Season 17: Lessons from Mistakes, Errors, and Setbacks

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are starting season 17. Yes, it's a one with a seven after it. It's amazing how fast things can fly by. It doesn't seem like that long ago that we were on episode 17, whereas now we are north of five hundred and fifty episodes. This season is going to be a storytelling kind of season. The goal here is to talk about mistakes, errors, setbacks and how they either were cautionary tales, lessons learned or maybe even a stepping stone to some future success or achievement. I got this idea. It wasn't from just something I made up out of whole cloth. I got it actually while I was reading Scott Adams book, which is basically how to fail at everything and still succeed. And I will put a link in the show notes to that. And it's basically his more or less autobiography of how he got to where he is as probably one of the best known comics, comic strip writers that is out there. If you haven't heard of Scott Adams, you probably have heard of Dilbert, which is what he does. And he talks through the book about a lot of different things, but spends a good deal of time on big mistakes he made. And you can look to a couple of solid successes, you know, being a huge comic strip writer that he is. But you can also see that there was a lot of learning that came from mistakes. And as I was listening, because I did the audiobook version, as I was listening to that, it occurred to me how often I have had similar situations where things didn't go right, but or more importantly, probably didn't go as planned, but ended up being exactly what needed to happen. Or it was a chain of events that allowed me to get to somewhere that was a success or a win. And so I'm going to go through stuff in this season that covers professional things early and even recently, personal things through my life that because I think all of these sort of led to where I'm at, led me to in some cases, you'll see very much directly have led me to the situation I'm in, where it could have been very different if things had gone differently, if I had made a couple of different choices and things of that nature. And it's not to play the goal is not to play like the what if game, oh no, what if this had happened or that hadn't happened, but instead to give examples of setbacks, mistakes, whatever, you know, what people normally consider negatives in your progress, negatives in your, your career or your life and how those can be turned to positives. Those can be ways, you know, growth opportunities. And I hate to go back to the sort of the cliche of they aren't problems or mistakes, they are obstacles, they are challenges to overcome or opportunities or something along those lines. But that's basically it. It's it's looking at everything that we do in considering that there are two different lenses we can or I guess points of view we can take at a very simplistic view. We can either take that positive view or a negative view. We can focus on what we don't have or where we made mistakes or where things aren't working the way we expected them to. Or we can focus on how things turned out anyways. They turned out good, how we still managed to get through this. All of that suffering we went through actually put us in a position to be able to do this other thing that we really, really enjoy. Now, if you're in the midst of suffering through something, OK, that may not be as helpful. You may not want to hear that right now. However, sometimes that's the best time to learn is to sit there and know that you're in the midst of something that just isn't working right. A great example that we've mentioned this situation in the past would be like a death march. You're in a project that just will never end. And sometimes while, you know, retrospective is great, sometimes while you're in the midst of it, while you're suffering all of that pain and you're working insanely long hours and it seems like you're making no progress. Sometimes that's the best time to step back and consider the situation you're in. And it's not just a. It doesn't have to be or probably is best not if it's a how do I get out of this as fast as possible, which is often our approach. But instead, how do I find a way to make this work for me? How do I find a way to maybe still be successful, but also get out of this negative situation in sense? Some of these things were handled, I guess, correctly or for the better. There's some of these things that I ran into that turned out good because of whatever choices or fate or luck or whatever you want to say took me there. There are also some where I totally did not do the right thing. And at least that's an example of some things that you can knock off your list and say, oh, we're not going to try that because we know some examples where people have tried it and it didn't end well. And so this is going to get a little. It's one of those. It's a little bit of an open discussion because people don't typically talk about their mistakes and errors. But I don't find them to be that big an issue because we all make them. And I think that's another that's probably one of the huge things to get out of this. Or, you know, Scott Adams, when he went through it, is that we make mistakes. There is nobody out there that was an overnight success and didn't make some mistakes somewhere. And usually if they didn't, then you find out that that overnight success very quickly becomes an overnight failure because they did not have the right foundation to support those successes or the advancements that they made. It's sort of like if you put together a resume and you know what it should look like and she put all kinds of fancy stuff on there and all of this awesome experience, but you didn't have it. It's not the same. So maybe you get that job, maybe even talk about it enough in an interview that you could get a job. But then when you have to actually put that to work, you know, you're an overnight success, you got that incredible job. But now all of that stuff, you know, it was basically, it was lies. It was smoke and mirrors that you used to get there. And now you're in trouble because you're going to have to find a way to make that work. You're going to have to find a way to somehow bring that wisdom and intelligence from experience into play when you just made it up. Same thing in life. We're going to find situations where you have their, you know, that opportunity knocks and maybe that opportunity knocks and we're able to open that door and we step into something really good. But that's not the end of the story. It's how do we step into that and become successful in it? And if we step into it, if we step in to something that's over