So today's show is going to be a little bit of an experiment in me trying to chill out because I'm pretty tightly wound all the time. stories so that's my goal stories fun stories so as you know if you saw the show last week we got a new house it's on a river and i took my best friend Plus David, who's in the community here. I don't think he's here right now. Where's the drink? Oh, all right. The drink is here. It's appropriately in a Twitch cup.
and it's irish coffee today so we have a i'm trying to use up leftover uh alcohol like little bottles that have like almost nothing in them and there's some kinsale irish whiskey which is not the best irish whiskey in the world but it's perfectly good in coffee with baileys and cream
It's a little bit hot right now. Got to take the insulated lid off and give it a minute so I don't totally burn the hell out of myself. Anyway, back to the story. So... we live on this river you can google it look it up it's called the puyallup river now puyallup's an indian word and like difficult doesn't it's not spelled like you would think but anyway there it is in chat
so this is a short river it comes off mount rainier and it's fed by glaciers um and so it flows perversely when it hasn't been raining and it's been hot and sunny the river goes up because more of the ice melts But anyway, my friend David, he's taking an overseas assignment with his company. He's moving to London. He's actually on a plane to London right now. He's going to be gone for two years. So we held our housewarming party for our new house yesterday. No, Sunday. And we said, look.
why don't we have a last fling you bring your kayak and we'll kayak down this river together so we got his kayak and we took it up river and this river is not rough it's got virtually no rapids but it is pretty fast and i said to him i said dave really there's only one thing you got to do which is there are some trees near the edge don't get pushed into them because they'll roll you you know they'll scrape you out of your kayak
um so it's about an hour trip and with the current we go about six miles so so for our for the rest of the world 10 kilometers it's a 10 kilometer trip but it only takes about an hour because the current's pretty strong So wouldn't you know, basically the first available tree, he goes into it sideways and gets rolled out of his kayak, loses his glasses, making him blind for the rest of the trip.
luckily he's a good friend and he's a good sport uh he's a good sport and um he said well the rest of this kayak trip is a trust building exercise because i'm gonna have to rely on your voice i can't see shit so uh we got down fine and then we had a nice party but i thought while i waited for the audience to come in and they're now here i'd give you a little vignette and i do have this vision now i don't have the right equipment so i don't know how i'm going to pull it off yet
But I'm thinking this is an urban river. It runs through town and it's only an hour and it would totally be possible to live stream a trip down it. I just need to figure out. how i'm gonna mount the camera on the kayak because it's totally possible and i could be reading chat here and you could be watching the river oh i'm sure it can be done it's not It's not hard. I don't even need a battery for an hour. Yes, if you can live stream SCA Combat, I can do a kayak.
Anyway, now the coffee has cooled off and is much better. I got to go slow, though, or I'll be slurring my words by the end of this. It's all right. I was talking to my mods earlier. and i was teasing him i said i definitely need a couple of the mods here today because i've got an inflatable hot tub and we're going to do a hot tub stream but turns out that's false advertising we're not So what we are going to do is I'm on a new kick. You may notice I've been streaming a little bit less.
and that's because i've decided i'm only i've done a lot of streams and i feel like some of them i'm repeating because there's only so much career advice i can give that you know i've done the magic loop stream i've done a lot of the others they're on youtube there's 100 videos there
So what do I have to say that's new? And when I don't have anything... to say that's new i'm not going to say anything instead i'm going to work on building the mentor network so most of you are familiar with the mentor network a lot of you are here today are in it if you're not familiar you can go watch those videos or chat can fill you in
We're going to have a meeting tomorrow night of the people who volunteered to help us develop it to try and get the first dev sprint going so that we can build the technology to let it scale out. I heard from somebody today who thought maybe they could get us free access to a piece of software. I could do viewer call in. I do have a lot of this is an entire page, as it turns out, of.
guests i have lined up and i do have some cool guests lined up i haven't been doing that for a while but i need to um So I'm a little delinquent on organizing with guests, honestly, which is what I need to do. Guests that can add something to the conversation because I've added what I have. If you follow me on LinkedIn, which you should, simply because LinkedIn is where a lot of business happens, but I will link you to a post I made. And it's in chat right now.
And hopefully that will take you to the post I made. It's short. You can read it in another window if you're not on mobile. But basically, here's what it says. It says, has figured out how to really educate and develop its people um i ask on linkedin where i have a huge network and one or two people were able to give me examples where some company or another has targeted development so like amazon aws has pretty good training for how to be an aws expert now
do they have good training for how to be a better manager do they have good training for how to be a better visual designer how to gain emotional intelligence um all the you know how to be a better financial analyst all the other things you need in a career depending on your job not necessarily but they've got that one thing dialed in um and so good news uh i figured this out it's not a surprise but companies have not really figured out how to develop their people systematically now
why does this matter well people have always had to learn on the job but in the old model kind of pre-internet you got a college degree you learned english or accounting or whatever computer science although it wasn't a thing you learned engineering and pretty much shit didn't change for the rest of your life so you were fine once you knew how to do double entry accounting that was a skill you could make a living on
from age 22 or whatever when you got out of school to 65 the same was true for mechanical drafting or whatever this is no longer true right technology changes super quickly uh all of these skills now get updated um rather rapidly your average career if you go to school now
you'll graduate somewhere between 20 and 25 roughly and you probably have a 40 year career after that um if you think about most of you listening many of you are not 40 years old good for you um but i am so i can tell you 40 years ago there were no cell phones uh there was no internet There was barely like, they were just starting to figure out like connecting machines with dial-up and 1981, like there weren't really much for home computers of any type yet.
