you come up with multiple Key Results. Key Results are like milestones but they don’t align on a linear timeline necessarily. They might or might not build/depend on each other. Objectives are memorable qualitative descriptions of what you want to achieve. Objectives should be short, inspirational, and engaging. An Objective should motivate and challenge the individual. Key Results are a set of metrics/milestones that measure your progress towards the Objective. By definition the success of each key result needs to be easy do decide. It’s also OK not to achieve all of the key results! There’s usually not a 1-1 mapping between objectives and a set of key results. Let’s see an example: you want to get better at programming in Go. An idea for an objective would be “I want to get confident at Go programming”. A set of potential Key Results for goal setting could be: Write a CLI tool for updating our JIRA board Write a REST API service for X Convert my old Go project to use go modules Study and deeply understand the following pieces of the standard library: […] You can get a sense. I find this framework really helpful for breaking down vague high level “things I want” into actionable and measurable smaller pieces. Perdoo has an , check it out! amazing guide for OKRs You might have seen company/department level OKRs which probably looked different, the reason for that is those usually have numbers as targets in their key results. Some of them are KPIs! KPIs This is a goal setting method! This is just a way to structure measuring things, usually performance, usually on the company/departmental level. E.g. for engineering you could have some of these KPI candidates: number of deployments per day, MTTR (Mean Time To Recovery), Cycle time. On a company level some examples are burn rate, profit margin, NPS (Net Promoter Score). not The most important thing about KPIs is which differentiates them from any other metric/indicator is that they measure the most important aspects of performance. You can have many supporting metrics but KPIs should be few and represent the performance In a developmental goal scenario, KPIs sometimes come in handy, mostly for making sure we focus on the real important things and not some vanity metrics. KPI targets are nice Key Result candidates sometimes. Such an example would be an engineer who wants to improve in code quality identifying e.g. mean pull request back-and-forth cycles as a KPI and then setting a target for it as a Key Result. SMART goals This is another framework that can be combined with others for goal setting. This talks about how an ideal goal should look like: Specific (simple, sensible, significant). Measurable (meaningful, motivating). Achievable (agreed, attainable). Relevant (reasonable, realistic, and resourced, results-based). Time-bound (time-based, time-limited, time/cost limited, timely, time-sensitive). The OKR framework guarantees some of these but this is still good guidance. Consider the previous example: “I want to get confident at Go programming”. Is this a SMART goal? Well… it’s not specific, it’s vaguely measurable (very subjective), probably Achievable, probably Relevant and not time bound. You could wrangle a bit with making it a SMART goal but I found that some things (the personal and motivating aspect especially) can get lost in that effort. I grew to prefer OKRs over religiously SMART goals. Again, this is another aspect to take into account and good guidance in general. Not clinging to goals Now we got to the most important discussion about goal setting. Your engineers set the most amazing developmental goals, so full of energy, motivation, ready to take on the world – then life happened. Should they feel bad? Should you be disappointed as their manager? Did you fail with goal setting? Hell no. Of course, it’s not nice when someone constantly ditches their goals but goals reflect an intent AND a life situation. Both can change. People might find out that Go is not their thing after all and jump to Rust instead. Did they fail their goal? Of course not. Hell, COVID might happen and people end up cramped together with flatmates or family, not really feeling energetic enough to keep learning. They might not be doing super well in work/life balance. I might do a separate post about the Buddhist concept of non-attachment and stoicism to give some more perspective here. The bottom line is that goals in general work best if you don’t cling to them but use them as north stars and proxies. How can you support your engineers in goal setting and achieving those goals? First and foremost by being supportive, not demanding (see the previous section). Depending on the level and experience of the individuals you might need to be more suggestive, using your own past experience to come up with good goal ideas and goal setting strategies. Make sure they understand it’s for them and you’re not there to dictate goals, merely to support them. Understand that you’re not always the best person to help them in reaching their goals! There’s a difference between coaching and mentoring and maybe already coaching is better done by someone else in specific areas. Remember, you’re there to support, not to dictate! If you feel someone else is better suited to help in a specific area, connect them! Make sure they have enough support for achieving their goals, such as time and mentorship ! actual during working hours I hope this article was useful for some of you out there, most things are trivial here, no great revelations but I sure could have used it a few years back 🙂 Previously published at https://ochronus.online/goal-setting/

OKRs, KPIs and SMART Goals, OH MY! 