our head, what can we learn from that moving forward? And so this, while being sometimes, you know, probably more, too much information that, you know, or more information than maybe people generally are going to care about or hear about. It also is, I think something to help you and a lot of times try to help you get the sort of the mindset that's involved in some of these situations or what, you know, sort of not just, Hey, I made this mistake, but along the lines, I made this mistake because I was thinking this, I was focusing on that. Because I think those details are very useful in learning how to navigate through these things. And it's also not going to be, well, it may feel like it would be, this is not going to be some super serious, you know, season and full of drama and, you know, highs and lows and stuff like that. There's also going to be, as usual, I'm going to try to keep it a little lighthearted at a time. There will be some, there will be some amusing things because not everything I have failed at was the kind of thing that you're like, Oh my gosh, that's horrible when you see the failure. Sometimes if you see it or hear about it, you're going to laugh. And that's also something we need to learn how to laugh at our mistakes, how to shrug them off and say, okay, made a mistake, adjust, you know, learn from it, adjust, and just try not to make that mistake again. Cause that's the key. It's not that we don't make mistakes. It's just that we try to reduce the mistakes we repeat because in those cases, once you get to that one, then you're like, I should have known better. And maybe you should have. And hopefully that's part of what you're going to get from this season. This is going to go, wow, this is going to go however long I feel like I've, I can dig through useful mistakes. So it could go a rather long time. And along the way though, I do want to, you know, throw stuff out there. If you've got, you know, if any of these things hit home or if you've got, particularly if you've got a related type of mistake you made that maybe went a different direction, that would be awesome to hear about. I'm not going to, you know, necessarily, I'm not necessarily going to share it at all, definitely not going to share your name or anything like that. It would all be anonymous and all that. But sometimes it's useful to say, you know what, I, here's what I did, or here's what happened to me. Here's how I handled it. And here's the outcome. However, this other person handled it this way. And this is the outcome. And some people are not, this is not going to be protecting the innocent necessarily, I guess, or the non innocent, because there are going to be some situations where I was a, a party to the event going on. Maybe I wasn't the one that suffered the most or made maybe the, you know, the big mistake, but this is where I can also share with you guys. Here's some mistakes I've seen and how they were handled correctly or incorrectly and some things to think about. So I'm going to try to do each one with a, I will call it a moral to the story. Essentially. Uh, here's what's happened. Here's how it went. Here's the background. Here's some things that were learned or maybe should have been learned. And, you know, maybe a takeaway or two of, well, if you're in this situation, or if you want to avoid this situation, here's some tips and tricks. That is what seven season 17 is going to be about. It's a bit of a departure from the little more, I guess, the more technical episodes that we've done of late. And hopefully you appreciate that, that we can get something. It's a little more lighthearted and it's also probably more importantly, it is a little, it's going to be actually probably a lot easier to, to consume when you're not sitting in front of a computer or taking notes or something like that. Because I know, yeah, you can listen to a season on patterns and any patterns, but usually you're going to want to like take some notes or something like that. And so it's not perfect fair or not as good a content to have, like when you're driving down the road, driving back and forth to work, things of that nature. So this one hopefully will be a little easier to, uh, consume to get something out of and hopefully you're going to laugh along the way as well. Hopefully if you, more than a few of these are going to have at least enough of a humorous side to them that you'll be able to sort of laugh your way through these a little bit as well. Uh, cause some of them, some of them I can laugh now, but couldn't laugh then. Some of them I was laughing then, uh, probably a few of them I'm still not laughing, but we'll see, you know, we'll see how those go. You know, sometimes it may be too soon, but since you haven't, didn't have to live through it, then, uh, it may not be considered, you know, you might not think of it as too soon, so we'll see how that goes. I think that covers the overview for that. And it's not really anything else too much else to get into for this one. Uh, these may be, I don't know about length on these. This is a, that's an interesting thing. Just as a heads up, these may run a little longer. Uh, typically we've been running, you know, 15, maybe 18 minutes ish. And sometime a little less. This, these, I'm guessing are going to be more like 20 minutes, you know, 20 plus minutes maybe. So we may strength, these may get lengthened out a little bit as we move forward. We'll have to see how it goes. This one's going to fall sort of in our normal time pattern, but going from here, because some of these may require some, uh, you know, some nice old background and, and setting the stage and things of that nature. Um, or may be a couple of, there may be a couple of related issues or errors or mistakes that will get brought up in it. Uh, we may digress a little bit more than normal. That being said, I am done digressing with this one. So we will come back next episode and we will kick it off with, um, you know, lessons learned, basically errors made and how to build on those. As always though, 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 podcast. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts, we are there. And remember just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. There are two things I want to mention to help you get a little further along in your embracing of the content of developer. One is the book, the source code of happiness. You can find links to it on our page out on the developer site. You can also find it on Amazon search for Rob Broadhead or source code of happiness that 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 develop a newer.com. If you would like more information, now go out there and have yourself a great one.