Building Better Developers

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 into a new year. Now, whenever you're listening to it, yes, you may be way beyond this new year, but this thing is releasing the beginning of 2024. Yes, we have gotten that far into the 20s. For those of you that were around here around when it was 1999 moving into 20, to the year 2000. We have been through more than a few new years since then, some good, some not as good. Now, being a new year, it is a time for us to think about what we're going to do in this year ahead. At least that's a habit everybody seems to have, or if it's not a habit, it's at least a fun thing to do. We're going to do those things called New Year's Resolutions and all of the things we're going to do to make our life better this year. Now hopefully, you have spent the last, probably the last quarter, assessing where you were last year, where you're going this year, or at least where you want to go this year, and got some things already in place to say, hey, I'm sort of thinking about this as a fresh start so what am I going to do going into the new year? And that's key. One of the things I want to talk about in this little special episode is let's go into the year thinking that what we did in the past is not as critical as maybe it is. Let's think about that as, hey, it's done, it's over, there's nothing we can do about it. However, we can learn from it. And so let's set maybe our resolutions or our goals or even our initial schedule as we get into the year. Let's do it with the idea of where do I want to be? Not where am I necessarily or where have I been, but where do I want to go? And like everything that we talk about, let's try to do this today. Let's try to get a start, even if it's five minutes on whatever your new goals are, and let's get a start right away on them. Go ahead and pause right now. Walk down the street, whatever it is you need to do to get that five minutes in, and then come back and then continue the episode. Or if you can listen to this while you're doing it, do that thing, that task, work on it while you're listening to the podcast. Because that is going to be your best chance of getting a habit going or getting yourself going in the right direction is take the first step. Go ahead, start today. Now we can spend a lot of time thinking about, well, okay, there's a lot of things I want to do. What am I going to do? What do I want to do? How can I improve? And if you're like me, you have a long list of ways you can improve. So one of the things you need to do is cut things off of that list. Or essentially, it's not really cut them off. It's put them on a shelf and say, hey, I'm going to tackle that later. So take a few items. If you've got to, if you've put together a list or there's some things you want to do, take a few or maybe even one. If it's something big, like maybe you want to, I don't know, maybe you want to quit smoking or you want to go on a lose X number of pounds, lose 50 pounds or run a marathon or whatever. There's all these things. Build a software product, write a book, start a podcast. There's so many things that we can put on our list and say, this is something I really want to do. Pick one or two or three. But ideally, pick one. Particularly if you've struggled with resolutions in the past, pick something and say, this, I am going to actually tackle this year. And if you're struggling with that, think about how you're going to feel three months from now, six months from now, a year from now, if you've been doing that thing. Because I think future payoff is a huge motivator when you can think about that. If you look at some of the people that have been incredibly wealthy, now some have won a lottery in a sense where they've got like a really good product or they've had a really good service or they've really connected with their customers or they've got certain skills that are very marketable. There are also a lot of, as they sometimes refer to as like, you know, quiet millionaires and things like that, they didn't have a big windfall of money. They didn't generate a whole lot. But what they did is they focused on what is life going to be like in a year or five years or 10 years if I don't make this purchase or if I do make this purchase. And a lot of times, and I'm just going on a financial example, so hopefully this isn't something that you see, it can be applied in other places. What they do is they look at and they say, hey, if I buy that magazine today, I'm going to spend a buck. But what is that buck worth a year from now? If I take that dollar and I save it or invest it, what can I do with that that will cause that money to grow as opposed to essentially giving it away today for that magazine? Now it may be an investment. Maybe that magazine is going to increase in value. OK, but it's making that decision. It's making that choice. If it's food, it may be, hey, it's going to taste good to eat this chili dog right now, but what's that going to do to my diet? Do I need to, you know, what is it going to take to work that weight off? If it's a project, if it's a, you know, if you've got a service or a product or a business that you're working on, I can go watch TV for a half hour. But what happens if I don't and instead I take that half hour and I apply it to my project? And this one, this is where that secret to success lies because we can do that in really small choices. So it could be stuff like I'm not really, I really, I like watching TV. I don't really want to give up an hour of TV. OK, what happens if you only watch 45 minutes of TV and you take 15 minutes of that and you put it on that business and you invest it in yourself or you go exercise or maybe you can double dip in a sense that maybe instead of just laying on a couch watching a TV show, you can watch your TV show while you're, you know, walking on a treadmill or something like that? I see this all the time. I, there's a lot of times I will go to gyms and I will see people that have their headphones on and they're watching, they're watching a movie, they're watching their favorite show while they are working out in some way, form or fashion. And so there are things like that we can do. We can combine and batch things that will then make it a lot of times much more likely for us to be successful in our resolution. Particularly if we can tie something we like to that thing that we're trying to build, then we get that sort of payoff. It's immediate. So a workout thing is something where it's like, hey, I want to start working out for 30 minutes a day. Well, if you link that to during that 30 minutes, I'm going to watch my favorite show, then you're like, hey, I get a treat of watching my favorite show. Oh, and by the way, yes, I'm also exercising. Now, not everything works that way, but that like, that small doses, the increments is I think where we can really find a way to make resolutions stick. And this comes from somebody who I have done a pretty darn good job in the last, I don't know, 20 years now probably of making progress on resolutions. And part of it is because I think about it beforehand and it's something I really want, but or want to change or want to do or experience or whatever it is. But it's also like, one, take that first step and two, find ways to make that a regular thing. Find some, a lot of times it's find something that you can do or focus on that is such a positive that you're like, hey, I want to do this thing that I'm not used to doing. Now sometimes that's going to