So, I know we were banging rocks together to make sparks to light fire for our dinner and we were glad to have fire. The point is, so much has changed. Eight-track tapes were still a thing, which you'll have to Google to find out what an eight-track tape was, maybe. Anyway, that's fine. bad transient technology pre-dvd which is also gone and dead so what's my point in business now you have to keep self-educating because the degree you get is going to be worthless later
Not that some of the basic skills won't apply, or if you've learned some math or learned some chemistry, those things aren't going to change. Or if you've learned some English literature, Wordsworth and Keats and so on, Shakespeare is still going to be people. but a lot of the what are called functional skills are going to be outdated so if you learn a piece of software useless in five years if you learn a way to build chips useless if you learn to work on internal combustion engines
Turns out that'll be useless too. And so, yeah, 8-track tapes do sound like crap. So the point of this is you're going to have to learn to self-educate. Yet. no company is very good at doing this now there are a few external companies that are starting to do a little bit in this space So there's Coursera, there's University of Phoenix, there's Udemy, I think it is, and Udacity. Like, people are trying. And God bless them, I want them to succeed. But the bottom line is...
Your degree or your education is going to become outdated and no one else right now has a system to teach you new stuff. So good news, bad news, that leaves it to you. Now, I want to give some framing and motivation because some of you are going to be like, shit, I just got out of school. I don't want to do that. Got it. I'm going to appeal to something you probably care about, money. First, though, I want to do a little framing.
think about the amount of time and effort you put in if you went to college or if you're going to college to choosing a college then choosing what you're going to major in like oh well is it going to be english or is it going to be history or is it going to be science or is it going to be engineering etc and then choosing classes do i want to take psych 101 or do i want to take philosophy
Or do I want to take another elective in my space and take more accounting or finance or marketing or whatever it is you do, more biology? You actually spend a lot of time planning, picking, choosing. Then you get to the work world.
And nobody does any of this for you. There are no majors anymore. There's career paths, which is kind of like a major. But in terms of your education, there's no major anymore. There's no curriculum. There's no graduation requirements. There's no one to tell you like, oh, you need this many courses.
hours across this many years in these subjects with this blend of electives and poof will bestow on you a ba or a bs or if you're in europe a diploma blah blah blah that doesn't exist in work there's no one there to tell you so um what the hell are you gonna do about that and i want to motivate you with a couple stories um
of what you don't want to be and then we'll go to the solution so back in the 80s when i first went to college i went to college in the well-known steel making city pittsburgh pennsylvania and uh but by the 80s all the steel making had gone offshore by the way andy thank you for the prime sub and the 10 months of subscription i really appreciate that support And I love prime subs. So I went to school in this steel city where all the mills were closed.
And some of you have heard this story before, but they used to do what are called man on the street interviews, where the local news station would go out and stick a microphone in some guy's face and ask him about some issue. And I noticed that a common thing these folks standing on the street corner would say is, well, when the mills reopen, comma.
And then some statement of future hope and glory. I'm going to buy a new house. This problem with crime in our neighborhood will go away. Our children will be better educated. We'll be able to invest in schools. Whatever the hell it was. When the mills reopen, comma. But in fact, the mills were never going to fucking reopen. They were gone. They had been torn down.
If you know what a Superfund site is, most of them were Superfund sites. Superfund was a government may still exist. It was an environmental protection agency fund. of money to clean up toxically polluted land that was so polluted no private company.
could ever do it yes super fund was super fun someone super fun super friends too it needed the super friends as well because basically you had mills that have been dumping various toxic chemicals um into the soils for decades and now they were gone and this land is in the middle of the city and they're trying to figure out what to do with it hey let's build a park on it we'll have three-headed kids um so
Don't be hopeless like that. And there are a couple of books I talk about. If you're wondering about this, read a book called Who Moved My Cheese? It talks about people who can't adapt.
so okay let's get to the point you're going to have to adapt and learn how the hell do you do it well good news this morning i created a recipe i want to share with you the conclusion from all i've said is your future education depends on you it can't depend on your boss he may or may not care it can't depend on your company they usually don't invest by the way why don't companies invest this is in my linkedin post if you went and read it
But why don't they invest? Well, number one, they don't know how. Number two, unless they're gigantic, they can't develop their own courses. And number three, they are terrified that if they educate you, all you're going to do is take that education and either stick them up for a raise. Or go to another company and get a raise. So from a corporate viewpoint, sadly, it looks like a losing game. It looks like, oh, if we invest in you and educate you.
you'll probably either want more money from us or you'll want more money somewhere else. And either way, we either end up paying you more money or we end up losing you to someone else who pays you more money and we have to hire. Now, this is a narrow myopic view. Someone in chat said myopic. It's completely true. Horribly myopic. Because what really happens is if you feel like a company is investing in you and you...
They are going to pay you more. They should because you're getting stronger. You're delivering more value. You should be paid more. That's totally fair. But the best way to keep people is to create reasons why you can afford to pay them more because they're delivering more value.
Unfortunately, companies can't figure this out. The general way companies handle this is they tell you where you suck. They give you a review that tells you all the things you're not doing. And then... they give you a bunch of work and a bunch of pressure to fix that and they basically say you need to fix these things but their ideas of how to help you are very weak usually so that's my that's my usual experience with companies um And their level of investment. Now.
why invest well and why start now by the way if you are young i saw a few people weigh in and say they're 40 but whatever whenever you are in your career why on earth you just got done with your degree why would you start this now well first if you get behind it's really hard to come back But second, you want to have a level of investment and a plan across your whole career. It's always easier to stay on top of the cutting edge and that will lead to you being paid more and promoted faster.
this is not hard to figure out anytime a new project comes up and someone asks oh who knows this language or who wants to learn it if you can be the volunteer magic loop style who says yes me i know this stuff or i want to learn that or i will go learn it on my own you will get the opportunity and other people won't and um that will lead magic loop again go see that video if you don't know it that will lead to your promotion so we'll stick the short version of the magic loop in chat
You really just do those five steps. And in this case, step two or step four is where learning comes in. In either step two or step four, you're going to learn something new. Okay, so if you know the book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, the final habit in the book is called sharpening the saw.
