Chapter 2 — Optimise For Learning
The chapter opens with Lau’s own story: Google lavishes perks on staff to keep them, yet he still left after two years — once his learning curve had plateaued and he knew he’d learn more elsewhere. The lesson: optimise for your rate of learning, not for comfort.
Adopt a growth mindset
Carol Dweck’s two mindsets, and how they shape your relationship with effort and failure:
- Fixed mindset — intelligence is “carved in stone”; you’re either smart or you’re not. Failure proves you’re not, so you stick to what already validates you, and give up early to blame effort rather than ability.
- Growth mindset — skills and intelligence grow through effort. Challenges and failures are learning opportunities, so you persist far longer.
“It’s not about apologizing for where your resume doesn’t line up but rather telling your story — who you are, what skills you’ve built, what you’re excited about doing next and why.” — Tamar Bercovici
Invest in your rate of learning
Learning compounds like interest, so three things follow:
- It grows exponentially. Knowledge is a foundation for acquiring more, faster — e.g. understanding recursion unlocks trees and graph search, which unlock compilers and network topologies.
- Earlier is better. The sooner you optimise for learning, the longer it has to compound. A good first job makes a better second job easier, and so on.
- Small deltas matter enormously. We badly underestimate how much a slightly higher learning rate adds up over years.
The least intuitive part is that last point: coasting on unchallenging work isn’t just boring, it carries a large hidden opportunity cost in future growth.
Reid Hoffman’s framing (The Startup of You): treat yourself like a startup. Startups prioritise learning over early profitability — ship a beta, then iterate as they discover what customers want. Treat yourself as a permanent work-in-progress to invest in daily.
“Think about what it means to improve just 1% per day and build upon that every single day… it will make us 37x better, not 3.65x better, at the end of the year.” — Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO
Seek work environments conducive to learning
See Six Factors of Learning To Look For In a New Work Environment.
Dedicate time on the job to develop new skills
It’s easy to feel buried — especially when new in a role — and spend every hour catching up rather than building the skills that would make the catching-up unnecessary.
The fix is Google’s “20% time”: roughly a day a week on a side project to improve the company. It was controversial at first, but produced Gmail, Google News and AdSense. Carve out your own version, but take it in one- or two-hour daily chunks rather than a full day weekly, so it becomes a habit. Productivity may dip at first (or not, if it displaces web-surfing) — the point is the long-run payoff.
What to spend it on: deepen what you already work with, or build out “adjacent disciplines” (Steven Sinofsky’s term) — fields next to your core role where more familiarity makes you more self-sufficient. For a product engineer that might be product management, user research, or backend.
For concrete ways to use that time, see How To Take Advantage of Resources Available At Work.
Always be learning
Learning isn’t confined to work. Keep asking: How can I improve? How could I have done this better? What should I learn next to prepare for the future?
See 10 Ways To Inspire a Habit of Learning.
Source
Edmond Lau, The Effective Engineer, Ch. 2.