A Planning Mistake

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 watching into our season 17. We did an overview last episode and here we're going to dive right in. This episode, we're going to talk about a mistake I made and it's a planning mistake, which for myself is not terribly common, at least at this point in my life. But I think probably earlier in my life it was. And it has to do with choosing a major in college. Now I guess I'll set the stage a little bit. When I went through high school, I went through what would be considered a college prep kind of program. So everybody there more or less was intended to, the intent was to go on to college, to go on to something beyond your high school and that educational stuff. And so we had classes that even sort of set the stage for that. It wasn't just basic stuff. We got into essentially what would be college level in quotes classes. That wasn't like college, but it was some of that material. So we were exposed to it. And that includes, if you don't know what they are, AP, advanced placement tests, which technically are, they're supposed to be college level because you're supposed to be able to take those at a high school level. And if you do good on the test, test out of college credits or college courses. It doesn't mean you necessarily get credits, but at least you've tested out of them. So you don't need to be able to go in and don't have to actually take that course as part of your graduation requirements for college. So by the time I got to college, I had an idea of the things I like to do. And it was very general. It was basically math and science related stuff like writing and literature and sort of your liberal arts types of things were not, not my cup of tea. Those were not things I was looking forward to. So I sort of had that in mind. However, when I got to college, sort of the first thing there is where, you know, you're getting your classes together and figuring out what are you going to do this freshman year as you start out. And particularly at my college, there was where I went, it was a, it's an engineering school, a lot of math, a lot of engineering and sciences. And most of the freshmen go in and take roughly the same classes. And it's a little, you're, you're, there are some electives. So you may take a, I don't know, like a writing class over a literature class or maybe you throw a foreign language in there or something like that. But the basics were like some sort of a science, like a chemistry or physics, math, which was almost everybody was calculus. I don't think they even had a pre-calculus class there and some stuff like that. So you sort of know what your freshman year is going to be like, or at least the first, and we were on a quarter system, so at least the first couple of quarters, it's pretty close to set. But I go into my counselor and say, all right, I need to sign up for my classes and get started here. And they asked what my major was. And I didn't know, I was sort of planning on trying out the waters a little bit. And I didn't think that it really mattered that much. So I thought about it a little bit and like a little bit of maybe probably not even a minute literally, it's probably seconds of thought. I said, you know, I think I'm going to try computer science and math. That sounds like fun. And I was thinking at the time that if I got further into some stuff, because I'd sort of thought about mechanic or physics, I thought about chemistry. I thought about a couple of other things and said, well, this is just a nice general, you know, kind of major to pick. I'll do that and I can come back later and do something else. Well, turns out that that was that was more, it was more of a decision than I thought it was at the time. I did not go into there properly prepared. It was one of these situations where I went into this this meeting and didn't really know or comprehend what the agenda was, what we were actually discussing. Now, this turned out OK because I actually enjoy writing code. I enjoy developing and creating software. I enjoy the things that have come out of that computer science degree. So this one is cases where sometimes we make a mistake or we take a direction that is not what we necessarily thought things were going to be. But it turns out OK anyways, because sometimes life is a lot of times life is not what we expected, but we either we either conform to it or it is surprisingly more pleasant than we thought it was. And just like if you try a food, sometimes you'll see something that doesn't look that good and you try it out and realize, oh, my gosh, I have been missing this food all my life. I would do that in other areas as well. Now I said with these mistakes, I want to talk, you know, have sort of a moral of the story. Now this situation is just a very it sticks out in my mind because it's something that ever since then, basically ever since probably, I don't know, six months after that decision was made, when I realized that that was the, you know, in quotes, right decision, that was the one that I needed to make. And I have no idea. I mean, it was just it was almost like throwing a dart at a board and picking a major at that point. I didn't really I didn't really care. I didn't really think about it. And so it worked out OK, but it easily could have not worked out OK. I could have picked something else that would have been not good. You know, that maybe I would have been much more challenged to get through. And it was it was not this was not like a walk in the park. It's not like I picked something that was super easy. And then I was able to just coast through my college career. It was something that was I did end up wanting to do, but also took a good deal of work. If I'd had something that I did not enjoy as much, who knows what would have happened? Or maybe like many people that we've I think we've