Category: Uncategorized

A quick ‘Pro Tip’. If you’re testing out a UI action inside of ServiceNow, and you’ve got to windows open, one where you’re making changes to the UI action and another that has an incident open where the UI action is located, refresh the incident window before testing changes to the UI action.

I was testing out a UI action recently, and there were definitely times where the changes I made to the UI action didn’t propagate out to the window with the incident until after I did a hard refresh of the page. I wasted a bit of time there trying to figure out why my UI action wasn’t behaving as intended when the problem turned out to be that I was still running an earlier version of the UI action.

(This post was written back in October. I had it written, but didn’t get it edited before getting fired, so it’s just been sitting on my drive gathering digital dust. It’s still good information, but just keep in mind that the timing is off. Everything I’m talking about happening in the present actually happened almost half a year ago.)

Hello, and welcome to another week of writing code.

I’m still trying to progress in my actual programming skills — and it’s not going all that spectacularly — but fortunately I have something else that I’ve been wanting to talk about for a little while now.

When the development manager here at work first approached me about making the switch over from accounting to development, one of the questions that came up was what computer I was going to end up programming on.

I had — have — a perfect good HP Spectre 13, but the advice from the development manager was that I should go ahead and get a MacBook. Our company seems to of fully switched over to a bring your own device policy for the development team, which meant I was looking at having to spend $2k to $3k buying a MacBook if I was going to take his advice, which was a little hard to stomach for a number of reasons, but I went ahead and did it anyway simply because at the time we had no Windows programmers at work. We had a whole bunch of programmers working on MacBooks or other Apple computers, and a couple of people working on Linux-based computers, but I would have been the one and only programmer who was trying to do what needs to be done on a Windows-based laptop.

There was a part of me that wanted to push forward using my Windows laptop out of sheer stubbornness, but I knew that choosing that option would just mean that I would either spend a lot of time on my own troubleshooting problems that nobody else had (with very little actual understanding of how to do what needed to be done), or I would constantly be going to him or one of the other developers asking for help troubleshooting problems that only I had.

Given all of the other things that I knew I was going to need to learn in order to be a adequate developer, and given that the development manager was already facing a pretty large investment to get me up and running to the point where I was adding more value for him personally than I was requiring in the way of training, the only smart decision was to go ahead and pick the platform that the majority of the other developers were using.

I’ve never actually read Stephen R Covey’s seven habits of highly effective people, but it’s my understanding that he relates a story about two guys out in a forest who are competing to see who can chop down the most trees or something along those lines.

The story is told from the point of view of the one guy, who is convinced that he’s going to when because his opponent keeps walking off into the trees for several minutes at a time on a regular basis. The first guy figures that there’s no way that his opponent can keep up with him given that his opponent is taking so much more in the way of breaks and he is.

Flash forward to the end of the story, and it turns out that the second guy was walking off into the trees so that he could sharpen his ax. So, even though the first guy spend more time chopping trees, the second guy was using a sharper ax (and therefore a better tool), and as a result managed to cut down a lot more trees than the first guy.

This isn’t quite the same thing, Covey’s seems — from my secondhand understanding at least — to be advocating taking time off to improve your skills and ability to do the work, but it’s a close cousin. What I’m advocating is to be actively looking for tools that can simplify your life, make you more effective, or save you time.

The $2500 or so that I spent on my refurbished Mac Book was a lot of money for me, but if my time is worth 50 bucks an hour, then at some point the time that I’ve saved by not having to troubleshoot my Windows PC in order to get it properly set up and keep it properly set up should more than offset the money that I had to spend on my Mac Book.

Of course, I could’ve gone with a Linux computer, but when I was being told by both the development manager, and another developer who’d switched from Lenox to a MacBook approximately a year ago, was that while a Linux computer requires a lot less ongoing troubleshooting than a Windows PC, it still requires a significantly greater amount of troubleshooting on an ongoing basis than an Apple product.

I’m sure that there are any number of people reading this who could provide perfectly reasonable arguments why going with an Apple laptop was the absolute worst thing I could have done, but regardless of the realities of everything, even if both the development manager and other developer I talked to were completely wrong in their appraisal of the situation, the simple fact that I’m using the same platform as the two of them should mean that they’ll be a lot more willing to help me as I run into problems with the set up on my box.

