Why Programmers are Better at Life

let me ask you something why does it seem like all the top ceos and billionaires today are self-taught developers and not like mbas or traditional business people in fact engineering degrees and many of these are software related represent 22 of all billionaires which is the highest of any other type of degree versus only 12 percent who study business developers developers developers developers developers so you have to wonder is it because smart people gravitate towards programming and are ultimately more capable maybe or maybe it's survivorship bias where only the programmers who just happen to be also good leaders ended up succeeding which is almost certainly true or how about the theory that technically minded developers lack empathy as they crush their competition on the way to the top perhaps in some way getting revenge for not being accepted in their younger years i mean there's no way you guys never understood you never understood the first thing about this look who knows but what i've chosen to believe is that there's something to the mindset of a developer concepts and mental models that cut across disciplines that make them extremely effective not only in business but also better at real life developers anyone who's learned programming will tell you there was a distinct shift in how they thought before and after where you get more logical more analytical doing no small part to the mental models we're going to cover in this video and there's five of them if you're new here i'm erin jack i started as a broke english teacher went to san francisco to make a high paid salary as a software developer and left it all behind for my freedom to become a remote freelance developer i can proudly say now that i'm also the founder of the freemote freelance developer bootcamp which actually takes you from xero to remote freelance developer if it sounds too good to be true i've left a link below just for you so you can go decide for yourself okay let's dive into those five mental models developers use to be extremely effective in real life and the first one is called chunking i first heard the formal definition for this one in a book called learning how to learn which is actually amazing if you're gonna teach yourself anything which you're probably going to have to with the way the economy is going anyway chunking states that every problem can be broken down into smaller and smaller and smaller pieces until it's something you can do right now you can ask yourself what is the smallest possible thing i should do next now most people will just see a huge problem and think it's too big it's too hard it takes too much time but a trained programmer can break even the most impossible sounding task down into logical actionable components now chunking might be obvious to the logically minded among us but for many people it's not and this is really the only way you can tackle those larger problems that most people simply won't even attempt this can mean anything from understanding that you constantly need to be filling your business sales funnel with leads because otherwise you're not going to get any customers at the bottom or when it comes to dating trusting in the process that talking to five girls a day will eventually get you a girlfriend remember you just need one structuring a process like this takes a lot of pressure off you as the individual too which sort of leads us to the next mental model and the next one is what i like to call ruthless objectivity we'll start with an anecdote when i started working at uber i really loved the environment because if your idea was bad in a meeting it was simply not entertained in other companies i was in people would pretend your idea had merit say thank you great idea but if your idea sucks that's really just wasting everyone's time now what an environment like this does is train you to do two specific things you gain clarity an ability to look at things the way they actually are some people call this intuition or judgment the other thing it lets you do is separate emotions from decisions which really applies to everything from your business idea you want to work but really just won't to just being cool-headed in every interaction now this might put some strain on your relationships with your more idealist or let's say politically correct friends so be just a little bit careful what you can safely do though is turn this inward and analyze your own weaknesses and shortcomings you can quickly admit i'm not good enough yet or i should have someone else do this and quickly move forward rather than trying to make up some stories now this creates a smooth transition to our next model which is called continuous improvement there's actually a cool japanese word for this called kaizen if you've seen jiro dreams of sushi it's about a guy who's been making sushi for decades and still seeks to further master his craft even though the marginal improvement of every single day is astronomically small we're talking point zero zero zero zero one percent better every day but he's still going you could also call this a unshakable growth mindset but i'm really trying to stay out of self-help territory here but what does this mean for you well in your career you need to constantly resharpen your skills whereas react might have been the fastest way to become a software developer three years ago ecommerce development might be more profitable for you in 2021 but most of the time it's actually not a choice as we all intimately now know with the last year of covet anyway even if you're comfortable where you're at now stop learning at your own peril model number four automation which is a word that's as overused as blockchain at this point so to avoid that let's talk about a specific type of automation libraries which are basically just code someone else wrote that you can use for yourself these save you time the point where doing projects without them within certain deadlines would be pretty much impossible at a micro level any repetitive task within programming you might want to write a script or a function for i like to think that real life programmers are constantly auditing their daily routine in the same way in practice this can be streamlining your routine or even hiring or outsourcing of course there are low hanging fruits which save you a ton of time over the long term like cutting down your commute getting a faster laptop or skipping showers and once you've maxed these out you can even consider outsourcing i know what you're going to say aaron i can't afford a personal assistant well maybe not a dedicated person but consider having groceries delivered for example you can even go to the extreme that naval does which is setting an aspirational hourly rate and outsourcing literally everything below that getting haircuts is definitely below my hourly rate so i just i don't do them okay mental model number five is functions inputs and outputs now this is just my theory but i think programmers actually implicitly understand life better because they understand functions okay this is really going to sound like some math masturbation but when you think about it everything in life is kind of like a function for example college the input is your time and money and the output is a piece of paper i'm joking developers your own productivity is highly dependent on inputs and outputs too and i think this is part of the reason a lot of programmers are into what's called biohacking like doing a crazy diet not for being in shape but for mental clarity the kato diet going into ketosis all that stuff it's a whole part of youtube and on the more extreme end i've known people who even micro dose take a little bit of lsd before work i never actually tried that personally though and i think you do see a lot of intelligent people recommend reading a lot of books for the same reason but then you get those people who say i don't read i just take action just do it and by taking action they mean taking a drop shipping course after taking a day trading course and everyone knows the only good course is free mode i know you're going to say aaron you missed the shortest path algorithm it's so obvious for getting things done fast and sure there are probably way better mental models than i came up with so definitely leave a comment below with your idea the main point of this video though is just to get you thinking laterally whether that actually means you learning programming and applying it to a different discipline or your own life let me say this i think even if you don't want to be a career-long programmer learning it really does help you in some tremendous cross-cutting ways with all that said check out freemode the freelance developer bootcamp below if you're learning to code or want to when you're down there you can just tap the subscribe button really gently if you want to okay with all that said catch you soon [Music] you

Channel: Aaron Jack

Views: 44,104

Keywords: programming, web development, javascript, react, learn programming, learn to code, coding, software development, become a software developer, software developer, freelancing, freelance developer, coding tutorials

Id: MkpKosDd6UU

Length: 7min 56sec (476 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 17 2021