The art of working hard

Ingredients

In this article i will cover all the necessary things needed to build a strong future from scratch.

Which includes

1.Difference between motivation and drive .

2.Avoiding noises from your environment.

3.How to make a physical space to avoid distractions.

4.Dealing with ADHD and OCD. ( if you have any )

5.When does money matters and when its not.

6.Improving communication skills.

7.How to be visible in the crowd.

8. Maturity

9. Global Thinking.

10. What not to do

If you are unemployed, how to get a job fast ??

So this is how it works. if you are unemployed then learning more and more stuff will not make any difference, because companies will always consider you as a fresher, and even if you master all the tech in the world, companies will still not be hiring you when they have someone who has real world experience in some tech. even if they are average in it.

I will share my story, when i was learning programming myself, i learned html, css, then react, tailwind, redux, zustand, ( still unemployed ) , then nodejs, express, handlebars, linux, etc. but these things do add value into your cv, but when you are learning these stuff by yourself, you might not have real world usage of these things, like maybe your personal project include some of these but unless there are customers for that product. it adds no value.

And it is hard. programming as a whole is so hard that there are fomo, market, global issues , layoffs etc. everything is so unpredictable.

Which makes most of the people try other fields and work for a lower salary.

1. Motivation vs Drive

Motivation is something that is there for limited time, like watching a movie like social network, or listening to an eminem song can make you motivated for 2 hours or may be 1 or 2 days. that is the maximum impact it can do to your life.

So you cannot rely on that , you need something that makes you achieve your goals in the long run..

This is what drive is , where it creates this constant fear in you. you alter the world and people around and makes things up so it works for you.

Some examples are Ego, Force of parents on you, etc.

These things are bad. but you can convert these bad things to be good for you. Like ego , if your friend is making money, then it's obvious that you can make that too, that's where ego hurts..

Force of parenting, parents do care about you, and your success but most parents doesn't know the real world, the market, the opurtunities you have right now, so they might force you into things they want you to be. Which is also something bad because someone is forcing you to be something that you don't want to be.

These feelings can be turned to be in good use. these is what i call Drive.

If you don't have these things, then it's simple, Train your brain in a way that makes learning and working hard a habit. something like doing things everyday can make a habit. even on the hardest day, atleast open your laptop and work for 1 minute and close it. this will make a habit , something that will take months to build but once you stop doing it, that will hit you hard. something like the sideeffects of morphine.

Once you have it, you can learn the things and..

Make your foot into the door.

This is the magical word, when you are getting into the industry, you only need to know the basics of one framework or library, something like react, and then practice the interview questions, there is this old pattern most companies follow, build a todo application in react 100 times. know about the most used hooks etc. nothing is important other than that. you can always learn complex state management, data handling, performance tooling later.

There is a high probability that this alone will land you an internship, or a low salary job, or even unpaid internships are the go-to.

Once you are in the industry, this is time to learn stuff, the actual hard stuff. complex state management, error logging, performance monitoring, caching, etc. You need to learn these side by side while you are at that shitty job. And don't be comfortable solving tickets.

Avoiding noise

When you are at the new job, there will be groups, funny, friendly people that turns you. you don't have to be too much comfortable in that situation, instead utilize the free time for your future. Do not go outside for a coffee every single day with that group and spend 2 hours.

Now comes social media.

Uninstall the apps right away, and you will realize that it's not important, no one cares if you are on social media or not posting a status every day. So uninstalling it , or deleting the account actually works. everything other than that, like limiting the usage time and shit does not work.

Apps like instagram or facebook is built by greatest engineers on the planet, neuroscientists to make it addictive. you cannot beat that. Something like instagram time limit doesnt block you after you hit the 5 more minutes button more than 3-4 times. then it unlocks the application completly. ( They do it intentioinally to make you hook into the platform.

Avoiding distractions while working

Once you avoid people, the next thing is to fix your working space, i am not talking about your cubicle or table at your office, but this is about the part of your home where you sit and study.

Do not learn on the bed, make a small space for learning. avoid mirrors, comps from that area. keep a clean table. ( these are from my school teacher btw ) it works.

Dealing with ADHD and OCD

These shits are the biggest enemy of mine, i do have it , most people have it. This is not curable, you have to deal with till your end of your life.

