• The way you think is the only thing responsible for the way you feel
• So develop a positive mindset by:
• - Practicing mindfulness
• - Journaling daily
• - Constantly learning
• - Try improvised comedy
• - Train yourself to look for what YOU can change in any negative situation

Have you found yourself getting frustrated at something that’s gone wrong? Maybe you’ve turned to blame other people or events for what’s happened and for the way you’re feeling.

If you let things that are out of your direct control affect the way you feel, then your life is going to be an unpredictable mix of highs and lows. Personally I’d rather have more highs than lows. The best way to do this is to stop letting things you can’t control effect how you feel.

This includes pretty much everything in life. The only thing you can actually control is your own mind, thoughts and actions. So we need to train ourselves not to develop negative emotions to anything that happens outside of our own minds. If something positive happens that was outside of your control, then by all means let it make you feel happy. Otherwise I’d be speaking pure madness.

I like to call this positive thinking. Training your mind to see anything that happens to you in a positive, or at the very least neutral, way. I’ve found a few great techniques for doing this:

• Practice mindfulness
• Journaling
• Learning
• Improvised comedy
• Looking at what YOU can change

Practice Mindfulness

Mindfulness helps you to live in the moment, accepting anything that’s happening to you or going through your head. With practice you’ll find it easier to clear your mind and not get overly emotional when you don’t want to be.

You can practice mindfulness in a bunch of different ways; meditation, yoga, exercise, art etc. Anything that gets you to focus on the present moment and helps you to clear your mind.

For me it’s been mainly 10 minutes of meditation every day. I started with a lot of guided meditation from apps like Calm, which teach you some great techniques for emptying your mind.

Journaling

By writing down the positive things that happen in your life, you are subtlety training your mind to look for the good things. With time you may get to a point where you never really notice the negative things that happen in life. I use an app called Day One, and write a paragraph every morning about anything positive or neutral that happened the day before.

Learning

Constantly learning is a great way to develop a positive mind. And reading will give you and endless supply of content. I think any kind of reading is useful for this, but the most beneficial is to actually read up on self development ideas and philosophies. Here’s a quick shortlist of books that come to mind:

• The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life
• Thinking Fast and Slow
• A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy
• Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want

Improvised Comedy

I go on about improv a lot. And that’s because it’s amazing! The only reason I did my first introductory course, it was to get better at public speaking. I had no other ambitions, but now it’s turned into one of my best hobbies. Whilst the teachings and practices have had a huge benefit to my positive thinking.

Level 1, or introductory courses are full of people who have never done any acting or performance before, they start off quite shy or introverted. But when you get them to start making things up, this amazing change happens and everything they do becomes wonderful, it all becomes right!

Improv is all about supporting the other players, accepting people ideas and building something together. Over time the improv habits you develop spill into life and you become better listeners, more accepting and develop a more positive mindset.

If you’re London based, I recommend checking out the Hoopla beginners improv course.

Looking at what YOU can change

When things happen that have a negative effect on you, instead of assigning blame to others, look at what you could do differently. I’ve never found a situation where there wasn’t something you could do differently or perceive in a more positive way.

Remember, it’s only the way you think that’s deciding your emotions. So everything is your fault, what will you change?

So…

Stop blaming other people and events for the way you feel. You’re the only person who can control the feelings you have. Any negative situation can be ignored, reframed in a positive way or turned around onto yourself so you can change it next time. Explore ways of developing a positive mindset and you’ll be just fine 😁

Footnote

I’m writing to improve the way I think about and communicate ideas. Please give me some feedback on this post at contact@charliejackson.com. And join my email newsletter here to keep up to date.

It’s All Your Fault was originally published in Lessons by Charlie Jackson on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

TL;DR

• We’re usually shit at listening to people
• Being better listeners is great for our relationships
• Use “Yes And”, building the conversation off the last thing the person said
• Show genuine interest in what the other person is saying
• Ask questions

Too often you may have found yourself in a conversation where you suddenly realise “I have no idea what they were just talking about”. You remember the topic, but as soon as the other person started speaking, you begun figuring out the point that you wanted to make as soon as there was a break in their sentence.

If you’re observing a conversation like this between other people, you find yourself listening to a bunch of individual points that don’t relate much to each other, often with countless interruptions. If you wrote down what was said it would look pretty meaningless.

We need to be better at listening

When we become better listeners conversations start to make much more sense. More importantly it’s super beneficial to you and your relationships:

• You are likely to become more respected by the other person in the conversation
• People will like you more
• You can say less and be considered more interesting
• You will remember more about the person’s interests, and be able to engage with them easier in the future
• You will not be that dick who keeps trying to talk about themselves
• With more information you can make better decisions in life, if you’re not listening you’re not gaining any new information
• You will enjoy the conversations more when you pay attention and invest in them

Yes And

In improvised comedy there’s a principle called “Yes And”. It’s about listening to what your scene partner just said, agreeing with the premise they just established and adding something constructive to it e.g.

