November 2020

Top 7 Upskilling Platform(s) for IT Professionals

November 19, 2020 In Technology 7 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

Technology is always going faster than we can all catch up with, thanks in large part to factors such as Moores’s law and innovation. Moore’s law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years, which invariably halves computers’ cost.

The need to upskill and reskill in our rapidly changing world cannot be overemphasized, the machines are coming, and we all need to be ready for the disruption that would come with it. According to the World Economic Forum’s future of jobs report 2020:

In addition to the current disruption from the pandemic-induced lockdowns and economic contraction, technological adoption by companies will transform tasks, jobs, and skills by 2025.

43% of businesses surveyed indicate that they are set to reduce their workforce due to technology integration,
41% plan to expand their use of contractors for task-specialized work, and
34% plan to expand their workforce due to technology integration.
By 2025, the time spent on current tasks at work by humans and machines will be equal.
A significant share of companies also expect to make changes to locations, their value chains, and the size of their workforce due to factors beyond technology in the next five years.

WEF estimates that by 2025, 85 million jobs may be displaced by a shift in the division of labour between humans and machines, while 97 million new roles may emerge that are more adapted to the new division of labour between humans, machines and algorithms.

Here are 7 Upskilling platforms that could help every IT professional stay in touch with the latest innovation and technologies.

The Paradoxical Commandments by Kent M. Keith.

November 18, 2020 In Poem 2 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

The Paradoxical Commandments were written by Kent M. Keith in 1968 as part of a booklet for student leaders. It is often found in slightly altered form.

In 1997, Keith learned that the poem “The Paradoxical Commandments” had hung on the wall of Mother Teresa’s children’s home in Calcutta, India; and, two decades after writing the original poem, Dr. Keith wrote a book of the same title expanding on the themes of the poem: Anyway: The Paradoxical Commandments: Finding Personal Meaning in a Crazy World.

Jeff Bezos “We Are What We Choose” 2010 Princeton University Commencement Speech.

November 17, 2020 In Speech 9 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon) delivered the baccalaureate remarks to the Princeton University graduating class of 2010.

Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life — the life you author from scratch on your own — begins.
How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?
Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?
Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?
Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?
Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?
Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong, or will you apologize?
Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?
Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?
When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?
Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?
Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

Walter Isaacson on Creativity and Innovation.

November 17, 2020 In Personal Development 6 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

“Smart people are a dime a dozen and often don’t amount to much. What counts is being creative and imaginative. That’s what makes someone a true innovator.”

In the introduction of Jeff Bezos’ new book, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, Walter Isaacson, Author and Biographer of Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Ada Lovelace, Steve Jobs, and Albert Einstein. Walterson shares some great insights on some of the qualities that made these men creative and imaginative. He writes:

“Smart people are a dime a dozen and often don’t amount to much. What counts is being creative and imaginative. That’s what makes someone a true innovator.”

“So, what are the ingredients of creativity and imagination, and what makes me think that Bezos belongs in the same league as my other subjects?

It is always Day One.

November 17, 2020 In Personal Development 8 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

“Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”

One of the core tenents of Jeff Bezo’s thinking at Amazon is “It is always Day One,” which is a philosophy on staying nimble, having a small business mind with a big company heart. It involves maintaining a customer-obsession and focusing on the needs of the customers. Amazon strives to be the most customer-centric company in the world.

In a conversation he had with David Rubenstein, club president of The Economic Club of Washington on September 13, 2018, Jeff said:

It’s Day 1. Everything I have ever done has started small. Amazon started with a couple of people. Blue Origin started with five people and a very, very small budget. Now the budget of Blue Origin is over $1 billion a year. Amazon literally started with 10 people; today it is over 750,000. That’s hard to remember for others, but for me, it’s like yesterday. I was driving the packages to the post office myself and hoping one day we could afford a forklift. So for me, I’ve seen small things get big, and it’s part of this Day 1 mentality. I like treating things as if they’re small. Even though Amazon is a large company, I want it to have the heart and spirit of a small one.

