Choosing What to Give a F*** About

I recently finished reading the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*** by Mark Manson. At first glance, you might find the title a bit racy or downright offensive. However, if you are able to make it past the first chapter your perspective will likely change. I have to warn you though, the F-bomb gets dropped several times in the first chapter alone. I stopped counting at twenty because I was too busy laughing.

Average is Now Not Good Enough

One of the things that Manson talks about in this book is that we are constantly being overwhelmed with extraordinary stories on all social media platforms. While we are scrolling on our social media feeds whether it be Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, we are bombarded with bits about the richest, the fastest or the most popular. The book explains that average stories do not sell, a concept I happen to agree with. The media prioritizes the most shocking and appealing content to drive sales and product awareness. This is having negative side effects on minds that are still impressionable. Many people are putting themselves down because their lives or stories are not like the ones they find on social media constantly, therefore they start acquiring a sense of inferiority and self-doubt. Here is where the name of the book comes into play. We should stop caring or “giving a f*ck” about everything we see in the media.

Don’t Try to Always be Happy

Manson criticizes books or ideas that encourage people to always have a positive outlook on things. Sometimes we experience things that are bad and it is ok to not be optimistic about them, but rather deal with them as they come without sugar coating them. He also says, “This book is not a guide to greatness.” To be able to solve the problems in your life you must first be able to cope and embrace the fact that sometimes life or circumstances are crappy. Not everyone will lead an extraordinary life, but empowerment will come to you once you admit to yourself the problems you have and decide to face them.

Final Thoughts

Self-entitlement is very popular right now and is not always good. It is not always the kind of entitlement which makes a person think they deserve some sort of special treatment because they think they are better than others, rather the type of entitlement that comes from a person feeling sorry for themselves. Entitlement also encourages people to be politically correct to an unhealthy intensity. Sometimes people just need to deal with their own problems. As Manson says, we need to choose the values that really matter to us and expect to face the problems that come with upholding those values. I highly recommend this book.

The Argument About Self-Made Success

Recently one of my friends came to me with a great book recommendation called Outliers written by Malcolm Gladwell. I want to share with you the points or concepts that I liked the most out of this book in very words. The most surprising argument in this book is that “self-made” success is a myth. However, the writer makes some good points to back this up.

Location, Time and Circumstances Matter

Becoming a master at anything takes 10,000 hours of practice and some people achieve that quicker than others due to the circumstances they are in. Let’s take Bill Gates, for example, everyone knows he is very wealthy and one of the most successful people in the world. He was born in the 1955 and it so happens that at a very young age he had access to a computer that allowed him to start putting in the hours to hit his 10k at a very young age. I still think that it did take a lot of effort to learn computer programming back in the 50s, but not many teenagers had access to a computer during those years. Bill Joy was born in 1954, he grew up to found Sun-Microsystems, a huge computer company. In 1955, Steve Jobs was born and we all know what he was able to accomplish. While I was reading this book I started to see a pattern, these remarkable figures were in their teens single and hungry at the right time, in the right place. I agree with the author when he states they might not have been the smartest people at that time (although I’m sure they are/were very smart), but other people who might have been more qualified did not get the same opportunities they did.

Cut-off Dates Make a Difference

In the Canadian hockey, there is an annual cutoff date. January 1st is the cutoff. You might not think this has meaningful implications, but it does. A player born on December 27 has to earn a spot against other players who are virtually a year older than they are. If you are 9 years old and you play against an 8-year-old you would definitely have an advantage, no matter what sport you are playing. Naturally what tends to happen is that a player born later in the year does not have the same advantage as someone born earlier in the year. Gladwell also gave examples of outstanding player records and statistics that correlate this argument. The majority of the players in the Canadian National Team were born before June. Coincidence? The same rule applies in academic situations too.

