Emotional intelligence is predictive of greater work performance and better leadership. The book manages to backup these claims with scientific research. I learnt that people skills and motivation are more important than raw intelligence for engineers - and by extension probably web developers as well.
A major topic of this first chapter was that emotional intelligence is trainable by everyone. Emotional intelligence training starts with training attention, so that we can start to notice our emotions as they arise. A very effective method of training attention is mindfulness meditation.
The end of the chapter encouraged me to spend two minutes sitting, watching my breath and without agenda. I did this and noticed that during this time, the feeling of thoughts racing around my head slowed down. Afterwards I felt more peaceful in general.