Stop Chasing Your Tail - How To Reset Your Progress Without Panicking

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor 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 of Building Better Businesses, but we are actually the Building Better Developers Podcast, also known as Develop-a-Nor or vice versa, depending on how you found us. I happen to be Rob Brodhead. No matter how you found me, that's who I am. One of the founders of Develop-a-Nor, also a founder of RB Consulting, where we help you figure out technology. And honestly, we're not actually worried about helping you figure it out. We figure out your business. We sit down with you. We understand what your business is. We work with you to figure out your special sauce and all your secrets so we can craft a recipe custom for you and your business through integration, simplification, automation, innovation, however the approach needs to be. It may be all of those. It may only be one of those. It may be that we give you a sheet of paper and a pencil and say, this is really all the technology you need. Probably not the case, but you never know. We look at what's out there. We spend a lot of time on technology. We know a lot of the tools are out there. We know what some of the options are and we know how to find the options as well. So even if you're in some really deep niche, we can help you figure out a solution that suits your budget, suits your customers, suits your products and allows you to make more money with spending less money or at least smarter spending of money in the technology world and all the sprawl that is out there. Now good things, bad things. A good thing is, oh, this is like a good little combo too. So let's start with a bad thing. The other day we had an order from somebody and I'm not going to say who it was, but it's sort of like an A to Z kind of place. And we got this order and we got notified as one does through these orders that they couldn't deliver the order. Well it happened to be, this was for my wife and she was actually sitting there and we were on the street and we looked down and we saw the delivery person. And so she was texting with him through the device and said, hey, I see you. I'll come get this. She goes to this guy, does not speak English. But he does speak a language that she speaks. So even speaking his native language, she is not able to get him to understand that there's probably more than one package in his car and that the one he's looking at is not hers, but there's another one in there that he needs to drop off. Didn't work out. So it took us another day before this thing showed up. The good thing is what showed up is that she had ordered a travel multi-screen laptop extender thing, which is, I know I'm getting too technical here, but it was really cool. It allows you to have like a nice, it sits on your main screen, your laptop. It opens up into a couple of nice little like, I think they're 14, 15 inch monitors, something like that. High quality, love it. And it is definitely a good way to turn your little laptop into a road warrior desktop. And I will be definitely testing that out for a while. And she will probably get another pair as well for her so that we can have like lots of lots of screens if we really want to. But you only need one screen for this guy and I'm going to let him introduce himself. So Michael, go for it. Hey everyone. My name is Michael Melosh. I'm one of the co-founders of developer NURB, Building Matter Developers. I'm also the founder of a company called Invision QA, where we help companies with software problems. You can be a software company or you can just be a run of the mill company on Main Street trying to do your business, but struggling with the technology to do your job. It could be anything from Windows isn't working or your inventory system is crashing or your website is down. We come in, we walk through you, we help you understand your problems. We help you understand your technology stack and then we will help you customize a solution to meet your needs. So along that line, I'm jealous. However, I have two 49 inch ultra wides. Unfortunately, they are only used for work, not gaming. I have game on them once in two years, which is a shame. But what you're describing is almost like the ultra wides, but for my laptop, which is beautiful. I would love to just take that with me anywhere because when I travel to different places, that would be awesome. So a little bad thing there is I don't have that jealous. Good thing, though, things have been moving along. Weather is better. Life's better. Allergies still suck. But as Rob mentioned in the pre show, new games coming out or remastered games coming out, so excited to get around to that eventually and some other gamings, because I am a gamer. I like to switch to waiting to see that Mario Kart World looks interesting. But anyway, I digress. Very excited about gamings that are coming out. Blueprints has sucked up what little time I have. But with all that being said, at least I've had good thing is I've had time to have a little slice to enjoy the things I like to enjoy. Well, the negative is. I don't have the tech you have. I'm tech envy. So I'll pass it back to you. Yes, we all have that at some point, and I'm glad to be the envy, the envy as opposed to the envy or or something like that. But I'm also not obviously not enough of a wordsmith. So instead, I'm going to continue on with the topic of this episode, which happens to be effectively don't panic. I want to talk about. This is it does get a little bit into the developer side and some of the other things, but it's regardless of your situation. This is really what what to do when you're when you're finding