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You will also get a proper introduction to my work on improving focus and doing meaningful work, along with some other exclusive goodies
Focus is like a muscle—it can be trained and strengthened. By cultivating focus deliberately, you can work with greater intensity, sustain concentration, and achieve life-changing productivity.
Most people are more focused on college degrees, certifications, and other credentials than they are on learning and improving skills. Learn how to stop chasing credentials, build real skills, and showcase your competence through practical projects and artifacts.
Building a consistent reading habit can transform your life. Learn practical strategies, book recommendations, and how reading develops competence, perspective, and fulfillment beyond formal education.
AI can make you far more productive, but it can also cause valuable skills to atrophy. By focusing on understanding, reinvesting time saved into deeper work, and collaborating with AI intelligently, you can improve skills while taking full advantage of AI’s power.
By building your own feedback loop, you can accelerate growth in any area of life. Find reliable, honest sources of feedback and getting as close to them as possible. Capture feedback quickly and intentionally, focusing only on what directly informs your improvement. Analyze the data to uncover patterns, root causes, and actionable steps.
Stephen King has written dozens of bestsellers, sold over 350 million books, and built a net worth north of $500 million. While impressive, these are metrics he pays little attention to. As an author, there is only one metric that King pays attention to—words written per day.
Setting goals, making plans, working hard, and achieving success can lead to recognition. Recognition can lead to distraction and perceived public expectation. Those distractions and expectations can shift your priorities away from doing meaningful, fulfilling work.
Successful people are often successful in spite of the things they do. What are you trying to accomplish? What variables matter most in the equation for your success? Are there things that others say are essential that might not even be necessary?
Hiring someone to work for you (or looking for a job yourself) is all about "fit." Is the candidate capable of performing job responsibilities competently? Will they enjoy the job down the road?
Stripped of business and coding jargon, Agile Development is an incredible framework for self-improvement. Make a plan to get a little closer to where you want to be. Act on that plan. Measure the outcome of your actions. Then, use what you have learned to adjust your vision for the future and plan your next move.
While we can’t run an automated program to detect all of the potential, unseen problems in our lives, we can create our own personal Chaos Monkey by brainstorming the things that could go wrong in a given situation or project.
If you don’t account for inevitable unplanned work ahead of time, you will have to find more time by dropping something else, which causes pain for all parties involved.
"When you are consumed with the rightness or wrongness of a given issue, it’s easy to lose track of what the issue actually is." - Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
Discover how “Monk Weeks”—a purposeful period of solitude for deep reflection and life calibration—can help you live your life more intentionally. Learn science-backed benefits of intentional solitude and practical steps to improve clarity, creativity, and well-being.
When there are tasks that just need to be done, you can use this process to reduce the amount of unpleasant, mundane work you have on your plate. The Eliminate, Automate, Delegate, Do framework helps you focus on what truly matters.
"If you haven't read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren't broad enough to sustain you." - Jim Mattis
Stefan is a software engineer and writer specializing in applying lessons, tools, and principles from software engineering and business to personal development and self-improvement.
He holds a Master’s degree in Information Systems Management from the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University and works as a full-time software engineer. He lives in Vancouver, WA with his family.