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You should read at least one job-related book a year

Being good at your job is satisfying.

Quiet-quitting – doing the bare minimum to satisfy your job requirements – sounds miserable to me. Spending most of your day putting minimal effort in? And trying to just skate by? I can’t imagine a more surefire recipe for depression.

I was an apathetic student, and it made the school-day miserable. The few times I tried hard in a teacher’s class, I ended up enjoying it so much more. Part of that causation was obviously in the other direction – I wanted to try harder in the classes I enjoyed more and when I had better teachers – but not all of it was. Trying hard ended up being more satisfying.

One of the only classes that I ever studied for in high school was Señor Rayburn’s Spanish class, and it made such a difference.1 I could participate in class! And make jokes in Spanish! Studying at home felt worthwhile, and it felt like I was actually making progress at something.2

I’d argue that trying hard at things is often easier in the long run than not trying hard. Doing a good job is easier than doing a mediocre job. While it takes more energy to try hard at a thing, dreading a thing and then feeling depressed while doing it will also sap a lot of energy. (I’m not arguing that you should be a workaholic! Just that it’s not fun to spend every day being mediocre at something.)

One thing I’ve been surprised with over the years is how many people don’t spend any time on extracurricular learning/projects aimed at getting better at their jobs. I honestly feel like I do very little extracurricular learning, but over the course of years, those dribs and drabs of learning have added up.

There are a ton of good reasons that you might not want to spend time on professional development outside of work: life is busy; there are a ton of things more important than your job; it’s miserable to feel like you have to do outside-of-work “work”; and it can feel like even if you get better at your job, it won’t have any impact on your company’s appreciation of you. I think those are all valid emotions, but I still like being good at my job, and part of getting good at my job has been putting in a small amount of effort outside of my normal 9-5.3

I’m a huge proponent of reading physical books to learn more about a thing. Formats like YouTube videos are appealing, but I think videos often offer the feeling of learning rather than actual learning. Books are a great format for doing the hard mental work of understanding a thing. I’ve done a few online courses that were decent, but I think they often end up too scaffolded and many don’t offer the same ability to skip around. For me, books are best.

Right now, I’m muddling my way through CSS in Depth. It’s solid so far, but this is one of the times that I might try to find an online course instead–I want to spend more time playing around!

Overall, I think most of the books I’ve read were solid, but a few of them really stood out. It doesn’t mean that these books are necessarily the best book on these topics, just that they worked well for me. (I’m sharing affiliate links because it’s fun to see when someone finds a recommendation valuable! My $2.85 lifetime earnings aren’t a huge motivator)

I think all of those books have had a meaningful influence on my career and ability to do my job well. Pretty good value for $40 and a few nights spent reading!

  1. One unique thing about Señor Rayburn’s class is how mastery focused he was. One small example: when we went through homework worksheets in class, he explicitly didn’t care if you’d actually done the worksheets. You could leave them blank! He cared that you were able to fluently answer the question when he called on you, and his expectations were higher if you hadn’t done the homework. I often didn’t do the homework (which often felt like busywork), but it was one of the few times that I actually remember intentionally studying for a class throughout all of highschool. ↩︎

  2. This is getting far afield from the main topic of this post, but the school curriculum really didn’t work well for me. I enjoyed Spanish – it felt like I was learning a real skill! – but many other subjects fell pretty flat. I like writing, but I hated English; it felt like we were learning how to analyze (mostly dull) books and then write fancy book reports, where what mattered was how nuanced our analyses were. I like technical work, but I hated Math, Physics, and Chemistry; it felt like we were learning abstract topics that weren’t going to be useful until college, if then. The curriculum felt like we were learning things that were mostly there to allow us to accomplish the next level of schooling rather than trying to accomplish anything “real.” ↩︎

  3. In theory, at-work professional development can help! I think you can build an engineering culture that values continuous learning and provides space for it during work hours, but I think it’s pretty easy for it to then end up feeling mandated. I think the best learning has a core of self-motivation that’s pretty easy to destroy, even with the best of intentions. ↩︎