Again, this is a very specific instance and not extremely useful in and of itself for most of you, but there is a principle there that I do think is very valuable. Back when I was writing novels full-time, I figured out that I could write between 1000 and 2000 words per hour by typing on the keyboard.

I’m sure there are a lot of people out there that can type — and think — a lot faster than that, but I found that a typing speed in that neighborhood was enough to allow me to write a book in roughly 30 days. However, as time went on I started hearing reports from other self published authors that they were seeing really good results using the latest version of Dragon Naturally Speaking for voice recognition while they were writing their books.

I had actually used Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 or 15 years before that point while I was in college, and was never able to get it to work satisfactorily. Part of that was probably my poor enunciation, part of it was the fact that all of the microphones I tried were likely not up to spec for working with voice recognition, and part of it was the fact that Dragon Naturally Speaking wasn’t as good back then as it is now, but the result was that I relatively quickly stopped using Dragon Naturally Speaking and went back to typing (back in my college days).

As it turned out, with the right microphone, and the new version of Dragon naturally speaking I found that I was able to routinely turn out 2600 words per hour via dictation, and occasionally even break 3000 words per hour.

Getting myself up and running with Dragon Naturally Speaking was a lot of work. I went through a couple of different microphones before I found one that really seemed to work well — even though my original microphone was highly rated by the company that makes Dragon NaturallySpeaking — and even more than that, it took some practice to get myself to the point where I was comfortable speaking my thoughts rather than just simply writing them out via my keyboard.

In spite of all of the (metaphorical) pain and effort involved, being able to increase my productivity by 30 to 50% was hugely helpful at that time in my life, and if there hadn’t been such a huge uptick of piracy when it came to my titles, that increase in productivity would’ve been enough to ensure that I made a very good living writing.

So, the moral of that story — or the principle that I’m trying to communicate — is that don’t be afraid to try new things that seem like they will have a significant impact on your life. Even things that have a small impact can end up making a large difference if you chained together enough things that all individually only make a small difference.

The ‘competition’ is going to end up using anything that is hugely helpful at some point, and if you let yourself get left behind from a productivity standpoint, you just asking for problems at some point in your career or life. That being said, I don’t advocate doing anything stupid. Don’t risk your help, and don’t spend money that you don’t have in the pursuit of efficiencies in areas that you haven’t proven you can make enough money at to eventually repay the investment.

A lot of times it’s human nature to look for a magic bullet to solve all our problems, which results in a lot of people going the debt for what can only be described as get rich quick kind of solutions, but more often than not if you stop and take a hard look at what you doing, there’s a productivity enhancement that you could unlock which is much closer to what you’re already doing, and therefore much more likely to pay off in a reasonable amount of time.

That’s it for me for the week, good luck with your endeavors in the coming week!

(This post was written back in October. I had it written, but didn’t get it edited before getting fired, so it’s just been sitting on my drive gathering digital dust. It’s still good information, but just keep in mind that the timing is off. Everything I’m talking about happening in the present actually happened almost half a year ago.)

I can’t believe it’s been another week already! I’m afraid that I don’t have the exciting update I was hoping for, which means I’m still stuck on my side project, but I do have something that I hope will be useful to some of you.

I fully expected that transitioning from accounting to development was going to be tough — which it has been — but I’ve been consistently surprised at all of the things about it that I didn’t realize were going to be so tough.

I think that it’s human nature to forget how hard it was when you started something once you’re a decade or more down the road and have achieved a very high degree of mastery in your current field. You tend to think that you’re just really smart, and that’s why things come so easily to you, but in many instances I’ve been under calling all of the beneficial experience that went into getting me to where I currently am as an accountant.

One of the things that I’ve noticed this week is that I’m tending to skim through stuff when I’m working on a programming task even though I really should know better. At first, I thought that I was just tired and overwhelmed given some of the other accounting commitments that I’m still trying to satisfy while simultaneously attempting to get my feet under me as a developer, but as I’ve watched the development manager review code, he scanned through stuff with incredible speed, and I am starting to realize that I read quickly on my development tasks because I’m used to being able to read through stuff very quickly when it relates to accounting.

In accounting, I have sufficient master the subject that it’s generally easy for me to pick out the relevant points of whatever it is that I’m reviewing without having to slow down significantly. With development, that tendency to read through stuff quickly — relying upon a mastery of the subject that I don’t have to make sure I pick out the key points of what I’m reading — will continue to get me in trouble until I finally manage to break myself of that habit.