the idea of this analogy is if your job is to cut wood you get a saw you start cutting wood you cut a log you cut a log you cut a log you cut a log eventually the saw gets dull and so it's cutting slower So it actually, the best way to cut wood at that point is a little bit slightly illogical.
on the surface which is the best way to cut more wood faster is to stop cutting wood and go sharpen the saw because when you come back with a sharp saw you'll make up the lost time and more Everyone can understand that analogy in sharpening the saw, but strangely, in the workplace, employers don't seem to be able to...
figure out the equivalent idea that at some point it's better to have the person stop work learn a skill an ability a technology a tool and then go back to work faster this is lost because magically you're supposed to do that all yourselves and people don't know how to educate you. So let's get to the specific recipe. I've talked about why do this. It doesn't need to be complicated.
to educate yourself throughout your career you need to do three things one set aside time it's going to take time two determine what it is you want to learn note this changes over time you learn some stuff you move up in your career you need to learn different stuff that's okay determine what you need to invest you can think of this as a college analogy
of determining what courses you're going to take oh i'm going to take a course in human relations i'm going to take a course in accounting i'm going to take a course in marketing And then the key is to stick to this systematically over time. Here's where it gets interesting. How much time? Well, ask yourself honestly, if you're post-school.
how much time are you spending educating yourself right now and some of you will say oh hey i listen to books on tape in my car or i go to classes or whatever and i'm spending an hour a week or an hour a day or whatever it is many of you though are not doing anything you're just going to work which is great you're learning some things on the job but you're not learning any you're not purposely learning anything for yourself to keep your skills fresh or you do it very rarely
well guess what if you do a little more than that you will stand out from all the other people like you who aren't doing more and if you put in even an hour a week it becomes 50 hours a year and 50 hours is a lot it's like five books or one you know course worth of effort etc um
And we have Liger, who's in Singapore. He says he's 5,000 hours deep into Mandarin. Yeah, so he's a Swede, moved to Singapore, so he's immersed in Mandarin. So I assume it's the language he works in at least part of the day every day, and we're going to talk about that. the best way to learn a new skill is to make it part of your work so liger that was a good interjection because trying to learn mandarin an hour a week from a book or tapes or an online tool
as opposed to learning a little bit of it and then having to use it every day, he's going to accumulate practice hours way faster than you or I can. So... he's jumped us ahead a little bit and I will come to it. But the best way to learn is going to be to figure out how to manipulate your job so that what you want to learn is part of your job.
Why? Because let's say you're really motivated. You're going to put in an extra couple hours a week to learn on the side. Fantastic. That's 50 hours a year, then one hour a week, 100 hours a year. That's great. Let's say you can make it part of your day job and you end up doing that skill 10% of your working hours. Well, that's four or five or six hours a week, depending on how hard you work.
which then is hundreds of hours a year and that's if it's only 10 of your job so simple math if you can make it part of your work it's going to you're going to get this learning a lot faster but Your boss, your company is unlikely to figure out what you want to learn for you. You're going to have to find.
the company the job within the company and the project that lets you learn what you want and that may mean moving jobs that said we're a little bit ahead of yourself and chalk bog i'm glad you enjoyed the talks and i'm Glad this one's working for you today. Story lock. All right. Okay. Let's see. So the next thing I want to say is... Many of you are in college or haven't ever thought about a different learning method after college. College is very structured. University is very structured.
In college, it's choose your classes, go to the lectures, do the homework projects or papers, take the exams. And some of you skip many of those steps. You don't go to the classes, you don't go to the lectures. You skip as much of the homework as you can, and you plan on acing the exam because at the beginning of the semester, the professor said if you get an A on the exam, you get an A for the class. And you're like, that's my plan. I know. I was there.
okay interestingly a lot of things have changed in 30 or 40 years but that hasn't um so you have a lot more options now you can still take classes You can go to college and take them, night school, MBA, executive MBA program, things like that. You can also go to all kinds of vendors. We mentioned Coursera. We mentioned University of Phoenix. You can still learn in typical coursework fashion.
You can also read or listen to audiobooks, which is a variation of reading. So there's tons of written material. You can get a mentor. We talked earlier today about the mentorship network we've built and that we're getting ready to scale. So we're halfway, not quite. We're a third of the way through the pilot, and we just are kicking off the dev work to build what we need to scale.
By the way, if any of you are devs listening who want to contribute to that and can volunteer and do serious volunteer work, reach out to me on Discord. Mod, stick the Discord link in chat if you don't mind. Okay, you can use YouTube. You can use other online resources to educate yourself. And of course, as I said, you can do it at work, on the job, based on your job. The point is you have all these different methods.
through which to learn and most of those aren't college methods the set of topics is also a lot wider and i want you to think about this in school it was all domain knowledge if you're a physics major you learned math physics and then whatever else they made you learn if you were a finance major you learned accounting and financial planning and again math and so on stats and on and on if you are an art history major you learn about art and writing when you're in work in a job and in a career
We call those functional skills. But that's only one category of what you can now learn. If you're not in a tech field, you can study technology. And you say, why would I study technology? Well...
As a lever, if you're the expert on the tool set, if you're the only one on your team who understands what a database is and how to use it or how to write reports in Tableau, if you're the only one who's a true PowerPoint wizard, these become actual useful career skills that can change how you're perceived if you're someone who can write an excel macro in some groups that is an arcane skill that gives you godlike credibility in other groups it's like really
are you kidding me so the point of this is technology knowledge can be a skill You can learn communication skill, interpersonal skills. You can raise your emotional intelligence, your ability to organize teams, motivate teammates, work with others, work with difficult customers. This is highly paid. And that can be super valuable. You can learn project management and process, yes.
you're part of a team where everybody is smart hopefully and knows their stuff but if they can't work together if they cannot organize their work That's a whole other skill where you can go get certified or you can get the knowledge to organize work. By the way, I've said before, most of my career and my personal success came from being good at this.
