Focusing on positives, reframing challenges as opportunities for growth

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Well, hello and welcome back. We are starting a new season. This is season 13, lucky number 13, and to offset 13's unlucky history and story, we're going to focus this episode, this season actually, on positives. We are going to take a little different look at things that we struggle through, more or less on a daily basis as developers, and look at pulling the positive out of some of these things. And yes, it does come somewhat from this time. Recently, we're still actually, as I'm recording this, still in the middle of the whole coronavirus stuff. People have been locked down, people have lost jobs. Life is just not normal, or there is a new normal or something like that for a lot of people. So I think it's a good time for us to take a step back and maybe look at some positives and try to get a little bit of different focus, get off of the negatives and some of the challenges that we face. As I go through this season, I'm going to look at things that we generally, well, we'll say complain about, or at least we don't look forward to them. And it may include the classics like meetings, and when there's a bug, trying to debug it and track it down, looking for a job, things like that. There are a lot of things that we do that we don't necessarily look forward to. Some of these come from our makeup, what makes us good developers, what makes us want to be developers, and particularly if you have that entrepreneurial spirit, the things that us to go out and find problems, solve them, build a solution, something that's useful, something that has high quality and that we can be proud of, our babies basically that we sent out there to solve problems in the world. And with that focus, there are some other things that we still have to do, but we tend to see them as taking away from our primary focus. And this is not unique to developers or technology people. Everybody has their strengths and their weaknesses. And within their jobs or at least the work that they do, there are going to be some things that they, hopefully that they like and some which they, there's always going to be some things I think in every job that you don't like. But maybe if you don't have the right job, there may not be a lot of stuff that you like, but it is just a little bit more of, there's some things that you don't enjoy. And then there's some things that you just downright dread. And so it varies depending on what you're looking into. But you think about for us as developers, it's sort of the standard to some extent is that we like writing code and building solutions and working with computers and not as much with people. And while that may not be you in particular, if you just use a broad brush approach, you could see where that would be something that people on a whole would like or dislike based on their bent. Think about, for example, I was out talking to a car sales guy the other day and talking about cars and what was good and what wasn't and talked a little bit about financing and stuff like that. And he said, no, that's not me. We got a guy for that. There's another guy that deals with all that stuff. He says, I deal with cars. That's what I'm comfortable with. I don't deal with numbers because I just don't do them very well. I don't remember them. I don't have enough meaning behind them in that. So I do what I do. We've got another guy that does what he does. And that's sort of what we run into. We run into things that we do. And in a lot of these cases, we don't necessarily have, in this case, quote, a guy that does that. We may. There may be some things that we don't do depending on what the size of the company is. So maybe we don't do a lot of QA. Maybe we don't have any dealings with customers directly. Maybe we don't do any sales or marketing or anything like that for our job, for our product. But we do still have those kinds of tasks that we have to do. Even if you're a great developer, you may get and you have a job that you love. You could have a company that goes under that you get laid off and then you have to go look for a job. And maybe you don't like interviewing, but you're going to have to. So we want to look at going in these situations with a positive attitude. I'm hoping that as we go through this season, as we walk through the challenges that we'll say, which is again, sort of an optimistic positive approach as opposed to problems or struggles, you call it a challenge and suddenly it does change a little bit, maybe your mental attitude going into it. But I think there's a lot of value in that. I think that we have to realize, we accept that there are things that are difficult, that take work, that may not be what we would enjoy doing, but there's a positive to them and that actually those things even do, those are just like, that's the spice of life. If you went through life and you had no challenges, then it would get very boring very fast. And if you disagree, go find a video game, just about any video game that has a quote God mode or something like that where you're unbeatable. And how long are you going to be interested? If you can't lose, if you, whatever you do always works out, then it just, there's no challenge. There's nothing, you're not going to learn anything. And pretty quickly you're probably going to be bored because more or less everything becomes, I've done this before. So this is, this is not just a pragmatic approach to things and saying, Hey, there's some things that we want to accept and that we have to do and that we all have our, we'll call it our grunt work or something like that. There's always the dirty work or whatever that everybody has to do as part of a job. The things that are not really what we want to do, but we have to do them. Instead of just agreeing that we have to do this, I want to look at these topics and really look at how you can make them work for you. Looking into them with a positive of, Hey, I've got to do this, but when I come out of it, here's some things that it's, that are