In fairness, the other thing that I think I have working against me is the high degree of pressure that I’ve been under in this most recent role to turn things around quickly in an effort to keep up with everything that was changing on a monthly and sometimes even weekly basis.

Either way, I have made a renewed commitment to slow down and take the time needed to stop making so many stupid mistakes. For those of you who are making a similar kind of transition — whether it be from accounting, or from a completely unrelated field — tried to keep an eye out for the habits and assumptions that you developed in your previous roles. Yours might not be exactly like mine, but the chances are that sooner or later you come across something that you’re going to have to unlearn in order to achieve your goals as a developer.

That’s it for this week from me, good luck with all of your efforts in the coming one.

I recently had a client (a sizable multinational with employees speaking 9 different languages) that needed real-time translation inside of ServiceNow.

The translation of labels on a given form–and of UI Actions–is already built in. It’s not real-time, but the translation plugins for the various languages already have translations defined for the baseline labels.

Translating things like description, short description and resolution notes (especially in real-time) is a whole different ball game.

I created some custom tables, set up an outgoing REST message, and then did a whole bunch of coding. I can’t give away any of the secret sauce, but here is the outcome:

First we start with a standard incident with the short description and description populated with English. You’ll also notice that we’ve got two new buttons at the top of the form, ‘Translate’ and ‘Translate Notes’.

Next, you can see a screenshot showing the same incident, but with the user’s language switched to French. You’ll notice that the labels are translated (‘Caller’ is changed to ‘Appelant’), which is standard with the French Translation plugin.

The ‘Translate’ and ‘Translate Notes’ buttons have been translated, but the values in the description and short description fields are still in English.

Then, after clicking the ‘Traduire’ button, French translations are added below the short description and the description fields. (In the blue field decorator.)

 

Then, if another user (with their language set to Spanish) opens up the same incident, the labels and buttons are both translated, but since the ‘Translate’ button hasn’t ever been clicked by a user with Spanish set as their language, we don’t have a translation for the description or short description.

Once the ‘Traducir’ button is clicked, the Spanish translation is displayed.Below is a screen shot of a new incident, once again in English. This time from the service portal.

Here is the same incident, this time as it would be viewed by the ITIL user with their language set to Spanish. The additional comments in English that were visible on the ESS view are visible here as well, untranslated.

Clicking the ‘Translate Notes’/’Traducir Notas’ button brings up a UI Page with the original value in English in the 4th column, and the Spanish translation in the 5th column.

Looking at this particular screenshot, I can see that I probably should have made the title “Work Notes & Additional Comments” and the work_notes/comments label in the second column dynamic. I should also probably duplicate the Spanish value from the 1st row, 4th column and push it into the 5th column. I’ll have to circle back around to the client and see if they want that change made.

Finally, here is the ESS view with an English translation for the Spanish additional comments response which was input by the ITIL User.

There were some other wrinkles with this particular engagement that I won’t go into here, but overall I’m very pleased with how everything came together.

It would have been very easy to set the description, short description, and resolution notes to translate automatically rather than requiring the user to click a button, but there was some concern about things being translated unnecessarily.

I did however set it up to re-translate anything that has been previously translated if the source value of the original field is changed. All of the translations are saved off so that the API doesn’t have to be called (and charges incurred) unless the value of a field changes, or a particular field hasn’t ever been translated.

There is an app on the ServiceNow store with a price tag of $9,500 per month that has a few extra bells and whistles, but this replicates a significant chunk of the functionality, and the only ongoing charge is a $20 per million characters.

I think this is a big win for everyone involved, and I’m happy to have been able to automate the translation process so that the ITIL users at that company can spend more time doing other, higher-value work instead of manually translating incidents.

I ran into a problem recently when trying to run a fix script with my then-boss.

It’s been a couple of weeks now, but to the best of my memory, we had queried the database for a list of records, and then were wanting to insert into another table using one or more pieces of data from the list of records.

It seems like an easy problem to solve.

var gr = new GlideRecord(‘table_name’)

Then add your query parameters and run gr.query()

Finally, you then use while(gr.next()){} to step through the records, and inside of your while loop, you create a new GlideRecord object that you can use to insert the new record.