be pretty easy. It's not something, you know, something you want to do anyways. So it's not like you're having to offset some painful thing. Now, if you don't like to work out, for example, then yeah, you may need to have something sort of big to say, hey, at least I'm also doing this fun thing like watching a TV show or something like that. With the business thing, it can be stuff where it's like, it can be drudgery. And particularly when you're like, you know, in the trenches of your business and trying to design stuff and thinking through things and building up marketing materials or all the little details that can come into it. But the bonus there is if you do it in little pieces and it's like you go do it, you know, chug your way through it, like spend a little time really working on it. And it's like, yeah, it's tough. But then 15 minutes later, you're done and you made progress. And now you've got it out of the way. It's almost like pulling a tooth. It's just like, okay, yeah, this is a little bit painful, but it's only for a short period of time. So I think that's the other thing that you get. Not only do those little increments build up and eventually become big increments, big changes that you can make, that also means that it's less risk or less investment per day let's say to do that. It really, if you spend any time really looking at your day, it is really not that hard to find 15 minutes to do the thing that you want to do. And you may feel like it is, but if you balance that with what happens if I do this thing, let's say three months from now, if I've done this thing every day, what does that look like? Because then that daily cost that may seem like, okay, it's a little bit, but it's probably not. It's going to be very much offset by the idea that like, wow, I'm going to be in this position in maybe as soon as a month or two months or three months. Weight loss is like a great example because it's like, hey, if I give up, like maybe you're a sweets person and so I'm going to give up sweets or let's just say you eat three chocolate chip cookies every day. And instead you say, okay, I'm going to eat two chocolate chip cookies every day instead. What change is that going to make? Now here that's one, like that's not a whole lot of a change. And in doing so a month from now or two months from now, if you're, and I am not a dietary expert, I'm just using this as an example, but let's say that you just eat one less chocolate today per day. And then a month from now you're 10 pounds lighter. Is that a good trade off? If you're building a business, what if you take, let's say you take 15 minutes out of your lunch, every your lunch break every day, five days a week for the next month, what kind of progress can you make on your, your product or your service? If you have then, you know, whatever that's going to be five to, you know, five to eight hours of work on it. Now it may not seem like a lot, but it's the kind of thing that if you can get a little bit then you can, you can make some progress on it and it may take time. So it could be something like if you wanted to write a book, if you spend 15 minutes a day writing and it's going to take you, let's say overall writing a book is a hundred hours of effort. If you spend 15 minutes a day, then basically, you know, you're getting, it depends on how you do it, but let's say do it six days a week. So you get an hour and a half of work per week. That still means that, you know, yeah, it's going to take a while, but a year and a half from now you have a book. And that's, that seems like a long time, but I think you'll also find that as you get into this, that little, those little increments, it's easy to grow those to bigger increments. So if you do 15 minutes a day for the first month, it's really not that hard to grow to 30 minutes a day in the second month. And again, this is from experience's site. If it's really painful, it's something you really don't want to do, then yeah, it's hard to grow from 15 to even 20 minutes. But if it's something that you want to do, particularly when you start seeing the payoff, you will find excuses to get some extra time to address that or to work on that. You will find other ways to essentially snowball that effort. It will become something where you're like, hey, I'm really, I'm like seeing a payoff on this. I want to see more or I want to see it faster because that's who we are. So as we go into the new year, all I can ask you to do because, hey, I want to see you guys become better developers, better people, better whatever it is that your goal is. I'm there. I'm cheering you on. I want to see that happen. And I think the best way to start the year is take that first step. And maybe while you're taking that first step, figure out what is it going to look like for you to alter your schedule or make a few adjustments so that you can take a step like this every day and just even start slow, like say for the next week or for the next month. And then as you're getting into this, then you can always assess it and say, okay, can I do this? Do I continue? Can I grow it? Because those are the, those little steps, those baby steps, everybody has to take it. I don't care how successful you are. I don't care. Actually, if you fail miserably, whatever it is, you got to take a step. And when you take a step in the right direction and you're able to continue to do that, you're more likely to eventually make success because guess what? Every day then, you're moving closer to that, that lofty goal that you've set for yourself. So as we go into the next year, maybe set a lofty goal for yourself. Think about something that you wish you had done this time last year. What is it that you could have done last year that you didn't, that you really wish you had now because you would be in a certain position or have a certain thing done. And maybe that can be your motivation this year to say, okay, this time next year, I'm going to be able to look back and say, yes, I did that. Whatever it is. If you have any questions, comments, anything that you would like to share with us, or if you just need somebody to periodically, you know, cheer you on and help you out with those steps, feel free to drop us a line at info at developinure.com. Because as we go into the new year, we're taking our baby steps as well. Some of them are built off of things that we started last year. Some of them are new directions that we're going. But just like we ask you to do, we're getting started on these things. We're moving forward and our goal is to get to the end of the year and look back and say, cool, we got a couple of things done. Hopefully you'll be able to join us in that celebration. That being said, let's dive into our year. Let's go out there. I'm going to give you a few minutes. I'm like cutting this one a little short. So take those minutes and apply them to whatever it is that you're thinking about as a goal for the year. And 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-Nor 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. Please check out school.developanor.com. That is where we are starting to pour a lot of our content. We've taken the lessons, the things that we've learned, all of the things that make you a better developer, and we're putting it there. We have a range of courses from free short courses up to full paid boot camps. All of these include a number of things to help you get better, including templates, quick references, and other things that make us all better developers.