yourself blocked, when you find yourself in a rut, when you find yourself stuck chasing your tail, when and it's not just that you're doing it, it's when you essentially realize it. And now you're like, how do I stop? How do I stop this? You know, because if you're just chasing your tail, you could be like a little dog that's just happy as I'm chasing my tail. And then suddenly you realize I'm chasing my tail. I can't do this anymore. This is killing me or something like that. That's usually when you panic, you're like, I don't know where to go, I don't know what to do. And that's basically what we're talking about here is like when you throw your hands up, you're like, all right, I don't know where to go. I don't like where I'm at. I don't like where I'm going. I don't know how to change course, things like that. That's what I want to talk about this episode. Now, we all, I think, handle these situations differently. Now, I will tell you that I do this a lot. I like there's the Hulk line where he's like, they're like, how do you turn in the Hulk so fast? And he's like, because I'm always angry. You know, that's like me. I think there's at some point I was always stressed. So stress isn't new to me. It's just my modus operandi. I'm used to always being under fire, having pressure, got to do stuff, get it done today, things like that. It doesn't mean that I'm the most pleasant person when fires erupt and things like that. There are sometimes that dumpster fires bother me. And usually that means it's going to bother the people around me as well, which is probably more motivation for me to figure my crap out. So I'm not making everybody else miserable. The thing that I do to help fix those things is first, just scream really loud. No, you can. I think there is a value in just saying, you know what? I'm in a bad place. I'm stuck or something like that. And give yourself a minute to just be like, I'm so sad for myself. Cry tears, go like, you know, have a beer, have a big bowl of ice cream, whatever it is, it's your thing. Take a little bit of time. And the thing is, is take a little bit of time to step. Just stop. If you're chasing your tail and you can't figure out how to stop chasing your tail, then sometimes it's just a matter of just stop. It's just like sit there and sit in it for a second and go, this is not what I want to do. This is not where I want to go. And this can be with a project. It can be almost anything in your life. And from a business side, these are going to be things like I am stuck. I've got a customer that I hate and I'm trying to figure out how to get him out of my life and or her. I'll even allow it's not just gender, but you know, or this like I've been off more than I can chew or this project should is taking longer than it should or this product isn't working the way it is. There's like an on and on. There's so many ways things can go wrong and they can frustrate the living daylights out of us. However, once you essentially like own it and say, all right, not good, got to fix it. The panicked approach is in do everything. That's like, you know, it's like people are running their hair on fire and they're going away like, I'm going to die. I'm going to die. Well, you probably will, because in most movies, those are the people that get killed first. What you want to do is you want to take a deep breath and figure out. What is the path to get you to success? It is almost it is almost entirely a reset in a sense. It's like, OK, this is where I'm at. And you may not even know. So you may have to take a little bit of time to adjust to, you know, assess where you are and then say, what's the goal that I'm trying to accomplish? What will get me out of this? And then it's actually pretty simple. Then make a plan is what are the steps I need to take to get there? Now, I'm going to take something that's the say it's sort of business need, but not. And let's just take it like let's say it's a money thing because it's like it's a nice simple. So it's like, hey, I'm in too much debt or my, you know, I don't have enough funds to get this product finished for my customers or, you know, this. So it could be a business level, not enough money, or it could be a personal not enough money. Well, what you need to do is say, OK, well, I don't have enough money. And then you need to look at like assess a little bit. So is it because my income and my outgoing are out of balance? If so, this is sort of like an if and then kind of thing. You know, take this step. But it's OK if they're out of balance and I'm my income is not what my outgoing is. And I need to go probably address my outgoing. Now, this goes back to what we talked about in a prior episode where it's like sort of like an MVP requires like what's going out that I can stop and then if that's not good enough, then what's going in? How can I improve the income? So those are steps. Those are solid steps because you get to a point where maybe it's like I want to in order to get to my goal. I need to have my income outpace my outcome for two months, let's say. So, you know, that that's at least you've got to go. You set a goal, a goal line, a objective is key because now you start working with things to say, keeping that in mind, how do I get there? Now, the interesting part in all this to avoid you from falling back into panic and despair and you just curl up like a little ball is make sure that your objective is something you believe is reasonable, is doable. If it's not adjusted to something that you think that you are capable of doing, it's like it can happen. That doesn't mean it's going to be easy, but it is a realistic goal. So if your goal is I want to be a billionaire in three weeks and you've never