Jeff Bezos’ expansiated on the concept of “Day One thinking at Amazon” in his 2016 Shareholder Letter and 1997 Shareholder Letter.

Jeff Bezos was recently asked at a recent all-hands meeting at Amazon: “JEFF, WHAT DOES Day 2 look like?” His response:

That’s a question I just got at our most recent all-hands meeting. I’ve been reminding people that it’s Day 1 for a couple of decades. I work in an Amazon building named Day 1, and when I moved buildings, I took the name with me. I spend time thinking about this topic.

“Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”

Amazon Kindle eReader.

November 16, 2020 In Favourite 5 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

In the past 4 years, I have gifted 4 Amazon Kindle e-readers to loved ones and have used 2 versions myself (Oasis and Paperwhite). If you ask me what my favorite e-reader or gadget is, straight up, my answer would be the Amazon Kindle e-reader. The Amazon Kindle is a series of e-readers designed and marketed by Amazon. Amazon Kindle devices enable users to browse, buy, download, and read e-books, newspapers, magazines, and other digital media via wireless networking to the Kindle Store.

The Kindle eReader has really enhanced my reading speed and urge to read more books. I can now read in the dark before I sleep (one of my favorite things to do); the kindle device also supports dictionary and Wikipedia look-up functions when highlighting a word in an e-book. other cool features of the Kindle includes:

Book Summary -Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean by Kim Scott.

November 16, 2020 In Book Summaries 9 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

“Radical Candor” is what happens when you put “Care Personally” and “Challenge Directly” together.

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Kim Scott earned her managerial experience working with great teams and individuals at Google and Apple. Radical Candor draws from her first-hand experience working with titans such as Larry Page (Google), Sheryl Sandberg (Google), Dick Costolo (Twitter) both as a direct report, manager, and coach.

Radical Candor draws directly on her experiences at these cutting edge companies to reveal a new approach to effective management that delivers huge success by inspiring teams to work better together by embracing fierce conversations. She draws on her wealth of experience to expand on the concept of radical candidness with insights on hiring, firing, providing guidance, obnoxious aggressiveness vs ruinuous empathy, running meeting among other tools that makes someone become a great boss, have tough conversations and not lose your humanity in the process.

Kim identified three simple principles for building better relationships with your employees: make it personal, get stuff done, and understand why it matters. “Radical Candor” is what happens when you put “Care Personally” and “Challenge Directly” together.

Here are my favourite takeaways from reading, Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean by Kim Scott:

Top 30 Quotes on Knowing your Worth.

November 15, 2020 In Quotes 6 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

You are not your lost job, your failed marriage, your failed exam, or your fancy cloth, watch, car or house. The value you place on yourself determines how others treat you, just like the dollar bill is always worth a dollar no matter what you do to it: rumple it, step on it, tear it, still a dollar. Why? Because the marketplace and the society agreed to accept it as legal tender no matter what. That is the same way your worth is determined, the value you place on yourself.

You are what you say you are, what you tolerate becomes your standard.

The marketplace would pay you exactly the value you place on yourself, nothing more nothing less. You are worthy, you need nothing more, you are specially made to withstand any circumstance trust on you. As Leo Buscaglia once said: ” ‘Your talent is God’s gift to you. What you do with it is your gift back to God.’

In his great book, Seasons of Life, Jim Rohn writes:

Do not doubt yourself, for where doubt resides, confidence cannot. Do not neglect yourself, for with neglect comes loss. Do not imagine yourself to be less than you are, nor more than you are, but seek always to become all of which you are capable. Do not allow yourself to become arrogant or discourteous, for both are characteristics adopted by those who seek to cover their weaknesses.