Player 1: “Harry, you’re back from the war, thank god you’re safe!”

Player 2: “Doris, what are you talking about, I’ve been working in the mines as usual”

This is not “Yes And” the second player has discarded the world built up by the first, where they have just come back safe from war, and established themselves as a miner instead. Watching scenes where the players don’t “Yes And” end up being very confusing, disjointed and often have no substance to them. Done with “Yes And”:

Player 1: “Harry, you’re back from the war, thank god you’re safe!”

Player 2: “Yes Doris, I’m back, and it was the thought of you that kept me surviving”

Here is an example of “Yes And”, the second player has accepted the reality established before and added some detail. Now we know how much both the characters care about each other, and have more of a platform to build off.

“Yes And” only works when both participants are listening and building off what was last said. You can use this technique outside of improvised comedy to be better at listening and improve the conversations you have. Try to extend conversations off the last thing the person just said. You don’t have to agree with the point they make, “Yes And” is about agreeing with the reality (in our case, what the conversation is about) and adding substance.

Don’t ignore the last statement

When using “Yes And”, it’s important to do it off the last thing the person said, not the statement before that. Otherwise you’re just plain out ignoring them. And people will notice that.

Player 1: “Harry, you’re back from the war, thank god you’re safe!”

Player 2: “Yes Doris, I’m back, and it was the thought of you that kept me surviving”

Player 1: “I’m so glad you didn’t forget me, I was worried the stress of war would drive me from your mind”

Player 2: “And now that I’m back I intend to start a new war, here in Los Angeles!”

In this example we get a lovely “Yes And” from player one, about being worried she would be forgotten. However player 2 ignores this offer and carries on as if they’re talking directly after their previous statement. This is a more subtle way of ignoring “Yes And”. As on the surface it looks like they are doing “Yes And” by talking about war, but they completely ignored what player 1 had added in their second statement.

In real conversations it can be hard to comment on the last statement that was said. Sometimes we don’t have anything to say, or expected the conversation to go somewhere else. That’s where questions come to the rescue.

Show genuine interest, ask questions

When people see you showing genuine interest in what they’re saying their respect of you will likely skyrocket. It’s lovely for other people to find you interesting. So find others interesting in return.

This can be hard, you may know nothing about the subject or are just super bored. If leaving the conversation is not an option then you need a way to make the conversation more interesting.

The solution here is to ask questions about the last thing the person said. Think of something that you find intriguing or confusing and ask about it. Not only will you learn something new, it’s a great way to enjoy the conversation more. And the other person may notice how much interest you’re showing in what they’re saying.

Make it not about you

To sum up, stop thinking about your own agenda, pay attention to what others are saying, go off the last statement they made and ask lot’s of question. You’ll have more enjoyable conversations and develop better relationships.

Footnote

I’m writing to improve the way I think about and communicate ideas. Please give me some feedback on this post at contact@charliejackson.com. And join my email newsletter here to keep up to date.

Listen — It’s Not About You was originally published in Lessons by Charlie Jackson on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

• Assign probabilities to every aspect of a complex problem or choice
• The probabilities do not need to be accurate
• The process forces you to weigh up the different factors in a more neutral way, resulting in more accurate choices
• Nothing can be 100% certain

We face difficult problems and decisions nearly every day. And it’s not always obvious what the most rational path is to take. A technique I’ve picked up from the amazing Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, is to assign probabilities to the different aspects of the issue, and use those to inform my conclusions. This is best illustrated with some examples:

Everyday Life — Work Estimates

As a programmer I get asked all the time to estimate how long particular tasks will take. There are many biases that distort the estimates we give, so I have turned to probabilities to improve the accuracy of these estimates.

Previously for a given task I may have instinctively replied:

Maybe it will take 2–3 days

Nowadays you’re more likely to hear:

I think there’s an 80% chance this will be done in 2 days, 15% chance within 3 days and 5% for any longer

Firstly to respond like this you need to think through what could go wrong, draw on previous experience of estimates going over and weigh it all up for this specific task. Something we may not do as often as we should.

Secondly, this conveys much more information to the manager, letting them know the level of uncertainty in the task (Not just to cover my ass if it goes over 3 days). It informs them on how likely it is that something might run over, so they can plan accordingly.

Considering Belief — The Simulation Argument

The ideas we believe in can dramatically alter the decisions we make every day and the direction in which we take our lives. So we should make sure we believe in things that make sense. Or just stop believing in ideas that can’t be reasonably proven.

Do we live in a computer simulation (like The Matrix). Emotionally I would love to believe this, as it’s a great comfort that when you die, it might just be the end of the simulation and you start a new one. So I wanted to see where I would rationally put the odds of us being in a simulation.

During my research I found a great post stating that one of the following must be true:

1. If our civilisation got advanced enough to build a simulation as complex as our subjective experience, they would have no interest in building such a simulation
2. It is not possible for a civilisation to get to a point where they could build such simulations
3. There is an overwhelming chance you’re living in a simulation right now (> 99.99999%)

I found the argument interesting so I’ll use it here as an illustration of how I’d assign probabilities to an idea. I’ll leave it for another post to justify and criticise these points.

