I’ve been reading “The One Thing”, a book that preaches focusing on one thing at a time in order to achieve extraordinary results. By doing so, your success will build gradually, in a kind of domino effect. I believe this has been the case for me and it inspired this post.
I’ve been reflecting recently on my life and career. I’m all together not entirely satisfied, so naturally I’m working on fixing that. I’ve realized that of all the people that I look up to, do I know how they got to be so influential/successful/interesting? Whether it’s a mega celebrity or your company’s CEO, often we just know them from their biggest, most public achievements.
Ten years ago in Fall 2005, I began pursuing a computer science degree at Marquette University. My first programming class taught Java. Prior experience had included using DOS commands to run “Command & Conquer” and “Doom” on my parent’s Windows 95 PC and a BASIC class that I took in high school, taught by a gym teacher who knew as much as we did. So frankly, not much!
This post is inspired by several groups of people: those who ask me about software development and learning how to program, are curious about my apps/accomplishments, and Ramit Sethi, famed entrepreneur of IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com. In a recent email, he wrote about how people love to believe that success is effortless and just happens:
Excited to share my first podcast appearance today on The Talking Devs podcast. I met Chris Bohatka at That Conference years ago and have since kept up with him mostly via Twitter. When he approached me about being the first guest on a new podcast project he was starting, I of course said yes!
We had a lot of fun recording this. Despite clocking in at 1 hour+, we could have kept going! We cover a lot at a fast pace:
moving from Chicago to Seattle, starting a PhoneGap mobile app business in the context of Fitwatchr, and my upcoming Pluralsight course on PhoneGap Build. Check it out!
