Why Interview, Finding One's Why, Root Goal Analysis

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back. We are continuing our interview season, Interviews 2.0 as we call it. This episode we are in part two of an interview with Greg Offner, a piano bar pianist that lost his voice, got it back, and through all of that learned how to find something he enjoyed even better. A better life came out of that tragic period. We talked about the tragedy last episode, got some of the good news that obviously he's still talking and things like that. In this episode we're going to move into focusing on his current projects, his company, his public speaking, and how to deliver value and get that aha moment to come into the minds of his customers, of his audiences, without them having to go through a tragedy such as his own. We're also going to dig into quite a bit. This is sort of like a why interview. How you've determined what your why is, how you can get yourself from maybe being busy or maybe even content to actually being happy and look with each day with a little more joy and expectation and hope that it will be even better than the day you had before. Now maybe I oversold it. You be the judge. Let's get back to our conversation with Greg. One thing that has always been a sort of like a summary in a nutshell of that is from the fear versus the running towards versus running away is over the years I've talked to many, many people that they get into that job and they're not happy for whatever reason. Sometimes it's the career, sometimes it's just the coworkers, sometimes it's the hours, whatever it is. That's always been one of the things is it has been a discussion of make sure you're running to whatever it is that you're going to as opposed to running away. Because if you run away from your McDonald's job and you end up at Burger King and you realize that you don't like that, then you're going to run away from that. And it really is it's one of those things where you need to think about what is it you as opposed to I need to get away from this. What is it that you want? You know, it's not just getting away. It's like there's something that's better than that. This is really a it is something that often you run into people like yourself or there's just like there's this life defining moment. And it usually is. It's like, you know, I was in a motorcycle crash and almost died or stuff like that. That is so almost you'd almost say rare, but shocking to get people to say, oh, I need to shift gears and focus on what makes me happy as opposed to in particular, like you even brought up what other people see. And so I'm sort of reacting to what what other people's expectations are instead of what I want. And so with you and how you present this stuff as how do you approach going into a session or a keynote when you know you want you know, I can tell you want people to change their focus in doing that without without giving them a they have a heart attack. So they have a life and death experience or something like that. But to shake people out of or is there something that you do to sort of shake them out of their rut to move to something that is that that it is it's a change in perspective and focus to focus on what do I really want? Yeah. Let me think about how to answer that question, because it's a big question. When I step on stage, my focus is adding value. I don't worry about my performance or sort of what I'm doing up there, because if I get in my head and I start thinking about what I'm doing, then I'm not focused on the reason I'm on that stage, which is it's not to look good. It's not to, you know, to be good per se. It's to deliver value. However, I can deliver value. It should be my focus when I'm up on stage. The idea of waking them up or sort of shaking or doing what might be called in psychology, a pattern interrupt, right, to get them to snap out of the current way of thinking and sort of look at things a different way, just sharing my story allows people to do that, because like any story, we instinctively put ourselves in the shoes of a protagonist or of one of the characters. So in some capacity, folks are listening to my story, but they're putting themselves, they're going, wow, what would I do? How would I react if that happened? God, what would it be like if you could sing and then you couldn't sing? I mean, I don't know what everybody thinks, but they're putting themselves in my shoes or they're painting themselves as the main character. So in a way that creates a bit of a pattern interrupt. But what will create that lasting motivation or that lasting shift is getting clear on what they want, because that first step of just simply admitting, yeah, we're pretty bad at setting goals. I like to say we set goals that sound good when we share them with our friends over cocktails. But those aren't often the real goal. Those are just good goals. And so I challenge people to stop setting good goals and start setting real goals. And when we do that, the whirlwind of life, the velocity, all the responsibilities and obligations and expectations that people have of us, those become subjugated to that real goal because it's so deeply connected and it's