rnc

Sam, you started Loopt when you were 19 and figured things out very quickly along the way. Could you give us some insights on how to increase the speed at which we learn stuff? Many people here(myself included) rely on books to learn about something or solve their problems, and that doesn't seem to be the case with you and other top founders(Collison brothers, Drew Houston, etc.)

This is something I've also been wondering for a while (I live in Peru). Most of the folks I know follow this path: apply for a Master's degree abroad and then try to find a way to stay in that country. But this is the thing: I'd love to work abroad without having to do a Master's because I don't like reading/writing papers, it doesn't seem like a very optimal path to me. So my current strategy is to build a portfolio on Github, get freelancing work online and then see if some company abroad hires me. Could this work? Could some company hire me based on my experience online? Glad to hear any thoughts on this

I remember that some years ago while reading "Hacker and Painters" I got the naive impression(I was 18) that I could just go to grad school and then become rich by just building a technically superior product, without having business experience. How wrong I was.

Leechblock(Firefox add-on) did the job for me; you can make the websites available only for some amount of time per day/week and then they'll be blocked. The effect of this after a while was that I lost interest on reading news endlessly. In the general case, I think that first you need some tools that force you to change your behaviour; after a while it becomes a habit and you won't need then anymore.

Care to elaborate? I'm early in my career(24), love embedded systems, but I just don't know if there are good jobs available in this industry for young people. Could you give more info?

What works for me is to go to bed early(10pm), wake up at 6am and to study/ready/practice programming for an hour not matter what. The key is to set aside that hour even if there are other duties that you have to do.