Positivity

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Well, hello and welcome back. We're continuing our season where we're looking at the positives, looking at all the negative things out there, but saying, let's push those aside and focus instead on the positive. This episode, we're actually wrapping up this positivity season. We started out just sort of like I'm ending it, trying to just set the table to say, hey, we understand that there are good and bad things with any topic we can think of, any situation that we can think of. And we can focus on the negatives or we can focus on the positives. Maybe you can focus on both. I'm not sure. I think usually we end up, you know, either the glass is half full or the glass is half empty. And we focus on one or the other, not both very often. We have touched on both of those in most of these episodes. We've, you know, I don't know if we've highlighted, but we've at least listed out a couple of negatives related to each of these situations, just in case. Because in some situations you may not see the negatives at all. And there's nothing wrong with that. In some situations, maybe you didn't see the positives at all. And I'm going to say there is something wrong with that. But you need, I think it helps us to look at the ways that we can move forward, that we can utilize the situation, we can assess the positives and take advantage of those as opposed to being dragged down in the negatives. And that is really the goal of this season, I think, if you want to look at an overarching goal. Our whole mantra of becoming a better developer I don't think is possible if you focus on the negatives. You have to address them because that's what becoming better is, is you look for weaknesses and things like that, where, you know, areas of improvement. Now, that doesn't mean that you can't improve something that you're already doing well, that you're already good at. But at some point there's going to be weaknesses or gaps to be filled. And those are definitely opportunities to become better. And I think the mindset of seeing positives in just about any situation, even if they're not big positives, you find that silver lining for that black storm cloud, I think that helps us sort of feel like we've already got some wins maybe. It helps us with our mindsets so that we can say, hey, it's not all bad. Here's some things that we can work with. And it may be that there's some great negative, but if you can find a way to turn that around or offset that, that's part of becoming a better developer. More importantly maybe is understanding that there are positives in every situation. And this I think goes more to interactions with our coworkers and peers and our bosses and maybe people that work for us and things like that. Understanding that there's challenges in any situation, there's negatives in all of these things that we've listed, but there's also positives in there. There are things you can get out of it. I really look back a lot to the customer support kind of example. You can focus on the cliché basically of customers calling it that maybe don't understand that you have to hit the power button to turn on the computer or they don't understand that you click the log on button to log in or something like that. Something seems very to us that is very obvious and trivial. And you can dwell on that or you can look at what we get, what we learn in dealing with our customers. You can look at the situations where they help us understand better maybe how they use a product, how they work through the problem that we presume that we have solved for them. The learning that we can get from any situation is something that we need to keep an eye out for that we need to be cognizant of in order to become better developers. Otherwise we get into that state of being settled knowledge or something along those lines and we aren't going to learn anymore. We decide that we've learned what we can. We've gotten what we can out of a situation so there's no sense going back to that. And that's a problem. What if you have a fruit tree that's an annual fruit tree? I don't know. I don't know enough about trees. Let's say apples because I think apples come out every year. I'm pretty sure maybe more than once. But let's say you go to an apple tree and you got all these great apples and you pick all the apples and then you decide, okay, I got all the apples out of the tree and I'll never have to go back and pick them again because they're not going to be any. Well, that's not true. At some point they're going to be more apples on the tree. And I think a lot of these situations are the danger or the risk in them is for us to look at them and then not return to them, to not really understand the value that comes out of them. And so we get some value. We get maybe a couple of positives, but not enough because we don't understand the positives that are maybe a gift that keeps on giving in some of these cases. Customer support would be that. You may get a great insight into what your product needs to do in a call with a customer through a support situation. But then if you decide, okay, well, we got that. And then from here on out, it's just a matter of telling people to turn it off and turn it back on again, then you're going to miss out because there's going to be somewhere, there's going to be other opportunities. There can be other users that have different situations that can give you great insight into what it is you're trying to solve or how your solution can be improved or adjusted. And that's where I see, and it's being completely transparent, I tend to be pretty much an optimistic kind of person. And so that's why this season is probably easier. I think I could probably gripe with the best of them if I wanted to do a season of negatives. I could go back and whine about every situation and say, gosh, this is why. This is tough or difficult or taxing or makes me want to quit or throw my computer across the room or something like that. But I think that's easier. That's like shooting fish in a barrel. I mean, that's just way too easy because all of us can do that. Frustrations are part of work. We have those moments for sure. But I don't think we, because we get annoyed or there's some sort of, we'll call it pain that's associated with the frustrations, maybe that's sometimes more memorable than the lack of pain that some of the positives give us. Because we don't always get laughter or joy or something like that out of the positives. I think a lot of times we just take them for granted. These are just things that we see on a regular basis and we don't think about them until we're forced to think about them or until they're taken away. Think about the ability to breathe, assuming you can breathe freely right now. That's something