going to make me a better developer in doing whatever this task is and not just, you know, a more patient or understanding developer because you've just gone through a really not fun series of work, but actually where even these things make you a better developer. Now this doesn't mean you're going to turn around and say, Oh man, I love this. I want to be doing all of these things all the time. I didn't like them before, but now that I see that they make me a better developer, I want to do it every minute of every day. No, we're not going to go to that point. That's unrealistic. Just because you're advancing and becoming a better developer does not mean that you're enjoying necessarily that process every step of the way, but I do want you to understand that in your frustrations, in your moments that try your patience, that there is some good coming out of this that you are even in your, we'll call it your darkest moments. If we want to over dramatize it, even in those, you are becoming a better developer in going through these things. You go through these trials and you do become a better developer. You're a better developer on the other end. And this may seem, I don't know, commonsensical or something like that. I mean, if you look at anybody that has achieved anything anywhere, there was always a challenge. There were always dark moments. There were always those points where they could have quit, but they didn't. Now if you're getting paid, you may have maybe quitting is not really realistic because you have to put food on the table, things like that. But there is a, and this is part of why this season has come about. There is a cost and it's actually, you can see articles on it, you know, healthcare and medical and stuff like that. There's a cost to going into something with a negative attitude. I think in productivity and I think it can be shown. I don't know if that's as, it's as easy to show in a scientific way, but there is definitely health related stuff as far as, you know, stress changes how we think and how just the chemical balance and so how we react to things. And it also just negative tends to build on itself. It has a momentum. So if you go into something with a positive attitude, that starts you off with a momentum towards positive things. If you go into it with a negative attitude, you build a momentum towards being more negative. It's not quite the idea of a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it is very close to that. If your focus is on the positive, you're more likely to find positive things. If your focus is on the negatives, it's more likely to find negative things. And now it's not that this season wants to become the season of being a life coach or anything like that. But I think there is value in us looking at some of these things we've done that we don't enjoy and realizing that there is a positive that comes from it. And for a variety of reasons. Number one, and part of what prompted this besides it's being, you know, unlucky 13 and some things like that, and me wanting to just have a sort of upbeat kind of season. I spent a lot of time recently dealing with people that are, they're entry level, we'll say, you know, they may not be exactly entry level. They've got varying levels of education and things like that. But for the most part, they are new into this field. They are going into a situation where, you know, obviously everybody would love to hire people that have experience. And these are people that really don't have experience or have minimal experience. And I want you to be able to take this season and apply it to what you've done, particularly if you struggle to find where you have experience, particularly experience that you can talk to specifically. And hopefully this season will help you enhance that. And just as an example, and we will go into a lot of these. Let's just go, let's go back to the debugging example that talked about. If you've written an application at all and had to debug it basically at all, then there is a skill that you learned while you were doing that. I mean, you may have had some related skill, but once you actually went into it, there are things that are useful to talk about in an interview where you can talk about the problem you were trying to solve. The challenges, the bugs that occurred, the thought process that you went through to debug it, to find the actual problem, the root of the problem, and then fixing it. And all of that is a story kind of experience, which is the best kind of thing to have when you walk into an interview. If you're looking for somebody to hire you for a project or for a job, and you have stories about what you've done. One, they're going to be more memorable. Two, they're going to be more relatable. And three, they tend to give, I don't know if, I guess have more weight or be more impressive than simply a laundry list of skills. Think about it. It may be hard to put yourself on somebody's shoes, but if you've got somebody that says they've got 10 years of experience building, say, in the lamp stack. So they've got 10 years of experience with Linux and Apache and MySQL and PHP. And then you've got somebody else that has five years of experience. But instead of listing that just they have five years of experience, they talk about the projects that they've been on, the problems that they face, the solutions that they've come up with. Maybe some of the interactions they had with teams and customers and managers and bosses and things like that. That quickly becomes something that is much more real to the listener or has the feel of being real more than the person that just lists a bunch of skills. And now those may be extreme examples because there are going to be some more details for that 10 year person. You're going to have more details in just listing out those skills. But if it really just ends up being a laundry list of, I worked on projects A, B, and C, and here's the technologies in each of them, versus the other person that's got five years of experience and they talk about those projects. They actually go in and they turn them into