It came from being good at organizing to get shit done on a date. That was basically a lot of my career was bringing groups of people together, getting them in. in in uk english getting them sorted and pushing to get something done and that was a skill and it was a skill that drove a whole career now leadership is also a skill And there's probably more. The point I'm getting at is when you think about educating yourself, do not narrowly think about only your college major or your job.
i'm an artist i need to be a better artist well you also need to be able to sell that art or you need to be able to work with people who are the customers of that art and so on now bottom line is you have to make your own life plan for how you're going to educate yourself and the point of my stream today is it pisses me off and i think it's sad that no one else is going to help you with that So I'm trying to help you with it. And the basic point is...
You're going to do better staying current and building valuable skills if you take a few minutes now and in your future to think about, hey, what the hell would I like to learn and how am I going to do it? And what commitment am I going to make to myself?
than if you don't it's really simple if you take a thousand people today and divide them into the ones that have a plan how they're going to systematically keep their skills current and build new skills and who follow all the simple stuff i've talked about here or even fucking any of it and a set of people who don't and are like ah i'm getting paid today and like i'm kind of tired and i want to go play some games have a beer
And they don't have any plan and they don't do much. And then you compound that forward five or 10 years. I'm very clear on who's going to be doing better. So. and uh somebody asked me a question i'll come back to but i'm going to give them a chance to edit it uh it's in our question tool and it says who can you learn to be a good leader throughout our career
um and i didn't misread that who can you learn to be a good leader throughout our career i don't understand that question so maybe try again um do you mean how can you learn to be do you mean i don't know so okay looks like people mean how so when i come back and answer it i'll cover how okay so you have to do this yourself and people with a plan are going to do better than people without a plan
this all should be obvious if you don't agree with me that's okay but you know i'm not going to bother to prove it to you because i think it's obvious so now we're going to go to a gaming analogy this kind of learning is like an open world game there's no structure we just talked about that you have to make up your own structure make up your own goals and your own quests that lack of structure is both good and bad on the bad side you do have to figure it all out yourselves on the good side
You get to pick your own things to focus on. Important, we've talked about this when we've talked about flow state and when we talked about motivation. You can pick things you actually give a shit about. Great, hopefully you have a career, you have a job. if you want to grow in that career you actually have the choice because nobody else around you is bothering they're all just whining about the work and slacking off as much as they can and then going um going home
All you get to choose what you want to do. And we have lots of people in the channel. who have reported back from using the magic loop, hey, I actually went and asked my boss how I could help, and they were blown away. And then I did some things to help them, and they promoted me. We have this story all the time in our Discord server. Major Gamer Geek.
thank you for the ongoing sub uh and yeah i want to tell this story okay i'm going to interrupt myself which i do a lot tough live with it my daughter who's 18 and my stepson who is 19 i talked about this a few months ago they both got jobs during the winter in the ski industry my stepson worked at a local ski shop setting up
rentals so rental snowboards rental skis he was the rental guy my daughter worked checking scanning tickets at a local ski mountain both of them discovered as late teenagers incredible work superpowers which i'm going to reveal to you and are going to blow your mind about how low the bar is They discovered that they did two things. Their employers adored them. And it makes their moms and I cringe. Thing number one.
Show up for your shifts. This is apparently yes, Taron fear you were on it Show up. He was right as I said it it popped up in chat Show up thing number one of two just turn up Thing number two of two, actually do a little work rather than fucking off the entire time you're there. This got...
My stepson offered a permanent position through the summer at a ski shop, which has very little business in the summer, but they keep a few people on and they offered him the job. And I got my daughter who was working at the ski slope, which closes down because there's no snow. As an hourly, a new hourly worker, a kid who'd never had a job before, paid two different bonuses because she showed up and others didn't.
And yeah, the troll here in chat says, he may or may not be really a troll. I'm not calling you a troll except that's your name. It is that basic at that age. Now, as you move into the professional world, that would not fly at Amazon. If all I had done at Amazon was show up and do a little work, I probably would have remained employed, by the way. I would not have been thought of as great. So the bar does get higher in more demanding.
in more demanding uh environments plus david oh you're here man you missed it i told the story of our kayak adventure you'll have to rewind the vod later and listen And also, if you haven't gotten to it, Renee's asking about some EC2 stuff. Yeah, so those who didn't hear about it, that's good old Dave, man. He's a trooper. We went kayaking in the river out behind my house, and he had to add swimming to the recreation plan for the day. And then blind kayaking to go after it.
have you taken off yet do you leave tonight or do you you can't are you already in London there's no way you'd be up so gar 98 of course you've missed a lot for shame for shame all right so i've covered most of this i want to get to the conclusion and then we'll take um questions ah t minus six hours then you have lots of time to uh get renee the ec2 access thank you and please hang out during the show um
i'm glad you're here dave as i mentioned is my best friend he gets on a plane for london in six hours uh and so i'll only see him occasionally for the next two years but i am super happy for him oh and dave irish coffee buddy that's today's drink when i visit yes only better and many other good drinks in the great united kingdom okay Let me wrap this up on the main point. You have to figure out three things to build your own education plan.
and those three things i'll give them to you and then i'll give a little more detail on them there how are you going to make time particularly this week what are you going to start doing this week to make time um what are you going to try and accomplish this year have some goals for the year and what is your long-term goal five years or ten years now i think it's probably easier to go backwards on this
to start with what is it i think i want to be when i grow up what is my next five years look like my next three years my next 10 years then figure out okay what could i try and do about that this year and then figure out how am i going to start making time this week what commitment am i going to make to myself this week and if you just do those three things
You will be head and shoulders above others. Now, I said my kids learned this superpower of actually show up at work and do a little work. The easiest way to learn a lot is to combine everything I've just said with... the magic loop so as a piece of review for the magic loop it says one do your job well go ask your boss if you have a boss go ask your owner whatever it is
How am I doing? Is there anything I could do better? If they give you feedback, go learn how to do that learning and do it well. Once they say, yeah, you're doing great. Thanks. Say, cool. Is there anything else I could help you with? then when they tell you something, you go do that. They will be blown away. See, earlier point about the bar for most people is they don't fucking show up. Oh, I had to call off work. I had a hangnail.
oh yeah, I had a chance to go get fucking drunk. So I did. And I called off work. The amount people call off work is amazing. And the flimsy excuses. If you just don't do that, you're a miracle worker, but I'm taking you a level higher. You can be much stronger by just asking how you can help and then doing it. But then...
