What if I told you, there’s a one technique which will GUARANTEE an improvement in your coding skills and… it’s FREE. There’s no need for a partner, or expensive equipment, or supplements/nootropics. I’ve been using it for many years now and I became much better software engineer as a result. I was able to write 14 technical books while having a full-time job coding, speaking at conferences and teaching workshops all over the world.
More over, a lot of people outside of tech and coding use this technique to gain great advantage and improvement in their work: actors, writers, athletes, etc. It’s one of the best kept secrets and has been for many hundreds of years and probably longer. But hundreds of year ago, only select few people knew about this technique. Now anyone can tap into its power… but will you be the one to rip the benefits of this awesome technique for your career?
But let’s get back to coding.
Let me ask you: What is the most important important skill in coding?
What allows you to dig deeper into a problem and come up with a solution? No. Programming languages and apps are just tools.
To make it more specific, what allows you to track a function call and keep in memory three different variable values while also applying methods on an array and noticing places where you can refactor the code to make it better?
Let me give you the hint: experienced programmers (10+ years) have this skill in abundance. This is why they can solve complex problems and work with technologies which make any one else on their team cry like small baby. Senior programmers are masters of this skill and I won’t be surprised to find out that most of them use this productivity-boosting technique.
Do you know by now?
Can you guess?
It’s focus! Focus is the most important skill for a programmer. If you can focus more, then you can solve very complex problems. If you can change your focus from one thing to another faster, then you can be more productive. Most coding tasks require focus, e.g., finding bugs or find abstraction patterns to improve code and systems.
And what is a free technique to improve the focus? It’s meditation. It’s free. There’s no need for equipment. There’s no need for a partner. It’s affordable to anyone!
Any excuses like “I’m not good at meditation” just means you need meditation the MOST to calm your monkey brain. In our world of Slack, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and open offices it’s the people who can perform deep work that will be value and will get ahead.
Not convinced? Meditation is popular in India and look how many programmers from India are out there! I’m not saying I have hard data to prove anything. It could be just a coincidence, but my gut feeling is that there must be something to it.
Also, programming itself is a state of a blissful flow or trance. The more you do it the better you become at going into the flow state. Programming itself is like a meditation!
I paid more than $3,000 for my yoga teacher training. That’s an expensive way to learn meditation which basically what yoga is. Luckily, you don’t have to pay as much unless you want to have a motivation from spending all that money.
You can start just by counting from one to four for FREE. Start with 5 minutes per day for 1 month, then increase to 10 minutes. Give it a few months. Notice any improvement in your ability to focus while coding. Leave a comment here or write me an email about your results.
