karma or work ethic and the importance of investing in oneself

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 are in between seasons and we're going to do a couple of one-off types of topics for the next couple of episodes. Possibly even working into the holidays as I record this, we're getting near that time, getting close to Thanksgiving and then Christmas. So we may or may not actually step into a full-blown season, may do a couple of one-offs and may even slow down our pace a little bit here or take a week off here as well. This episode though, not to get too far ahead of myself, this episode I want to talk about, it's essentially karma or work ethic or getting out what you put into all of this, all of the stuff that we've talked about, all of the software development and the side hustles and your career. It starts from a very recent experience that I had where I had some work come to me basically through a couple of different things I had done that were not, they were not done to game the system or earn an extra buck or anything like that. They were just done because I felt like there were good things to do. Now, one of those is things like this. The podcast, it's the content that we put out on Developineur, it's the mentor classes and my other site at rbsns.rb-sns.com where there's also regular blogs and things like that that are put out. This content is produced without, it's not paid for, it's not, I mean there's advertising and stuff like that but it's not, essentially it's free. It's just stuff that's put out there as part of sharing and maybe giving back to the environment and the places that have been very beneficial to me. I figured the internet would not be that useful if there weren't people out there cranking out content to help others. It's sort of the payback, I guess, that's part of paying it forward or however you look at it. I go out there, I search the internet all the time for solutions, for quick hits, for ideas. Somebody else has put some time in to create content or provide something on a topic that I'm looking forward to or I'm looking up and I figured it's only fair to do some of the same, a little bit of a payback. Now, the other side of this was a project that was a side hustle project that could have been, which is interesting, in one case it could have easily been something that I would have passed on because it wasn't very, initially very big. Two, it wasn't initially very big but it grew sizable and I easily could have bailed out. But one, I like the project, I like the person, the customer I was working with, I like their ideas and decided, hey, I'm going to plow forward with it anyways even though it's definitely not a moneymaker. Those things combined to put me in this situation where I had a conversation with somebody that also has some ideas and has a product that they want to put together and it could turn out to be, if nothing else, it will definitely be some work for a little bit and could turn out to be one of those very lucky things to be a part of. Now, I say all of this because I want to point out that we have, throughout all the things that we've talked about, we have a lot of investment in yourself that we assume or maybe even promote. We've said on again and again and again, we've talked about doing stuff outside of your normal job, doing extra stuff, doing side hustle, things on the side, learning and doing all of these things that are not directly paid or compensated, they're not part of your job. You may look out and have situations where you're, for example, in your job you're asked to research something that you wanted to research anyways so you get a sort of a two-for-one deal on it. But there's a lot of the stuff that we're doing that you're not directly getting compensated for. You're spending time to better yourself, to invest in yourself and your future, and there's no payment at that point. It may even be negative in some cases. There could be situations where you take a class or go to a conference and spend money out of your own pocket and that is investing in yourself. It can take a while. It doesn't all just turn around in a week or a month or maybe even a year. The thing I want to point out here is sort of the opposite of the overnight success. I think in modern society in particular, we really want to move fast. We want to see the fruits of our labor quickly. The components that added up to this particular situation were multiple years in the making. And the developer has been around a few years. We've done, I don't even know how many hours of time have gone into this and effort. The podcast alone, you're probably talking, there's hundreds of hours that have gone into that. And then you include the mentor classes or over hundreds of hours now and the blog articles and things like that. And that's not to complain or anything. It's just to say that sometimes it takes a while for something to quote, pay off. And it's not that I haven't had other benefits along the way. The research that you do, that the investment in myself and my own skills have helped me. And that's what I want to push to you is say that these things that we promote and that we say, I don't know if we say as strongly as you should be doing them, but these would be really good things for you to do from a career point of view. They are not necessarily going to directly add to your bank account, but over time, particularly if you take a little bit of time to look at what transpired to earn you maybe a job or get you through that interview or give you, put you in a position where you had that idea that turned into a side hustle. I think these things will contribute to that. And if you didn't do this extra work, then you would miss out. And while it's not a pie in the sky kind of thing that says, hey, if you do this, at some point you will be a multimillionaire or something like that, but it does say that, hey, if you work on your career and you work on your goals and depending on the goals you set, you will be able to achieve some of them. And it may take a while. That's the way everything is. We have challenges. We have good days and bad days, good years and bad years as 2020 may show most of us having a bad year. But there is a value beyond just self-satisfaction and knowing that you put in the effort, that you worked hard, that you did what you could to become better than you were the day before. There are potentially other rewards out there. And honestly, I think there are likely other rewards out there. Most of the people I know, if not all of them that have put time in doing the kinds of things we talk about at Develop and Orr, I can see where they have gotten promotions or they've gotten a job they otherwise wouldn't or they've got side hustles or they've got all kinds of things that are good that have come their way that you can logically draw in lines from those good things to the extra work they put in, the time they spent investing in themselves. And now I think this is a timely subject because we're getting towards the end of the year. The last couple months of the year are inevitably, for most of us, now there are exceptions, for most of us there's a lot of dead time. And dead time is probably a strong word, but we have time off. We have some long weekends, we have holidays, and then I understand they may be filled up with going to Christmas parties and Christmas shopping and trying to decorate a house or traveling to visit relatives and things like that. I mean, it can be a very busy time. It can be an exhausting time. But during those travels, during some of the down times, for me at least, it's always been a good time of the year to reflect and plan and sometimes even get a little bit of extra work in to achieve