27 May 2025 #learning #books
Since 2020, we’re living in a new normal.
Constant layoffs, market volatility, AI stealing our jobs… The best thing to do is to learn new skills and build something we can’t be fired from.
But who has time to spend 10,000 hours becoming an expert to monetize a new skill?
Here’s where “Skip the Line” by James Altucher comes in. A book with strategies to ditch those 10,000 hours and learn a new skill faster, without going back for 4 or 5 years of college or begging to get into the small circle of “experts.”
Here are 6 principles I learned from “Skip The Line” to master any skill faster:
1. Do 10,000 experiments
It takes 10,000 hours to be an “expert.”
That’s about 10 years of part-time practice. But the world is changing so fast. By the time you’ve put in those 10,000 hours, everything will be different.
Instead of tracking hours, track experiments. Small and consistent actions that teach you a skill faster.
A good experiment:
- is easy to set up and do
- has little downside
- has huge potential upside
- has never been done before
- teaches you something
“You know something is a valid experiment when you take out what you normally do, get curious about an idea, as in “What if I try…,” and then, you suddenly feel fear.”
With experiments and real projects, we learn way more and faster than in any classroom. Remember passive learning is just entertainment.
2. Master your microskills
Whatever you’d like to learn, chances are it’s not a single skill, but a range of microskills.
“Break apart a skill into 20 microskills. Figure out how, each day, you can get better at each microskill”
Writing isn’t just one skill. It’s headlines, openings, storytelling, calls to action, editing, formatting… And that’s just non-fiction.
3. Master idea calculus
You can cheat your way through those 10,000 hours by bringing your expertise from other areas.
Add a new idea or concept to an existing idea in the field you’re learning. Or subtract an existing idea from it. Or mix two disparate ideas from another field to create a new one.
4. Find PLUS, EQUAL, and MINUS
To learn anything faster, you need to find your PLUS, EQUAL, and MINUS:
- PLUS are your mentors. People online or offline who you can learn from. If you can’t find mentors, books are always good mentors.
- EQUAL are others learning the same skill. These are the people who challenge you and encourage you to keep learning.
- MINUS are people you can teach. Teaching is the best (and fastest) way to learn anything.
5. Follow the 50/1 rule
The 80/20 rule has a close cousin.
You know the 80/20 rule, right? 80% of wealth is accumulated by 20% of people. 80% of outcomes come from 20% of effort. 80% of views and reads come from 20% of posts.
But what if we apply the 80/20 rule to itself? 80% of 80 is 64, and 20% of 20 is 4.
And if we apply it again? 80% of 64 is 51.2 and 20% of 4 is 0.8. OK, let’s round that up to 50 and 1.
It means that 1% of effort brings 50% of outcomes. That’s a cheat code to get results faster.
If you’re writing, that’s your headline, opening lines, and first paragraphs. Or your titles and thumbnails if you’re doing YouTube.
Whatever you’re doing, find your 1%.
6. Find your wheel and its spokes
One thing is mastering a skill. Another is making money off of it.
Find your wheel, your main subject or skill. Once you’ve found your wheel, look for spokes. Ways to monetize and expand your wheel.
If your wheel is photography, your spokes could be:
- Sell stock photos,
- Offer wedding photography services,
- Shoot product images for small businesses,
- Shoot LinkedIn-optimized portraits for executives,
- Offer walking tours through the most scenic spots in your city,
- Teach a budget-friendly photography course for beauty creators,
- Offer “I fix and enhance old photos” services,
- Create a course for better pet photography,
- Start a newborn photography business,
- Run workshops to teach others,
OK, I already wrote my 10 bad ideas for today… And you got the point. There’s more than one way to monetize a skill. Don’t marry a single one. I’m talking about ideas here.
The world still needs experts. No doubt. I wouldn’t want guesswork in an operating room. But you don’t need to be an expert to make a living. You don’t need 10,000 hours. You need more experiments, faster feedback loops. This new world is for fast learners, for those who know how to skip the lines.
26 May 2025 #writing
No matter how thoughtful your content is, without a strong headline, people won’t read it.