However, after several iterations, we weren’t able to get the insert to work while it was nested inside of the while loop.

My workaround for that is to step through the records using the gr.nex(), and push the information I need from the records onto an array (or an array of objects). Then, further down I can step through the array and do whatever inserting I need to. That worked without problem, and more closely mirrored what I do with function calls (since you can only return one item, if I want to return anything complex I end up placing the information I need into an array, an object, or an array of objects, and then just returning that).

Hopefully that will save some of you fifteen minutes at some point when you avoid replicating the problems we had.

Given that I’m in the middle of a job search right now, getting posts up displaying my skills is more important than sticking to a regular posting schedule.

Due to that, I’m going to try and get a bunch of content posted in the next few days even if it means that I ultimately end up having a gap in posts at some point in the future.

For my first ‘show my skills’ post, I’m simply going to link to a post I wrote for the Lumagent blog that recently went live. It describes how I went about setting up an automated time sheet reminder inside of ServiceNow.

You can find the post here:

Creating Email Reminders For Missing Time Sheets

Hello, and welcome to another week. The last several week’s worth of posts have been more high-level items that I’ve seen prove helpful while trying to excel as an accountant and as a writer, and which I assume will prove helpful as I’m transitioning to full-time developer.

This week’s post is going to be a bit of a change from that, but before I get into that it’s probably worth explaining some of what’s going on. I’m actually several weeks ahead as far as writing posts go. There are several things that play into that.

When I read the Complete Software Developer’s Career Guide and he recommended so highly getting a blog started, I knew that I needed to start writing posts immediately or I would be risking having that idea end up in the trash heap of other great ideas that I never made it around to doing anything with. So, I started immediately. The fact that I don’t have an actual blog up yet (it shouldn’t be too hard in theory given that I’m just planning on using WordPress), combined with the fact that Katie hasn’t had much—if any—time to do an editing pass over the posts means that I can’t post the entries I’ve written so far even if I wanted to.

As it turns out, I don’t want to start posting them until I’ve got a good backlog of entries both written and edited. My theory is that once I start posting I need to do everything possible to make sure that I stick to my announced schedule of one time per week, but I’m very conscious of the fact that life (especially with baby #4 on the way) sometimes gets in the way of those kinds of schedules. By having a backlog of posts (and trying to write more than one post from time to time in a given week as a way of further building up that buffer), I’m putting myself in a position where even if I miss writing for a week or two I’ll still be able to deliver as promised to my blog readers.

This week I finished my Javascript tutorial at Codecademy.com. That means I’ve now been through the tutorials for Java, Python, HTML, CSS and Javascript. In theory that also means that I have the foundational knowledge to start building stuff.

That’s nice, but it also means that I’ve moved from the orderly, incremental world of progressing through tutorials to the messy world of figuring out stuff that I’ve never done before.

I tend to be more focused on the outputs than I am on the inputs (as you can probably tell from my posts so far on goal setting). That works really well for the most part, but when I’m trying to build something from scratch, there are inevitably going to be some times where I put a lot of time into a project and don’t have much to show for the effort—or at least that’s what it feels like.

In reality, there is a lot of learning what doesn’t work so that I can rack up the small victories as I find things that do work, but that learning is a bit harder to measure. Things are further complicated by the fact that I don’t really have any good idea of what will be involved in getting something new built.

I know roughly what I want the end result to be, but I don’t have any really good idea what is going to be involved in getting to that point. That tends to make my victories feel even smaller.

All of which probably sounds like just a bunch of whining, but that’s not what it’s meant to be. There is some pretty compelling research that I saw at one point which indicated that we actually feel emotions first, as far as order of things that happen, and then only after that is it that our conscious mind reflexively tries to decide why it is we feel that way. Given that, I find that it’s really, really valuable to occasionally step back and think about what it is I’m feeling and why I’m feeling it. It’s even more valuable when I do so with the understanding that my first thought around why I’m feeling something — the reflexive response — usually ends up being wrong.

That was a little bit of a rabbit trail, I suppose, but the piece that I was really trying to get across is that with the ever mounting push to try and get my arms around development, and get my first side project app live, it’s getting harder to fit in the time that I’m supposed to be dedicating to writing a blog post each week.

The upside to all that is I now understand what’s going on, so I’ll be better positioned to make sure that I get the blog post written early in the day rather than leaving it until the last minute.

