The Power of Output - Review

I just read "The Power of Output: How to Change Learning into Outcome" by Shion Kabasawa (jp: 学びを結果に変える　アウトレット大全), which I originally bought to practice my Japanese and pick up some useful skills along the way.

I've always noticed I'm a bit lacking in the "output" department. Honestly speaking, for every hour I read, I probably write less than 5 minutes. Indeed, I don't use social media at all to share my own thoughts, and the most I ever output is when writing software or writing my private diary entries (which I do once every few months to summarize recent events and collect my thoughts).

The Power of Output is a compendium of over 80 different "tips" to become more output-oriented. For a guy like me, that means reading less and writing more. It's all about turning passive consumption into active creation.

Frankly, a lot of the tips in this book are meant for Japanese salarymen, and not so much for a software engineer who is used to a Western work style. That being said, I learned a few cool tricks that have helped me boost my productivity somewhat and keep me on-track with my tasks. In this post, I'd like to share the tips I found the most useful:

Introduce Yourself (the right way) - 自己紹介する

Let's be honest, introducing yourself sucks. I don't think I've pulled off a decent self-introduction, ever in my life. I feel like I say too much, or say too little, or just say things that don't reflect my actual personality or thoughts at all. Well, it turns out you can use a little framework (no, not THAT kind of framework) to keep your introductions short and relevant. The steps are as follows:

1. Make it so that anybody can understand

This one seems pretty obvious. Now I dare you to introduce yourself as a Software Engineer to a non-technical person without using any jargon. No front-end this, no React that, and definitely no mentioning how good you are at "greening the Azure CI/CD pipelines". Turns out, it's quite a challenging task. Essentially, you want to cut out as much jargon from your introduction while still making sure you stand out somehow. We'll take a look at that in the next point.

2. Make it memorable

"Hi, my name is John Doe and I'm a motivated full-stack engineer with a passion for developing scalable software solutions."

If this sounds like what you wrote on your LinkedIn blurb, it's okay. 90% of engineers have the same kind of drivel, and they still manage to get jobs. The problem is, that a bland intro like that says literally NOTHING about you. At that point, it's just noise to the people that make decisions.

You need to find a way to set yourself apart from the crowd. Let people know what makes you special. In other words, if you have or did anything that stands out, put it in there so people won't forget you. Did you win a bunch of hackathons? Did you make a unique text-based adventure game that's worth playing? Things like these are not necessarily going to boost your chances of getting hired, but at least they'll help you stay in the minds of the people reading/hearing your intro.

3. Slap some numbers onto it

This one seems to be catching on lately. It seems everybody these days is achieving fantastic things in their jobs. Go and read any dev's resume and you'll see things like "Sped up cat picture loading by 9000% resulting in 20% MoM revenues". I'm sure those big numbers help catch recruiter's eyes, but let's try and keep it honest guys...

Anyways, slapping some numbers onto your intro might be a good idea (as long as you don't make it too pointless or jargon-y, see point #1). Something like "Developed X custom websites" or "Won X hackathons" might point you in the right direction.

Write a To-do List (the right way) - TODOリストを書く

Anybody with the ability to read and write, has probably taken a nice shot at writing a to-do list. Dare I say, some people write to-do lists every day. Well, it won't hurt to figure out how to optimize these things so that they don't end up like your New Year's Resolutions.

The way you write them will vary depending on the complexity of the tasks you undertake, but ultimately, you want to follow this pattern:

Groups of 3

Whatever tasks you want to do, split them into groups of three. For example:

Morning:

1. Read and answer all emails
2. Get progress on X work task
3. Finish project Y documentation

Afternoon:

1. Complete X work task
2. Start project Y development
3. Mention issue Z to manager

Free time:

1. Read 1 chapter of X book
2. Watch movie with family/significant other
3. Prepare meals for the week

Now you're thinking "This is just to-dos with extra steps. Can we not reinvent the wheel?". Turns out, by forcing yourself to decide the 3 most important things to do in a given time period, you can:

1. Prioritize better
2. Get a sense of achievement as you go throughout your day and
3. Increase your chances of actually getting stuff done

Try it out yourself and let me know how you like that productivity boost!

Write them down (literally)

I know you want to look cool, but don't crack open Vim and write your to-dos up on a text file. Don't use a janky smartphone app either.

You want to write them down on paper. Why? Because you want those to-dos to be right in your face, constantly reminding you of what you're supposed to finish for the day. On top of that, you want them to remind you of how well you're doing so far (gamification), for extra motivation.

Write a Book Review (読書感想を書く)

Unfortunately, the English translation of this title does not do it any favours. The literal Japanese translation would be, "Write down your thoughts and feelings about what you read".

Maybe you're one of those folks who are just addicted to self-improvement. You love mentioning how you read this or that book the other day and you flaunt your bookshelf with over 9000 tomes (none of which you actually remember the contents of).

Well, by writing a short review of a book, much in the same way I'm doing over here, you can make sure that the important points actually stick.

Furthermore, you can hear other people's impressions of the book too, which is way more fun.

Note that this need not apply only to books. It could be movies, soccer matches, whatever you think is memorable enough to let other people know about.

To sum it up, these are some good outcomes of writing reviews of the stuff you consume:

1. Improve your writing
2. Discover other people's opinion
3. Remember the conents in the long-term
4. Improve your ability to think and explain
5. Achieve more self-growth than by reading alone

Summary

There you have it, my first book review ever. It feels less like a review and more like a crappy motivational blogpost, but it ain't bad for a first shot. It's kind of funny that I've read somewhere around 300 books over the course of my life, and never stopped to write a quick review of any of them.

I hope this post was remotely helpful to anybody. Please do leave your thoughts if you found it interesting! Or even better, take a look at the book (which I'm afraid is only available in Japanese at the moment).

Thanks for reading!