all known go out there. You put the time in, you get a degree, you choose a career path. And then five years later, you look at it and say, this is not what I want to do the rest of my life. And you bail out and go another direction, which is, you know, would be even more difficult. So while it worked out. The thing I want to point to here is lack of planning is lack of. Consideration for some of the things that we get ourselves into. And it seems like meetings in particular offer us an opportunity to make this mistake more often than just about anything. Now, depending on what your role is and what your position is, you may be, let's call it a passive attender of meetings on most days, maybe almost all days, maybe throughout your career. But at some point, there's an expectation for you to be an active member, that you maybe have a presentation or that you more so maybe you're the one that's supposed to be driving the conversation. And if you've set up the meeting, then that, you know, it's pretty likely that that's that's the goal. If you, let's say, have an appointment with your doctor to talk about some pain that you're having, you're going to be driving that meeting. However. You have the situations where maybe you didn't set up the meeting, but it's expected that you're supposed to drive it, that you're supposed to be the one to talk about it. And sometimes you need to prep. You need to make sure that you have a plan that you're not just rambling all over. Using a doctor example, if you call your doctor and set up an appointment because you're feeling ill, feeling ill and you want to get some help. That's one thing. If your friend, family member, whatever, sets up an appointment for you with the doctor and that family member is going with you, then you may think that they're going to drive the conversation, which can make it awkward when you get in there. And maybe they start it off and say, hey, we have thank you for being able to see us, doctor. I'll let this person, you as they point to you, I'll let them explain what's going on. Well, you may have very little idea what's going on, or maybe you had maybe you've been feeling a little sick the last couple of days. You haven't felt so good. But then you had this pain that's been bothering you for weeks. And you may not know what which of those you're supposed to talk about. And of course, it really goes off the rail if you just start talking about both of them at the same time. Now, that may not seem terribly likely, but in business, it is something I've seen numerous times where there is a meeting that's put together, particularly if you have meeting planners or meeting schedulers. Often it'd be like maybe a project manager or product owner. Maybe there's somebody's executive assistant or something like that that creates this meeting. And you end up in a situation where you have people attend the meeting and nobody really knows what's it about. Now, there's a couple of people at fault in that case. The person that set up the meeting should have some sort of an agenda included or some notes or description to say, hey, this meeting is to discuss this thing. But even then, sometimes the discussed whatever we're discussing, maybe something that's sort of foreign to most people in the meeting. Or it's like the one I see a lot is it's the equivalent of like a sales meeting where there's really two groups coming together and Group B is the one that needs to be sold. And it's a meeting to sell. But the people in Group A are not informed that this is to sell. And they think instead it's to learn more information from Group B. So you can really easily get into a bad situation quickly if you don't have at least somebody that knows that this is why we're doing it. And this is what it's prepared for. And I say all that to say, you know, as part of the planning, is to say, if you find yourself on a meeting and you don't know why and that may happen a lot. Don't be afraid to ask whoever scheduled it. What is the what's the purpose of this meeting? Is there, you know, is there going to be an agenda? Who's talking? What's what are the goals? What are the desired results of this meeting? And if you're not a part of it, it may be something where you just bow out of it and say, look, I have nothing to contribute to that conversation. I don't think there's anything I'm going to learn from it that is of, you know, has value. And particularly, maybe if there's a summary sent out afterwards or a recording that I can listen to, then I can, you know, at my leisure, get the information I need versus having to, you know, take this specific block of time out of my schedule to do a meeting. But then the flip side of that is if they if there's a meeting that you know you're going to attend, such as I had in this situation. With the with my counselor years ago. Have a plan, go in to these things, and sometimes only take seconds. But before you go into something like that, have sort of a plan of attack, have your own agenda of why am I getting here? What do I need to do? Do I need to take notes? If there's if there is an agenda, if there are materials, read them beforehand, take a look at them, go look through the materials. Don't be this person that comes into a meeting about, you know, some document that was attached to the meeting invite. And you're the one that one of them that says, Oh, I haven't looked at that yet. Well, the whole purpose, usually those things being a part of it, is so that you take a look at it. In my case, I should have gone in, having spent more time understanding what was involved in signing up for classes. And I I give myself grace, I guess, with this, because I have seen it with many, many other people, including my own children, where you think that you're going to get more, maybe more guidance than you do in some of these situations. And so take a look at what you're stepping into, whether it's a meeting, whether it's a relationship, whether it's a job. And probably we'll see some other examples of this as we go through this season, where there are some missteps and mistakes. But interviews are a huge portion of that. A lot of your likelihood of being successful in an interview is going to come back to preparation and consideration of how you're going to approach that particular meeting, that particular conversation. And so we need to be a little more. I want to it's almost polite, but it's also intentional and even just cognizant, just understanding that when we have something that is scheduled, we have a meeting, whether it's formal or informal. There is usually going to be something we're expected to bring to the table. Expected to bring to the table. Even if it's something as informal as getting together with friends after, you know, for drinks, after work or something like that, just sort of a social gathering after work with some of your coworkers. People are going to talk about, well, maybe or not, depends on how it is, is maybe people want to talk about work. Maybe people don't want to talk about work. So understand the, you know, so you don't have to just read the room. I mean, sometimes that's your only option. But. You know, so you have an idea of what are you getting into in particular, because sometimes you're going to find out that you don't want to get into that, as maybe you don't want to go hang out with your coworkers and talk about work stuff when you did that all day, or maybe you only want to talk about work stuff with them. But also in any similar situation, you know, there may be something that you you're going to get into that and you know that when you're in that situation, in that environment, in that meeting, there is some level of expectation of you. And if you're not prepared for it, do not be afraid to say, I'm not ready for that yet. For example, if there's some big document that needs to be reviewed to make that meeting worthwhile. And you can't get the time to review that document. And don't do this at the last second, don't come in, you know, a minute before the meeting and say, oh, I need to reschedule this because I'm not ready. You need to make sure that you are. But if you can't, if you look at your schedule and say, there's no way I'm going to be able to properly prepare for this, then let the people, you know, the coordinator know and say, hey, I'm not going to be able to properly review that beforehand. You guys need to reschedule it. And so planning while it sometimes seems to be, I think people see it as more like, I don't know, an academic exercise or there's just certain types of people, you know, just like people have pictures of what software people look like or accounting people or lawyers or salespeople or whatever. We have this these predisposed ideas about what people are like and what certain tasks are. But that doesn't make those tasks any less important. Planning being one of them, some people, you know, look at it as a planning for, you know, nerds or whatever, you know, some sort of people that spend too much time thinking about stuff. But. There's a value in planning before you, you know, doing a I hate to say it almost like the equivalent of a pre meeting before you get into a meeting. Understand what it is you're going to talk about, what is it that you are expected to do so that you don't in an app situation where you're in a meeting and somebody tosses it over to you and you're completely unprepared. And it's not only the content, but it's who are you talking to? Who's the audience? Most likely, most of us are going to think very different about a presentation we're expected to give if it's to a couple of our coworkers that we deal with on a daily basis versus the the CEO or the owners or the runners of a company. Or if it's a small group of a couple of people. As opposed to something that's recorded is going to be seen by millions or tens of millions of people. There's differences in those situations, and we need to be aware of what situation we're running into and then. Plan accordingly and do the work, the pre work as needed so that you're prepared for that. And that will avoid you, hopefully walking in a situation like I did, where you are asked a very important question and you provide a very flippant, ill informed, non informed answer. Because sometimes those can be devastating, those can be very bad situations, particularly you can turn out on a dime. You can have something that's very good, like walking in saying, OK, we assume that you have some plans for your major. You're coming here, you're going to spend a couple of years in college and you're going to have this degree that's going to impact your career in the rest of your life. And you didn't spend near the time you needed to. In my case, I didn't spend near the time I needed to really thinking through that. Luckily, you know, gut instinct or whatever took over and it worked out OK for me. But that's just that situation. So even though it worked out OK, definitely a mistake and also definitely an opportunity for me to learn from it. And now for those of you listening to learn from it and consider next time you're going into a meeting that you at least have spent a little bit of time understanding, setting expectations and confirming that those expectations are correct for that meeting. That being said, I think we can wrap this one up. I think we're done beating this dead horse. And we will come back next episode looking at another mistake and looking at how we can learn from them. But 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 Develop-a-Noor 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. One more thing before you go, Develop-a-Noor 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. 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