How To Learn

Quick note on how I like to learn ‘just-in-time’:

A curious thing I've noticed is that technical folks always start from the point of- what's a good book to read on xyz topic when they're looking to learn something new

As someone who's been a generalist most of his life- I've picked up product, sales, finance and ops knowledge by following the method of just-in-time learning and applying that.

A software engineer recently asked me what books to read on sales as he thinks about launching his business.

My suggestion to him was to not read anything, rather, cold call 100 potential clients to pitch them and see if they'd like to be be interviewed for 15 mins to validate/invalidate the idea.

I would google "how to cold call" and watch 2-3 videos and that's it.

The confidence from having 100 conversations - regardless of the outcome, will give so much momentum, you probably won't need to ask advice after that. You'll figure stuff out.

And probably at that point, read GAP Selling by Keenan.

Anyhow, the conversation ended there.

....and then I asked him what might be some nice books to read on learning to code.