3 systems to make self-learning easier, Mentors to follow on Twitter and Cool Project Ideas for teaching yourself programming MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses) are a boon to us, self-learners. Lectures from the world’s best professors brought straight to your hands, no matter what corner of the earth you live in — Isn’t that the recipe for disrupting world-class education and democratizing it to the entire world? A recent (one of the creators of the popular MOOC platform — ) suggests — study by academics at MIT edX No, it might not be : the learners have been concentrated almost entirely in the world’s most affluent countries and neighborhoods, on an average only 6 out of every 100 people who enroll in a course actually complete it and these numbers aren’t improving. The study can be summarised to say that MOOCs aren’t as disruptive as the world expected when it first got introduced to the idea in 2012. So, how can we include more students in our goal of democratizing education? MOOCs help the self-learners who needed help with finding the resources to learn some subject. Maybe we can democratize education even further if we take a broader look and address the needs of those self-learners who need help with finding the motivation to learn those subjects. Motivating students is unstructured. I believe that along with teaching themselves the concepts of the subject, self-learners also struggle with things that we take for granted in traditional means of education — A sense of direction (guided by competition), a learning environment and a peer group. Since, these are the very things that drive people to be self-motivated, a lack of them is a very real problem for the self-learners. This problem is especially acute for the ones who come from non-traditional backgrounds and the ones in unfavourable surroundings (like developing countries). They are fighting an uphill battle. I aim to bring some structure to it with this article. What follows is my advice on how you can hack your self-learning if online courses don’t seem helpful enough for your situation. 3 Systems to help teach yourself <some X> After 2 years of being a self-learner who taught himself everything he wanted and another year of being lost, unmotivated and kind of depressed, I have realized that — Teaching yourself anything can be difficult, draining and quite a lonely process But when you care about what you are learning, you change it from something that drains you out of energy into something that lifts your spirits and makes you more confident And having a few peers can make it a whole lot easier With all of this in mind, I have been able to come up with 3 systems that will help you learn X when your physical environment won’t — Make serious efforts to fall in love with X before you try to learn it Create and be in an environment that motivates you Incentivize yourself to push through the nitty-gritties of learning X Remember they are long-term systems and not one-off tips and tricks. They are regular practices to increase your odds of learning X in the long run. Below I describe each of these systems in details, tell you why I think each of them is important and give you some personal suggestions/tips for getting started with each. 1. Make serious efforts to fall in love with X before you try to learn it If you love something, you will care about it. And when that happens, learning no longer remains a “task”; it becomes an adventure. You will be hungry for knowing more about it and you will have the energy to hunt for answers to your doubts. When you first want to know , it isn’t because you love X or even find it exciting. You are probably more excited about the maybe ecause you have seen a peer go completely nuts talking about X or because you’ve heard/read it enough times that X is a “hot” skill to put in your resume. But there’s a catch: How to learn X idea of loving X.. , b Although, these reasons are a good starting point they aren’t enough. If you dive into doing X for these reasons, you’ll just be . If someone were to ask you , you will probably not have an answer that can make you proud. following the herd “Why do you care so much about X?” So, before you go looking for the best courses that teach X, make serious, conscious efforts to find reasons to become obsessed with X. “What if I try to skip this and just go through with the learning?” I believe that whenever you force yourself into learning something just for the sake of it, you create a very unsatisfying learning experience. Working hard for something you are really excited about is passion but working hard for something that you don’t really care about is stress . Doing so is likely to drive you into one of the following 3 situations — Finding yourself unable to care about the subject and discontinuing midway Completing a course, earning the certificate and that’s it Getting stuck in the “ ”: doing an endless series of courses, watching lectures and tutorials without actually putting them to any use tutorial purgatory None of these are desirable. Personal suggestions and tips for getting started: find reasons that will get convinced that learning X is the absolute best possible use of time right now. Consciously you your Before you ask someone “ , ask “ . How to Learn X” What makes you excited about X” Go to Twitter or Reddit, hang around the community of people who love X and go deep into the stuff that resonates the most with the people there — the most liked/upvoted posts. Go down the rabbit hole. This brings us to the next system. 