Awesome. Just put up the magic loop in chat. You get to step four where you've earned their trust and you say, you know, I would really like to learn Mandarin or we have Dave here. It's perfect. He literally went to his management and said, you know, I've always kind of wanted to live overseas. Would there be any opportunity for that in our company? This is important. He is being sent to London.
They're paying to ship his shit. They're paying for temporary housing. They're paying for his housing while he's there. All of it. Furnished housing for two years. Then they pay to ship it all back while he's there. They pay for the differential in his tax rate because the UK tax rate is higher. Dave, if I'm telling any major lies here, feel free to correct it. If they're detailed lies, let it slide. No, seriously. They're paying for all of that.
Why? He did a good job. Then he asked. He asked and said, hey, I'd be interested in overseas assignments. Do you have anything? And they said, really? We'd love to send you to London. And now as soon as the pandemic was over to the point where they could get his visa and send him, he leaves today. This is the magic loop in progress. He did his job well.
He asked for something he wanted, and poof, he's going to London for two years. They would like him to stay longer. Maybe he will. Who knows? The point is, that's all the magic loop. And if you want to learn something like Mandarin for the example we had with Liger or others, you just have to ask. And sure, you won't always get a yes. You may have to.
change jobs you may have to change bosses you may have to change companies roles we talked about that before if you have a shitty boss at a shitty company then you have to do some of this learning yourself and get the hell out. But good companies are desperate. And remember, this is important. Rewind to my kids. Okay.
you guys can google this it's screamingly funny and you can send it to the mods and uh you can send it to the mods and they will post it for you she worked at a place called brandywine in ohio this is a ski hill those of you who aren't from the us ohio is basically flat its elevation runs between like 100 meters and 500 meters across the entire state which you can think of as being as big as a country um and if you are from the u.s then you know ohio is basically flat
particularly her part 300 feet tall this ski hill this is not a premium employer okay this is a shitty employer now they got bought by vale resorts vale's a big company but literally this is a this is a ski resort that's only purpose is to be a marketing front for veil to get people to buy the epic pass which is veils pass and go ski at their real resorts in the colorado or in the american rocky mountains and around the world she's working at a at a
place that's open it opened like after christmas like january 5th or 8th or 10th and it closed in march it was open like 60 days and yet They were impressed with her and they gave her a good reference. She has a new job now. They gave her a good reference so she's got another good job. This stuff isn't that hard. By the way, and I'm very proud of her.
None of this is from her watching my show or listening to me. Oh, I've gone fuzzy. That's a little sad. I'm getting low-res bandwidth back to myself.
but that's okay a little macro blocking a little video compression never hurt anyone if you can hear me so same thing with my stepson he's working at a ski shop okay a regional ski shop in a mall storefront basically a strip mall storefront uh too much irish he's gone fuzzy it's not quite gone but it is good here dave water i'll switch the other twitch cup Again, what I'm describing to you is not hard and even in shitty companies, they value people who do good work. That's my actual point.
even marginal it doesn't have to be an amazon it doesn't have to be goldman sachs those are great companies it doesn't have to be one of those for you to get this kind of investment opportunity so What else? I've covered just about everything I need to do. What are you going to do this week? What are the things you're going to do this year? Here are some examples. Can you pick a good project at work? Is there a book or a set of books you should read?
is there a course you want to take this year can you find a mentor for this week how are you going to create one hour a week to invest and then maybe someday you'll make that two hours or maybe you'll get that done at work how are you going to create that time um okay and so now we have a couple questions in we're going to delete the one that was miswritten and you can vote on those or ask me others but i've made the point recapping the point companies don't know how to educate you
Your skills that you're learning in college now or that you have learned are going to age out because of the pace of change and your companies really can't help you. So it's up to you and you're better off having a plan than not having a plan. And what I want to encourage you is the bar is so low. Just have some damn idea of what you want to go learn, and you'll be able.
to pull ahead of the competition around you because the bar is incredibly low. And so that is the whole story of self-education. You have to do it or you're going to sink. But if you do it, it doesn't have to be that hard and you can combine it with the magic loop and then you'll soar. And so we have examples at the low end, right? My kid working in an hourly ski hill and getting a bonus and a great reference for a next job.
And we have examples at the high end. We have Dave who's here right now and who flies to London all expenses paid to live there for two years on his company's dime while he does valuable work for them and earns that money. But he's also going to travel Europe, experience another country, blah, blah, blah. It's win-win. And all he did was ask. Okay. Hmm.
awesome does have a good point here in chat he says don't try to do all of this at once awesome is a classic overachiever for those of you don't know him awesome is not just his twitch handle it is his actual first name so his parents might have given him very high expectations um and so he was trying to be all awesome all the time and that is too much you don't have to do all of this remember it's a superpower just to fucking show up to work sadly so
All right. Go to the UK to travel Europe. Yep. All right. So let's see. How do you stand out when all of your results are seen as the result? Of your team as a whole. So. Usually people who are close to the team.
can see the difference they can see that your team different people are pulling different amounts of load in the team so I'm not actually familiar with this situation long term short term i see it so whoever wrote this in chat give a little more context of what your team or company circumstance is The answer to this, though, is how do you stand out is without beating your chest about how great you are. You do the magic loop I talked about. You start stepping up.
asking for where else can you contribute or what can you do better you also help your teammates remember unless you have a very interesting team a lot of them aren't showing up or aren't doing very much because they're not that motivated so if you show a little motivation your management should differentiate if they don't go find another environment go find another team go find another manager because this is not normal now i get if you're playing as a part of a team
Some of your good effort will get credited to others. But there is a sports analogy here. It is the Lakers, to use a U.S. basketball team, who win or lose. But no one has any ambiguity about who the stars on the Lakers are and who the bench formers are. And the same is true on most teams. It is true the team achieves the goal.
