DR

Soft Skills by John Sonmez

Summary: I am a believer that success is 80% mindset, 20% mechanics. I believe that the soft skills (like presentation skills, people skills, discipline, willpower, and focus) determine most of sucess in any field, and software development is no exception.

This was a long book, with many chapters. I would definitely not recommend reading cover to cover. If you treat it as a buffet, there are some real gems, so I would recommend selecting the chapters that seem most relevant to you.

Rating: 8/10

Big Ideas

  1. Productivity
  2. Focus
  3. Treat your career like a business
  4. Marketing yourself
  5. Learning

1. Productivity

John lays out a fantastic, prescriptive program for being productive. The focus is on the pomodoro technique as well as a system for managing tasks.

The pomodoro technique involves working in chunks of 25 minutes, with a 5 minute break afterward. After about 4 cycles of this, you take a longer break. Importantly, you are to remain fully-focused for those 25 minute chunks. This style of working aligns well with our mental energy levels and allows us to refresh at the point when our energy reserves begin to deplete. The longer break serves the same purpose, on a longer timescale.

I have found this method to be incredibly helpful. If you follow it, you’ll be surprised how much you get done in just a few pomodoro sessions.

2. Focus

What is the single greatest productivity “hack”? Focus. Ok, it’s not a hack. But it is the single ingredient that has the greatest impact on our ability to complete valuable work. High value work is cognitively demanding and requires rare skill.

If work were easy, low-skill, or could be performed in a distracted state, it would not be very valuable. Therefore, improving your ability to focus and applying that ability to high leverage activities is one of the most important things you can do for your productivity and success.

3. Treat your career like a business

Many engineers prefer to not think about business. They would prefer to show up, write good code, and get paid accordingly. The better they are at that, the more they should be paid, right? Unfortunately, this is not how the world works.

A business cannot just have a good product or service and hope to succeed. It needs to market its product or service. It needs to sell. It needs to negotiate. It needs to consider gaps in the market. It needs to set goals. It needs to have a long term vision.

One can have a long, stable career by just being a good developer. If one really wants to excel, they would do well to treat their career like a business.

4. Marketing yourself

If you take the advice above and treat your career as a business, you’ll need to ramp up your marketing department. At its cord, marketing is just connecting a product or service with someone who wants or needs that product or service.

There are employers out there who would love your services, you just need a way to reach them and show them why you are the right fit.

Your resume is marketing material. And considering it could be 6-figure+ document, it is worthwhile to spend time, effort, and even money to bolster it into as strong of a marketing campaign as you can.

A personal website, podcast, youtube videos, articles, twitter, etc. can all serve as marketing materials.

5. Learning

In “Soft Skills”, Sonmez recommends a 10-step learning process. One of my biggest takeaways about this process was to get really clear on defining what you want out of learning. Specifically, it is important to make a project out of your learning, with a defined due date, and a plan.

Steps 1-6 are about setting up your learning plan.

  1. Get the big picture: understand the broad strokes of what you’re trying to learn
  2. Determine scope: narrow your scope down so thjat it’s not overwhelming
  3. Define success: be specific. Don’t say “learn html”. Say “create a 1 page static site using divs, h-tags, spans, and imgs, styled with simple css”.
  4. Find resources: gather the proper learning materials
  5. Create a learning plan: break things into small chunks and create a timeframe
  6. Cut down your plan: narrow to just the necessary pieces Steps 7-10 are about doing.
  7. Learn enough to get started
  8. Play around
  9. Learn enough to do something useful (and do it!)