A friend asked me to talk to his son about how to choose a university and his career. These notes, always under construction, is the key advice.
General Advice
- Always do the most difficult thing you can do.
- Be extremely organized. Keep a journal of what you do, what happened. I found MS Office 365 to be the best communication and office solution. I keep notes in OneNote, Confluence, and Dropbox Paper. For complex tasks, I use JIRA.
- Travelling has always been the best education.
- Elite universities do open the doors for the entry-level job, but
- A substantial proportion of people get there via family connections.
- All universities use virtually identical textbooks
- A hiring manager most often weighs the projects you have completed far more than the name of the university you graduated from.
- Build continuously your personal brand, https://firstname-lastname.com. Create your personal blog – maybe the easiest way is to create a WordPress.com blog and once it gets successful, migrate to other hosting, if needed.
- Associate yourself with the top companies in the world, like Amazon Web Services. Become an AWS Community Builder and all doors are open to you.
- Always fight for the things you stand for. Even if you lose, the fight itself is best self-advertisement and you attract the people sharing the same values.
Career Goals
- Be a generalist with you being able to go deeper whenever necessary.
- Be loyal, direct, honest, valued for your views. Ask more questions than answers.
- Spend at least 20% of your time on upgrading your knowledge.
- All companies are software companies.
- You should aim at becoming a world-class – see the trimodal distribution of software engineering salaries. The #3 roles are virtually never listed on job boards.
You are ….
- You are who you know → build a network of friends you can trust.
- You are the company you keep → we’re defined by those whom we keep close – they are reflection of who we’re, what we believe in and what we stand for.
- You are what you publish → your written skills are principal.
- You are what you read → my Amazon Kindle has always been one of the best investments I have ever made. For reading list suggestions, check this article. For news, I read Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, New York Times and monitor hundreds of RSS feeds via Feedly.
The Most Valuable Things In Life are …
- Time is your most valuable asset. Money can always be replenished, but time can never be returned.
- Love of your life once you find it. I never trusted dating apps and always depended on instinct.
Your Health
- Do not drink regularly soft drinks, like Coke, which cause skin pores clogging and have other side effects → Chinese imperial teas are much more powerful
- Watch movies in front of stationary bike or rower or treadmill and spend every day at least an hour on them
- I love downhill skiing since it’s 50% mastery of fear and 50% body coordination.
- Hiking is perfect for clearing your mind.
Your Finances
- Get the best gear for anything you spend most time with. It’s an investment.
- Invest in broad ETFs, rather than individual stocks.
- Buy all with credit cards linked to an airplanes’ frequent-miles programs.
Your Home Location
- Your location determines your lifestyle, the kind of life problems you face.
- The most expensive city in the world, Zürich, does not necessarily provide the best lifestyle. In fact, after 10 years living here, I concluded that life is elsewhere.
Key Quotations
Our words reveal our thoughts;
~ William Arthur Ward
our manners mirror our self-esteem;
our actions reflect our character;
our habits predict the future.
Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived, or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?
~ Hunter S. Thompson
There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.
~ Helen Keller
Hope is not a strategy. Luck is not a factor. Fear is not an option.
If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.
-Juan Ramón Jiménez
To laugh often and much;
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
to win the respect of the intelligent people and the affection of children;
to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;
to appreciate beauty;
to find the beauty in others;
to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition;
to know that one life has breathed easier because you lived here.
This is to have succeeded.