All that being said, as my skill set has started to expand, I’ve been able to rack up a few tiny accomplishments that I’m proud of, and that I want to report back to my readers on. Here are the things that I ran into and managed to solve during the last week.

Firstly, I noticed a few weeks ago that there was a problem with my writing website — the one that is directed towards people who are reading my novels. The homepage is supposed to have this attractive graphic of seven different books that readers can get for free by signing up for my mailing list, but when I went there to fix a couple of other problems that have been lingering on the website for several months while I was working on my provisional patent applications, I noticed that the graphic had disappeared.

I tried everything I could think of to find the graphic on the website in the WordPress backend, but didn’t have any luck. I assumed that word press have fallen over somehow and deleted that image, or that I somehow deleted it at some point in an effort to save disk space and bring down my hosting costs.

I couldn’t find it in my dropbox account (I really love Dropbox, by the way. It’s not perfect, but it’s been hugely helpful when it comes to keeping stuff synced up across multiple computers. If you don’t have an account already, you should try them out. If you use this link then Katie or I will get a little bit of extra storage on our accounts.)

Back to the problem with the website: I asked Katie to dig up the original file from off of her desktop, but she’s been extra busy trying to keep our kids alive lately, so she hadn’t made it to that yet, and I had just chalked it up as something that was going to have to stay broken for a few more weeks or months.

A little while after that, I was trying to get QuickBooks installed on a laptop for a new employee in the accounting department. I don’t remember why I felt like I needed to test the browser on her machine, but at some point during that process I opened up chrome and went to Dean rights.com. Imagine my surprise when I saw the big graphic that I thought had disappeared sitting exactly where it was supposed to be on my website.

To make a long story short, it still wasn’t working on any of my machines but I finally had the thought that I should inspect the site and see if there are any errors on the page. As it turned out, there was an error:

err_blocked_by_client

Some searching online turned up that the likely problem was some kind of ad blocking software, which matched up really well with the fact that I recently installed an ad blocker extension in chrome. I turned the ad blocker off, which fixed it for me, but didn’t address the fact that it would be invisible to anyone else who had an ad blocker running on their browser.

I could live with that if there wasn’t any other solution, because at least some of my traffic would be seeing the graphic telling them about the opportunity to get a bunch of free books, but it still wasn’t ideal, so I did some more digging. As it turns out, if you have a graphic on your site with the word ad anywhere in the name, the ad blockers are smart enough — or at least this one was — to strip that out of what is displayed.

I renamed the graphic, re-uploaded it to my blog, and that solved that problem.

The next problem I ran into involved moving files in the terminal on my MacBook. The development manager at work has been really kind to serve as a resource for me as I’m trying to get my legs under me as a developer, and this last week he agreed to help me set up a skeleton of an app so that I could experiment with it rather than breaking stuff at work.

As part of that process, he told me to from one spot to another, and then got distracted by someone knocking on his front door. I wanted to show as much initiative as I could, so I looked up the copy command online and typed it into the terminal for him to check when he got back to where we were working.

For all of you much more experienced UNIX or Mac OS users, the obvious answer is the cp command to, which I was smart enough to arrive at as the proper route forward, but I used the -r flag on it. I showed the development manager, he looked at it for a second and said he thought that would work just fine (it turned out that when he did the same step he used the move command), but several steps later in the process I wasn’t getting the right outputs.
I still don’t know a lot about programming, but anyone who spent very much time in a controller role in an accounting department inside of a small organization that’s evolving rapidly tends to pick up some pretty good problem-solving skills. A few minutes of investigation while the development manager was dealing with some small fire that was happening back at the office showed me that the files back in the directory that I’d copied from were giving the correct output.

Logically, that seemed to me like an instance where the copy must have gone wrong, so I went online to see if I can find something that would confirm my theory. As it turns out, cp -r doesn’t maintain symbolic links, but cp -a is a recursive copy that does maintain symbolic links in the files that are copied over

Copying the original files into a third directory confirmed that cp -a did the trick, but then I had the problem of trying to figure out how to not have to redo the last hour or so worth of work. I decided to copy the files from my working directory up to one of the earlier versions that had the symbolic links working– doing so with the -r flag so that I wouldn’t mess up any of the symbolic links in the earlier version– and then I copied everything from the earlier version directory — which now also included the latest versions of the files — back into my working directory — this time using the -a flag.