made more than five dollars in a year. OK, unrealistic. You're not going to get there, but. Roll it back and figure out. And maybe it is maybe it's one of those like the only way I'm going to get out of this is this objective that is impossible. OK, reset your expectations. This is actually key as a business person because sometimes it's not just reset your expectations. It is let's reset my customers expectations. Maybe a hard conversation, but it's actually a very good one to have because. What you end up doing is resetting stuff for yourself, but also for those that are causing you stress, those that are part of the problem. It's getting them on the same page and being able to say, OK. We didn't get it. We're not going to get it. This seems like we've taken some wrong turns or whatever it happens to be. We need to make some adjustments. Then that will allow you to make the adjustments and also reduce some of the stress. So I'm going to stop right there and sort of toss this over. What do you think on that? So. I'm going to start with the question, how did we get here? Because the biggest problem I run into a lot a lot is. When you reach the point where you're chasing your tail, you're in that don't panic, you're in that feedback loop of what do I do? Oh, there's all these fires firefighting mode. I hate saying firefighting mode because firefighting mode and chasing your tail are kind of two different lanes. So be careful with that. You can be in firefighting mode, but not be in this feedback loop. How did we get here? We run into situations and I'm there more often than not because I'm always over extending my time and resources because we only have so much time in a day that we can get things done and we commit to something, but then something else comes along personally or work wise or whatever that changes that time. We already have committed to getting X done, but now we have something else that has taken up that time and you're freaking out because it's like, what the hell, you know, how am I going to get all this done? When I made these commitments, it made sense, but now I'm off the rails. It's like, oh, crap. You know, it could be money. It could be time. It could be you're over committed. Most of the time, my problems are over commitment and money. And unfortunately, money isn't always. In my control, I should say. I have set a lot of things in place. So to correct this problem, to help avoid a lot of these feedback loops for particular issues, money is one of the few things you can do to. Buffer yourself through feedback loops. You know, you have to pay bills, so you have a set expenditure that you have to cover every month, every year to keep the business going. So that is almost finite. Yes, there are some unexpected costs, but really running a business like the expenditures of the business are pretty finite. There are some things per project that go up and down. But for the overall business, you have a set. I need X to pay the bills. Your home life, personal bills are about the same. You have X to live, you know, mortgages, electric bill, cell phone bill, etc. It's those outliers where you overextend yourself either in business or in personal that bites you in the ass. And these money is one of the number one reasons why people go crazy. It's one of the biggest stressors in our lives, and it applies to business. It's not just personal. And it's not just about running the business. When you take on a project, you place a bid, hey, I'm going to do X to get this job done for you, and you can easily fall into the stress of we're not there. Are we there yet? You know, you may plan things out to where you have things in. You have the triggers in place to protect yourself. But even those triggers do not protect you because there's the old saying, you know, the straw broke the camel's back. There's always something. Externally, they can come in and destroy a project. It can destroy a project. It can destroy your finances. It can destroy whatever it is you're working on. And you get into that mode where it's like, like Rob said, I got to do everything. Sometimes if you get into that mode. If you're if you have a team. And you seem to be the only one yelling fire. In a movie theater and everyone else is fine, do you see fire? Or do you see gasoline and they don't see the fire? Meaning, do you see a catalyst for something that is not there or something that is potentially going to cause a problem, something out of your control? And you need to walk it back. So if people around you and say things are fine, but you're like, they're not fine, where's the happy medium? Are we out of control? You know, are you the person that is, you know, the sky is falling? And it is falling, but no one else is seeing it. Or. Are you over analyzing being too critical about where you're at, where things are? And your team is trying to tell you, hey, come back. You know, it's cool. We're calm. But there is a place where we're in between where you could be in a situation where a person sees the fire and no one else does. So there's there is a case where, yes, we're talking about chasing your tails. We're talking about don't panic. But there is a situation where someone is raising the flag. Hey, there is a fire. Things are wrong. You do need to listen, but maybe pull them aside. Or take a step back. Hey, are things really as bad as they seem? I think what you want to look at in this is from the panic point of view, because it's sometimes, yes, you're just panicking because you're panicking, but there's usually something behind that. There is some pressure. There's something needs to be done. There's something like that. And so I like to look at it as it's sort of the old, I