As one of these options must be true the total of all the odds needs to add up to 100%. Here’s how I would roughly distribute the following probabilities.

1. 20% — Human motivations would need to change dramatically for this to be true. Sure, our motivations are likely to change if we merged with Artificial Intelligence (AI). But I still find such dramatic shifts less likely.
2. 40% — It might not be possible to get to a point where we can build these simulations. As advanced civilisations may always end up wiping themselves out before reaching this stage (See the Fermi Paradox). Potential due to building the AI needed to make these simulations in the first place. It may also not be technologically possible.
3. 40% — If the first 2 options are not true, it means that in our future we will reach a point where we could create billions of these simulations. And run many more simulations than there are humans. Given that you wouldn’t be able to distinguish our reality as a simulation or not, and there are billions going on. The odds of this reality being a simulation is billions to 1.

Turns out I have roughly put a 40% chance on it be near certainty that we’re living in a simulation, which is much lower than my instinctive feeling. Looking at it now my subconscious never weighed the first 2 options. This is a big shift in what I emotionally felt/hoped and highlights the value of assigning probabilities to your beliefs and not just blindly following.

Why this helps you think

The benefit of going through the probabilities doesn’t lie in coming up with accurate odds. It’s mainly about forcing yourself to rationally weigh up the different factors in the decision and not let our subconscious unfairly weigh some evidence more than others. Which we do every day thanks to our numerous biases.

It also helps you realise that nothing can be 100% certain. There is always a chance that a theory is wrong. 2 + 2 = 4? Maybe, what if all maths you’ve been taught has been a conspiracy, and everyone is in on it? Or we are in a simulation and the laws of physics inside the simulation have been made wrong on purpose as an experiment? Sure these are incredibly unlikely, but uncertainty exists for everything.

I’ve been applying this to both big and small decisions. The odds don’t need to be accurate, but the process should hopefully allow you to be less biased, more rational and have thought through some aspects you might have missed.

Footnote

I’m writing to improve the way I think about and communicate ideas. Please give me some feedback on this post at contact@charliejackson.com. And join my email newsletter here to keep up to date.

How Thinking in Probabilities Helps You Make Better Decisions was originally published in Lessons by Charlie Jackson on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

• Write to improve your thinking
• Writing reinforces the ideas in your head
• It helps you realise what’s actually important when communicating
• It will point out gaps in your understanding
• Get feedback on your writing to further improve your learning

Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking

When I first heard this I started thinking about the way I communicate ideas, and how I struggle to explain new concepts in a clear way. It always seems so obvious to me, but it was frustrating to see people fail to grasp these “amazing” ideas I was getting so excited about.

This quote helped me see the problem: I had trouble explaining the ideas I researched because my thinking was still muddled and all over the place. I didn’t have practice trying to describe these ideas to people in a simple way. I was often trying to explain things I had just read and hadn’t thought through yet.

This is why I started writing. Not for self promotion, not to spread the ideas, not to look good on a CV. I’m writing to improve the way I think about, and explain, ideas. Maybe you should as well.

How writing has improved my thinking

Going though an idea again helps learning

Writing forces you to go through the ideas over and over. Reinforcing the concepts in your head. You try to organise your thoughts logically in text and become more familiar and confident in what you are saying. It also helps you remember the ideas, which is great for someone like me, who normally relies on a phone to do the remembering.

Rewriting makes you focus on the essentials

Some core principles in good writing include; cutting down, rewriting and simplifying your work. When you do this, and do it brutally, you need to really figure out what the most important parts of the ideas are. And the simplest way of explaining them.

You’ll find the holes in your explanations

• When explaining ideas, each sentence needs to lead on from the previous and make logical sense.
• Statements should have justifications.

After reading the first draft and you’re looking for the flow of logic, you will soon realise where all the gaps and confusions are. By rewriting again and again, the flow and clarity of your explanation will improve massively.

Get feedback

To find out how effective your writing (and thinking) is, ask for feedback from someone who has read your work. Get them to sum up the main points, and tell you what didn’t make sense. We all absorb ideas in distinctive ways. To better communicate you need to understand how different people process what you are saying.

To sum up

Keep writing and rewriting about the ideas you want to understand better. Get feedback and don’t do it for anyone except yourself.

Footnote

I’m writing to improve the way I think about and communicate ideas. Please give me some feedback on this post at contact@charliejackson.com. And join my email newsletter here to keep up to date.

Improve your thinking by writing was originally published in Lessons by Charlie Jackson on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

TL;DR

• Your best learning comes when your super motivated, so recognise what does it for you
• Solve your own problems
• Keep a list of all project ideas and problems you have
• Constantly keep up to do with new tech and practices
• Implement something new on every project you do
• It’s ok to not finish a project and move onto the next fun thing
• Share everything you do

A little story of learning

My programming path started during one of my startups. I was a product design graduate, and we were working on smart home technology. As with most small businesses, you get to a point where you think you need a website. So off I went to figure out how the WordPress world worked.