Do not spend time regretting the past, but invest that time wisely by preparing a better future. You are a fertile seed of the creator of all things, destined not to lie dormant, but to spring forth from the soil called life, and grow upward toward the unlimited horizons— overcoming all obstacles in the process. It is your destiny to tap your talents and to achieve all that of which you believe yourself to be worthy… to love more, anticipate more, overcome more, plan more, attract more, and enjoy more than you ever dreamed possible. Such is the standard of life awaiting your mental decision and outstretched hand. You are deserving— you are becoming—and you shall succeed.

When you’re 18, you worry about what everybody is thinking about you.
When you’re 40, you don’t give a darn what anybody thinks of you.
When you’re 60, you realize that nobody has been thinking about you at all!

Here are some great quotes on knowing your self-worth:

Teddy Stoddard and his teacher Mrs Thompson.

November 14, 2020 In Favourite 5 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

Never doubt that your gesture or your little initiative can make a difference in someone life. Here is a great story about how we can all impact each other. I first stumbled on ” Teddy Stoddard and his teacher Mrs Thompson” story from a public teaching of Dr. Wayne Dyer.

There’s a story from many years ago that tells of an elementary school teacher whose name was Mrs. Thompson. As she stood in front of her fifth-grade class on the first day of school, she told her children a lie. Like most teachers, she looked at her students and told them that she loved them all the same. But that simply was not true, because there in the front row, slumped in his seat, was a little boy named Teddy Stoddard.

Mrs. Thompson had watched Teddy the year before and noticed that he didn’t play well with the other children. His clothes were messy and he constantly needed a bath. Teddy could be unpleasant at times. It got to the point where Mrs. Thompson would take delight in marking his papers with a broad red pen and making bold X’s and finally putting a Big “F” on the top of his papers.

Jack Kerouac’s 30 Beliefs and Techniques for Writing.

November 14, 2020 In Writing 3 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), often known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist of French Canadian ancestry,who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.

Jack Kerouac’s 30 bullet point list titled: Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, contains great gems on the art of writing and living. The list was included in Portable Jack Kerouac, a compilation of Kerouac’s novels, poetry, letters, and essay.

In the book, Portable Jack Kerouac, the editor writes:

KEROUAC WAS INTERESTED in writing, rather than writing about writing, and he made few efforts to explain or theorize about his work. “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose,” thirty terse, sometimes enigmatic phrases and commands, was an attempt to describe what he was
doing, but “The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” was a more extensive effort.

He wrote it at the request of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs in the fall of 1 953, after he had shown them the manuscript of The Subterraneans. His friends were so impressed by the fact that he’d written the entire book in three nights sitting at a table in the kitchen of his mother’s apartment in Queens that they asked him to describe how he’d done it.

Know your Worth.

November 13, 2020 In Life 11 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

“Convinced that we are not good enough, we can never relax. We stay on guard, monitoring ourselves for shortcomings. When we inevitably find them, we feel even more insecure and undeserving. We have to try even harder. The irony of all of this is . . . where do we think we are going anyway?”

You are not your job description, your place of birth; you are not your abuse; you are not your defeat, rejection, or failures. Many of us attach our self-worth to external factors such as our jobs, cars, material possessions, etc. When we lose any of these material things, it usually affects our self-worth and mental health because we have attached so much meaning to them.

In the social media age we are in right now, many of us place our self-worth on the number of followers, retweets, likes, reshares, and all the other metrics used by social media to validate our popularity or awesomeness. The metrics used by social media platforms to validate us are all ephemeral yardsticks, which are not built to last but built to make us come for more; we become like a drug addict always needing the next shot. We are all in a trance.

There is a story about an elderly dying man who told his child:

Here is your grandfather’s gold watch and it is a couple of hundred years old. But before I bequeath it to you, I want you to go to the watch shop and see how much they would offer you.

The child went, and then came back, and said the watchmaker offered 7 dollars because it’s old and has some scratch.

The old man said: go to the coffee shop.

He went and then came back, and said: they offered 4 dollars.

