self-publishing

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. Hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of interviews and we are reaching the unfortunate end once again of an interview. This will be the last part where we talk to Dale L. Roberts and we wrap it up with a brief discussion about being a professional writer, about choosing essentially a career or at least making that your day job and some of the things that go into that. There are a few choice nuggets that come out of that conversation that I will cover as we do the wrap up. Since we have just a little bit of additional information or a little bit more of the conversation with Dale, I wanted to make sure I gave that the proper time. It's a little weightier and it's got a little more heft to it because there's a couple important points that are brought up that I want to make sure that we cover and do that as part of the overall summary. That being said, let's go ahead and dive right into it. Here's Dale. That actually leads right into what you've mentioned. You said, hey, I want to go be an author. By all accounts, you've succeeded in that. What are some of the keys or the lessons learned or recommendations you'd have if somebody else has now listened to you and said, gosh, I love this. I want to be that guy. What would be their next steps or what would be some of the things they need to think about before taking that leap? Normally, I'm sure anybody would get onto a podcast. They're going to immediately push their consultations and coaching and things like that. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do this instead. If you want to find out information about me, just search up selfpublishingwithdale.com. That's literally my website. What I will say is this, is just get started. Just do it. Be consistent about it. If you look at something like Mount Everest and you want to scale the top of that, it requires immense planning and a lot of time and effort. One of the most important things is that journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, although Mount Everest is in a thousand miles. You get what I mean. Just get started. That's going to be the important thing. The most important thing too is reach out to other people that are in and around your business. You aren't doing this alone. It's a lonely enough business being an online entrepreneur as it is. Don't try to do it by yourself because the more that you lock arms with other people, you can push yourself further than you ever thought you could be able to do or even do on your own. I am super thankful for all the success that I've had because I did work with other entrepreneurs, that I did work alongside them. issues. I could vent my frustrations or tell them some of my problems and have those problems solved in return. That's the next step that you need to do, which is the very first step. Just make it happen. That's something we talk about regularly is the idea of essentially a momentum of you just do it, you do it on a regular basis and you essentially becomes a habit. It just becomes one of those things that you just do. You mentioned that early on. You said that was one of the things you said, all right, I'm going to do this. You knew you were going to have to spend time that you were doing other things focusing on writing and moving that forward. Is there maybe, and this is sort of just an out of the blue question, so it may not be there, but is there maybe one thing that you did that you look back and say, well, I'm really happy I did that? Or maybe one thing that you did that you wish you looked back and realized, man, that was mistake that sort of threw me off that you would, you know, that maybe somebody else would run into that you can use as a cautionary tale or as a suggestion to to help them get through it. Ooh, biggest, biggest decision that really made the huge, the biggest difference, I think, for me. I think Will Smith always said, don't have a plan B. I don't always necessarily agree with that because Will Smith said don't have a plan B because if something falls through for your plan, you already have an excuse to stop doing plan A. But I think probably the best decision I made and nothing I would recommend anybody else ever do was just to burn the votes, quit my day job and get away from it. I loved my job. I miss it every now and then. Probably not that much that I want to return to it. But there was that. Now, as far as mistakes goes, is comparing my success to other people's. Kind of goes back to the whole paycheck flex. I used to see people that would say they earn $10,000 per month or $20,000 per month. And here I was only making $50, $100, $300 per month. And I'm eating ramen noodles and frozen vegetables. It sucked. So as I'm hearing these people share these stories on YouTube videos and podcasts, I felt defeated and I got desperate and I started doing things that weren't good, that weren't good for my business, that would reflect poorly on me. And it really, it hurt me for a minute there. At one point or another, I did something and I've shared it on my channel before that was against Amazon terms of service. They caught me doing it and they suspended my account. And that was the reality check that I needed because it was almost like the universe telling me, don't be desperate, just stay the course. Don't worry about other people's 10 or 20,000 or $30,000 paychecks. You don't know what kind of work that it took for them to put into that. You don't know how many corners they may have cut. Just do what you're doing and keep pushing forward and trust the process. So yeah, my worst mistake was just not trusting the process and allowing desperation to guide my business decisions. That is awesome. That is a very good answer to it. I like that quite a bit. And then often it's that the old idea of, you know, get rich, slow kind of thing. And you see that a lot is it. And I've seen some people that are, that are like that, that are very big voices. One that I've mentioned before to the audience, you may have heard, may know of them probably have heard of Gary Vaynerchuk is one that talks about, you know, he, he hit it really big and was sort of an overnight success, but really wasn't, you know, he, he's very open about the fact that he busted his butt for what, you know, decades literally to get to that quote overnight