At the Gather Conference again for about the 6th time. It is a 1-day tech-orientated unconference held in Auckland every year.
The day is split into seven streamed sessions each 40 minutes long (of about 8 parallel rooms of events that are each scheduled and run by attendees) plus and opening and a keynote session.
How to Steer your own career – Shirley Tricker
- Asked people hands up on their current job situation, FT vs PT, sinmgle v multiple jobs
- Alternatives to traditional careers of work. possible to craft your career
- Recommended Blog – Free Range Humans
- Job vs Career
- Job – something you do for somebody else
- Career – Uniqie to you, your life’s work
- Career – What you do to make a contribution
- Predicted that a greater number of people will not stay with one (or even 2 or 3) employers through their career
- Success – defined by your goals, lifestyle wishes
- What are your strengths – Know how you are valuable, what you can offer people/employers, ways you can branch out
- Hard and Soft Skills (soft skills defined broadly, things outside a regular job description)
- Develop soft skills
- List skills and review ways to develop and improve them
- Look at people you admire and copy them
- Look at job desctions
- Skills you might need for a portfilio career
- Good at organising, marketing, networking
- flexible, work alone, negotiation
- Financial literacy (handle your accounts)
- Getting started
- Start small ( don’t give up your day job overnight)
- Get training via work or independently
- Develop you strengths
- Fix weaknesses
- Small experiments
- cheap and fast (start a blog)
- Don’t have to start out as an expert, you can learn as you go
- Just because you are in control doesn’t make it easy
- Resources
- Careers.govt.nz
- Seth Goden
- Tim Ferris
- eg outsources her writing.
- Tools
- Xero
- WordPress
- Canva for images
- Meetup
- Odesk and other freelance websites
- Feedback from Audience
- Have somebody to report to, eg meet with friend/adviser monthly to chat and bounce stuff off
- Cultivate Women’s mentoring group
- This doesn’t seem to filter through to young people, they feel they have to pick a career at 18 and go to university to prep for that.
- Give advice to people and this helps you define
- Try and make the world a better place: enjoy the work you are doing, be happy and proud of the outcome of what you are doing and be happy that it is making the world a bit better
- How to I “motivate myself” without a push from your employer?
- Do something that you really want to do so you won’t need external motivation
- Find someone who is doing something write and see what they did
- Awesome for introverts
- If you want to start a startup then work for one to see what it is like and learn skills
- You don’t have to have a startup in your 20s, you can learn your skills first.
- Sometimes you have to do a crappy job at the start to get onto the cool stuff later. You have to look at the goal or path sometimes
Books and Podcasts – Tanya Johnson
Stuff people recommend
- Intelligent disobedience – Ira
- Hamilton the revolution – based on the musical
- Never Split the difference – Chris Voss (ex hostage negotiator)
- The Three Body Problem – Lia CiXin – Sci Fi series
- Lucky Peach – Food and fiction
- Unlimited Memory
- The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness
- The Setup (usesthis.com) website
- Tim Ferris Podcast
- Freakonomics Podcast
- Moonwalking with Einstein
- Clothes, Music, Boy – Viv Albertine
- TIP: Amazon Whispersync for Kindle App (audiobook across various platforms)
- TIP: Blinkist – 15 minute summaries of books
- An Intimate History of Humanity – Theodore Zenden
- How to Live – Sarah Bakewell
- TIP: Pocketcasts is a good podcast app for Android.
- Tested Podcast from Mythbusters people
- Trumpcast podcast from Slate
- A Fighting Chance – Elizabeth Warren
- The Choice – Og Mandino
- The Good life project Podcast
- The Ted Radio Hour Podcast (on 1.5 speed)
- This American Life
- How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran
- The Hard thing about Hard things books
- Flashboys
- The Changelog Podcast – Interview people doing Open Source software
- The Art of Oppertunity Roseland Zander
- Red Rising Trilogy by Piers Brown
- On the Rag podcast by the Spinoff
- Hamish and Andy podcast
- Radiolab podcast
- Hardcore History podcast
- Car Talk podcast
- Ametora – Story of Japanese menswear since WW2
- .net rocks podcast
- How not to be wrong
- Savage Love Podcast
- Friday Night Comedy from the BBC (especially the News Quiz)
- Answer me this Podcast
- Back to work podcast
- Reply All podcast
- The Moth
- Serial
- American Blood
- The Productivity podcast
- Keeping it 1600
- Ruby Rogues Podcast
- Game Change – John Heilemann
- The Road less Travelled – M Scott Peck
- The Power of Now
- Snow Crash – Neil Stevensen
My Journey to becoming a Change Agent – Suki Xiao
- Start of 2015 was a policy adviser at Ministry
- Didn’t feel connected to job and people making policies for
- Outside of work was a Youthline counsellor
- Wanted to make a difference, organised some internal talks
- Wanted to make changes, got told had to be a manager to make changes (10 years away)
- Found out about R9 accelerator. Startup accelerator looking at Govt/Business interaction and pain points
- Get seconded to it
- First month was very hard.
- Speed of change was difficult, “Lean into the discomfort” – Team motto
- Be married to the problem
- Specific problem was making sure enough seasonal workers, came up with solution but customers didn’t like it. Was not solving the actual problem customers had.
- Team was married to the problem, not the married to the solution
- When went back to old job, found slower pace hard to adjust back
- Got offered a job back at the accelerator, coaching up to 7 teams.
- Very hard work, lots of work, burnt out
- 50% pay cut
- Worked out wasn’t “Agile” herself
- Started doing personal Kanban boards
- Cut back number of teams coaching, higher quality
- Spring Board
- Place can work at sustainable pace
- Working at Nomad 8 as an independent Agile consultant
- Work on separate companies but some support from colleges
- Find my place
- Joined Xero as a Agile Team Facilitator
- Takeaways
- Anybody can be a change agent
- An environment that supports and empowers
- Look for support
- Conversation on how you overcome the “Everest” big huge goal
- Hard to get past the first step for some – speaker found she tended to do first think later. Others over-thought beforehand
- It seems hard but think of the hard things you have done in your life and it is usually not as bad
- Motivate yourself by having no money and having no choice
- Point all the bad things out in the open, visualise them all and feel better cause they will rarely happen
- Learn to recognise your bad patterns of thoughts
- “The Way of Art” Steven Pressfield (skip the Angels chapter)
- Are places Serious about Agile instead of just placing lip-service?
- Questioner was older and found places wanted younger Agile coaches
- Companies had to completely change into organisation, eg replace project managers
- eg CEO is still waterfall but people lower down are into Agile. Not enough management buy-in.
- Speaker left on client that wasn’t serious about changing
- Went though an Agile process, made “Putting Agile into the Org” as the product
- Show customers what the value is
- Certification advice, all sorts of options. Nomad8 course is recomended
