Smartcuts
Entrepreneur and journalist Shane Snow (Wired, Fast Company, The New Yorker, and cofounder of Contently) analyzes the lives of people and companies that do incredible things in implausibly short time. How do some startups go from zero to billions in mere months? How did Alexander the Great, YouTube tycoon Michelle Phan, and Tonight Showhost Jimmy Fallon climb to the top in less time than it takes most of us to get a promotion? What do high-growth businesses, world-class heart surgeons, and underdog marketers do in common to beat the norm? One way or another, they do it like computer hackers. They employ what psychologists call "lateral thinking: to rethink convention and break "rules" that aren't rules. These are not shortcuts, which produce often dubious short-term gains, but ethical "smartcuts" that eliminate unnecessary effort and yield sustainable momentum. In Smartcuts, Snow shatters common wisdom about success, revealing how conventions like "paying dues" prevent progress, why kids shouldn't learn times tables, and how, paradoxically, it's easier to build a huge business than a small one. From SpaceX to The Cuban Revolution, from Ferrari to Skrillex, Smartcutsis a narrative adventure that busts old myths about success and shows how innovators and icons do the incredible by working smarter--and how perhaps the rest of us can, too.
Stats for nerds
5recommend
6mentions
6people
2015–2025years
83% recommend17% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Read the book Smartcuts and see if you can use one of the 9 ideas the author talks about to move to a new situation (review here: https://www.jjude.com/smartcuts/)
Since you have work experience in backend (doesn't matter java / c#), and AWS certifications, leverage them. I would advice against going to front-end at this moment. FE is comparatively a different beast.
Without knowing lot of your details (your domain, residence etc), here are some options that I could think of (some of which I have done in 30 years of experience).
- move to a company that uses the same tech but in a different domain (say logistics to finance) and then jump from there to a company that uses a modern tech (finance legacy tech to fintech company using rust or go) - within the same domain can you create a portfolio of side projects which are all aligned in some way - say if you are in retail, can you create projects on teraform scripts to deploy .net projects to multi-cloud (gcp, aws, azure); or for supporting blue-green deployment; idea is to use your "modern" knowledge within legacy but creating public portfolio to showcase your "modern" knowledge. - find a local leader that you admire (if you go to city-wide tech conferences or something like that you can find some like this), and ask them if you can help them with something as a side-hustle. They don't have to pay but they have to write a recommendation on LinkedIn for your work. Most tech leaders who talk have some projects going on and they struggle with their time. You can help while building a good portfolio - combination of some of the above
Do a combination of content creation (git projects, video streaming of coding, writing on LinkedIn ...), building a network, and obtaining social proof (recommendations). This will help you get good jobs.
For long term, this is the roadmap I would encourage: https://www.jjude.com/learn-next/
I also wrote about how the jobs are evolving: https://www.jjude.com/future-of-jobs/
- Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking
Fabulous book about how certain individuals strive in what they do, and what separates these people from the rest of us. It has very interesting stories as well of how these individuals became so accomplished in life.
- Find a cause or project that you really believe in, and put your effort into that.
The book "Smartcuts" by Shane Snow address the issue of wealthy people feeling depressed. Its a great book!
- 1) Superintelligence. This is a really great read about the implications of AI, or general intelligence. It's really intriguing and brings up so many scenarios I've never thought about. Anyone interested in AI should definitely read this.
Similarly, On Intelligence is an absolutely brilliant book on what 'intelligence' is, how it works, and how to define it.
2) Hooked. Although it's very formulaic, Hooked provides a lot of good ideas and approaches on building a product.
3) REWORK. If you're a fan of 37 Signals and/or DHH, this is a succinct and enjoyable read about their principles on building and running a business.
Currently I'm reading SmartCuts and The Everything Store - both of which are great so far.
- I just read Smartcuts, Made to Stick, and Traction - a great trio of books to get your mind in the right spot as you pursue a market to create a product.
- Building a startup (actually others are doing the building, I'm doing everything else :) I would bring one or two books (Traction, Lean Startup, Smartcuts, etc.) and my iPad.
I would use some time reading and some time writing either ideas/notes or blog posts.