Both of those victories — all three if you include fixing the graphic that wasn’t working my website — were pretty small things, but it was nice to be getting to the point where I can at least troubleshoot some of the problems by myself.

A few other things that I learned this week as well:
If you’re watching a tutorial and they use yarn, there’s a very good chance that you can get the same result just using npm.
If you need to know what’s running on a particular port, you can use this command from the terminal: sudo lsof -l tcp:<port number> where <port number> is the actual port number you’re wanting to check.
A lot of times when you tell a process to run from the terminal it ends up sort of running, but not being quite what you need because you messed up on one of the earlier steps. I didn’t realize when I was happening, that the process was still running, I would just keep opening new terminal windows because I was no longer able to use the existing terminal window to do anything. In those instances, when you want the process to stop, you can use ctrl-C to cause the process to exit gracefully.

Lastly, back when I was working on creating that skeleton with the development manager, there was a piece of the tutorial we were using where I was supposed to build the hit the app on my local box via a browser and get some kind of stock splash screen.

The first time through the tutorial, I didn’t get that splash screen, but for some reason I didn’t think much of it. That’s a big mistake, and frankly I know better than that when I run into a similar problem in accounting, so I should’ve known better than that now when running into that kind of issue in a development context.

If something doesn’t work early on in a process that you don’t understand, and run through the steps up to that point again. It is highly unlikely that something broken earlier in the process will magically fix itself later on in the process.

That’s it for me for this week, but I hope someone out there eventually comes across this post and gleans a few useful nuggets from it.

Welcome back to my third installment on using goals to create habits that transform your life. So far, I’ve covered the value in making the goals small so that it’s less painful to sit down and do them, and the value behind having an accountability partner to whom you’ve defined the goal, and then implementing some other kind of tracking that will allow you to look back and see what you’ve accomplished.

I a started out today having a very specific thing I wanted to cover, but we’ll see how well I stick to that.

My experience in the past has shown me that creating new habits that leads to some kind of trackable results that you believe — rightly or wrongly — will change your life can be very addicting. On the one hand, that’s really good. That very addicting nature means that once you get started it’s the natural tendency to keep at it. Even better, once you’ve had success with a few new habits, you become more likely to add even more habits.

I think that’s probably at least part of what is driving the life hacker craze (I use craze in the best possible way here), but that addictive nature means that you need to go into this kind of thing with your eyes wide open. Firstly, make sure that you have a clear understanding of what you’re odds are of accomplishing the thing that you’re setting out to do, and the relative benefits of achieving your goal.

If I set a goal to increase the amount of distance I can run without getting tired and out of breath, barring really unusual circumstances, I can say with a relatively high degree of certainty that over time I will accomplish that exact goal. If, on the other hand I set a goal to become a world-class marathoner, my odds of successfully achieving that particular goal are very, very small.

Getting enough sleep, eating a healthy diet, and gradually working up the amount of time I spend exercising — more particularly running — should really be all that would be involved for accomplishing the first goal. When it comes to the second goal; however, have to do all of that on and much, much larger scale. In fact, I think it’s pretty safe to say that the very top percentage of professional marathoners couldn’t put in enough hours training to remain in their peak condition if they were simultaneously trying to hold down a traditional 9-to-5 job.

That means that in order to become an elite marathoner, I would have to dedicate enough hours to training in order to reach the top levels of performance which are available to someone holding down a traditional job, then get sponsorships or some other kind of outside funding that would allow me to transition into running marathons as my full-time job. Nothing there is completely undoable yet, but there are genetic aspects of simply can’t be overcome by someone who didn’t when the genetic lottery.

Everyone loves a story about someone who refused to quit pursuing the dream, and as a consequence overcame tremendous odds or handicaps to achieve greatness, but as a society we tend not to look at the other side of that coin. For every person who set out to achieve some incredibly unlikely goal, and who ultimately succeeded, there are probably thousands or tens of thousands of people who put in very similar amounts of effort but who failed and were left with nothing but regrets, bitterness, and a lot of wasted time to show for their efforts.