Turns out that as a designer, I was picky, and couldn’t find a single theme that did what I wanted. The margins and colours were wrong, or there was one specific layout option I wanted that the theme couldn’t provide. I decided to start understanding small amounts of CSS and HTML, so I could customise the look of these themes. Hooray, the world of super basic programming!

As the months went on, we found some reason for wanting dynamic content from the database to appear somewhere the theme didn’t allow. This was my chance to start looking at PHP, which was much more confusing than CSS and HTML. An actual programming language, rather than a markup and style syntax. I was getting into the big leagues.

Over time, the code I had added on top of the theme got larger than the code inside the theme itself. It was time to take ultimate control and build my own WordPress theme. It started taking much longer to build features, but I had all the power and was having way too much fun learning.

It didn’t take long until I figured out it was the process of learning, trying something new and getting immediate feedback that I loved. More than the outcome itself.

As my understanding of PHP grew I dabbled with more advanced themes and trying to do away with the tyranny of WordPress, by writing my own Content Management System (CMS). Especially as my startup ideas at the time were essentially custom CMS’s (Yeah, we changed what we did a lot). Turns out building a CMS is not a trivial task.

As the #InternetOfThings was growing on Twitter I got more into my Raspberry Pi and node.js work. So I could build smarter digital photo frames. This really boosted the limited JavaScript knowledge I had at the time.

Node got bigger and frameworks like Angular and React popped up so I discarded my foolish jQuery and PHP ways and dived headfirst into the only language that I could build every part of my ideas in, JavaScript.

This coincided nicely with a failing crowdfunding campaign and running out of all money and investment. Time to get a really job as a front end developer.

Over the years working for the man, seeing how bigger projects are structured and learning the fun stuff on my side projects, I got much better at this “dev” business. I’m now freelancing and spending a good proportion of my time learning new stuff for my own projects whilst picking more interesting client projects to pay the bills.

90% of my programming knowledge came from personal projects

How to maximise your learning

I got into programming to solve the problems I already had. Those problems and projects super motivated me to learn. And my rate of learning was much higher as a result.

Write down every project idea

The first step in learning through your side projects is having a side project to work on. I keep an easily accessible list of potential projects and problems I want to solve. I add to this whenever I have a new idea for something to build. When I want to work on something new, I go through the list, prioritise them by what excites me the most, and pick the top one to do. I recommend Trello for managing this. Especially if it starts getting big.

Always do things differently

If we want to be learning, we need to be doing something new on our projects. Whether it’s a new piece of technology or library you heard about, or just a new way of organising and managing what you do. This means you need to be aware of new technology and practices to apply. So keep up to date! Follow newsletters, relevant accounts on Medium and go to meetups.

Its ok not to finish

You don’t have to finish a side project. You can do it just for the fun of doing it. Too often we tell ourselves off for not finishing something, or for getting excited about a different project from the one we’re working on. If you’re not relying on this project for income then follow the fun. If you’ve gotten bored, or something else seems too enticing not to work on, it’s ok to go do it.

Share it

My final way for getting the most out of a project is to share every part of it. Make all your code open source, tweet about it, write a post about what you’re doing. This way you might get people offering you advice on things you could do differently, or may even offer to help you out. And as an added bonus it looks great to potential employers and clients.

So learn by doing, rather than learning for the sake of learning.

Learn by Building — Motivated Programming was originally published in Lessons by Charlie Jackson on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

TL;DR

• Start with the smallest possible way of doing the habit
• Slowly increase intensity/duration of the habit
• Decrease the intensity/duration any time you miss a session
• Write out the progression from smallest intensity to the maximum intensity, with as many steps as possible and reference when increasing/decreasing.
• I still don’t have any solid advice for motivation yet, soz

For me, maintaining a habit is about starting with the smallest version of the habit that’s possible. Giving yourself no excuse to do it every day. Then slowly increasing the duration or intensity of that habit. Whilst decreasing the intensity if you’re not doing as well as you should be.

I’d like to focus this post on the scale of “smallest version” and “it’s ok to decrease intensity in order to maintain regularity”.

Start so small you can’t fail

Here’s a few examples of the “smallest version” of a habit:

• Meditation — 1 deep, mindful breath a day
• Exercise — 1 sit up a day
• Dieting — Leave 1 mouthful of something you don’t want to be eating a day. Or have 1 mouthful of something you want to be eating.

The most important thing when maintaining a habit is regularity. Getting it to become part of your day, so it feels instinctive, you begin doing it subconsciously. Over time this reduces the amount of mental effort needed to start the habit. So you’re more likely to keep it. If you try and do too much, you’ll end up finding excuses not to complete your habit. So start with something you can still do, no matter what mood you’re in or how little time you have.

