one of those fundamental skills that will carry you through the most difficult parts of your career it'll carry you through the transitions in your career It'll carry you through disruptions like what we're experiencing right now with AI.
It'll carry you through from title changes, from hopping tracks.
Let's say you're an engineer and you want to become a manager.
The fundamental mindset that I want to reinforce, to remind you of today is the mindset of building your vocabulary.
Building your vocabulary.
And to be clear, I partially mean building your literal vocabulary.
But it goes beyond that.
And it's part of the fundamental mission of this show, of this podcast, to help developers, to help engineers, software engineers, data analytics engineers, product engineers, front -end developers, people who are building things.
Whoever you are, you probably count in this.
okay to help you find clarity perspective and purpose in your career and finding clarity finding perspective and even finding purpose those efforts rely on On the mental tooling that we talk about so much on this show.
How do you find clarity?
How do you find perspective?
How do you find your purpose?
And the first building blocks are your vocabulary.
So when we talk about mental models on this show, that is a form of vocabulary the mental model concepts that you build that lattice work that is part of your vocabulary because it will help you in attaining for example clarity a mental model can help you in attaining perspective A model can even help you in understanding purpose.
Building your vocabulary is also about understanding your own self, the granularity of your own self.
You know, we've heard stories about how there are different words in different languages.
You can Google this.
I don't have a good specific example for this, but I'll make something up here.
For example, there may be so many words for the underlying concept of love, and a given language may have a really specific articulation of a feeling, an idea that another language doesn't have. So this nuanced explanation, the nuanced vocabulary, the ability to combine these ideas together, this is a good analogy for understanding the variety of, for example, personal values you hold, understanding the way that you respond under stress, the kinds of things that you care about over time.
How do you operate in a high -intensity environment?
These are all pieces of your personal intellectual, emotional, spiritual, whatever AL word you you want to use here uh these are all types of vocabularies that you can develop for yourself another another more concrete example of this that i've experienced in my personal life is understanding different forms uh in my personal life i i mean in my personal career life understanding different forms of diagrams very simple uh you know vocabulary that i've been been working on recently.
Understanding, for example, what is a causal loop diagram?
Now, what's really interesting is that we can build our vocabulary and then we can take advantage of this vocabulary in new and unique ways.
Another good example of this, there are paradigms in programming.
Paradigms and design patterns, those kinds of models, ways of thinking about So if you have never experienced, for example, the asynchronous paradigm or the event -driven architectural paradigm, then those pieces of vocabulary, which may be useful, again, these are kind of like mental models, right?
They may be useful in multiple contexts, but you won't have access to those until you learn that vocabulary, right?
So this is something that even Paul Graham talked about.
He talked about the idea that, you know, understanding something like small talk provided a unique advantage that was a kind of a leap ahead of other programming languages because it has a fundamentally different paradigm.
There are parts and pieces of how you would use small talk that don't have a good analog with other languages.
This vocabulary has been useful to Paul Graham and many, many other engineers who have found tools that express what they are thinking in more nuanced or more powerful, higher leverage ways.
So if you are able to develop this vocabulary, And I would say you have an opportunity to continue refining this vocabulary by learning about it and exploring the nuances of it with an LLM, for example.
You're going to be able to wield a more complete kind of picture in whatever endeavor you're moving into.
to. So for example, if I wanted to explore a subject that I've never thought about before, now I have some tools at my disposal.
I will search for various systems and try to develop an understanding of the causal loops in the system that's at play.
This helps me get a picture for Or what kinds of things are happening?
Where are the leverage points?
What might I do to change things, to balance something out?
You know, what does the system look like?
And I can do a lot of this work now just by having the vocabulary.
I don't necessarily have to have, you know, every piece of skill, underlying skill or perfection of that vocabulary.
But having that top level and understanding those concepts so I can piece them together, this is probably the most valuable skill that I've learned, that I've picked up in my career.
The ability to add to your repertoire, to add to your overall vocabulary, some of these ways of thinking.
I won't limit it to mental models because I do think it goes beyond that.
that the concept of a mental model captures some parts of this, but it's not entirely complete.
You know, for example, understanding what a, what a C4 diagram is, this is a piece of vocabulary.
It might be, you know, you could kind of squint and call that a mental model, but really it's just some vocabulary.
And, and here I, you know, I want to be careful that you understand what I I mean when I say vocabulary.
I really mean conceptual vocabulary.
I don't mean just one word, but also what's the connotation of that word?
Where does it come from?
When is it useful? How does it piece together with other things that are adjacent?
When would you care about seeing a C4 diagram versus say a pipeline, you know, that kind of, you know, charting.
There are plenty of opportunities to develop your vocabulary as you learn about these various things.
You know, one way that I would suggest that you pick up as soon as possible is to start Start with the fundamental kind of primitives, the principal pieces of your system.
Think about the inputs, the outputs, the flows.
Is this a static system?
Is it a dynamically changing system?
Thinking in these systematic terms can help you understand what are the primitive interacting pieces.
And then you can think about, okay, what am I trying to get out of this?
And am I trying to understand, you know, how these things work over time?
Maybe there is some kind of time series graph that would be a piece of vocabulary.
So, you know, one incredibly useful tool in this regard, and I won't recommend using LLMs for everything in your life, but this is a place where an LLM does a fairly good job.
And the reason for that is because you can describe these primitives and you can ask, ask, essentially ask questions.
And because of the way LLMs are trained and because of how the kind of lookup will work, you're going to find something that many people have likely used for that type of primitive.
So if you had XY data, you're likely to find a scatter or plot graph as a tool that you might use to visualize that XY data.
This is a remarkably good tool for expanding your vocabulary for that reason.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea.
I hope you will make it a point, you know, in your learning journey in particular, make it a point to always be expanding your vocabulary.
This means that you're looking for the leverage points at the categorical level.
You're not just looking to, you know, add a little skill here and there.
You're not just looking to learn how to use a thing, right?
That is a lower leverage change to your skill level, right?
The much higher leverage is to know why you're using that thing in that context.
Why would you use that thing instead of another thing?
when would you use something different you know how can you piece together your various pieces of vocabulary to get the things that you care about to get the insights that you care about etc thanks so much for listening if you enjoyed this episode please let me know you can join the DeveloperTea Discord community head over to developertea .com slash discord I'm in there and so are a bunch of other engineers who listen to this show regularly you can also email me we don't talk about the email very often, but developertea .gmail .com.
You can email me questions.
You can send me comments.
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all. Thanks so much for listening.
And until next time, enjoy your tea.