a goal. This includes writing a book. The bulk of the Developer and Orr book, the content was written, but the actual editing and final touches in that that are more than a little bit time consuming, those are done in the last few weeks of the year. And part of that was because I sort of put my goal, I was going to put a book out that year, and got that thing December 31st and got it finished up the last of the edits and everything else that I could officially publish it. And there's several other things. There's been that period of time I've used to create some of the tutorials that we've got and to crank out some of the material and content that shows up in the podcasts and the blog articles. And so I say that to put it on you that this is a good time, even if you are busy because we're getting to that natural end of the year, New Year's resolutions and all that good stuff, we're at a point in the year, in our annual cycles, where this is a good time to take a look at what are you doing? What have you been doing? What are your goals? And are there some things that it makes sense for you to either try to knock out this year, a couple of things that maybe you could do to make yourself get yourself to a point at the end of the year that you're wrapping it up and you have some really good accomplishments under your belt, or take a look at some places where you want to change, where you want to switch gears and focus on something a little differently next year. And this is not a work only, career only kind of thing either. It may be that your balance in your life is not where you want it to be. Maybe you're not as healthy as you want to be. Maybe you're not spending as much time with your family as you want. Maybe you're not, I don't know, watching as much TV as you want, whatever it is, these things that will drive you to happiness or contentment. Let's make sure that we get those built into our life. Let's make sure that we can take some steps here and maybe get ourselves turned in the right direction again, if we've gotten off course. It's maybe a time to stop something as well. Maybe there's some things you're doing that are not good that you don't enjoy. And it could be as simple as, I don't know, having that extra piece of pie every day at lunch. Or it could be smoking or something like that that you need to stop. It could be something you're doing at work or at home, some habit or hang up or something like that that is not either detrimental to you in some way or it's just something that you've realized it's just not what it was. It could be that you used to, I don't know, play golf all the time and love it and you realize you don't like it anymore. Maybe this is time for you to stop playing golf and go do something else. Or maybe there's something else you're doing and it's time to stop that and go play golf because you always wanted to. I don't know. This is a very personal thing to you, but I'm pushing you to that to say, hey, this is a good time to take a look at what do you want to do? Where do you want to go? And if this sounds familiar, yes, we do this on a regular basis because life is a series of seasons and within those seasons there's changes and there's all kinds of things that occur that can point us in a direction that we maybe didn't think we were going to go in. I have seen that quite a bit. Boy, I think all of us have seen that quite a bit in the last six months to a year as a lot of things have changed. People are in very different situations now professionally, personally, as than they were a year ago or two years ago or 10 years ago. And while that may seem to be, it may seem that this year has been a stark and large amount of change, if you really look at it, we historically, if we look back at our life, we've probably got some substantial changes depending on what you are every few years or maybe you're more stable or static, maybe every 10 years or something like that. What you like doing as a teenager is not going to be the same as what you enjoy doing probably in your 20s or then in your 30s or then in your 40s. Some of it's limitations and things like that, but some of it's growth. There's things that you were not able to do when you were younger that for whatever reason you're able to do that when you get older and vice versa. There may be some things that you enjoyed and were able to do pain-free or whatever when you were young. And now that doesn't work for you anymore. Or you just outgrew it or it's just something you can't, you just don't have the time to do. So maybe this is a period of reflection where you say, Hey, I used to enjoy crochet. I haven't done that in a long time. And I think moving forward, I'm going to try to schedule some time to do some crochet going forward or work on my origami skills or whatever it is. Again, very much personal you, but it's just as we've gone through multiple seasons of content and all of these hints and tips and tricks and stuff like that, there is always a period where it's worth it to gather yourself together, reflect a little bit, and maybe throw out some of the things that you've been thinking about that have been weighing you down or causing you to ponder more than you need to and instead focus on the things that matter. Another good natural turning point in the U.S., we have elections coming up and once the elections are over, hopefully fairly soon after the election day, then it's maybe a perfect time to switch gears and shift away from spending a lot of time on social media or watching news or whatever it is because of the politics and your concerns or interests there. And now maybe stuff's ratcheting down enough that you can go focus on something else again. Or maybe there's some sports that you watched a lot and now because of the change in schedules, maybe you've got some additional free time that you used to not have, yeah. Especially if you went to something and things that you used to do in person, if you went to sporting events or concerts, now maybe now this is something that you, because you're not doing that, maybe you can switch up your schedule a little bit and take advantage of the fact that you don't have these other options and spend this time adding to your, adding another arrow to your quiver basically, maybe growing your skills or maybe making some adjustments that will help you moving forward enjoy life at least a little bit more. So your challenge in the week is to spend a few minutes just with a general self-reflection of am I happy? Am I content? Am I not? And if you're not happy and you're not content, then is there something maybe that you can change or plan to change that will flip you over into that happier content area? If you are happy and content, are you in a situation to maintain that or is there something you need to change to make sure that you can continue down that path? Because at the end of the day, that's really what's best for all of us. If we can go through life content or happy, I think all of us would take that. If we could have next to zero time when we didn't follow that category, I think you'd be considered living a very blessed life. And that being said, whether you're living a blessed life or not, do please go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the developer in your 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 developer.com. Just a step forward today is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. One more thing before you go, the developer podcast and site are a labor of love. We enjoy whatever we do trying to help developers become better. But if you've gotten some value out of this and you'd like to help us be great, if you go out to developer.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.