It’s ok to do less

Every January we see people signing up for the gym, going a few times a week and end up doing nothing by week 3. This is the problem of not starting small and not decreasing intensity when it becomes too much. I had this with my daily meditation practice. I started small, with 1 breath a day and kept increasing the amount I’d do to about 15 minutes. I kept this up for around 6 months and then suddenly stopped doing any meditation at all. I had got myself into a mindset where I thought it was failure to do less. And I was finding it harder at the time to complete my 15 minutes. As a result I just gave up completely, rather than winding down.

Had I realised I was struggling and started decreasing the time I was meditating, even if it went all the way back down to 1 breath again, I probably wouldn’t have stopped when I did.

Keeping track

To effectively increase or decrease the intensity of your habit, you need to know all the steps in the progression and track when to go up or down.

One way to do this, is to write out a list of all the steps. Starting with the smallest version, and ending with the most you want to be doing. With as many steps in-between as you can make. Whilst using a habit tracking app, such as Habitica, to track your streaks (number of times you did your habit without a break). When you get to a certain number in the streak, like 5 in a row, then you increase to the next step. If you miss even a single session, go down a step.

I haven’t been able to find a good app that can handle this increase/decrease automatically. For now you’ll need to do this bit manually, or maybe combine Google Forms and Google Scripts if you like a cheeky bit of coding.

What I’m not sure of yet

One thing I still haven’t figured out as well as I’d like to is motivation. I found a few methods for hacking motivation, but they haven’t worked too well for me:

• Gamification — Using a habit tracking app that turns doing your habits into a video game (check out Habitica)
• Social pressure — Telling friends and family about your habit goals and updating them on progress
• Betting against yourself — 
  Actually putting money on the line if you don’t keep up with your habit goals (See Beeminder)
• Rewards — Giving yourself treats and rewards when you reach a certain streak

Start small and do less — Forming habits for life was originally published in Lessons by Charlie Jackson on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

1. Use ads to test what works

Google, Facebook and Twitter ads are great ways to test the value proposition of what you are building. And to find out what it is that people care about. Even if you don’t have anything to sell yet. Need to decide on a name, catch line, logo or hero image? Set up A/B tests as ads and see what versions lead to higher click rates. It’s a great thing to do at all times, so you can slowly keep improving and refining your offering.

2. Idea — Starting a Mantra meetup

I’m building an app that helps you record and remember what you’ve learnt from books, podcasts talks etc. When thinking about marketing I had the idea to start a monthly meetup. Where we have 30/40 minutes of people talking about ideas and concepts they came across recently, followed by discussions, networking and drinks. Think small TED talks for smaller, more relatable ideas. I’m imagining the talks would be around self improvement, startups, design and tech. Mainly because that’s what I like ;)

3. Start building your audience and influencer relationships now

Whatever your idea or business, start talking about the relevant things on social media now. Engage with influencers and start building those followers. You don’t want to start from scratch by the time you actually have a product to promote.

4. Find the simplest solution, even if it costs

I find regular posting and maintaining of social media to be a complete ball ache. I get really into it for a week and then give up for the rest of the year. So finding the simplest solution that makes it super easy, is critical for me to keep doing it. I recently upgraded my Buffer account so I can run all my social through the 1 app, before I was using a mixture of the free version of Buffer and TweetDeck. But even only running two apps was enough to put me off doing it every day. Damn laziness!

5. Making lists calms me down

I end up writing lists for the same things over and over again. For some reason it feels really good and calming. I thinks it’s to do with clarifying my thoughts. Either way, give it a go and see if it works for you. My preferred tools are Evernote and Trello. Evernote I use for brain dumps, Trello is good if you want to prioritise the list afterwards.

6. Don’t publish something the moment you finish it

When you have just finished a blog post, drawing or anything else that took you a bit of time, you feel great, excited that you just finished something awesome. But don’t publish now! You need a to come back to it a little later, after that euphoria has faded a bit. Then check for edits. I had this recently with a sketch of mine. As soon as I finished it I got super excited and published it straight away. Afterwards I noticed a whole bunch of stuff I wanted to adjust, but I had already published to the world.

7. Put some good effort into planning your RPG campaigns as the Game Master

I recently started my first Role Playing Game campaign as the Game Master. I’ve played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons over the last year, but was never in charge. This campaign was based off the Discworld RPG, which is super awesome! I know the Discworld series incredibly well, so already had a great base of knowledge for the world and how it works. I spent around 6 hours planning for the first session and it was well worth it. I was mainly planning and building Non Playable Characters and potential situations that could occur, depending on what the players wanted to do.

I do a lot of improv so didn’t want things to be too rigidly planned out. When it came to our location and maps, I decided on using Realtime Board and sketching out what the characters could see as they progressed.

Realtime Board worked great for this as I could use my iPad and Apple Pencil to draw and the players would see the changes in real time. I’ve used roll20 a lot in the past, but it’s capabilities to draw like this are pretty laggy and buggy.