2. Create and be in an environment that motivates you We all admire self-motivated people. It’s like a superpower that makes them unstoppable. But nobody is born with a self-motivating ability, right? So what gives them that “drive”? And more importantly, how can we cultivate that in ourselves? I believe that what you need to self-motivate yourself is an environment that is filled with people and ideas that inspire you to do more. When you’re around people who value a thing, you’re more likely to value it yourself. And you can have that environment too, regardless of your physical whereabouts — if you leverage the power of the Internet. Creating a motivating environment online You know how your newsfeed is so great at helping you discover all those pleasing and mouth-watering and unimaginable and insane food videos because it knows that you are a foodie. Now imagine, what it would recommend if it knew that you are interested in Machine Learning or blockchain technology or open-source software. You can turn what is perhaps the most negative aspect of social media — an addictive and infinitely scrollable feed — and use it to your advantage! “What if I skip this?” Remember the saying — “Y ? ou are the average of 5 people you spend the most time with” So, you could skip this step if you are surrounded by a group of people who talk about and regularly share cool things about X with you. But even then, you’ll feel better if you have access to your own sources of new, cool stuff that you can share with them. But most of us, self-learners, aren’t surrounded by such people. We are the people who come from non-traditional backgrounds or a not-so-great college or from a developing country where we don’t have access to peers with similar aspirations. This might be the easiest way for us to solve our personal-environment-problem. Personal suggestions and tips for getting started: I heavily use Twitter. I would suggest that you join it too. To persuade you further, I would recommend reading this article by Alexey Guzey — . Why (and How) You Should Join Twitter Right Now It’s simple to let its recommender system know that you are into X: Follow the people interested in X — people who could be your role-models and learners who are passionate about X Stalk the hell out of their profiles And spend (a limited) time going through your awesome awesome newsfeed! Do this and see how Twitter’s newsfeed lets you discover all those unimaginable things and helps you with self-motivation. “But if I’m just getting started with Twitter, how will I know whom to follow and whom not to?” Yes, that’s a real problem for newcomers to the platform. Therefore, I have created several lists of Twitter accounts if you need help getting into the programming ecosystem. Here are lists of people who love: machine learning data science blockchain/crypto web development brain-machine interfaces You can check out more such lists . here 3. Incentivize yourself to push through the nitty-gritties of learning X A lot of the time self-learning can be really draining despite having all the right reasons for learning. That’s when you might get stuck on some of smaller X’s that comprise our bigger X. You need to incentivize yourself so that you can constantly push through this slump. A simple way to do this is to work on a project on the side you are going through the tutorials/courses. Building something that seems is a great way to trick yourself into learning X with dedication. while cool and interesting Personal suggestions and tips for getting started: I know that this is scary. I know there are a few serious insecurities that you might have, especially if you are doing this for the first time: Insecurity #1: “I would love to build something by myself but I don’t have ideas for any new interesting projects.” Yes, this is perhaps the narrowest bottleneck that prevents most people from doing a project. Even more than the actual difficulty of building the thing. I think that browsing through other people’s hackathon projects on is a great way to come across such ideas because — devpost.com They are just : being personal projects built by young programmers in just some 12 or 24 or 48 hours, they are very doable small, cozy, warm pet projects You can know that you are : most of them are hackathon winning projects building something worthwhile How cool would it be if you created: — . — Android development A simple notifications app that lets you select messaging apps that you want to block notifications from when the frequency of notifications exceeds 1 every 3 seconds And tricked yourself to learn — Python, Basic web development (HTML/CSS, Javascript) A web applicatio n that lets you search inside a YouTube video and get you to the point where that word is uttered — a Ctrl-F capability for videos And tricked yourself to learn — Android app development A messaging app that automatically sends a text to your loved ones letting them know that you’ve reached a particular destination because you often forget to do so And tricked yourself to learn — #messages sent, #words sent, average no. of words per message, most common words, longest double texting streak, chat hour pattern, most shared website links and more — Python and even web development if you decide to build a website for it A tool to analyze your Whatsapp chat and reveal things like And tricked yourself to learn (This will combat the effects of newsfeeds that allow people to only see posts on social media and news sites that agree with their point of view) — Basic web development (HTML/CSS, Javascript, jQuery), maybe some Machine Learning A browser extension