But people still, when it comes payday time, some people get $20 million contracts or $100 million contracts and Nike endorsements. And some of them get to come back to the team next year at the minimum salary. That's usually true. All right. I'm going to see what else is here, if anybody add anything. Hmm. hyper hobbit you don't have to always do more than others you have to do more than others on average you have to and by the way the real time to show up is when there's a crisis if
The power goes out. There's a customer crisis. There's a holiday crisis. There's a technical issue. There's a need for somebody on the night or weekend. Being that person who steps up when it's needed is more important. than stepping up on a daily basis both are valuable and you should do some stepping up when it's not a crisis but being there when the chips are down will get you noticed and remembered
That's right. Or like when Ethan had trolls and needed a mod to ban them or needs audio help. That's right. When I reach out to Shadow and say, I'm busy fucking up my stream, come rescue me. She shows up. And that's incredibly valuable to me. So I have tried to repay that by helping her and I notice her expertise. No offense to my other mods, when my stream's broken, I don't reach out to the rest of you because Shadow is the one who has that expertise.
So the answer to this question is take the right steps to show value to your management and your company. And if they don't recognize that over time, leave.
Go somewhere where value is appreciated. Generally, when they say the results are the results of a whole team, that's lazy thinking because no one does that to the lakers no one does that to a sports team and it's like oh yeah the tampa bay buccaneers they won the super bowl yeah it was a team effort there's no stars oh wait except fucking tom brady right no one is ambiguous that like the buccaneers didn't do shit for years if you know american football and then tom brady
and you can apply this to football and everything else right no one has ambiguity about the value of Lionel Messi even though Messi gotta get my e high enough no one has doubt about his value even though he's part of a team all right there you go all right let's see um i next question these are good questions by the way yeah well i'm going uh i'm headed to rome on a trip soon so
i'll be back in the land of football and jerseys it'll be good i don't have any good gear right now um that's interesting i'll have to find out if i can get the kids to a big soccer match i haven't thought about that there must be a rome fc or something that's playing uh jocko willink has a good analogy about this in his book extreme ownership when he's talking about strong and weak leaders within their boat crews he does by sepolis and we think the book
extreme ownership is an amazing book um basically uh this story that bisepolis has brought up is um This SEAL team guy figured out or saw that if you took, there was a case where they took the strongest leader and put him in charge of the worst performing team. And he was able to transform that team simply by changing how they thought about themselves and how they were being led.
conversely they took the leader of that weak team and they gave him the strong team the strong leader he just left and that team was able to stay afloat because the team members were good but they sank in performance so it showed very quickly the influence of a leader and leadership and so if you have a bad leader you should go and that's fine like it's okay to get the hell out of a bad leadership situation all right
um this question says i like my job but hate the city it requires me to live in the company has denied other more senior devs requests to go remote and many of them have left do i have any options besides look for another job sure one is suck it up that's not a great option the second is ask them an open-ended question as opposed to demand to work remote ask them
Under what conditions would you consider letting me work remote? Under what conditions would it be valuable for the company if I were remote? You ask it. You try to get them to say what they would need and see if those are things you can meet.
because who knows what their reasoning is maybe they want you to come in for meetings maybe they want you to travel at your own expense and maybe you should do that if you really want to move i don't know what their objections are basically you have to find out um in any case where you're up against a hard no the question to ask is what would it take under what conditions would this answer change so my old boss at amazon taught me this and it's a great question
Under what conditions would this be different? What would need to be true for this to happen? in this case you want to move remote from there to go to a different city you would ask under what conditions uh could i live in des moines again who knows and then you can get slightly tougher and you can say well We've lost a lot of talent. I really don't like it here in this city. Is there anything we can do? But you get to that question second, and then you just leave that threat hanging.
Given that you've lost a lot of talent, they're going to be motivated to try to do something. Maybe they won't or maybe they feel they can't. But basically be curious and go into learning mode. Try and learn what the objections are. Also be patient. What I mean by that is as they lose more devs, they're going to be more and more open to remote work. I see fewer and fewer companies who think they can force everyone to live near the office anymore.
we could do a whole nother show on this it's going to transform our society because basically you're going to have a two-tier society one tier of society that can live where it wants and work from where it is and another that can't So we have a huge pandemic driven after effect, a demographic shift that's going to rock.
the industrialized world and going to transform the non-industrialized or so-called third world because many tech guys are going to be like you know i can go work in costa rica own a villa on a mountaintop or on a beach work from there it's the same time zone and live on a fraction of the money and so even though i'm 24 26 or 32 i'm going to live like a retired millionaire because that's what my salary is worth in costa rica or fill in the blank location
so that's coming all companies are going to be forced to allow some sort of remote work it's coming you can your last option to this answer is simply be patient all right Irish coffee almost gone. Irish coffee very good. I have a lot of non-profit experience with running projects and programs. and found that I was able to manage all the responsibilities well. Great. How do I translate these skills to my day job as an engineer when I don't see budget or help make the high-level decisions?
have you asked it's a super surprise you may not have have you asked um your boss can i be involved in these decisions this is the whole ask how i can help magic loop time again in chat okay number one does your management know anything about what you've done the skills you have okay this is this is worth covering because we're talking about learning
When you go learn a new skill or you've developed new skills, you got to actually tell your management. You don't have to brag about it, but you can just say, hey, by the way, I've been doing a lot of project management or program management with fill in the blank nonprofit. Or I've been running their books for them or handling their budget or their strategic decisions. I love my work here as an engineer, but I have other skills. How can I apply them?
key question is there anything you need i could help with given that i have these other skills and that's gonna get people to use your skills now again same recipe if you're doing good work and you're meeting your day job as an engineer And you tell your management you have these skills and you would love to use them to help them. And could you be involved in some of the budgeting?