guess, an old saw, basically of. We let tomorrow's problems worry about themselves today has enough problems of itself. I think a lot of times when we panic and things like that and actually the panic itself, when we're usually what happens when we panic is it's like we're just trying to get everything done at one time or we're just trying to like this problem has to be solved immediately. And I think that's where the challenge is, is to rein that back in because it being solved immediately is probably not actually going to solve it. It's things like I'm in the rain and so I need to solve this immediately. So I'm going to run across the street inside that building. And then you run in front of a car and you get killed. OK, you have. Yeah. You don't have to worry about the rain anymore, but you have bigger issues. And that's really the problem we have. It's we're in a situation where we're trying to get out of it and the panic, the problem with that is that we don't think rationally, that we put ourselves a lot of times in a worse situation than we were in before, or at least there's a chance because now we're not really paying attention. So our risk of getting into something we shouldn't be improves, increases quite a bit. And so that's really where it comes down to is when you're when you find yourself in this situation. You want to find that goal. But one of the things that's like and this is sort of that basic, most basic of things is find your first step that is in the right direction. So you could be spinning around and around around and chasing your tail. And so it's that stop and go, OK, I'm chasing my tail. I need to stop this somehow. OK, what am I supposed to do other than chase my tail? Oh, I'm supposed to walk down the street to that corner. OK, which orients yourself? Where's that corner? How can I get there? I don't need to get there right now, but how can I put myself so that a minute from now, five minutes from now, an hour from now, I'm closer to my goal than I am right now, that I've made some sort of progress? And this goes back to the little bit incremental baby step kind of process. Progress is just as long as we can build a little bit of momentum in the right direction is going to help us for that next step, that next step and that next step. So it really is. It seems so cliche, but it really is. Stop, take a deep breath, give yourself a second, assess where you are and then just pick a first step, because even if that goal is impossible to you right now, take a step in that direction anyways, and let's see what happens, because that at least puts you in a better situation than you were before you took that step. So that is where the challenge is today. If you're freaking out, if you've got something that's stressing you out, if you've got something that you think is going to stress you out, if you've got problems, if you've got 99 problems and working code ain't one or something like that, stop for a second and just consider what is the step, what is one little step that you can take that will put you in a better position towards that goal than you are right now. And it may be a very difficult step sometimes. It could be things like, well, I guess the first thing is I'd have to talk to my boss. OK, nobody likes unless I'm your boss, nobody likes to talk to their boss. Those kinds of things are like, what's that step? And maybe it is like, I can't talk to my boss, but that's the step that comes to me. OK, well, rain it back that instead of talking to your boss, maybe it's I'm going to sit down and start to craft an email to my boss or I'm going to think about what is it that I'm going to talk to my boss about or something that gets you moving forward, gets you off the ball, essentially of sitting there and just not being in a good place and instead saying, OK, what can I do to move myself out of this? Maybe it is just, OK, I'm chasing my tail. I don't know where I'm going to go, but at least now I'm going to chase my tail slower or something like that. I mean, sometimes it is very, very minimal. But if you chase your tail slower and slower and slower, eventually you can stop. It's just like it really is step by step by step. That is what you need to be looking for. So I think your first step and Michael knows what's coming. Send us an email at info at developernerd.com and let us know how it's going. We would be happy to commiserate with you. We would be happy to help you down a gallon of ice cream, whatever it is that helps you feel better, we would love to be there and just like be your support team and root you on and help you guys cheer you forward wherever it is you're going. It could also leave us feedback on YouTube, anywhere that you get podcasts. The out on X, we are at developer. We have a Facebook page. Yeah, we're boomers like that or whatever it is, even if we're not. We've got plenty of places to get a hold of us. Any of those places are great. Developernerd.com itself, we've got feedback forums. You can leave feedback comments on anything that's out there, whether it's videos, whether it's blog articles, whatever the heck it is. Love to hear from you. And we'd love to hear how your challenges are going. These have been and honestly, if you get the newsletter, you note that that's this has been there been a lot of interesting challenges in this season. And I think that even if you pick a couple of them, you will find a huge improvement in your business because we've had some actually really good things that we've stumbled across as we've gone through the season and had some topics and some related challenges. That being said, go out there and have yourself a great day, 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.