so inside of us that we'll do anything. We'll we'll we'll we'll barrel through any obstacle over around through under whatever it takes to get towards that goal. Philosophers would call it an autotelic goal. So auto means self and telos is Greek for goal. So the self goal. And so when we use this, what I call root goal analysis process to get to that real goal, we're distilling what we say we want down to a place where we've written this goal now on paper and we look at it and we go, I just can't distill this any further. I can't explain any other way than saying this is what I want. This is what I want. You know, it's sort of like how how do you describe, you know, why you love the person you love? I mean, you can list characteristics and but you get to a point where you go, I just I just I just love them. This is it's how I feel. We want to get to that point with the goals that we're going after. So I was thinking, I mean, just one that I had a Rolex wristwatch at one point, and then I sold it to help pay for some parts of our wedding. And I'd like one again. I really liked it. I just enjoyed the way it looked on my wrist, how I felt about having it. And I started to put myself through this Ruko analysis process because it's not a small purchase. And I was like, do I really want a Rolex or is there something else? You know, what will what will having a Rolex allow me to do or to feel or to become? What do I believe about having this thing? And it turns out as I worked my way through the process that I actually don't. I don't need it. I wouldn't say no to one. So if Rolex is listening and you'd like to send me when I will happily take it. But in terms of putting my hard earned money and effort towards getting this thing, it's actually not what I want. It's something else. So now now I can set my sights on that very clear and distilled goal and move towards that. So, you know, if you're listening to this, my challenge is what goals do you have that if you apply this framework, you might realize, wow, that's that's not actually my goal. It just sounds like a good goal. My real goal is something else. Yeah, that is a it's a beautiful story for buyer's remorse. Basically, as you go buy that, you know, you get that thing and I'm going to look great with that watch or that suit or whatever it is. And you get done and you go, wow, this it was great for 30 seconds. And it's like, OK, now I'm paying the bills for it. Or there's this other thing that came along that I really wanted that instead. And it's it's probably one of the biggest challenges of of our society, I think, because it is so much, you know, what did you do now? And especially in the social world and stuff like that, where it's, hey, I'm on this vacation. I did this thing, right. At that. And you can you can look at all of them and say, wow, that would be great until you take that next step and say like you did. It's like, OK, yeah, but is it that great? Yes, it's something I want that much. I call it the neighbor's new car. You know, so like our new car is great until the neighbor gets a new car. And then we've got the old car. Nothing materially changed about our car, except the perspective from which we're viewing it, which is now the neighbor has a newer car. And so our car is in a new car in psychology that the principle is called hedonic adaptation. And so we adapt to positive or negative stimuli. And I'm giving a very layman sort of, you know, a definition of this, because I don't want to bore people and give the long version. But so you make fifty thousand dollars, let's say, and you get a twenty thousand dollar raise. Big raise. Wow. You feel great about that. Three months later, you do not feel great about that raise. That is now your baseline expectation. And it's going to take even more money next time to get you back up to that level of feeling great. So another twenty thousand dollars raise wouldn't do it. You'd need a twenty five thousand or thirty thousand dollar raise. So that same thing happens to your point with material things. And we can also habituate negatively. We can adapt negatively to stimuli. So a great example, great story to tell about this is that so my daughter is now two years old and she the first week, I guess, we put her into daycare. She developed a pretty gnarly cold. And as new parents, we didn't know what to do, what to do about it. What to do about that. And so we called the pediatrician and they were like, does she feel warm? I said, yeah, that's a fever. You should get Tylenol dummy. And so it's just like, oh, of course, that's what we do with new parents. You know, we're a little bit obsessive. So I went to Walgreens and I looked for children's Tylenol and all I could find was flavored Tylenol. I couldn't find any regular children's Tylenol. Regular children's children's Tylenol is flavored Tylenol. And I thought, well, that's that's kind of fascinating. Why is that? It turns out it has to be flavored so that the kid takes the medicine because if it were unflavored, the kid wouldn't take the medicine. They spit it back out because it tastes yucky. Isn't that fascinating? The kid feels like crap. And if they took this medicine in the future, they would