1. Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.
2. Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That’s when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.
3. Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.
4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.
5. Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It’s also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.
6. Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeisterhas found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you’ll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.

Read rest of the article at blogs.hbr.org.

We spend so much of our time waiting to be loved, hoping love will find us, searching, yearning for that special love. Feeling empty and lost without it. Wanting someone to give us love and fill us up. Unfortunately, that’s not usually how life works. You will draw to you exactly what you create in life, and what you believe you are worthy of. So loving yourself can create love in your life.

Here is a simple formula to learn to love yourself

• Start by making a list of the things about yourself that you like in your head. It’s hard to resist that.
• Then back away from anyone in life (friends, lovers, family, co-workers) who’s taking you for granted or constantly cuts you down to size.
• Then get active in doing the fun projects & chasing your dream that you deserve. A positive spiral will emerge.

Via wheelquestions.org

Chris Hamilton has released hi new book on developer evangelism. A must read book for every developer out there. The handbook is Creative Commons and free to use.

The book starts with explaining what developer evangelism is, how to start evangelizing with right mind set and why you must need to identify your key strengths from the whole spectrum of evangelism.

What you will find in this book:

• What developer evangelism is
• what makes you a good developer evangelist
• How to write for the web
• How to use social media and the web to promote content
• What made presentations great
• How to deal with criticism of your company and what to do with the competition
• How to write excellent code examples

You can find table of contents at here. I am still reading this book. I hope to write a summary on this once I am done with the reading. Understanding concepts of developer evangelism will make you a better developer, so go ahead and read it now.