But how to deal with it ? when you are learning stuff , and you have ADHD, you will switch context fast like you cannot focus on things properly for 5 minutes streaght.

So the key part is to trick your brain , when you are learning stuff, you offload everything to the sideeffects of ADHD, like for example, learning about webhook for a new project, you might thing, oh.. i don't know TCP or UDP yet, i might need to learn that stuff, now when you are into TCP then you will think about topologies, and the never ending curcle goes on and one. and the motivation to learn websocket is gone.

Make a clear syllabus first. use ai for it. fire and forget. what are your project requirements, which part need websockets, is that 100% of the project ? or this is for a small part, like a chat system, make things clear first. and make a list. check the completed parts. do not go deeper into things because you will learn everything else if not now, then another day. so keep this thing in mind. Even if you miss something now, or skip it that's no big deal. you will learn it in the future anyway. so be comfortable in skipping the hard parts. ( unless that is the core part of your application )

Now OCD, this should be fixed before anything else, you can always check real world signs of this and note it down. if you are sure you have OCD, then here are the steps

When learning something online, you might have a feeling that if i don't take note of this thing, you will forget about it in the future. so you spend too much time taking notes or perfecting the note you written instead of focusing on getting the actual in depth knowledge of the tech/language.

So f* notes. you dont need it. if you need it, google/ai is there for you. you must understand the usage, or should remember what and when something occured, even if you forget.. leave it.

Money

Do not focus on money, your stupid friend might be making more in a month than you make in an year, that's not the point. your focus should be on the next 10 years. where i will be.

There might be jobs that pay more than an average software job, but your focus should not be making money when you are starting, your focus should be learning stuff that makes you good in the future, money will follow anyway.

When you are good at some niche, your time values more.

• Time is important

This is the stupidest thing i hear from people.

Time is not important

do you think a rapists time is important ? so that they can rape more people ? or a murderer ? is their time important ? No.

So your time is not important, what you do with your time is important.

Take an example of elite people , like mark zuckerberg, or elon musk is there 24 Hours equivalent to yours ? No because they do important things . ( I do not like these guys, but i am making an example in here ).

You have to be mature enough to understand if you are doing important things or not, your time will value more when you do important things, and money will follow.

6.Improving communication skills.

Communication skills are not so important, some people exaggerate it. if you have the skill you don't have to be the team player or the the bull in the group , if you are good at something people will see the potential in you, but if you can do both, then it's good. sharing your knowledge or keeping yourself visible will make you earn easier than someone that is so good at the tech. But still this is personal,if you don't like interacting with people all the time, and if it drains you off, then no need to do that. Some people can handle some people cannot. keep your head down and work on your skills. ( But make sure that you are super good. if not then work on your communication skills, language etc. )

7.How to be visible in the crowd.

Help other people, not in an arrogant way. This will pay off, a good manager should be able to offload work to engineers, it's your choice if you want to be a manager or an engineer.

If you opt for an engineer till the end of life, make sure you are good, you are visible globally, like open source contributions.

8. Going global

When it comes to new libs, frameworks. when you spend enough time with it, you will know the leading people/ engineers in there, like for example in react native there is this guy called evan beckar . He is super good, and react native is entire thing. So companies doesn't need to look into his cv. he is global already, so be that one guy. Make yourself visible.

What not to do.

Don't be so comfortable with a job, company for so long. People say the market is bad right now, but when is the market good? i am 3 years into this tech field and i have never seen a good time where the market is good. and everything is fine.

So dont go deeper into the fomo. there is need of engineers, good engineers who can handle things end to end.

Don't sit in a company for too long The salary increment will fall into a limit, all companies have a limit set which they allocate to employees, when you hit that limit, there will not be any more increments, or bonuses coming, no matter if you are working hard or not. The company wont break their budget just for you.

Your value goes down when you stay.

Exposure to new tech, projects, team is something that you need to focus.

There is no top 1 percent.

You might be seeing these videos where the top MNC developers laying off and getting rejected, having the top 1 % mindset will ruin your life as well. like there is no ceiling, you can always be replaced. so building a portfolio and getting into more and more harder things are required, wherever you are.

Sometimes companies might cut cost by firing employees, that is natural. but do you think a developer worked on scale will not be hireable by other companies ?