If you’re into RPG’s and haven’t tried the Discworld one, I highly recommend it.

8. Pair programming is super useful, but slow

I’ve recently been leading a lot of pair programming sessions for the first time. In these sessions I was screen sharing with two other developers, going through some React code and building some new features. Describing my process as we went along, as well as talking through and implementing ideas the others had. I found it really interesting to describe my thinking as I was coding. It’s not something I’ve ever done before. It makes you take a moment to really think about whether you’re doing something in the best way. The whole process is a lot slower than writing the code alone, but I definitely feel the resultant code is structured much better. It’s also a great way to teach and learn.

9. Pick your battles

I need to keep reminding myself not to get into certain conversations with some people after a tipple or two. No one is getting anywhere or developing their ideas, it’s just not fun or constructive for anyone. It’s just so tempting to call people up on something when you think they are being outrageous. But there’s a time and place for that, which is certainly not when everyone’s been drinking.

10. Reuse reuse

I can’t stop reminding myself about the importance of building super generic components and abstracting away business logic as much as possible. The pair programming I was doing really helped that and made me realise I could be better when coding by myself.

11. Pick good names, and don’t be afraid to change them

Naming components, functions, classes and methods are super important. It’s one of the critical factors in making code easy to understand at a glance. So spend a moment or two just to make sure your naming really does make sense. And don’t be afraid to change the names once you’ve written them. Even if it involves a bunch of find and replaces. The clarity you achieve makes it worth it.

That’s all folks

Thanks for making it this far! I’m a freelance developer and startup guy, checkout my website for more on what I do, social links and to get in contact https://charliejackson.com

Calm yourself using lists, picking your battles and paying for simplicity was originally published in Lessons by Charlie Jackson on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

1. Find a work environment with people in a similar situation to yourself

I recently went to a meetup in London where freelancers got together to work out of a free co-working space for the day. Being a freelancer myself it was great to be surrounded by other people going through similar challenges to myself. It’s also nice not being surrounded by strangers with nothing in common, or just being alone at home working. Also great for networking and finding people to potentially work with or for.

2. Passion gets you many places

Showing genuine passion for something can really help you with new opportunities. For me, I’m specifically thinking about technology and programming. After having an excitable talk about tech with someone on the phone, the next thing I new I got asked to give a presentation on some of the topics at the persons company. Which went super well. Don’t be afraid to talk about what you love, just be aware of jargon and going to far over peoples heads.

3. Programmers, be more personable!

There are loads of you fun, personable programmers out there. However I have seen many of the stereotypically secluded programmer in my time. Sure, if you don’t want anything more than what you have already, by all means carry on squire. Otherwise, go out to meetups, get out of your chair, stop the video games for once and go out to experience the tech scene. Especially if you are in London, there’s tech and programming events going on every day. You probably know a fuck tonne about what it is you do, go an give a demo or talk on that. You’ll feel great afterwards, meet some cool new people and be exposed to loads more opportunities.

4. Be constantly curious

Try and get interested in many different things, become more multidisciplinary. Sure you could become an expert in one very narrow domain and spend your life in there, but I feel it’s so much more rewarding having a good understanding of as much as you can, rather than a very singular understanding of one or two topics. This is totally possible, as the time it takes to become an expert in a field is exponentially larger than the time it takes to become good at something. See the threshold of impressiveness below.

It’s also great for creativity as you’ll be able to combine more different ideas and practices across domains. For more listen to the Tim Ferris Podcast with Issac Walterson.

5. Make sure you always give out your contact details when meeting someone

I just forget too easily, or my mind is focussed too much on the topic of conversation. But you never know what will happen when you add someone on LinkedIn, that you just met, and then they realise they need your services or want to work with you. Who knows, just do it.

6. Know what your cravings are and make sure they get satisfied

Unless it’s something you’re trying to avoid doing, make sure you do the things you need to do. For me I need to do some programming at the very least every other day. Regardless of what it’s for. I found myself doing a week of admin/marketing activities and by the middle I was losing focus so easily and couldn’t figure out why.

Then I did a few hours of programming on some side project. It completely brought my mood back up for doing the other activities which are higher priority. Now I try and treat myself at the end of most days, with an hour or two of programming, just to engage my logic mind.

7. Copying someone else's artwork feels like cheating, but makes you better

I’ve been doing a lot more drawing and art stuff recently. To get back into it I’ve been finding cool shit I like online and either replicating them or doing my own take on them.

At first I kept feeling like it was cheating, like the stuff I was creating was a cop out. Then I came to realise that it’s just like doing study pieces to improve your skills so you can do better original work. As all my work is digital, I started by tracing on top of a translucent layer of the original artwork, but this was way too easy, I wasn’t developing my observational skills as much. So now I do it all from observation instead. It also makes for better timelapse videos.

8. Big lists don’t get done, split them up

When faced with a giant to do list, it can feel so daunting we never even start. Split the list up in loads of smaller prioritised lists. With no more than 5–8 items in them. It’s amazing how much more motivated you will feel to get through them.

