A career is like how you eat an elephant

Learning something new or refreshing skills to help your career can be exciting and frustrating all at the same time. It can fill you with high and low emotions. It can make you feel valuable and worthless all at the same time. It can propel your career, or it is the fog clouding your development. To develop your career takes planning and thought, it takes time, it cant be achieved overnight. 

So it is "metaphorically speaking" like how you would eat an elephant. First, you need to know what you are looking to do, have a plan, take small repetitive bites, look to consume more so the food doesn't go off, and finally be resilient and have a stomach of lead. I've never contemplated eating an elephant before now, but I'm sure if I asked, someone, somewhere, would say, "Yeah, it tastes just like chicken!" - I'd strike them off of my social list!

I am back into a technical role, and heads down and bum up in the technical detail of how to build cloud-based, flexible, extensible and simple systems. I have spent my life around teams who have built leading-edge systems. As my career has evolved, I have moved from the keyboard creator of great systems to being a people leader, an enabler of great systems building. Now I am delving, back, into the detail of how networks work, security models, serverless architecture, containers, learning to code something more than a "Hello World" main function in Go. So those emotional highs and lows, feelings of being valuable, agonising over how worthless I feel are all coming and going quite quickly. Sometimes my emotions change with every issued "go run somecode.go"... command.

As I have said in other posts, I have been very fortunate to mentor and lead people. In doing that I get asked how to build new skills or refresh them? I generally get asked within the technical world. The speed of innovation in the technical world is supersonic; things like the cloud have had a flywheel effect on the pace of change. It's exciting, however, if you want to be current, you cant turn your back on building code for too long. The world passes you by. The currents of change become too strong to swim against, and no matter how hard you try, you keep going backwards.

So how do you re-skill? Or get good at something that you once considered yourself an expert at? To me, there are a few practices or principles you need to apply. They are; Have an end-state in mind, Create and revise guiding short term goals, use the compounding effect, focus on the 1% Improvement principle, obtain a Rhythm, and finally have Endurance. Like eating that elephant.

Have an end-state to refer back to continually. Something like when I am crushing it, I am <X>, or I know <Y>. Then create and continuously revise a set of interim goals that guide your activities, so you are on track. Make sure the goals generate an outcome that can be tied back to the end-state. If the thing you are learning is new or has evolved since you last mastered it, then make the goals vaguer than ones that are set in stone. You don't know what you don't know, and as you embark on learning, you will find areas to explore that you never knew existed. In my case, my current goal is "Build a well-architected serverless web application." not a "Learn to build a web application, with a SPA front-end, event-based serverside logic in Lambda and a Dynamo-DB storage, and make it multi-AZ capable. ". If the thing your learning is not technical then my best advice would be to think of the goals as guard rails, allowing you to freely move left and right as you meet your end-state, over a set of railway tracks that hold your direction rigid. Frequently review the goals and their ability to move you towards your end-state, every day you move forward you know more, and will be better at setting goals.  

The compounding effect is when one activity helps propel you forward on another activity, as a side effect. So one of my goals is to create and author technical content as I think it will help guide people in their careers. So I'm doing a few things; To post technical content, I first need the muscle memory and a routine of writing material. At the moment, I don't have much technical content that I feel will help others if I share it. However, I need to get proficient in the act of posting - I can write articles like this! Before I start working towards one of my goals, I write a short sentence about the goal and what it will achieve as an article intro. I'm going to write most of those technical articles at some point. Those articles sentence concept helps me make sure I understand the goal before I embark on it. I now use the goal and activity of intro writing to compound the improvement of my learning. As another example, if you want to learn something, then maybe set an objective of presenting the thing you learn. As you learn, build the presentation story. To be able to present something well, you need to learn it well enough to talk without umm-ing and arr-ing. The two things, learn and present, have a compounding effect on one another. 

Small 1% improvements. It's hard to learn something new very quickly. Most of the things I hear people wanting to learn or improve in are big! The steps required are too big to be achieved in a set of simple steps. You can't go from student to master, from fat to thin (If getting thin is what YOU want), unfit to an athlete, loosing to winning in one go. You can only get there through a set of small, 1%, improvements. To continue to learn, to continually improve, you need to feel success regularly. So set your goals small, but a sequence of lots of them. Make them achievable in a reasonably short period. Use the success of reaching one goal the fuel for you attempting your next. Teams like British Cycling used the process of 1% improvements to make the team great. James Clear has a great article on it https://jamesclear.com/marginal-gains.

I've finished 4 IronMen Triathlons, each eighteen months apart. I took a break between every one of them. I needed a break; my family demanded it! For every race, I set a process up for finishing a race into three phases. Phase one, in twelve weeks, get fit enough to train for an IronMan. Stage two, another twelve weeks, train for the IronMan. Race phase, on the day of the race, not a day before or after, be fit enough to actually have a crack at racing, not just completing it.  

When I did my second one, I remembered how fit I felt on the day of the first race. I was bulletproof fit, hadn't I been able to run a marathon straight after riding a bicycle 180KM? When I started my second training program, day one of phase one, it was demoralising trying to run after a 60KM ride. I had to stop running after 300 meters. I only managed to run 300mtrs out stop and then hobble back again. I had to accept that I was starting out once again. But I couldn't picture myself doing an IronMan now. I was demoralised! So I had to agree with myself to believe that I could do another one. I just needed to keep that as my goal and improve every day between now and race day. I had to feel success every day, I couldn't have another bad 60KM cant run demoralising day. Every day, I needed to build on the last; I should only look to improve 1% every day. But in 24 weeks if I improved something by 1%, then there were 168% of improvements in my program. You can improve something by 1% a day! It's achievable, every day it's a 1% improvement on something bigger than the day before. So the simple 1% improvements become achievable and bigger as you move along.  

Rhythm, you need to get into a constant rhythm of learning. Learning, relearning or improving needs continual attention. In my case, I need technical education as a practice that's a constant in my day. You need to be repetitive and constant in the activities that will help you learn and improve. Your Rhythm will be slow at the start, however, if you compound Rhythm with the 1% principle, you can make it faster, more frequent over time. When are you going to learn? An hour a day on the train? Or when you get into work early and are eating breakfast at your desk, maybe a podcast while walking the dog at night. Get a Rhythm, anything at the start and build on that. Don't stand still! Get going, get a Rhythm, then build on that and make it faster, and continually a more frequent beating Rhythm.

Finally, Endurance - set yourself up to relentlessly move forward. Use the happiness of each small improvement as the energy you need to move you one step further ahead. Every famous explorer experiences their fair share of failures. They take time off, they stop, however, they get back on their horses! Explorers have Endurance, they stayed focused on the task ahead, they are relentless about moving forward, they breath deep, focus on composure, but they move on and on and on. Learning a new skill is like this; you take your knock's, its hard, things get in the way, you falter, fail, stop. You throw your hands up in the air out of desperation at the difficulty of the task ahead. But Endure, deep breath, look at the goals you have, maybe they are wrong, perhaps you have gained insight into how to try things differently, go at things from a different angle. What's the worst that can happen? You might learn something new! Keep going.

I feel that my career is my own, and it is my responsibility to manage it. I don't want others to dictate where I go. I'm not too fond of the idea that luck or a chance phone call from a recruiter will decide what I do next. Nothing wrong with recruiters, but it is my career. So I take care of my career, where I want it to go. How I want it to work for me is my responsibility alone. Today I need to go technically deep again in a big way; going deep has a purpose for my current and future career. 

The above is an insight into how I am managing that process. I hope it helps you because writing this has helped me!