we don't think about very often. It's nice to take a deep breath and get fresh air into my lungs and all that kind of stuff. As opposed to a situation where, I don't know, if you're in a smoky building or if you've got some sort of sickness or you're in a, I don't know, a desert or something where you've got a lot of dust and crud in the air and stuff like that, breathing is a little more difficult. Breathing clean air may not be an option right there or fresh air. I think we do that in our jobs as well. All of these situations, almost all of them, I think if you just look at them and you have the idea of here's whatever we ended up with, 20 different situations and we're going to talk about the challenges that they provide or the negatives about those. I think you would be able to just right away seeing those, have in your head some negatives with every one of them. I would hope that if you looked at that same list and knew that we were going to focus on the positives, that you would be able to have positive situations with each of those as well. I just don't know that that's always true and I think with most of it, it's probably true in some cases and not in others. All of us have, I don't know what we want to call them, but we'll just say it's things that bug us more than other things. We have our pet peeves. We have things that for whatever reason are much more annoying or likely to put us in a bad mood than others. It may vary from day to day or week to week. There may be some times that we're very happy to struggle through some of these problems and others where they were just tired of them. We just want to move on and do something else. That's understandable. Even though I've listed these several times as being positives and negatives or bright side of stuff, it's just not the words, unfortunately, to help convey that I don't really want to see them to take it to another level as good or bad. These are just things. These are traits of situations and I think you can look at them as a negative, as the traits that take away from that situation as negatives, as bad or something like that. Or you can take that optimistic approach and look at those as opportunities, as things that you can maybe alleviate or correct and allow you to focus on those positives, those good things, those fun things, however you want to look at them. I think that is actually a good mindset to have, maybe an essential mindset to have to become a better developer. Instead of looking at situations with a mentality of loss or something like that, or this is a failure of this situation, instead look at it as a way that you can, something that you can tackle, that you can address, that you can look at and maybe solve or remove in some way to make that situation overall better, a bigger positive. That's where the season is, is hey, let's get out there and look at ways to overcome these obstacles. They're there. They are what they are. The world is what it is. We can go out there and we can look at these with an eye to alleviate them or in some cases even circumvent them and make the world a better place for all of us, whether it's our coworkers, whether itself managers, organizations, customers, you name it. Everybody to some extent is probably impacted by the pluses and the minuses of these situations. It's our job to make the most of them, to highlight the pluses and try to alleviate the minuses where we look at them. We get to the challenge of the season. We started off looking at are we essentially an optimist or a pessimist? Do we look on the bright side? Are we a glass half full person? Are we looking on the bad side, the negative side? Are we a glass half empty person? There's a 1A and a 1B. One, have you changed, has this season as you've thought about these positives and negatives, did maybe highlighting the positives help you shift a little more towards a glass half full person, towards a little more optimistic person? If it did, what, this is going to get a little deep, what maybe triggered that? And if it didn't, what maybe stopped that from happening? We don't have to, but I think most of us want to. And I think that's the fun, that's the joy of life is getting better at random stuff and not getting better for better sake, but getting better so that we can go on different adventures and take different journeys. You can't build a rocket if you haven't first spent the time trying to figure out how to build the explosive fuel or figure out what kind of forces needed to launch something into the air or to guide it back. There's always steps, there's always prerequisites. There's certain steps we have to take to get to certain points in a journey. And think about a journey where you've got these great points of view or vistas that you would experience along the way. Well, first, you've got to take the steps to get to each of those points, each of those incredible moments of being able to see something or experience something. That's the better part. Getting better is not necessarily better as in more good, less bad or something like that. It's really about getting us to interesting points on our journey. And I think we get there faster when we look at the positives, when we look at the things we can build on as opposed to focusing on the things that hold us back. And so as you get to the end of this is how do you move forward? If there was a change in the positive, there's a towards optimism that was made, how do you continue that? How do you take that and use that to your advantage as you move forward? If you didn't, how do you maybe open your mind a little bit to the idea that maybe there is some positives out there and allow you maybe to become better faster? And I think that's where that works out. As always, hoping the best for all of you and we will continue to do this at any rate, whether we slowly or quickly are getting better. Essentially the whole goal is, hey, let's just get better. And the big goal, as always, is for you guys to go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developer North Podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, and other podcast venues, or visit our site at developernor.com. Just a step forward a day is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. One more thing before you go, Developer North Podcast and site are a labor of love. We enjoy whatever we do trying to help developers become better. If you've gotten some value out of this and you'd like to help us, be great if you go out to developernor.com slash donate and donate whatever feels good for you. If you get a lot of value, a lot. If you don't get a lot of value, even a little would be awesome. In any case, we will thank you and maybe I'll make you feel just a little bit warmer as well. Now you can go back and have yourself a great day.