I do this with Trello. So for each big project I’ll have 2 Trello boards, “Current” and “Backlog”. “Current” has a column for “To sort”, “Next”, “Today”, “Blocked”, “Doing”, “Done” and “Invalid”. Each of these columns is only allowed to have a maximum of 6 cards with the following exceptions:

• “Doing” can only have 1 card at a time.
• “Blocked” can have more, as it’s not really a to do list
• “Done” and “Invalid” can have as many as you like. I have a script that clears archives these columns every day.

In the “Backlog” board there’s about 6 columns called “Priority 1”, “Priority 2” etc.. These can have as many in as you need in your backlog. But to be honest, I never really go into the backlog board. It’s just a place where I put new ideas. I’ll check it over once a week, and sometimes move things into the current board. But very rarely.

9. Start all dev projects with the entire stack you want to use

I do a lot of side projects, many of them were only meant to be super small and quick things, but then they spiral into bigger projects I enjoy spending my time on. When this happens I like to make sure the project has been setup with all the best practices I like to use. (eslint, prettier, flow, jest, cucumber.js, logging to a server, uptime monitoring etc). Sometimes adding these things to a project retroactively is a bitch. So now I’m trying to start new projects with all my best practices. So it’s easier going forward and I’ll get even faster at building side projects with this tech.

10. Adding images to the Mantra App

One of my main side projects is the Mantra App. An iOS and Android app that helps you remember the things you’ve learnt from books, podcasts etc. It’s a super basic micro note taking app. That basically only let’s you write down quotes. I really want to make it more visually appealing, and have started my social posts for it with these kind of pics:

I’m creating these images manually at the moment, but really want to add this functionality into the app. So when you write a quote, you can select from a range of background images, or upload your own.

The main issue, is that when I use the app, I write things down very quickly and want them to be saved super quickly. As I’m normally listening to a podcast, and don’t pause it as I write down the quote. Having to select the right image you want before publishing could take a significantly longer time to publish the post.

So at the moment I’m thinking of letting you save drafts super quickly, without an image, just the text. Then you can go back later to pick the images and publish/schedule them.

11. Freelance as a project lead

Recently I’ve been working with a client as a project lead. Where my responsibilities are to set up the structure, README and build scripts for a codebase, and then intro new devs to the project and handle the code reviews.

For the client this means they can get less senior and cheaper devs to do the feature development, but can maintain the code quality by having someone like me checking everything that goes through. It wasn’t something I had thought of offering as a service, but makes a lot of sense and has been working really well so far.

12. Even big services crash sometimes, monitor them and have a backup plan

I recently had my website go down for an hour or so because Firebase, my hosting (owned by Google), went down. It’s not something that happens often, but it reminded me that even the big guys can have something go wrong.

I only noticed as I was working on my site at the time. So now I’ve implemented uptime monitoring and am planning a backup system, so if it happens again my site will point to a different temporary hosting provider for the duration. I’ve got good caching setup with Cloudflare so that really minimises the damage as well.

13. Don’t get pissed off with recruiters, just tell them what you need and educate them

Sure recruiters can be super annoying, getting dozens of calls and emails a day if you’re looking for work. With most of the messages offering you jobs that aren’t right for a whole number of reasons. Most of them don’t understand how the tech stacks you know fit together and what’s relevant for you. Tell them, don’t just ignore what they’re saying. A recruiter who likes you will be super useful now and in the future.

14. Under promise, over deliver

It’s so easy to feel pressured into making the sale by promising what the client wants in a timeframe that is unlikely. I find it’s best to never make estimations, when talking with the client. You always need to go away, clear your mind and think properly about it. I tend to make a list of prioritisation’s, will promise what I think can definitely get done, with the understanding that if that gets done, I can look at the next stuff with any time we have left.

15. If you’re working remotely, keep feeding back and be super responsive

16. Do what you can to get the first small piece of work with a client

As soon as you have them, you can show them how awesome you are to work with. You just need to get them though. Find a super small thing you could do for the client, and offer your first day at half price. It’s always easier to get repeat business than new business.

17. As a freelancer you don’t have to give your client a full 8 hours every day

You’re freelancing, you need to be constantly putting your services out there, maintaining your social media, blogs, doing self development etc. This needs to happen even if you have client work on. When is it going to get done? Don’t be one of those people who works outside of work hours, that’s for fun time.

Just tell you clients you can give them 7 hours of work a day, and the other work hour is for your admin and marketing tasks. It will make you less stressed and happier which equals a better worker.

My current thinking is letting clients know I can work 7 hours a day sometime between 9–6, with a maximum of 4 days a week for any one client. This gives me my time to work on my side projects, and develop my skills. Whilst maintaining my marketing activities and doing one of my drawings every day. All of which makes me much more effective and enthusiastic when I am working on client projects. You can always offer more hours per week but at a higher rate (just try not to do it too often).

