Shameless Self-Promotion
Hi everyone,
I’m afraid we’ve hit the shameless self-promotion stage of the newsletter life cycle. (I’d say it won’t happen too often, but I’m also planning next week’s letter to be promoting something, albeit not something of mine).
New Book
The first thing I’d like to tell you about is my new book, “Notes on Emotion”. This is a book (currently more like a booklet) that collects, edits, and expands on a bunch of my existing public writing about emotions. For example, last week’s letter about emotional health is included almost verbatim in it, and it contains an updated, integrated, and expanded version of some of my notebook entries about relearning emotional responses (Emotions as legacy code, Your emotions are valid but probably wrong, How I fix anxiety triggers), A crash course in having feelings, and more besides.
In its current form it is very rough. This is an early access version that I’m making available for the interested - some of it is good and an improvement on things I’ve written before, some of it is literally just a cut and paste of existing work, and the whole thing needs to be woven together better. I don’t necessarily recommend reading it in full right now (though bits of it are certainly worth a read), but the main reason to buy it now is that it’s available on a pay what you want scheme and you’ll have full access to all future versions of it, and I plan to raise the minimum price (currently £1) as it becomes more complete.
Come Talk To Me
The other thing that I’d like to promote is that I’ve started doing one to one sessions with people to help them get better at the sort of things I write about. The main thing I’ve been doing so far is helping people work through the ideas from How to become smarter. I’ve pitched this as follows:
There are a large number of things that you could think of as foundational skills, and we rarely or never really teach them we just hope people figure them out on their own. They are are so basic (both in the sense of "seemingly simple" and also in the sense of "basic building blocks of everything") and automatic for the people who are good at them that they largely just look like "talent" or "personality".
Being good at these skills often looks like someone is "smart" or "competent" in some general purpose sense. You've definitely seen people like this - they just seem to be really good in some slightly hard to define way. Some of this is probably natural talent (or luck, or privilege), but the way it manifests is just a large set of mutually supporting habits and skills, and many or all of those should be learnable. Learning these looks like (and to a large degree is) a way of becoming smarter.
Some broad categories of such skills:
Communication skills. e.g. How to explain yourself clearly, how to ask questions.
Emotion Management skills. e.g. Figuring out what you actually want, dealing with anxiety.
Problem Solving skills. e.g. How to sit with a problem instead of getting stuck, how to figure out how to get better at a problem.
Habit formation and change. e.g. How to stop a bad habit, how to create a new one.
External thinking tools. e.g. Using writing to solve a problem, diagrams, conversation modes.
Learning skills. e.g. How to acquire and retain new and useful information.
The problem is that as far as I can tell these aren't actually a set of easily separable well-defined skills that you can just list out, work through each of them, and suddenly be smart (Possibly they are, but if so I sure don't know the list!), but we can figure out the shape of what such skills like by looking at problems you face and figuring out how you can learn to deal with them better, and that's what I'll help you do.
The plan with these sessions is to do them as weekly sessions, setting people exercises to work on in between those sessions. I’ve been doing a few of these already and it’s been going pretty well, so if any of you are interested I’d be up for taking on a few more clients.
I’d also be interested in doing one-to-one work on any other things you’d like my help with though. I’d be particularly interested in exploring some developer mentoring (probably targeted at senior developers who don’t otherwise have good mentoring opportunities within their company) if anyone is looking for that.