Make your case for yourself — in interviews, in introductions, in salary discussions, at parties — without feeling gross about it. Internalize that selling yourself honestly is a service to the listener, not an imposition on them. Selling yourself is publishing your own README. Right now your README is empty (the introduction in your Slack profile, the bio on the conference website, the "About" on your personal site), so people read your repo (your code, your products, your record) and have to infer your value. Other people with worse code have great READMEs and get the stars. Write the damn README. A good README opens with a one-sentence claim about what the project does, follows with three concrete examples of where it's been used, lists the dependencies (your stack, your years, your context), and tells the visitor exactly how to get started using it (how to talk to you, what kind of work you take on, what kind of conversations you welcome). Apply this template to your three surfaces and the rewrite is half done. The deeper engineer's frame: under-anchoring on salary is the same bug as setting your gem version to 0.x.x forever. Semantic versioning has a meaning: 0.x means "experimental, breaking changes any time, not yet committed to backward compatibility." 1.0 is the moment you say "this is production-ready, I'm committing to its interfaces, you can build on it." Your career is currently advertised as 0.x — your library's version, and your professional self-positioning. After years of Rails, products in market, a gem with a real user base, and a studio of your own, you are at 1.0. Module 4 is where you push the version bump. The README rewrite is the changelog entry. The recorded pitches are the release notes. The 30%-higher salary ask is the new pricing tier the 1.0 release justifies.
This course unlocks once you've finished its prerequisite. Open prerequisite →
This is the most identity-level module in either curriculum. It is the module where the salary anchoring root cause gets attacked directly, where the LinkedIn rewrite forces you t…
This is the most directly leverage-bearing module in the entire non-tech curriculum stack, including the forthcoming Money/Wealth and Negotiation curricula. The Negotiation curric…
Approach: RE-READ in one sitting (you read it in Module 0). This time take notes. Then re-read every 6 months for the rest of your career.
Approach: READ Parts 1-3. Use the scripts. Do the comp-research exercises.
Approach: READ Parts 1-2. SKIM Part 3 (formats — covered better elsewhere now).
Approach: READ Parts 1-2 closely (the fundamental techniques). SKIM Parts 3-4.
Approach: READ Parts 1-2 (idea + audience). SKIM Part 3 (the long-game stuff is in Module 7).
Approach: READ in one sitting. APPLY the framework to yourself as the brand — the customer is your interviewer / future employer / future client.
Approach: READ cover-to-cover. SHORT. The audiobook is excellent.
Approach: READ the "Building Judgment" and "Earn With Your Mind, Not Your Time" sections. RE-READ in Module 7.
Three exercises, all required:
11 lessons. Read in order; spiral back when you need to. By the end you'll have used the core ideas twice — once on the abstract, once on something you'll meet at work next week.