My Takeaway

Read this book whenever you get a chance. It gave me hope, the ideas in this book lead me to believe and I don’t have to be superhuman-like to become successful. There is still a lot effort needed on my part to get there, but putting myself in the right environment will likely make a big difference. I agree with most of the ideas in this book, especially the notion of circumstances having an influence on the outcome of things. I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Find me on twitter and let me know or leave a comment below.

Lesson Learned

Being a web developer is easy in comparison to being an entrepreneur. I’m able to build an application, it will take some time, but I’m capable of turning an idea into a working service or web application. Having help expedites the process, but I’m capable of doing small projects by myself. However, putting my entrepreneur hat has been more challenging.

Misconceptions about being an Entrepreneur

As my friend Anthony wrote in his post, there is a difference between being a business owner and being an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur has to be able to wear many hats and having an understanding of web development is only one of them.

Many people picture the entrepreneur life as being glamorous full of excitement and riches, but that is not the case. Being an entrepreneur is a tough learning journey.

What lesson did I learn?

I am lucky and grateful that Edifica‘s investors believed I had the potential to develop Edifica’s web application with their help. We set out to develop the product and we did a great job doing so. After months of development, we finally had a working application and we decided to start marketing.

That’s where we went wrong. We should have started marketing while we were still developing. By the time we were done developing the initial offering, we did not have a community and we didn’t have constant traffic to our site. This was a big problem.

Suggestion

If you are currently working on a product and you are planning to make it available to the public, I recommend that you start letting people know about your product right away. You should keep your ears open and listen to any feedback you might get and take that feedback into consideration while the product is still under development. On Edifica’s case, we started gathering feedback after we had a working product. If this would have had happened on the development phase, we could have made better decisions about the product’s features. Planning your product’s marketing early on is crucial.

You Have to be Learning Constantly

Have you heard the saying “knowledge is power”? That saying holds a lot of truth. If you want to accomplish something you have to have the knowledge to help you. There are so many ways to obtain knowledge, especially now. If you are looking for information regarding any subject you can always rely on the internet to find the information you are looking for. However, books are still a great source of information.

Learning from Books

I prefer getting knowledge from books because books tend to go further into detail about one idea or topic, while the information you might find on the Internet is more concise and somewhat limited regarding a particular topic. In a book, you will get the full set of skills, thoughts, and insights from the author(s) regarding a particular topic.

It is very difficult for me to read books because I’m constantly on the go. I do read almost every night but is not enough. To make a bit more progress on my reading, I stopped listening to the radio or music during my daily commute. I now listen to books on my phone using Audible. This way I’m constantly working on two books at a time. One on my car’s stereo and reading another printed book at night. Currently, I’m listening to the Platform Revolution on Audible and reading Steve Blank’s
A Startup Owner’s Manual.

Importance of reading

I do believe everyone should constantly read. I recently heard someone make a metaphor comparing Watson, IBM’s supercomputer, with the human brain. Watson is a supercomputer capable of doing amazing things as is the human brain, but without any software, Watson would be just a pile of advanced circuits. We have to fill our brain with good “software”, for our brains to be capable of accomplishing great feats. It is important to keep feeding our brains with good knowledge regardless of its source, books happen to be my favorite.

Final Thoughts

On my following posts, I will be sharing my thoughts on new books as I finish reading them.

The Reason for this Blog

I’m a technology enthusiast and I’ve been a web developer for years. I worked for a construction company for 12 years while freelancing on my free time. Last year I was presented with an opportunity to be part of a startup, Edifica. Although I had freelanced for a long time, I only did it to earn a few bucks to make ends meet. It wasn’t until two or three years ago that I started thinking about trying something else and this opportunity with Edifica, laid a path in front of me, Entrepreneurship.

That is the main reason for this blog. I want to share with you the journey of becoming an entrepreneur coming from a technical background. I’ve been reading a lot lately, learning about how startups work or how they should work. I have been learning about digital marketing and many other things. I’m looking forward to sharing my experiences with you. Follow me on my journey.