The old man said: Go to the museum and show that watch.

He went then came back, and said to his father “They offered me a million dollars.”

The father said: “I wanted to let you know that the right place values you in the right way.

Don’t find yourself in the wrong place and get angry if you are not valued.

Those that know your value are those who appreciate you, don’t stay in a place where nobody sees your value.

Never doubt, and always believe in yourself by knowing your worth and that there are those who clearly appreciate these values.

“The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.” – Bruce Lee

Lessons Learned from Paul Rosenzweig’s Great Courses Class: Investigating American Presidents.

November 12, 2020 In Great Courses 8 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

History does not repeat itself but it rhymes.

The American president is a uniquely powerful figure on the national stage—indeed, on the world stage. He or she holds sway over an executive branch whose responsibilities range from national defense to agricultural price supports and on to health, education, and tax policy.

But, as the saying goes, power corrupts. It is not unheard of in American history for presidents to wield their significant powers in ways that are contrary to law or that call into question their fitness for office. What happens when presidents or their administrations are thought to have engaged in misconduct or the abuse of their powers?

When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal. – Richard Nixon

The Course explores how law, policy, and history can guide our response to presidential abuse, and considers whether the institutions of American democracy are robust enough to constrain a president who engages in misconduct. These issues, so salient in the past, are once again at the forefront of Americans’ minds.

The course also examines unique advantages that presidents have in responding to investigations of their conduct. They have, for example, an executive privilege which can be used to shield confidential executive communications—at least some of the time. Presidents also have the power of the bully pulpit, which is the ability to command attention and vilify their prosecutors or change the topic to whatever suits them better.

Here are my favourite take aways from viewing Professor Paul Rosenzweig’s Great Courses Class: Investigating American Presidents:

George Saunders’s 2013 speech at Syracuse University.

November 11, 2020 In Speech 10 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

Err in the direction of kindness.

George Saunders Group 88, professor of English and author of The New York Times best-seller Tenth of December delivered the following speech at The Syracuse College of Arts and Sciences’ undergraduate convocation ceremony on Saturday, May 11, 2013, in the Carrier Dome. George implored the graduating students to err in the direction of kindness.

Success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it, and there’s the very real danger that “succeeding” will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended.

Good Timber by Douglas Malloch.

November 10, 2020 In Poem 2 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

Good timber does not grow with ease, The stronger wind, the stronger trees.

The tree that never had to fight
For sun and sky and air and light,
But stood out in the open plain
And always got its share of rain,
Never became a forest king
But lived and died a scrubby thing.

The man who never had to toil
To gain and farm his patch of soil,
Who never had to win his share
Of sun and sky and light and air,
Never became a manly man
But lived and died as he began.

Book Summary – Radical Acceptance: Awakening the Love that Heals Fear and Shame by Tara Brach.

November 9, 2020 In Book Summaries 12 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

“Only when we realize we can’t hold on to anything can we begin to relax our efforts to control our experience.”

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In Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach explores in depth how Buddhist teachings can transform our fear and shame. Through meditation, mindfulness practices and fully understanding the healing power of compassion, we can discover the very real possibility of meeting imperfection in ourselves and others with courage and love – and so transform our lives.

Radical Acceptance does not mean defining ourselves by our limitations. It is not an excuse for withdrawal.

Part of the practice of Radical Acceptance is knowing that, whatever arises, whatever we can’t embrace with love, imprisons us — no matter what it is. If we are at war with it, we stay in prison. It is for the freedom and healing of our own hearts, that we learn to recognize and allow our inner life.

According to Brach, there are two wings of radical acceptance: seeing clearly (Mindfulness) and holding our experience with compassion (Self Compassion).

We suffer when we cling to or resist experience, when we want life different than it is. As the saying goes: “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.

Here are my Favourite take-aways from reading, Radical Acceptance: Awakening the Love that Heals Fear and Shame by Tara Brach: