Continuing Our Season on Mistakes, Missteps, and Errors

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 continuing our season where we're looking at mistakes, missteps, errors, and how they are not always a bad thing. How they can either lead us to success or at least help us avoid repeating the same kinds of mistakes in the future. This episode actually going to wrap things up. We have gone through this is actually episode 32 if you're keeping track. So we've gone through a lot of errors and missteps and mistakes. And one of the things that I want to make sure everybody sort of takes away from this, that was one of the original goals of this season, is that we can suffer through a lot of different things, whether it is due to a mistake of our own, just bad judgment on our side where we have some sort of consequences, whether it's something where somebody we work with we know in some way we get to see, you know, sort of share their experience through their mistakes. There are lessons to be learned. There are things that we can do where we can take that frown and turn it upside down, as they say. In a sense, we can take it, you know, the lemons that life gives us, whether we went and purchased those lemons or not, and turn them into lemonade. We can look at things in a glass half full or glass half empty sort of way. You can either look at it and say, wow, here's the things that I, you know, had to go through and woe is me. Or you can look at and say, look at all the things that I have managed to overcome and what I've gained by doing so. It's there's so many cliches around all this stuff. Even you know, the idea of no pain, no gain, which is, is an actual it's not just words. That's actually what happens when you work out when you physically work out. You hurt because things are being broken down and rebuilding stronger. And that doesn't mean that all pain is good. But we can find ways, I think with most of our mistakes and missteps to at the very least lead us to avoid those in the future. You know, like if you find out the oven is hot, you know, stove is hot, then you don't put your hand on it again. You're like, hey, I know that I got burned once or maybe two or three times because we're not always the the best at learning in the first the first time things happen to us. But at some point we learn, we move on and we don't burn our hand on that anymore. Now we may burn it on the thing next to it because we haven't figured that's out that that's hot as well. But you know, sooner or later we figure these things out. We make improvements. And even though we may feel like we are constantly challenged, there's constantly obstacles in our way. We're still making progress as we are getting through those obstacles or going over them or around them or removing however we get through it past it. That's progress. That is something that we can and we can look at it and say, yes, that was that was a challenge, but we got through it. So we had some success at least in moving forward or through that. One of the things that I think is key if you look through this season, because there's somewhere it felt like I think I know it did to me a little bit or felt like it was a little bit of reaching where it was something I was like, ah, that's not really that big a deal or that doesn't sound like much of a challenge. But in each of those or even a heaven forbid a mistake, but even those situations, there's something to be learned. There is sort of a moral to each episode that while maybe not directly related or, you know, some sort of thing that was a big neon sign lesson that came out of the mistake, although sometimes there were those, there are minor things. There are simple things that we do that maybe over time build up or over time we see the impact of it. And some of it does go back to the frequency as well. And like smoking would probably be an example. If you go smoke a cigarette or two and then never smoke one again, it's not a big deal. But if you smoke, you know, smoke one and then smoke another and maybe start smoking every day and then you smoke multiple every day and things like that, then it can lead to serious health problems. Vice versa. When we talked about health stuff, you know, if you go walk for five minutes a day and then maybe work your way up to walking to 10 minutes a day, half hour day, maybe you start running or other things, doing other workouts and that, then your body will get stronger. You will be healthier. You will be, quote, in shape. Of course, we're all in a shape. It just some of us have better shapes than others, I guess. But these things, these little things that were sprinkled throughout some of these, I think, more obvious types of stories. I want those to be something for you to think about or to consider as well, because sometimes we go through a day and it's not or a week and it's not bad. But maybe there were a couple of things that could have gone better. And this is one of those that reminds me of actually the agile method to software development, which we have talked about more than a few cases. When you go through sprints, when you finish a period of work, one of the things you do is you review what did we do and then you have that retrospective. And I think we can have retrospectives throughout our lives where we can look on a daily, weekly basis. What went wrong? What? Maybe what do I need to stop doing? What should I start doing? What can I do better? What do I not have to worry about for a while? You know, things like that. And we don't want to overwhelm ourselves, but I think there's there's something to be gained if we instead of on January 1st or December 31st or whatever, we sit down and we sort of think about New Year's resolutions and we create these annual resolutions that obviously most of us don't follow through with. And part of that's because they're big and they're just they're just more than we can we can really bite off and chew. Instead, maybe we look at something where we start each week with just some little thing. I'm going to do this a little better. I'm going to do that a little better. It can be simple things like that can end up being big changes. Could be things like I'm going to get out of bed 10 minutes earlier this week or I'm going to make sure that I actually have a decent sleep schedule for this week or I'm going to eat out less or eat healthier or I'm going to maybe I'm going to stop worrying about creating a to do list or maybe I'm going to start creating a to do list. Maybe I'm going to maybe I'd look at things I did last week. Maybe I'm not going to spend as much time on social media. Maybe I'm going to spend more time. I don't know, going for a walk, enjoying life, spend five minutes longer at meal time and just chill instead of rush through it and move on to the next thing. Maybe it's something like I'm going to change my my route to work. Maybe I'm going to try a different route for this week and see how that works. Or maybe I'm going to do a different path each day, depending on what your approach is. And maybe I'm going to start work a little earlier, a little later, work a little shorter days or longer days. There's all kinds of little things. And by longer or shorter, it could be five minutes. It could be something very simple. And it could be something that ends up becoming a big thing because of that power of incremental steps. Five minutes a day is not much. If you get into work each day and you spend five minutes plotting out, planning your day a little bit more because let's say your day is just completely off the rails or maybe in that first five you go into work and the things you do in that first five minutes is you look at your schedule and you review it and look to see if there's just something you can take off of your schedule. People are loaded with meetings. This is perfect. And just walk in every day based on how yesterday and the day before and last week went looking at what's on your schedule. Is there something that you can either remove completely or maybe you just say, you know what, I'm going to go to this and I'm going to intentionally leave early or I'm rude sometimes. But maybe I'm intentionally going to be late because I know that the meeting is going to go on without me and I can spend five or 10 minutes doing something else or maybe I'm going to move something around so that I can make better use of my time. Maybe I'm going to look at my schedule and I'm going to block out 10, 15, 30 minutes an hour or whatever. That is going to be time for me to be productive or actually eat lunch or take a nap or whatever. We can learn a lot from little things. And if we on a regular basis are going back to those and sort of reviewing them and spend a little bit of time and say, how did I do? What can I do better? Where can I make adjustments? Then it makes it also easier for us to make little adjustments and assume that there's going to be something that's going to come out of it. If we're doing weekly, I'm just picking that as out of the air. But if we do like a weekly resolution instead of a New Year's resolution, then we can then by its nature, we're not going to be thinking about what we're doing for the next year. It's just what are we doing this week? And there are so many things that can be done in a short range that we can we can suffer through it. Maybe it's something like I am going to only drink decaf coffee this week or not coffee at all, or I'm going to make my own instead of go to Starbucks or and this is not an anti Starbucks rant. So I don't want to I don't want them coming after me. But it could be things like that. It may be that I'm going to I'm not going to that snack I do in the middle of the morning. I'm not going to do this week or every day I'm going to write a thank you letter of some sort or an email to somebody just to show some appreciation. Maybe it's I'm going to actually spend some time watching my favorite TV show or reading a book or I'm going to read a magazine or whatever it is. Those are like little things and you can do it just in a week and say, OK, this week, this is what I'm going to do. And you go to like the whole Dave Ramsey approach to removing debt. And one of the things is, is that he talks about where you like you need to start paying something off. And then once you pay something off, you take what you were paying to that thing that you were paying that off. Once it gets paid off, you take that same money and you roll that into something else. And so now you've got the one thing you've paid off and now you're spending more to pay down yet another thing. And that stuff all builds on it. We can do the same thing with our little bit of improvement is if you go through a week and you spend 10 minutes a day on X, whatever that is, I'm going to spend 10 minutes a day, I don't know, just meditating or I'm going to spend 10 minutes a day reading news that can help me either mentally or call me or inform me or help my career. I'm going to spend 10 minutes a day looking, doing some sort of networking thing. Maybe you do that for a week and then you come back the next week and you can either continue to do that or maybe you take that time and you replace it with something else. Last week, I spent, let's say I decided I was going to drink an extra glass of water each day that I was going to switch. I was going to drink a glass of water or maybe it is, you know, maybe the first week you say, okay, I'm going to swap and do decaf coffee. And then the next week you say, I'm not going to just do decaf coffee. I'm going to swap that out. I'm going to drink water. And you can make progressions like that or for time. It may be something where you say my work schedule is insane. So I'm going to spend 10 minutes a day tackling some small thing. And maybe it's some small thing that I can get done in that 10 minutes or something on my list that usually has been just languishing back there that has not gotten, you know, has not gotten looked at in the next week. You know, maybe you've made some progress. So you say, all right, now I'm going to spend 10 minutes a day and I'm going to review. Maybe I'm going to clean up my calendar a little bit or I'm going to look for opportunities to schedule time that I can get things done. Or I'm going to spend 10, you know, that 10 minutes, I'm going to spend it getting to know my coworkers better or brown nosing my boss or whatever it happens to be. And over time, you can, you can take that, you know, as you go from day to day, week to week, you can take that stuff, those moments or those opportunities that you've chiseled out and you can tweak those and turn them into something else. One of these is just one of those examples is early on, I always had some sort of a side hustle type of thing, which early on was learning new programming languages. So the first few years, and I think I've shared this for I've made sure I was working on something new, learning something new every day. Basically, it was really more like every week, but that was always on my radar. And then after a few years, I had several languages that I'd learned. I had several things that I had gotten comfortable with. So I switched some of those to go from, well, I'm just going to learn about it to I'm going to quote, master it or be enough that I could jump in and utilize it, you know, fluent, I guess, in that language. And then as I got several of those under my belt, I moved into how I work on, I take that that same time, essentially, and I'm going to create products. I'm going to go out and work on more of a hustle type of thing. And I did that for a while. At some point, it became, you know, I'm going to write a book I want to do. I want to write every day or I'm going to do, you know, spend time on the mentor stuff we do and all of the presentations there or blogging or podcasting or our video series, all of our tutorials. All of those things started by just cutting aside, you know, cutting out a little bit of time and saying, here's some time that I'm going to do something that something's changed, not, you know, not just annually or over the period of years, but sometimes it would change from, you know, week to week, month to month, because sometimes it's just a matter of getting a couple of things off of your plate. And then that frees you up to go find other things to get off of your plate. And then you can go from smaller things to bigger things. So it's sort of a meta moral of this season. And we can look at all of these different specific things that we can do better, where we can learn from mistakes, we can learn from experiences and obstacles and challenges. But in looking at all of those, we can realize that we can learn that we can get better and that we can do so incrementally, we can do so a little bit a day and over time that can make us substantially better. You're not going to be a world class anything overnight, but over time, you can definitely work your way up to it. And maybe some of it's that 80 20 rule for self improvement. And maybe you can get that 80% fairly quickly, which would be a great way to go to 80%, go to 80% do that, you know, in area after area of your life, you can get yourself there so that you can feel like you've, you know, you're comfortable with it. You're in that you're 80% there and you're feeling a lot better about yourself. Then go back and start pushing on that last 20%. That being said, I don't want to stretch this out too long. I do not know just as a heads up, I have no idea what I'm going to do for the next season. It probably will not come until next year. I think we'll do the we're getting close enough. So we'll probably do the the holiday specials that we typically do. Look back a little bit, maybe look forward a little bit and see where we're going to go. Because one of the lessons I've learned is that was going through this was I want to make a few adjustments. There's a couple of things that I want to spend a little bit more time on. And I figure it's a good time to maybe let the podcast rest for a bit, take a deep breath, and then we'll come back whenever we do. But you can always check out developer.com d e v e l p r e n e u r dot com. You can send us emails info developer nerd.com. You can out on the site. There is a contact us. You can see when the the next mentor session is. You can find links to the podcast and to our Vimeo stuff and our YouTube stuff. And all of that will continue. We're we're for better or worse, not done cranking out content on a regular basis, hopefully to help you not only become a better developer, but become also maybe a better person. That being said, I'm going to let you go out with your better person self and prove yourself today and 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 to develop a new 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. Just heads up. Here we go. We'll give it up for Rob. He's my new best friend. I think I love you and we haven't even met. So I thought I'd write a little song for you because I think that you're so damn cool. California born, Memphis raised, but Nashville's where he likes to spend his days. That hockey rink is where he likes to be, but he's dying to head to Italy with Tim, Ian, Ben Beckham, Tom. Where he can stare at the stars all day long. He can eat that pasta till he passes out. I think there ain't a shadow of doubt. Come on. So I said, give it up for Rob. He's my new best friend. I think I love you and we haven't even met. I want to say, thank you for having me on your show. Cause this friendship of ours is one that can only grow.