In How to title your blog post or whatever, there’s this tip for headlines or titles:
“Consider title-driven thing creation. That is, consider first choosing a title and then creating a thing that delivers on the title. It’s sad to admit, but I think there are many good things that simply don’t have good titles. Consider not making those things… In practice, it’s often something in the middle: You start to create your thing, then you choose a title, then you structure your thing to deliver on the title.”
Title-driven creation not only applies to blog posts, but also to other forms of creative output:
- Before making a course or paid product, write its landing page.
- Before writing a book, choose a title, write a summary, and design its cover.
Before creating, write the marketing materials first. For blog posts and social media content, that’s the headline.
Every headline is a promise. Keep your promises, and your readers will trust you.
Here are some of my best healdines.
25 May 2025 #misc
Public speaking starts with a clear message.
If you need to speak publicly:
- Start with a catchy story
- Share one main idea
- Use three points to expand your main idea. Yes, three points. Our short-term memory holds around 5 or 7 items, and three is the sweet spot.
- End by inviting listeners to do something about it.
And that already sounds like a good post. A good post should have a clear message too.
Even better, if you are already writing using your own voice, print your post and read it in front of your audience, making the right pauses and changes in intonation, of course.
And, don’t use a PowerPoint presentation. I learned that from James Altucher, from one of his interviews, I don’t remember which one. A PowerPoint presentation will distract the audience from the message: you and your speech.
That works for a TED talk, a keynote speech, or a sermon.
24 May 2025 #coding
Rejecting AI is like rejecting calculators or computers.
It’s here to stay and we have to adapt. That’s why I always keeping an AI chat open, looking for ways to automate my work. Or maybe I’m just getting lazier as I get older.
This week, I tried Copilot (on the browser) to help me with some coding tasks. Here they are:
#1. Translate a Visual Basic code block into C#. I’m working with an old legacy WebForms app in Visual Basic these days. And being honest, I’m not in the mood for learning Visual Basic, so why not just translate it using AI? And as a form of exploratory refactoring, I gave it a large convoluted block of code and asked it to explain what it does and refactor it into smaller functions. And once I understood what it did, I threw away the refactored version. Sorry, Copilot!
#2. Create a C# extension method from a code block. Sometimes I’m just lazy as an excuse to test Copilot’s capabilities.
#3. Naming is one of the most difficult tasks. So why not ask Copilot for help to come up with descriptive names? I gave Copilot a class definition, explained its purpose, and asked for a list of better names. I ended up choosing one of its options and got my PR approved.
#4. Generate Builders for test data. I gave it a sample Builder class and asked it to follow the same pattern but for some methods of a different class. Copilot nailed it.
#5. Replicate tests from a sample test class. While refactoring away from logic-heavy controllers to handlers, I gave it an existing handler and its tests. Then, after giving it the signature of my new handler, I asked Copilot to rewrite my controller tests as handler tests, following the pattern from the other handler tests and keeping my original assertions. Again, Copilot nailed this one.
And just for the record, I’m not using any fancy prompt, but this one,
“Act as a senior software engineer, with expert knowledge of the .NET stack, its libraries and ecosystem, and clean code. <Explain task here>”
I’ve found better results when I gave Copilot a sample class or code block to replicate. Think of AI as a fast junior engineer that needs clear and precise instructions. Otherwise, it takes a wild guess instead of asking for clarification.
Also as an experiment, I used Copilot to launch a coding course. And once I learned enough copywriting, I revisited some of the marketing materials I generated with Copilot. And recently, I’ve been using a prompt to replace Grammarly.
23 May 2025 #mondaylinks
Hey, there.
Here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week:
#1. Microsoft has made a lot of noise this week. It laid off around ~6K people. And it made the Windows Subsystem for Linux (5min) and the Copilot Chat extension (8min) open source. It seems the layoffs and the release of open source aren’t related. At least, that’s the official version.
#2. Speaking of Microsoft, they enabled Copilot on the Runtime repository. And it seems AI can’t fix simple bugs (4min).
#3. It seems I’m not the only one who doesn’t like it when web apps use my location to decide what language to use. There’s already a better alternative to using IP addresses.
#4. One of the most common mistakes when writing tests is duplicating the logic under test inside assertions. That’s what’s called circular reasoning (7min).
And in case you missed it, I wrote on my blog about stop optimizing for scale when we don’t need it (2min) and the key to survive a stressful job (2min).
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See you next time,
Cesar
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