that referred you to a story with an opposite political view as the one that you are reading And tricked yourself to learn A script to analyze the sentiment of tweets of various Game of Thrones seasons to learn how bad the last season was (😜) — Python, Machine Learning, NLP And tricked yourself to learn has some really cool resources that you can (article read by 13k people). Kaggle use to learn Machine Learning and Data Science [Here is the link for the above datasets: ( , , , , )] 1 2 3 4 5 Remember your goal is self-improvement. That’s why, I believe, you can simply imitate and reimplement these ideas with a clear conscience. (Although it would be awesome if you could find a way to give the reimplementation your personal touch!) Insecurity #2: “But I don’t have any experience. How will I ever know what to learn, how to build and just, how to go through it all?” I believe that you don’t need any of that mysterious “real-world experience” to build something useful. The Internet is quite filled with stories of people who just , that they needed and in the process taught themselves programming. built what they wanted picked up the skills along the way I have written more about it here: . How (and why) to start building useful, real-world software with no experience “Every great developer you know got there by solving problems they were unqualified to solve until they actually did it.” — Patrick McKenzie But even then, I realize that this is easier said than done. And that is why I want to help you. Introducing, Build To Learn I have started an initiative to help self-learners with their self-learning needs. Here, I am going to create a series of tutorials centered around doing projects and teaching you the necessary programming skills along the way. (Of course, its all free! :) ) Build To Learn It’ll be like a story — You be the hero, the project our adventure and me, Gandalf, your guide: I will pay attention to the need (and the lack) of motivation in learning and keep the above 3 systems in mind and try to help you with them — A “Reasons To Love X” series which will serve as a starting point for various fields “List of People who Love X on Twitter” series that I introduced above The projects themselves which will incentivize you to do more You can sign up for this newsletter so I can send you a more extensive list of project ideas and let you know about the updates with . Build To Learn Also, I have also started a Slack group to build a community of people who want to Build To Learn. Our community is becoming larger every day (350 members already). You can join it using the ! link here Thanks for reading! If you like what I have written, you can reach out to me via or or the plain old email — nityeshagarwal[at]gmail[dot]com Twitter LinkedIn : If you have found my advice useful, I would love to jump on a 10-minute call with you to know your story, your learning struggles and give you more personalized advice :) PS

Making Self-Learning Less Lonely and More Fun

The 4 V’s Create a Strong Foundation By , published on Stephanie Ockerman Scrum.org Servant-leaders must create a strong foundation that helps people feel empowered to take action, enables them to move forward in a common direction despite uncertainty, and to feel inspired and resourceful during challenging times. The 4 V’s can help you establish this strong foundation: Vision, Values, Value, Validation. Vision “What do we want?” A strong vision helps people see where they are going and what they want to be true when they get there. While we may disagree on how to get there, it is likely we can find a common understanding of what we want to be true. A struggling team or organization may not agree on how to change their process of working or even on the right solutions for the problems they are trying to solve. However, it is likely that they can agree on some things they would like to work towards and how they want to feel. For example: We want more focus in our work, so we can get the important things done. We want to delight our customers. We want to love coming to work, feeling like we are part of a supportive community. We want to revolutionize _____. We want to be continuously learning and growing our skills and knowledge. A vision also helps people tap into the feelings of the future state when things get tough and . It is a reminder of why we are doing the work, and it helps people continue forward despite setbacks. A strong vision is clear, concise, and emotionally impactful. unite people when division surfaces The next time you sense your team is moving in different directions or maybe churning over unresolved issues, what powerful questions can you ask to help everyone focus on a creating or re-aligning to a shared vision? Values “What is important about that?” A vision is stronger when it is connected to the values of individuals, teams, and the organization. A servant-leader helps connect people to their values and a greater purpose, so they can experience greater successes and growth. As human beings, we each have values. Values help us live our best lives, understand others, and work more effectively in teams. When it comes to values, remember that people often interpret values differently. And that is why discussing them is important. Approach it with respect and openness. when there seems to be a disconnect. Approach conversations from the belief that all values are valid, and everyone is acting with the best of intentions. Be cautious of “weaponizing” values. Get curious People will feel a more meaningful connection to why they are doing the work. When the