Or could you support some of the decisions by doing project management or program management? Could you grow in that direction or could you help others? Could you apply those skills? And they say nothing. Go somewhere else. Go find a boss with more vision. There are actually bosses, lots of them, who either because they have vision or because they're lazy or both. By the way, it's fine that they're lazy. They're like, hmm.
So let me get this straight. You have skills and work I normally need to do. But because you want to use your skills, you would do the work I normally have to do and you'd be happy about it. Do I have that right? Come on, folks. This is not hard to get a yes. It's not hard. Not hard. Oh, you amuse me. I get to roll my eyes and make funny faces. That's great. If your boss doesn't have that level of vision, get out.
but most of them actually do if you just present it to them i was taught this great i'm gonna put it in chat um just the acronym i was taught with them what's in it for me help the boss understand what's in it for him he's saying oh i may not be using your skills he may not know you have them he may feel protective around those things you just have to show him you know
if i were helping you with this you'd have to do less or if i were helping you with this you'd have more time for other things that's how delegation happens i as boss have a vision of taking something off my desk and giving it to you. This is not a hard sell, usually. Has Evan ever read Bullshit Jobs? I'm not sure what that means. Had he ever talked about it? I have had relatively few bullshit jobs. If you mean, have I ever had them?
oh it's a book all right no let me go look now i'm curious it sounds like fun um i have heard of this book now tell me more about it if you're in chat P-break with channel points. Okay. Bullshit jobs. I'm sure there are bullshit jobs. That I have no. look it sucks and i know it's true i don't want it to be a bullshit jobs a theory all right i see it there's a german edition too which is from where something of work seen s-i-n-n who's german here translate back
This is not the same as the title in English. Der Arbeit is work, and vom Waren is from where. From where something the work. What is this word? Somebody use Google. what's that back in english i don't have time anyway um i will take a look at this book i haven't read it uh so scene means sense from where uh some so something about sense of work because in english it's called bullshit jobs a theory so anyway i'll check it out
but it's it's got to have means about the madness of work sun glitters thanks for chiming in sun glitters welcome all right of the craziness of work there we go all right that makes sense to me of the crave so seen me as sin zine i guess in this case means crazy from where the craziness of work okay what's my expertise uh careers management leadership resume review um i think actually we haven't used it today but i think there's like a bio link there you go there's me
All right, so bottom line, I think I've answered this question. If the person who asked it isn't happy with it, hey, you got what you paid for, unless you're a subscriber and then you got only part of what you paid for. Okay, we have one more question here.
it's the one i hope the guy hung around it was the one that was like mistyped in the beginning how can one learn to be a good leader throughout their careers this is a giant topic so i guess step one follow this channel step two look at some of the videos on youtube Step three, prepare for a long journey. But learning how to be a good leader is, number one, start trying to lead. It's practical.
By start trying to lead, you're not going to be a good leader if you never step up, get control of a task, a challenge, or a problem and try to organize other people behind you, around you, with you to solve that. By the way you do not need to be the manager to be a leader. People confuse the two. Leadership is about setting vision and direction and inspiring people. Management is about punching time cards, writing reviews, determining salary, and lots of other super valuable stuff.
But it is not the same as leadership. Leadership. Go see Simon Sinek's short TED Talk, Start With Why. Leadership is about setting direction and having a clear idea and clear vision, taking input, talking to others and getting them enthused to join you in an effort. And you can practice that whether you're in charge or not. Okay. What do you think is an optimal amount of work hours per day?
that's a strange question i think it depends but generally we work too many hours and we don't work smart enough and so we're usually dragging through so I don't know the answer to this, honestly. Someone just asked in chat, what is the optimal amount of work hours per day?
Throughout most of my career, I worked between 10 and 12. It was a lot. I got a lot done. Did I work as smart as I could have? Probably not. I learned more and I continue to learn about how to work smart. I try to teach you that here. Most of the time you spend working is wasted. Most of the time you spend is churning around and having meetings and not getting much done. And if you look back, how can I say that, by the way?
It's now, I can talk about what I mean by I could have worked smarter. It's now June. You've got five months of this year in. Go review, if you can remember it at all, what you did in January and ask how much of that is valuable now. And the truth will turn out to be that probably a lot of how you spend January, if you have a calendar system, Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, etc., go back and look at your calendar for June and see what it says. Sorry, for January.
And you'll probably find a lot of those projects are canceled or work you've done is no longer relevant. It seemed important at the time, but people didn't have good vision of what was truly important. And this is no one's fault exactly. It's very hard to figure out what will matter in the future. You know, a technique I use sometimes is I ask myself, if today were my last day on Earth, what are the most important things I could do? Or I use, since that's a little stark.
I use extreme ownership and I say what is the number one most important thing I have to get done today and then I don't do the other things. How much work is enough? It all depends on when you get those critical things done. If your most important task for the day is going to take all day, you need to work all day. My most important task today was we want to travel to Europe in a few days and...
I said this in the Discord server. I'll tell this story real quick. We're taking a special COVID-approved flight on Delta Airlines to Italy. To take this flight... you need to get a PCR COVID test 72 hours in front of the flight. Then when you go to the airport to get on the flight, you have to take a quick... like a rapid test which is a different type of test not this PCR variation that gives results in a few minutes you take a second test before you actually board then once we're on board
We have to wear a surgical mask, not just any mask. You have to wear a surgical mask. And they're going to give us new masks every four hours on this long flight. And we have to change our mask. And then when we land, we have to take another. rapid tests and then we can enter italy by the way my family and i are all fully vaccinated but that doesn't matter um what's the moral of this story well one moral is that we're now engaged in covid theater
where taking lots of precautions makes people feel like they're doing something, but this has no actual impact or effect. It's just theater in this case. Second, the most important thing I had to do today was get the appointment for that COVID test because it was blocking to our trip. So even though...