18. Avoid complexity by working at a higher abstraction level

Every time you are coding something and you start to think “this is getting complicated”. Take a pause and think how you can split the component or have a base class in someway that abstracts the complexity a little. I achieve this by having a rule in my eslint config that tells my off when a file gets longer than 100 lines (not including comments). It’s normally a good indicator of complexity.

19. Should you have a price calculator for you freelance services?

I’ve been wondering whether or not it’s a good idea to build a price calculator on my website for my freelance services. I love the idea of productising and standardising your services. So when a client uses you it’s like they could be buying your service directly off your website.

One of the key things a client wants to know is, how much will my new app/website cost and how long. This price calculator would include things like your hourly rate, how long the project might be, how long a website with certain typically features could take, what level of testing is required etc.

Sure it will always be rough and every client has different requirements that make things easier/harder. But having something that shows your clients how you go about pricing and a super rough guide to how much it could cost, will filter out clients who definitely can’t afford you, and potentially give clients more confidence in your ability to estimate and execute effectively.

20. Please write good commit messages

90% of the commit messages I’ve seen people write are one or two word messages like “update” or “bug fix”. Whenever I see a well detailed commit message with a good description I feel like tracking down that person them and buying them a beer. It makes understanding the history and issues with a project so much easier.

21. Don’t forget logging for your production app/website

I’ve recently got into using Sentry for the error logging of my production sites and apps. It really is one of the best ways to make sure the products you are building are working properly. You really should be adding in lots of end to end testing on your products, that should capture 90% of the issues, but there’s always going to be things you haven’t thought of or tested for. That’s what the logging is for.

22. Only monitor data that will change your actions

Too many people are obsessed with vanity metrics, stats that don’t mean anything but boost your own ego. e.g:

• Twitter followers
• Website hits
• Revenue (Profit is the thing that matters)

Don’t waste time on these. Instead only concern yourself with data that will change your actions depending on whether they hit specific goals.

For example, you could monitor your social engagement for a typical month, then do a month with more quirky copy or a different tone of voice. Keep everything else the same and compare results. If you have more engagement with the new tone of voice, keep it and try a new experiment to get better. This example is only important if social engagement is a genuine goal that makes sense for your business, it often isn’t.

23. Don’t be afraid to tell people what you want

Let people know what you want, how you want to work etc. Otherwise you may agree to something you’re not 100% behind, and the other party don’t even know this. Everyone works better, when everybody knows what everyone else wants.

24. Start small and work up

It doesn’t matter if you undercharge, just do some small projects, gain experience, traction, reviews and charge more after each project.

25. Destuffocate

I guarantee you don’t need most of your possessions and at least half of them don’t make you any happier. They just add stress by beings things you need to tidy, manage or spend even more money on. Chuck it out. More on destuffocation here.

That’s all folks

Thanks for making it this far! I’m a freelance developer and startup guy, checkout my website for more on what I do, social links and to get in contact https://charliejackson.com

Be curious, tell people what you want and 23 more lessons from this week was originally published in Lessons by Charlie Jackson on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

• App Store
• Google Play Store

App Description

Record and be reminded of the lessons you have learnt from books, talks, podcasts or anywhere.

The Mantra app lets you write down these lessons, edit them and be reminded of them later.

Features include:

• Write down the lessons you have learnt
• See random full screen mantra displayed on the main view
• Setup notifications to get reminders every day of a random mantra
• View all your mantra in a list, to find, edit or delete existing mantra
• Mantra syncs in the cloud, so you can view, edit and get reminded on all your devices
• See suggested Mantra and add them to your collection

Development

This is an app I have built in Javascript using React Native. If you’re a developer kinda person you can check out the code on GitHub.

Mantra — iOS and Android app to remember your learnings was originally published in Projects by Charlie Jackson on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I have been meditating on and off for the last few years. But in the last 70 days I have been doing 5–10 minutes every day to find out what the prolonged benefits of daily meditation are. Here’s what I’ve found:

• I can prioritise and organise much better
• This was one of my key stress factors, always wanting to do too much and getting overwhelmed with all the tasks I felt needed to get done. Meditation has helped me to realise that a task may not actually be important and has helped me to define a clear priority of tasks. Greatly reducing my stress.
• I can stay focused for longer, so I’m more efficient
• My breathing is much better
• My mind is calmer, and doesn’t race around as much
• Slower more deliberate though
• I am more forgiving, and more likely to see the good in people
• I am less worried about the future, and am focusing more on the present
• I am more honest with myself about my own thoughts, opinions and emotions

My daily practice looks like:

• Grabbing one of the giant pillows Viki made from our honeymoon
• Sitting cross legged
• Opening the Calm app and picking one of the 5, 10 or 15 minute sessions. My favourites are:
• Calm Light
• Less talk
• Timed Meditation
• No talk
• Choices
• Guided talk session around noticing distractions
• Body Scan
• Guided talk session focusing on awareness of your entire body

Meditation — Mindfulness practice for a happier life was originally published in Projects by Charlie Jackson on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.