work feels good, many benefits will follow both for successful outcomes as well as for the growth of individuals and the collaboration of the team. A vision connected to values creates an emotional impact. The next time you sense a lack of resonance, or especially dissonance, between people and the work they are doing, get curious about this. Is something out of alignment with the individual, team, or organization values? How can you create transparency so that people can work through the issues? Value “What value are we creating? What outcomes indicate we are succeeding?” This means we need to focus more on outcomes than on the outputs. It’s not just about how much stuff we can create; it’s about the value or benefits that stuff provides. You need to clearly define what value means to you, your team, your organization. More and more of the work people do in the world is about creating valuable solutions to complex problems. It is very easy for teams to get disconnected from the value of the work they are doing, especially if they are providing services or products that are not used by an external customer or paid for directly. Servant-leaders help people get clear on how the work they do connects to customer value and business value. If the work you are doing is for-profit, value will ultimately tie back to money. But it also ties back to creating happy customers because people pay for things that make their lives better, easier, joyful. If the work you are doing is non-profit, value will often manifest in terms of the benefits to society. It still ties directly back to money because the money you have to spend to create the benefits is usually limited. The next time it feels like people are disconnected from the value of their work, ask some powerful questions to help people connect the dots to how their work matters. And if it doesn’t, then perhaps the work needs to change, and you can help bring transparency to that. ( Read more about Product Value concepts , and consider how these relate to the type of value your team creates.) Validation “How will we measure valuable outcomes? How will we validate our assumptions about value?” In order to navigate towards a greater vision and the creation of valuable outcomes, you have to actually put something out in the world and validate if the assumptions about value were correct. Then you can learn how to create even more value or course-correct. Value is only an assumption until validated by the market. The earlier you get feedback, the earlier you can adapt towards more valuable outcomes. Remember that you are dealing with complexity. Your assumptions will be wrong. Things beyond your control will change and impact the work you are doing. Embrace this reality and frequently validate. (More to come on embracing change and unpredictability.) Create Alignment with the 4 V’s Even if a vision, a set of core values, and a definition of how you measure value already exist for your organization or your team’s products/ services, engage people in a conversation about these things. In order to create alignment, engage EVERYONE in creating this strong foundation. Different perspectives will be shared, and people will start to discover greater clarity in what these things mean to them, their peers, and the organization. Then they can move forward in the journey together. Servant-leaders create an environment of inclusivity, openness, and curiosity. Remember that is not a one-time only activity. You must . And you may need to adapt one or all of these as your environment and goals change. continuously reinforce and ensure there is alignment across all 4 V’s If you are in a management position, reflect on how you are creating the space to have regular collaborative discussions about the 4 V’s with those who report to you, the managers who are your peers, and the managers you report to. Consider ways of making the 4 V’s more tangible and visible to everyone. Consider when it is best to encourage others to share and explore their own ideas rather than providing answers. When you notice that there may not be clarity with the 4 V’s or perhaps there is mis-alignment with the direction the team is going, ask some powerful questions to help everyone explore together. Here are a few simple ways to frame a conversation: You don’t need to be in a management position to be a servant-leader and take action on the 4 V’s. That is an interesting idea. How will that move us towards [vision/ goal/ etc]? What outcomes can we measure as we implement this new approach to help guide us? Which of these ideas feels most connected with our core values and the outcomes we want to create for our customers? My perspective is ________. How can you help me improve upon this and offer alternative perspectives, so we can move in a better direction together? What if we try [IDEA/ EXPERIMENT] for X weeks and then assess the outcomes and what we learned in the process? What most excites you about ________? In what ways do you most want to learn and grow right now? If you could do anything and had every possible resource available, what would you want to create? This is part of a series of posts about servant leadership to influence change and inspire greatness . My goal is to make servant leadership more understandable and actionable for everyone regardless of your position, title, or industry. Because this is the only way to create meaningful change in our complex world. Instead of feeding into division, fear, and disempowerment, we will lead by inspiring, enabling, and empowering. Originally published at www.agilesocks.com.