success. And there's a lot of that out there where people, you know, they may, they may be marketed as such, but really when you look at it, they they've spent sometimes a lifetime working to get to that point. So that's a really good answer for that. Yeah. I think that we're getting close on time. So I want to respect your, your time there. And I've got, you know, I've got all of your links. And so those will be in the show notes for anybody that wants to look at them because, you know, eight URLs are not fun things to try to do in an audio version anyways, and try to, so we'll, we'll just have the links, something you can click on as opposed to something you have to remember and then go write down and type somewhere. I thank you a lot. It's been great conversation. Is there any, any parting wisdom or statements or anything you want to throw out to the crowd before we wrap it up? No, just make sure that whatever you do in life, that you, it puts a smile on your face and a skip in your step and makes you happy because this life is short as it is, it's going to be gone before you know it. And that's something I got to learn through working with senior citizens for nearly two decades. So make sure that you, you're happy in what you do. Yeah, that's important. And that's, yeah, that's, I hadn't thought about that. That's a great way to get some perspective is look at, you know, spend a lot of time with people who are on the back end of life like that and see what their, you know, what their regrets or their, their happiness is. And hopefully it sounds like it's worked very well to you to help you sort of plot out the, you know, of course it is, you know, made you happy and do it, do it works for you. So that's awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you having me on. Oh, I think thanks a lot for coming out and spending some time. Well, I guess, you know, virtually coming out and spending some time for sharing all of that. And I'll make sure I can do what I can to push anybody interested your way. And definitely if you, if you have any questions in the future or anything like that, or just want to catch up, let me know and we'll let you get back to your enjoying your life and you have a good one. Thank you so much, Rob. Thanks a lot. And that wraps up that interview with Dale Roberts. I had a great time talking with him. It's a good conversation, a great guy. And I wanted to spend a little time on the sort of like an overview. Now, Dale came to us talking about self publishing and we started with, Hey, let's, let's get started. If you want to write something, if you want to publish something, you got to write it first, get yourself into a habit, some sort of plan, whatever it needs to be, put it on your calendar so that you put that work in on a regular basis, probably daily as best as we've talked about before, and just start cranking your way through it. It doesn't have to be perfect. Just get the content together. So you can at least say you wrote a book. Now that may not be one that's very readable. You may have a lot of grammatical mistakes. And then of course you may need an editor on top of it. And both of those, you know, correcting via like Grammarly or something like that. And then having an editor reread our recommendations, but you may decide you really enjoy the process, which seems to be where Dale went to. It led him to actually give up a job that he didn't hate. And sometimes you hear about these people that are thrown into a new career or at least a big change because they were laid off or they just, they hated their job. They needed something different. That's not quite the story he has laid out. He actually enjoyed it, sometimes misses it. He was very happy. However, there was something bigger. There's something better that appealed to him. And now I think looking back, I didn't ask him this specific question, but I don't think there's any regrets with that. When you listen to him, he's very happy. He's reached a point where he is doing what he likes. He does it sort of when he likes. And even though that is the case, as he said, he could take a day off and it wasn't going to, it wouldn't matter. He can't take multiple days off, not because of financial issues, but you can hear it. He enjoys it. He likes going back to the work. And that's key. Whatever it is you're doing, it's one thing to occasionally need a break and a vacation. But ideally you're doing something where when you take that break, you're changing gears. You're allowing yourself to refresh or renew yourself a little bit, particularly probably in a lot of the stuff we do mentally. But then you're sort of building up an itch to go back to it as well. It's something that you enjoy doing enough that over time it bothers you to not be doing it. You're like, Hey, I, I miss that. That is key. What we talked about at the end there, make sure you doing something you like. Is very, very important. There is a lot of, there's a lot of information out there about do, you know, this thing or that thing, and it'll lead to riches or, you know, happiness or a bigger house or whatever it happens to be. But the key that they fail to mention in most of those situations is that really what matters is whether or not you're happy doing it. You could be, and we see there are stories about these as well. You could see somebody that, yeah, I don't know. I'm trying to think of something that most people don't like, but there are some that do, so like let's say janitorial work. And some people, a lot of people just don't like mopping and cleaning and stuff like that, but there are some people that is there. That's their thing. They like doing that. You think about, you know, take it to a little bit different extreme, I guess, or a little bit of a variation on that theme. There are mothers out there that have no problem changing diapers and cleaning up spit and doing all that kind of stuff. Or, you know, there are people that are like zookeepers, animal workers that they work with and cleaning animals and in dirty environments. And they're, they're cool with that. They like that. There is something about that job and probably not necessarily the same for everybody that appeals to them, that makes them happy. Now, part of the reason that I've had Dale on and that we talk about writing and publishing and doing a lot of the other things that are