Again, I think having goals is great, and that most people ere on the side of not setting big enough goals rather than on going after something that is too big into unlikely, but the problem is very real. It’s especially big when you talk about goals that revolve around making a living in entertainment. For every success story of an actor, or an author, or comedian who make it big there are a lot of people who don’t manage to ride the wave of luck and opportunity to becoming a superstar.

So, just be aware of the opportunity costs of what you’re giving up to pursue a particular goal versus both the payoff, and the relative odds of success. Deciding that you want to become an accountant as a way of changing careers is going to be a fair amount of work, but it doesn’t have to consume your entire life. In a similar vein, it’s not going to the to income in the tens of millions of dollars per year range, but if you are of at least average intelligence and are willing to put in the work — and possibly get a degree to backup the fact that you’ve learned what you need to learn – the odds that you’ll succeed are extremely high.

So, if I had to summarize that first point I would say it’s all about not setting goals that are so big and unlikely to result in success that you look back years later wishing that you hadn’t started on that path in the first place. I could probably stop the blog entry right there and the like I accomplished what I set out to accomplish, but it’s also worth mentioning that you can end up with the same kind of problem even if your goals are more reasonable.

You can fashion a whole bunch of really reasonable, high-value, likely to achieve goals — goals that you ultimately end up achieving — and still in the experience bitterly disappointed and unhappy once you realize that your goals didn’t actually move you towards the things that were most important to you. Make sure that as you are setting out your goals that they align with your core values, and that you are leaving time for the things in your life that either can’t be replaced, or that you don’t want to replace.

The thing that most immediately suggests itself as being in that category is your relationship with your family and your closest friends. Supporting those relationships shouldn’t mean that you have to spend dozens of hours a week at bars or doing things you actively hate to the detriment of goals that you know will help improve your quality of life, but you don’t want to fill your life up with a bunch of small things that cried out your ability to achieve the big things.

If it seems like I just gave conflicting advice, I suppose I did to some extent, but I really wasn’t trying to say don’t pick goals that are too big or goals that are too small. What I’m trying to say is make sure you’re picking the right goals and if you’re going to focus on something that’s really usage and really unlikely to result in success, make sure that you’re okay with what your life will look like if you don’t succeed at that goal.

That’s it for this week, I hope these posts are proving helpful or at least giving you cause to think about stuff in ways that you haven’t thought about them before. I’ll be back next week with more to say.

This is just a quick post to apologize for the big gap in posts between my last post and this one. We had a baby towards the end of the year, which I knew was coming, and I had a number of posts written and saved up to bridge what I was fully expecting would be a very busy few weeks/months, but then things went even further off the rails than I was expecting them to.

A week and a half after our baby was born, I was fired, and I was forced to spend the next 2 months looking for a new job. Give how recently I had made the switch to development, I put everything but looking for work and learning more programming onto the back burner.

I’d like to say that things have slowed back down and that I’ll be able to return to a more regular schedule of posting, but we’re now one emergency trip and a totalled vehicle later, and life is still a lot more difficult than it was back when I first made the switch to development.

That means that I’m likely to continue to be more irregular with my postings than I would like to be, but at the same time, I’ve been learning a ton, and I want to document my insights (for myself if for nobody else), so I’m going to attempt to resume writing posts as often as I can.

One change that I’m hoping will help increase the throughput of my writing is that I’m going to reduce the editing process that I’d been using previously. That means that it’s very likely that some typos are going to get through, but hopefully my current audience will be understanding of a few mistakes and will focus more on the core ideas of the posts.

I’m happy to be able to sit back down and write a little bit more about my strategy for achieving goals — whether they be writing books, learning to code, or just about anything else you can think of.

In my last post, I talked a lot about the value of setting small, easily obtainable goals. I also talked about the importance of setting your goals such that you are accomplishing them often enough during the week that they naturally lend themselves to the formation of a new, productive habit.

It’s worth mentioning in passing that I read some research somewhere relatively recently that said that the old ‘truth’ about doing something for a month being sufficient to form a habit wasn’t actually accurate. Some people, it turns out, form habits much more quickly than that; others take much longer than a month to hardwire in a new habit.

I don’t remember where I saw the research, or I would provide a link to the authors of the article, but one of the things that stuck out in association with all of that was the fact that something is in the habit until it starts to become extremely easy to do, so keep that in mind as your working on your small, daily, achievable goals. It may take you a lot longer than you think it should for working on your project (or your new skill) to become second nature, but if you stay at it long enough—something that’s a lot easier to do if your daily goals are reasonable—it will eventually become a habit and it won’t be so hard to continue making progress.

