Juvoni Beckford
Engineering Personal Development
Episode Notes (by minute):
-4:30 - Why Juvoni decided to teach himself how to code while pursuing another degree
-6:00 - How Juvoni saw a mismatch in supply and demand for software engineering jobs
-7:00 - How Juvoni was able to “stand-out” by consecutively leveraging prior roles to get better ones next
-10:00 - Why more people should look to develop a valuable skill, as opposed to actively job-searching
-11:00 - Why there are many, many components to finding a job and each one is a skill that needs to be developed
-11:30 - Why service-oriented jobs should look to create artifacts that showcase your character
-13:00 - How being the co-founder of Personal Development Nerds forced Juvoni to grow as a leader and further develop personally, given now having more “skin in the game”
-15:00 - The importance of signaling to the market and communicating to your friends when you are looking for job
-15:00 - How the feeling of shame can limit people’s ability to learn about more opportunities
-18:00 - What Juvoni learned growing up in a difficult economic environment and how that shapes his view
-18:30 - How Juvoni uses an “engineering mindset” for personal development growth, including habit tracking and productivity
-21:00 - How to think about a system-level approach to any new goal or behavior change
-24:00 - What Juvoni has learned from writing a personal annual review for more than seven years
-27:00 - Why we tend to have a bias towards the negative events in our lives
-28:30 - The importance of doing deep work in chunks of time and stopping to evaluate opportunities and learnings. Books mentioned here were Range, Deep Work, Tolstoy’s philosophy on The Hedgehog and Fox
-31:00 - How careers are having a long-time, and how people tend to think and act short-sighted
-36:00 - How our emotions are deeply connected to our work and personal development, and the importance to focus on even more now in early 2020
(Note: these are quick notes and takeaways by David Nebinski. Please see the episode for more accurate information)