instead of just a quick summary, they actually have a story about each of those projects. That person's going to be much more memorable and probably even though they may not have near the, or they don't have the experience and maybe they don't have near the value to the employer, they're not as much of a veteran and they may have more things that they're going to struggle through or more challenges they will run into than that veteran with the 10 years of experience. I would put money on most cases, that person with the five years is going to get hired. They're going to be more memorable, more relatable, dare I say more likeable. And so instead of sort of forgetting about the things that we don't enjoy doing, instead of just sort of pushing those inside and focusing on what we've enjoyed, the positives, I think this is a season where we can really spend some time thinking about the negatives, the challenges, the things that we didn't enjoy and how those still are key indicators that we have become a better developer. Those are still a very important part of our story and if we don't remember them and maybe even glorify them a little bit, then we are selling ourselves short. I think there is a huge value in being someone that can present challenges and difficult times in a positive light in a way that shows that yeah, we went through this, but it made us better. But again, think about the person that's failed over and over and over again. And maybe they finally got one success. Well if they focus on the failures as just being failures, we didn't do this, we didn't do that, we screwed up here, we screwed up there, this was a mistake, we messed up over there. If you focus on the negative, that's very different from focusing on how you dug yourself out of those holes that you got into, even if you were the one that got yourself into the hole in the first place. Because instead of focusing on everywhere that you failed, it's simply a change of looking at everywhere that you were knocked down and you got back up again. And that is the kind of spirit, the kind of attitude, the kind of drive that people like, they want around them, they want to hire that. They want to build teams like that. That resilience, that desire to overcome whatever your challenges are is a marketable skill and trait and one that's desirable by employers and vendors and stuff like that that would maybe want to hire you on. So let's not undersell this stuff just because we didn't enjoy it. We're going to take this season, we're going to look at these things that, well, we didn't have a great time talking about them, going through them, dealing with whatever the challenge was. However, there are ways that we can look at it, that we can view it. And now that we've paid the price, that we've suffered through those painful times, we've done those things we didn't enjoy, we can actually turn them into a positive for us. And in the end, make it something where you can essentially say, okay, that was worthwhile. I didn't enjoy it while I was in it, but afterwards, the gains that I made, the steps that I took towards being a better developer make it worth that time. That is the mosaic that creates you. That background is what makes you unique and what makes you relatable and even hireable. So that's what we've got to look forward to. We're going to talk about some things that are not necessarily the funnest things, but we're going to find ways to look at them and say, this is why they are valuable to us. And this is why we should bring these up in conversations and interviews and look at them as ways that we became better developers. Challenge of the week. Look back at your last week, say in the last seven days or whatever, your last business week, we'll say some of the challenges that you had. And then think to maybe if you've had a conversation with somebody recently about work, what was your focus? Did you talk only about the cool things that went on? Did you complain about the things, the challenges that you met, that you faced? Or did you maybe talk about the challenges that you faced and how you overcome it, overcame them and how you turned, as they say, life gave you lemons and you made lemonade out of it. There is a nature that we have and I think going into this season and by we, I mean, each of us individually, we have our natures. We're optimists or pessimists or realists or whatever you want to say. And there's varying points along that spectrum. But I think as we go into this season, it's helpful to spend a little time and do a little self-assessment and see where you fall because that will be an interesting light to shine on yourself as you go through these episodes and these challenges. And I think that's one of those things that if you know yourself and you know your tendencies, it will help you frame the things that we're going to talk about in a way to make them strengths for you. When you go in an interview, that these are going to be things that you can use to highlight who you are and why you are valuable to whoever it is that you're pitching yourself as as an employee. And that being said, it's time to get back to it. It's time to go back work, whether it's fun or drudgery today, and look forward to some upsides and some positives as we move forward. Try to bring a little sunshine into those rainy days. But as always, have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. There are two things I want to mention to help you get a little further along in your embracing of the content of Developineur. One is the book, The Source Code of Happiness. You can find links to it on our page out on the Developineur site. You can also find it on Amazon, search for Rob Brodhead or Source Code of Happiness. 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 Developineur.com if you would like more information. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developineur podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, and other podcast venues, or visit our site at Developineur.com. Just a step forward today is still progress, so let's keep moving forward together.