not coding, that are not typical necessarily developer tasks is to, you know, one to expand your horizon. I've found that the more you experience other people's jobs, you have some idea of what it's like and what goes into it. The more beneficial you are to them, the more that you can, you have a sense, you have an empathy for what, what plagues them, what keeps them up at night. What are the problems that need to be solved? And as problem solvers, that's what we, to some extent, that's our bread and butter. That's our food that feeds us. There have to be problems to solve. If there were no problems, we would be pretty darn bored. There's nothing to solve. So the more we go out there and experience these things, the more we get a sense for what kinds of problems are out there. And sometimes what we see in one industry can apply to another one or can be useful in solving problems in another industry. Now that also goes hand in hand with there is a value in a personal brand. And we'll talk about that in some other discussions here. There is, there's a value in sharing information, sharing content and experiences. And that's not necessarily just technical. You may decide that you want to write a book on a model train building or something like that. And the part of the reason to do this for this exercise, to go out there and write something that I, and that I sort of push it on a regular basis is because one, you may like the writing process. And if you do and you say, Hey, this is something I want to do all the time. Then there are links in the show notes for Dale's stuff. You go to self-publishing with Dale. And as you can tell from this conversation I had with him, he's really easy to talk to. He's really down to earth. He really knows his stuff. But I think he's an excellent resource for you to get started and get going. And even if you want to do it not as a career, but just to do it as a sort of a one off, then I once again would point you to Dale. I think he'll, if you get, you know, you can connect with him and talk to him. I think he can help you find the right sized approach based on your goals, whether you want to set yourself up to be the next Stephen King, or you just want to put together a little ebook to help people that are building model trains. Wherever you exist on that, you know, that spectrum, I think he can help you out from a self-publishing point of view in particular. If you want to go to full blown publishing, he may be able to help you. But that's a whole different can of worms to get into that stuff. What I want you to walk away with from this series of interviews is one, Dale's a pretty cool guy. He's got a great story and he's got a lot behind him to make him a useful resource for publishing. But besides that, note that whatever you do that you want to do, if it's worthwhile, it's going to take work. It's going to take intent. You need to plan for it. But you have to put in the work. So if you want to become a professional athlete, you have to do the exercises and the drills regularly. If you want to be a writer, you're going to have to write regularly. And it helps probably to have a specific goal, particularly writing. I mean, you can just randomly write day after day after day if that's what you want to do, if you just want to write. But if what you really want to do is convey information, then you probably need to think a little bit more about your audience and the information that you want to convey to them. What is the best way for you to communicate to them what it is you want communicated? And that may be writing a book. It may be some other self-publishing venue like an audio book, or it may be more of an e-book rather than a traditional book. That's something for you to consider and think about. I think I've been your ear long enough and just want to make sure that we keep our priorities where they need to be and don't go chasing after pots of gold when we find out we really didn't even want that pot of gold. Think about what makes sense for you. And this may be a great opportunity to add something to your resume. And make you more impressive to future customers to give you some validation to the claims that you make of the skills that you have. Or it may just be a fun thing to do. Could be a fun side hobby. I have really enjoyed the couple of times when I've gotten into a very regular cadence doing blogs and writing. I don't know what it was. Probably three, four, five hundred words every other day on whatever the topic was. That's me. You may like it more. You may like it less. But you don't know until you've tried it. That being said, that is a challenge for the week. Go out there and I think we've actually done something similar before. Go out there and think about what would be the topic of your book or maybe even just what would be the title of your book if you were going to write one. And then what is the appeal that has to you? Is that something where maybe you've got a little bit of an itch to go out and write or is it something where you say, gosh, I've got so many other things I'd rather do. It's worth consideration. So as always, 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 Noir 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 developernoir.com. Just a step forward a day is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. There are two things I want to mention to help you get a little further along in your embracing of the content of Developer Noir. One is the book, The Source Code of Happiness. You can find links to it on our page out on the Developer Noir site. You can also find it on Amazon, search for Rob Brodhead or Source Code of Happiness. You can get it on Kindle. If you're an Amazon Prime member, you can read it free. A lot of good information there. That'll be a lot easier than trying to dig through all of our past blog posts. The other thing is our mastermind slash mentor group. We meet roughly every other week, and this is an opportunity to meet with some other people from a lot of different areas of IT. We have a presentation every time we talk about some cool tools and features and things that we've come across, things that we've learned, things that you can use to advance your career today. Just shoot us an email at info at developernoir.com if you would like more information. Now go out there and have yourself a great one.