Each blue square is a day I made at least one entry.For the past several months I’ve been making a concerted effort to write in my journal every single day. I’d heard lots of great things about it in the past, but never really got into it. One of the big road blocks I ran into in the past was thinking that every journal entry had to be some insightful, well-written, moving piece of prose. This is actually one of the reasons I have never really had a blog take off and be something I do, too.
I’ve been slowly working my way through Search Inside Yourself (SIY) for almost a year at this point, and one of the mindfulness techniques it mentions is journaling. SIY is very much in the camp of “write for the sake of writing.” It even goes as far as to say that even if all you end up writing is “I have no real idea what to write about but this thing says I need to keep writing for 3 minutes regardless of what’s actually coming out”, then it was a valuable exercise. I’d like to add my support for that statement as well. Usually after about 2 sentences of nonsense, something comes to my mind and I end up writing for way longer than the prescribed 3 minutes.
Combined with an app I’ll discuss in another post that aims to aid in habit formation, I now not only write in my journal nearly every day, but it often ends up being my default location for brainstorming or thinking about things, and there are many days where I will write multiple entries. One of the wonderful things about writing every day is discovering what sorts of broader themes crop up in my journal.
One of the most valuable things I’ve gotten out of my journal is seeing the progress I’ve been making in my life. I’ve really been making significant improvements in my life in the past several years, and journaling gives me a way to look back in time at what things used to be like and see the progress I’ve made. I honestly can’t wait for 5 years from now when I look back at entries I’m writing today.
I have lots more I can say on this topic, and will say on this topic in the future. For now, I invite you to join me on this journey, and if you’ve been journaling yourself, I would love to hear the techniques you use and the value you’ve gotten from your own exercises.
Back in September, I started a new job at Stripe. During my onboarding trip, I was having a conversation with one of my coworkers over burritos about “Impostor Syndrome”, something both of us had been experiencing since we started. A couple of nearby coworkers weighed in with their thoughts and experiences and we had a great conversation. Afterward, she and I talked about doing a session on impostor syndrome as part of our onboarding curriculum.
Fast forward a couple of weeks, and I’m trying to put together a talk idea for SCaLE14x. I remembered our conversation and thought it would be a great talk subject, and I could also do a dry-run of it at work during my trip in December. Perfect! I submitted the proposal, it got accepted, and I scheduled a session to give my talk at the office in front of my coworkers!
Upon sending out just the announcement for the talk, I had lots of positive feedback from folks. One conversation in particular that came up was from another of the folks I started with and he linked me to a talk from Allison Kaptur entitled “Effective Learning For Programmers“, a talk he liked to refer people to any time the subject came up.
I was having a particularly difficult day and remembered this talk. Immediately I went and grabbed a copy of the book and started reading it. I felt like my brain had been sliced open, analyzed, and the results printed on the pages before me.
The general gist of the book is there are 2 basic mindsets: fixed and growth. A person with a fixed mindset does not believe themselves capable of improvement. The skills and abilities they have are what they were born with, and they cannot improve those. Failures draw the boundaries, the edges of skill and ability. A person with a growth mindset believes they can improve through effort, training, learning. Failure isn’t necessarily a lack of skill, knowledge, or ability. Effort, hard work, and learning can improve skills, enhance ability, and improve performance.
The book goes on to describe language that effects a mindset. Rewarding someone by saying how smart they are can place them in a fixed mindset. Talking about how hard they worked can impart a growth mindset. I’ve personally talked with people about this book, and one person in particular described the language as “something you are as opposed to something you do.” You are smart, or you do work hard.
I’ve been trying to apply the lessons from this book to my own life, to much success, and sometimes less than success. I think one of the greatest examples of the success I’ve had is to be able to look at times when I have been in a fixed mindset since reading this book and not feel unworthy because of them. Basically, not having a fixed mindset about my mindset. And to go one more level of meta, being ok with sometimes having a fixed mindset about my mindset!
The first time I saw Allison’s talk, a lot of what she said really resonated with me, but I didn’t translate it into action. Only later did I recognize the value of what I was hearing and seek more information about it. I feel like my mind wasn’t yet ready to receive the wisdom contained in these pages. I am immensely grateful it eventually was, and that this book came into my life when it did. I believe I’ll look back to this book as a major milestone in my life and my development.
It’s that time again. Time for me to switch blogging platforms and work at getting into blogging! I’m back on WordPress and likely here to stay. Things in WordPress world have gotten to the point where I don’t feel super paranoid that it’s going to get compromised, and if all else fails I can move to WordPress.com and have a super stable blog with all the backups and not have to worry about things at all. Hooray!
Because I want to make my site forward compatible with WordPress.com, and in the interests of not having all of my permalinks broken, I’m going to leave http://blog.kitchen.io/ online indefinitely. I’ll make a post over there redirecting folks to here, but that site will be mostly deprecated.
There are several reasons I’m switching away from Octopress, but the main one is ease of use. WordPress’ post editing interface is pretty neat. I can edit posts from my phone, it’s very WYSIWYG, and once I enable the embed.ly plugin, it will have very nice support for embedding content from third parties. Plus I feel like it can take the place of my photostream with its built-in media support. I may still end up with my own media hosting system, but with the embed.ly plugin, it’s easy to make cards for that, if I ever get there.
words with kitchen 