feel better, significantly better. Even though they feel like crap, they perceive that taste of the medicine to be crappier. And so they don't want it, even though that little bit is going to make them a lot of bit better later. I thought that's a fascinating analogy for how human beings make decisions and why we don't get the things that we want or why we don't do the things that we know will benefit us long term is because in many cases, it's that we perceive our current situation to be undesirable or we're not doing the best that we can, let's say. But it is our current situation. We know it. It's safe. It's warm and comfy. To do anything else would create discomfort, even though it's momentary or temporary discomfort on the way to a better end state. Many of us don't do it. That's why good goals are so dangerous because we then develop this habit of setting a goal. We say we want, we start to experience that temporary discomfort. And then we go, you know, I didn't really want that thing that much anyway. So, and we just revert back to our normal baseline, setting a root goal, setting a real goal gives us that motivation to say, you know, damn it, I want that thing. And I'm going to plow through this temporary discomfort because I know what's on the other side is better for me. And I think that's the one of the lessons that is a takeaway in my keynotes is that I think as adults, we need to get better at taking unflavored Tylenol. We just, we need to get better at doing things that yes, are temporarily crappy, you know, yucky, no good right now, but are going to make us better long term. And that's for the average person. That's for the, you know, the, the, the, the CEO or the person sitting in their ivory castle. I mean, we've got to make tough decisions. We've got to take unflavored medicine as adults. Well, I think it's part of that too, is I think more of us need to recognize it. It is that there is that light at the end of the tunnel. I think that a lot of people, they get into that rut and they're like, hey, yeah, I'm not real comfortable, but there's really nothing else out there. Everybody else is uncomfortable. So that's just, that's just life. You know, it's that jobs and work are, I think the most common one where people will say, well, yeah, I don't really like my job. I don't like it, but they said it, like it pays the bills and what are you going to do? Well, it's like, well, maybe you can do something else. You know, maybe there's something else out there that is entertains you, fulfills you is really what you want to do. And maybe there's a way to go do that and still pay the bills and do those things that you have to do, but actually, you know, and sometimes it does. It takes, it takes time. It takes pain. It takes investment. I mean, I look at simple stuff, like if you want, if you want to be a lawyer or you want to be a doctor, you got to go to school. I don't know any lawyer or doctor that said, I loved my school years. That was so much fun. Stand up late and studying hard and spending a lot of money and all of that. But they got to a point where they wanted, they got that job that they wanted to do. They, you know, they got to a point after years of practice and stuff and became a surgeon or actually any special, you know, I really want to go be an electrician. You're going to take a while to understand what it takes to be an electrician or, you know, work on air conditioners or be a plumber. There's like all of these things. There's nothing in life. It feels it's that you really want to do. That's like that where you can just, you know, overnight success. Boom, you're off and running. You got to, you sort of got to put your time into it. Yeah. It takes years to become an overnight success. And I always, I always think about the idea that Billy Joel once sucked at playing the piano. Like for him to be who he is now, he had to be really bad at that piano. You have to be bad at something to get good at something. And the dangerous part of the world we live in is that it's so easy to fill our brains and our Instagram feeds with photos and experiences of people who make it look like everything's an overnight success. And even many of the books that we read, the compelling titles are like fat to fit, the poor house to the penthouse. I mean, they make it seem like these two extremes are just bridged overnight. And they often gloss over the very difficult sacrifices, challenges, experiences, setbacks that people encounter on their way to their goals. And so I wish more folks would open up, get a bit vulnerable and talk about the messy middle, about the failures, about how they handled them, because that's really where the gold is found in these experiences. It's not, it's not the technical growth that we experience. It's the tactical growth that makes us better. It's not learning how to, like I said earlier, it's not learning how to play a piano better that necessarily makes someone a great piano bar entertainer. It's learning how to read the audience better. Sure. It's great if you are more technically gifted at the piano than another person. But if you take, I don't know, name that famous classical pianist and you put them in a piano