Servant Leadership 101: Vision, Values, Value, & Validation

A bit more than two years ago, I quit using . I didn’t quit 100%, as in deleting my account entirely, as I wanted to keep a to my friends and acquaintances around the world. I just stopped visiting and posting there. Facebook lifeline I wrote one last post to let my friends and family know. I wanted them to understand that it wasn’t about I still really wanted to be in contact with them. I just didn’t want to continue feeding the beast that is Facebook, which I increasingly viewed as a negative influence on the world. I told them, “I plan to post updates on my life using an alternative platform, most probably something I will build myself.” them. A farewell to friends on Facebook, posted more than 2 years ago. At first, I started with something simple. I created a and I had an email list with a small group of friends and family. I also started using an open-source end-to-end encrypted messaging app called asking some of my closest friends and family to download it and start to use it. This setup worked to a certain degree, but it wasn’t exactly the same as having a like Facebook, where 99% of my friends are easily accessible. new blog, Wire, social network But I didn’t give in. I started to look into alternative social networks, including , , , and many others. None had what I was looking for, and some were outright terrible in terms of user experience! Minds Mastodon Steemit So I started looking into building my own, which would use similar technology to ensure privacy as in Wire (or ) but would have a user experience closer to what you get with a social network like Facebook. Signal It was clear to me from the beginning that I didn’t want to just clone Facebook, adding an end-to-end encryption layer. There were many things I didn’t like about Facebook, apart from its inherent anti-privacy nature. At first things went kind of slowly. I worked on it in my spare time and mostly alone. I didn’t have any specific timeline of when to get it off the ground, although it was clear to me that this was needed as soon as possible. It just wasn’t clear that so many people would be willing to join me. Enter Stage Right…Cambridge Analytica Then came the Cambridge Analytica scandal. I had actually read about Cambridge Analytica already back in January 2017, when a friend forwarded me . The article described clearly how Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data to profile Facebook’s users, and then used the models to target very specific groups of voters with specific messaging. I shared the article with some friends (via email), but for some reason it never really went mainstream…until March 2018. an article about how they helped Trump win the 2017 election Undercover footage of Cambridge Analytica peddling its psychological profiling services, which were largely based on Facebook data. Source: Channel 4 News That’s when the British released a video of undercover reporters chatting it up with Cambridge Analytica staff, who were trying to sell their voter manipulation services. Finally, this important story went mainstream. Countless articles and reports followed criticizing not only Cambridge Analytica but also Facebook’s willingness to sell out its users to the highest bidder. Channel 4 News One morning in late March, I was reading an article with the headline “ .” I decided then and there that I have to either step up my game, or watch society crumble into a Facebook-owned dystopia. I went to my office, and I founded a company. Bye Facebook, hello Instagram: Users make beeline for Facebook-owned social network A Company is Born I gave the company the name . This was inspired from one of my scientific heroes . Some people have said they like the name, whereas others have said it’s too complicated. Obviously I like it, and I think it grows on you, too. I wanted to choose a name that bucked the trend of mashing up two or more English words (Facebook, Snapchat, Whatsapp, etc.). I wanted something truly unique, fit for a unique online service. Plus, I have lived all my life with a name that is hard to spell, which happens to be a very famous global brand. So I think Pondenome will do just fine. Pondenome Claude Shannon Article by Claude Shannon where the name “Pondenome” comes from. Source: The Bell System Technical Journal But a company is more than a name and even more than an idea with a name. So I began to do my research. I wanted to find out if anything like Pondenome had been attempted before. Apart from a few academic papers (e.g. ), I found almost nothing. One project, , had some similarities, but it seemed to bite off more than it can chew and is not actively developed (at least that we could unveil). SNAKE secushare While continuing my research, I decided to write to let others know what I was up to. I asked others who are interested to join along to get in touch. The response was huge! Many people volunteered to help out in various ways, so I set up an organization on Github for us to collaborate. (We later decided to migrate to Gitlab after Github was acquired by Microsoft.) All in all, about 25 people have joined our team in some capacity. an article on Hackernoon Our First Media Splash In August, I was contacted by a journalist from YLE, which is Finland’s public broadcasting company. She was doing a story about data privacy and asked to interview me. I happily obliged. In late August an episode on the TV program was aired on YLE1, in which Pondenome was broadly featured. A-Studio Pondenome was featured on the TV programme “ Source: Yle/A-studio A-studio” on 29th August 2018. This created quite a splash (in Finland at least), and I was contacted by many people afterwards who expressed their support and wanted to be involved in some way. This gave me a boost of confidence to keep pressing forward. Getting Down to Business After discussing within our team for many months about the technology stack and the features that we wanted to prototype, in September we got down to work writing code for our first full-on prototype, which we hope will also become our ( ). For the prototype, we are using the phenomenal , which allows us to implement and try out new features quickly. The front-end is being built using . One team member wondered allowed if it was good idea to base our site on a Javascript library maintained by Facebook. I reassured him that this was not a problem, as it is released under the very permissive MIT License. One of the beauties of open-source software is even your competitors can use it and try to do something better with it than you. minimum viable product MVP Meteor web framework React Truth be told, we are still in the beginning phases of our ambitious project, but with each commit to our git repository we are one step closer to launch of the service. A Social Network Supported by the Crowd In September we also launched . At the time of this writing, 35 visionary people have backed Pondenome by pledging a contribution. Our goal is to reach $30,000 in funding this year from backers. Even if we don’t achieve this goal, we are not giving up and will continue towards our goal of launching Pondenome as a live service in February 2019. The more people that back us, however, the more features we will be able to include in the initial release. So if you believe in our vision, please consider backing us! a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo Screenshot of our crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo.

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