October 2019
Beginner
400 pages
7h 56m
English
Content preview from The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
September 5Tend Your Field
There is a time in everyone's education when they arrive at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that they must take themselves for better, for worse, as their portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to us but through the toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to us to till.
Ralph Waldo Emerson—Self-Reliance (1841)
On the surface, this passage could rest as the thesis for self-reliance and a call for independence unencumbered by the opinions, successes, and analysis of others.
But that would miss what is perhaps the much deeper meaning: that envy robs you of the opportunity to realize the innermost aspirations of your soul.
Suicide is an intentionally harsh metaphor, but it displays how deeply Emerson felt about the fact that you can only be the miraculous you and that trying to be something other than that is, at best, a distraction and, at worst, or as he states later in the essay, like living as “a shadow on the wall.”
Today, note how often the information, content, and messages you take in fan the flames of envy.
Then, take stock of the gifts and goodness in your life. Let's go to work on your singular field of corn.
Challenge Question
- What is the most unique and original part of you?
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.