bar outside of them, just wowing the crowd with their technical prowess in terms of creating an engaging experience, it's likely they're going to fall flat because most classical pianists play in a very different environment than piano bar performers. It's a very highly controlled environment with a highly orchestrated set list, carefully curated. It does, it's not going to change on a whim. And the audience is generally silent until the piece is over. They're just simply there to observe. They're not participating. Switch that with a piano bar environment. It's chaos. I mean, it's controlled chaos. The audience is drinking first and foremost, sometimes heavily. The audience is encouraged to make requests. They're singing along, cheering along. Sometimes they are heckling. Hopefully it's in a nice way, but sometimes it isn't. There's so much going on. It's an uncontrolled, let's call it VUCA to use a business term. It's volatile, uncertain, complex, and sometimes ambiguous as to what's going on in that room. What sounds more like the environment we all live in? The piano bar. So how do we take those tactical skills and develop them in ourselves such that we bridge the middle of that story? We have the resources to get through that messy middle. These are skills like gratitude, resilience, energy management. So understanding how to manage our physical, our psychological, our emotional energy more effectively so that we're not wasting thoughts on things that aren't going to get us where we want. Those are the skills that I don't see organizations investing in. Not many anyway. 98% of the $300 billion spend, the spend globally on training and development, it's $300 billion and 98% of it is directed towards technical skill development, job-specific skills, training you for the job you're in, how to do it better technically. So if you're an accountant, it's how to understand the new 1099 guidance or 1040 guidance, or whatever. We've just lost all of your international listeners because they're like, what are those numbers? None of that matters. But if you take two accountants, both of whom look the same on paper, one of them has higher emotional intelligence, your organization will be better off with the one who's got higher EQ. They're a better person and that makes them better professionally. So I say better people are better for business. If we grow our people, if we help them transform to become all they're capable of being, our organization grows by default, by extension. And that will wrap up this episode. I would start the next episode with my thoughts and response to his latest, that latest part of the conversation. I apologize for that. I usually like to start with the guest, but this was such a good, almost mic drop kind of moment that Greg offered. That I wanted to make sure that we stop there, give you time to really assess it and ingest it, digest it and think about that because it really is, there's really some important things that he brought up there. This whole idea of root goal analysis that we discussed, but then also as we get into the idea of him coming in and delivering to his customers what they want, the difference between being a technically gifted piano player and sitting in a concert hall versus somebody that is really more audience to tune as a piano bar singer. And it may seem, it may be something that is not, it doesn't really click with you, may seem a little foreign, but I think how he described the two environments is hopefully enough to help you get a feel for the difference in the two approaches. And maybe you realize that most of life is, as he said, it's a piano bar experience. You're not in a laboratory that is squeaky clean and everything's perfect. Things are always going wrong. Life always happens and you still have to find a way to work your way through to adjust. And if you go into your day, your job, your project with the right attitude, with that right focus, working with your customers, working with your audience, I think you'll find success much as he has done. Now you're going to hear plenty of me in the next episode to start off. So if you want to fast forward it, go right ahead. But there may be a point or two in there that is useful as well before we return to part three of our conversation with Greg Offner. Trust me, it just keeps getting better. Every episode that we have with him, you're going to be like, wow, I'm really glad I spent the time listening to Greg and getting his particular point of view. If you want to follow him more, listen to more interviews with him, see what he's about. There will be links in the show notes as always, all of his contact information as we wrap up, as we get into the part four and wrap up, there'll be some more information from him as well. But just wanted to make sure that you know that that's out there. Check out the notes. If you can't wait to get more Greg, then go right ahead, hit a couple of those sites and say hi for me. That being said, if nothing else, let's get back out to that day that hopefully is full of joy, happiness and accomplishing your goals. Go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. 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.