I Have No Talent

Keynote presentation for the 2010 Great Lakes Ruby Bash.

Transcript

1. Ordered List John Nunemaker Great Lakes Ruby Bash, Lansing MI April 17, 2010 I Have No Talent An Organized Rant
3. Background The Rant That Struck A Nerve
5. The Gods First Nerve
6. The Mortals Second Nerve
7. The Path We are all on it (at different points).
8. 1. You Must Measure Yourself against you in the past
10. 2003 html, css, flash, photoshop, ftp oakprairiefarms.com, johnnunemaker.com
11. 2004 college grad, php, mysql, js, standards a lot of php/mysql admin areas
12. 2005 ajax, coldfusion, oracle, prototype, scriptaculous addictedtonew.com, mysql table wrapper, addicted to feedburner and flickr libs
13. 2006 rails, ruby, terminal, http requests, parsing xml/json, version control, class/instance variables, testing first rails site, railstips.org, nd forum
14. 2007 conductor, nd.edu, snitch, lorem, scrobbler, mirrored deployment, delegation, actionscript
15. 2008 googlebase, googlreader, statwhore, httparty, user_stamp, happymapper jquery, merb, git(hub), pythong
16. 2009 columbus, google-weather, crack, mongomapper, harmony oauth, mongodb, single page apps, include/extend, inheritance, tdd
17. 2010 proxies, identity map, composition, design patterns, refactoring, sinatra mongotips.com, wand, canable, joint, gemwhois
18. Generic to Specific I Learned From
19. Learning to Doing I Transitioned From
20. “ Aristotle What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing.
21. 2003-2010
22. 2003-2010 40+ oss projects
23. 2003-2010 40+ oss projects 100+ websites/applications
24. 2003-2010 40+ oss projects 100+ websites/applications 470+ blog posts
25. 2003-2010 40+ oss projects 100+ websites/applications 470+ blog posts a lot of code
26. To work hard and practice deliberately 2. You Must Choose
27. Choose You Must
28. You Must Choose
29. “ Jim Collins Greatness is not a function of circumstances. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice. You must maintain an unwavering faith that you can, and will prevail in the end. Good To Great
30. “ Malcolm Gladwell We sometimes think of being good at mathematics as an innate ability. You either have "it" or you don't. [...] it's not so much ability as attitude. You master mathematics if you are willing to try. Outliers
31. Work Hard You Must
32. “ Children who associate success with hard work tend to have a “mastery-oriented response” to challenging situations, while children who see themselves as just plain “smart” or “dumb,” or “good” or “bad” at something, have a “learned helplessness orientation.” Josh Waitzkin The Art of Learning
33. “ Jim Stigler, UCLA Prof The Japanese [teachers] want their kids to struggle. [...] American teachers, though, worked like waiters. Whenever there was a struggle, they wanted to move past it, make sure the class kept gliding along. But you don't learn by gliding. The Teaching Gap
34. “ Great companies did not focus on what to do, but rather what not to do and what to stop doing. Jim Collins Good To Great
35. Practice Deliberately You Must
36. “ The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call “deliberate practice”. Geoffrey Colvin What It Takes To Be Great
37. “ For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don't get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day - that's deliberate practice. Geoffrey Colvin What It Takes To Be Great
38. “ Understand that talent doesn’t mean intelligence, motivation or personality traits. It’s an innate ability to do some specific activity especially well. Geoffrey Colvin What It Takes To Be Great
39. “ Geoffrey Colvin Maybe we can't expect most people to achieve greatness. It's just too demanding. But the striking, liberating news is that greatness isn't reserved for a preordained few. It is available to you and to everyone. What It Takes To Be Great
40. Ordered List Thank you! john@orderedlist.com John Nunemaker Great Lakes Ruby Bash, Lansing MI April 17, 2010 @jnunemaker