I don't like chasing around doctors to get scheduled for an appointment. That was the most important thing to do and we got it done. So my day in a way is done. So to the point of how much to work, it's when did you get the work done that mattered? And that requires a show we're not going to do today, which is prioritization. Going to your question, awesome, earlier, I'm not going to answer it in detail today, but... I've done other shows on prioritization.
The key is how I could have worked smarter is I wasn't very good at prioritizing and saying no to things people wanted me to do, but that really didn't matter. And instead doing things that were so valuable that they would shut up.
when i told them your work that you're asking me to do is stupid my boss at amazon had a famous to him conversation where he was busy he was in a place where he was rapidly making money for the company it at this point in time he ran part of the amazon books program and he had developed a program um
called A plus detail pages. Doesn't matter. The point is it was making the company a lot of money and he was doing several things that kept increasing the amount of money the company made. His boss asked him to write some complicated report. he wrote back this took balls of steel i loved it he wrote back and said i got your request for a report i'm doing work that makes us a lot of money i don't think your report does so i'm going to keep making us money
And if you would like me to stop making us money and write your report instead, let me know. He never heard about the report again. Now that took balls of steel, I will admit. But what a great answer. i'm busy making us money your work is bullshit if you would like me to stop making this money and do your bullshit i will let me know and knowing my boss he wouldn't have done it anyway um but
You know, he's the type of guy who is willing to put his badge down and walk out the front door any given day, and so it makes him frisky that way. By the way, this guy works for Andy Jassy right now. Andy Jassy is the incoming CEO of Amazon. Another really fun story about him. He won't be working for Andy very shortly. There'll be a re-arc, which is all known. I'm not sharing anything private.
because Andy's moved up to the CEO chair, but he worked for him while he was head of AWS. And the great story here is, I won't go into the reasons, but let's just say the two of them disagreed on what to do. And Andy was telling my boss, well, you need to do this, you need to do that. My boss eventually decided he didn't agree. So he just stopped doing it. He just stopped listening.
And eventually he went back to Andy like six months later and he said, yeah, I decided your advice wasn't very good. So six months ago, I stopped taking it. And Andy said, yeah, I noticed. I figured you knew what you were doing. Imagine that. This guy's now going to run Amazon.
My boss was just... decided i actually know what my group needs and while i value your advice and input he was not being dismissive i don't think your advice and input on this topic is right and so i'm simply going to ignore it i'm not going to fight with you about it because that puts you in the position of win lose
and you have to try and cram it down my throat, I'm just going to ignore it. I'm going to do what I think is right. And if it doesn't work out, I know you'll fire me. And if it does work out, I know you won't fire me. I'm just going to do what I think is right. And so he did. And later when he called it to his boss, he said, yeah, I really haven't been listening to you for six months. His boss said, yeah, I noticed. That was the whole conversation. Yeah, I noticed. Now.
Can you do this in every bullshit job this book I need to read about? I don't know. But this approach works more than you would think if you're right most of the time. This is important. If you make the company money and you're right most of the time, it will work out. And that's where I feel awesome. I've said before, I wish I had taken more risks in my career. OK, let me see if there's anything else here.
um one two three asks is it okay to ask the boss straight up which work is more important sure it is that's totally fine fighting pickles thank you for the love of the stream the 50 bits um shows how useless the report was yes sean123 that's true and mate look i'm sure by the way the report had some value it just didn't have as much value as what my boss was doing and so what probably happened
is the guy he told politely or impolitely go screw yourself went and found somebody else to write his report someone whose work wasn't as impactful so someone else got dredged into making the report because frankly that boss was like well
okay, who can I find who's somewhat useless and have them do this? And by the way, in big companies, there's always someone who doesn't have the vision to make the company a lot of money, but does have the vision to write a report. And so you let them write the report. All right. I tried this advice out earlier this year. Bicepolis says he's still employed. So great story.
All right, everybody. So I have some coaching. I'm going to I have to talk to my mentees from our mentor program here in half an hour. So I'm going to sign off, take a break and get ready for that conversation so that I can do good mentoring of them. But just a reminder, we probably could still use some motivated developer help front end or back end.
i think we're going to use react uh and um we're going to have a call tomorrow night at seven to organize the developers in the first sprint to build the technology to scale the mentorship program we have in place so that everyone here can have a mentor or be a mentor if you want to volunteer for that join our discord reach out to me
renee rios right there in chat is the dev he's acting as our dev manager so you can reach out to him he's renee rios in my discord server you have him right there on twitch he's recruiting because we're going to start tomorrow if you and we have people testifying about the value of the mentor program
and if you don't know the offer you're going to be a volunteer but there is an offer we're going to structure it so that it's a project you can put on your resume with me as your reference so there is a payoff besides doing good if you do real work i'm not going to be your reference if you sign up and don't do anything so don't do that there's no such thing as an anti-reference but i certainly won't help you out so if you can help us though we would love to help
And you'll be doing a good thing where we scale up the mentorship. I also, by the way, there's another inside thing. If you help build the system, you'll have back end access.
to be able to look through all the mentors and figure out who you want to work with and you can reach out to them first because you're inside the database so there is real what i said earlier with them what's in it for me that you can get out of this all right um and with that i'm gonna call it a day um skills i don't know anything about that and don't answer those questions esports is not my world
um and so uh that's a devon nash question uh check him out he's good at that stuff all right so everyone it's been good this has been a good show thank you all for turning out it's been fun go forth and educate yourself follow the magic loop get rich and then pay it forward it is okay to do well in your career and then do some good as a result of having done well thank you all so much for being here and your time