The other main aid to making progress that I want to talk about is almost certainly something that you’ve heard before, but you may not have ever put this particular strategy into practice, or if you did, it’s possible that you didn’t realize at the time how much it was contributing to your success.

I find that it is vital in almost all of the goals that I set to have an accountability partner, which is to say someone to whom I report my progress or lack thereof to on a regular basis. You may or may not need to tell this person that you are using them as an accountability partner—I find that oftentimes reporting back to the person can be done in a very organic matter—but it definitely needs to be someone who’s opinion of you matters enough that you aren’t going to want to have to tell them that you failed to achieve your daily goals for the week.

If you find that you’re not being consistent with reporting back, then there are a few things that you can change up which may help incentivize you to be more consistent. Firstly, if your use of them as an accountability partner has been very informal, then it probably would help to formalize that. I sometimes use my wife as an accountability partner for things that I want to accomplish, but which she doesn’t really care about. In those instances it’s generally worked to keep my reporting back to her fairly informal so that she doesn’t feel like I’m expecting a lot of effort from her following up on something that she doesn’t think is important, but I am a naturally goal-driven individual, so I tend not to need a lot of external motivation to work on things that I’ve put down as goals.

Maybe it should go without saying, but the less your accountability partner cares about the things that you’re trying to achieve, the less value they will be able to provide with regards to helping motivate you to accomplish your daily and weekly goals. In the extreme, worst-case scenario having someone who thinks that the things that you’re trying to accomplish are bad or distasteful would serve as an active disincentive to accomplishing your goal.

I’ve heard it said that a goal that isn’t written down is nothing more than a dream. I’m not sure that I completely agree with that, but writing down a goal does help make it more real for most people. There is undeniable value in that. Verbalizing my goal to someone I respect tends to have the same positive kind of benefit of solidifying what I’m going to go do. There may have been times where I didn’t write my goal down or tell anyone and still managed to successfully create the habit of regularly working towards that goal, but by far and away, my best results have come when I have clearly defined the goal to myself, or someone else, and tracked my progress towards that goal.

You doubtlessly all caught that I just slipped one more strategy in there at the end, but just in case someone didn’t, I think that tracking your progress toward your goal is hugely valuable. When I was writing books, tracking my progress was relatively easy because all I had to do was log how many words I wrote each day. It’s hard to overstate just how motivating it is to watch your word count climb into the thousands and tens of thousands of words over the course of days, weeks, and months, but there were many instances where knowing that I had made substantial progress up to that point and not wanting to break my streak of successfully achieving my daily and weekly goals was all that kept me moving forward on a particular book.

I don’t know what you’re logging system will look like for the goals that you set yourself. It’s very likely that you’ll have to be more creative than what I was required to do with my writing, but I can attest to the fact that putting in the effort of finding a way to log your progress is more than worth the investment.

With writing, my absolute favorite part of the experience would generally happen around the two thirds or three quarters of the way to completion mark. I generally went into each book with a rough idea of where I wanted things to go, and a set of characters that I thought were interesting, but somewhere towards the last part of the book it seemed like things almost took on a life of their own.

I would go from forcing myself to sit down and write and often quitting as soon as I hit my daily goal, to rushing to my computer every chance I got because I was so excited to see what was going to happen next and how my characters were going to get to the end of the story as it had evolved. It was always a very rewarding experience, and as much as I always wished that writing a book was like that from the very first word, it never was. It was always those daily and weekly habits that helped get me to the point where the writing experience became so rewarding.

I don’t know if you’ll have an exactly similar experience with whatever it is that you set out to do, but so far it seems that every worthwhile task I’ve undertaken has some flavor of that feeling of satisfaction that makes all, or at least most, of the sacrifice worthwhile.

Next year is going to arrive whether you want it to or not, and few of us can devote 12 hours a day to a passion or a new skill, but it’s amazing how even a small investment in time reaps large rewards if you maintain the effort for long enough.

This is becoming a bit of a trend, but now that I’ve got started talking about this subject I have had a few additional thoughts that I think are worth adding to the mix. Unfortunately, I’m once again over my word count for this post and the rest of what I want to say will have to wait until next week.