Allan Nascimento

The Learning Loop

You like things you’re good at, but you don’t start out liking everything right away. There’s a loop: you need experience, there’s no shortcut around doing the work. You have to start something even if you don’t like it at first. As you get better, you receive positive feedback, which motivates you and creates a cycle where you improve and start liking it more and more.

Cal Newport’s Insight

I read a piece by Cal Newport, and he says that working right trumps finding the right work. He says you need three things to like your work: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. I know that advice sounds too optimistic, because it is. Every job has bad and boring parts, including the one you would have picked. No work is free of those moments.

Embracing Boredom

My rule is: do not avoid boredom at all costs. The boring part is usually the work, and it usually is the important part. In my job I do delegate boring parts to AI now, and that is a lot better for me. But talking to my clients is not the part I am delegating to AI, just to be clear. In the past I used to solve the wrong problems, because I tried to get away from the boring parts. Instead of talking to my clients first, I assumed what the client needed, and that created wasted work. It was boring to me to talk to people instead of programming or building an automation. I was so technically focused that I ignored the relationship with the client.

Asking vs. Assuming

I used to skip asking questions because it felt boring, and I thought it would make me look incapable. In reality, asking is the fastest way to get the right answer. Assuming feels fast because you get a result quickly, but if the result is wrong you end up doing a lot more work.

Understanding Clients

I learned to study how my clients make money, not just to respond to their requests. By understanding their business, I can identify the real problem and craft a solution that addresses the root cause.

Four‑Step Method

The method that works for me has four steps, none of which are exciting, and that’s probably why people avoid them:

Try a variety of things for a few months.
Keep the activities you’re naturally a bit better at.
Put focused effort into developing the fundamentals of that area.
Learn by applying those fundamentals to real projects.

Following this process helped me find work I love, even though I didn’t start out loving it.

Jiu‑jitsu Lesson

I’ve been practicing jiu‑jitsu for over a year. I’m the smallest guy in the room, and my sensei told me I was not attacking, only reacting. I’m still a white belt and I still lose a lot. For someone to be submitted by me, the guy must be having the worst day possible, because I am not good at all. But now I lose attacking wrong, and I learn from that. That’s far better than passively losing.

That’s it for today. I’ll see you in another video.