How do you visualize your perspective and purpose? How do you see your future? How do you look at what you hope will happen in the future? How do you plan? All of these are questions that I have a hard time answering because sometimes my future seems much clearer than others. If you are like me and most people, that's the case. You have an idea of what you want that seems very clear at one point in time and then becomes less clear for some reason or another. Maybe a different desire comes up for you or maybe as you are pursuing the original plan, things change. They may change internally for you or externally. In today's episode, I want to give you two basic principles for setting this vision, setting the perspective on your purpose. My name is Jonathan Cutrellol, you're listening to Developer Tea. My goal on this show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective and purpose in their careers. That is the motivation explicitly for today's episode. I want to give you these two principles. The first one is to give it a home. Give your vision of the future, your vision of your purpose. Give your understanding of what your future looks like. Give it a home. What does this mean? People, this is writing in a daily journal for others. This is putting up a post it on your computer screen with some kind of goal on it. Whatever it is, have some focal point. Something that you can revisit. You can view. You can see making things visible is kind of the underlying principle here. By giving it a home, you're making what is otherwise somewhat fluid, somewhat difficult to put your finger on. Making it visible and much more to your brain, at least much more tangible. If things begin to change, you can easily see the change as it forms. In other words, you can compare what it was to what it's becoming in your head. Giving something a home is necessary if you want to visit it regularly. This is a theoretical place where you are giving it an actual physical place, which would be preferable or a theoretical place that you might use kind of like an ongoing ceremony to revisit this. Whatever your place is, give your vision for your future a place. Just to be clear, I don't want to make you think that we're talking about this big, long term vision. That certainly is something you can do with this, but we're also talking about the short-term things. We're talking about the three-week or three-month goals that you have. Giving those a visible place that you can revisit is just as important as those bigger goals. So, this first principle, giving your purpose, your vision a home, that you can visit on regular basis. We'll talk about the second principle right after we talk about today's sponsor. Today's episode is sponsored by Launch Darkly, Launch Darkly's feature management for the modern enterprise, and it's fundamentally changing how you deliver software. Here's how it works. Launch Darkly enables development and operations teams to deploy code at any time, even if the feature that the code is enabling isn't actually ready to be released to users. New wrapper code with feature flags and that gives you the safety to test those new features and the new infrastructure in your production environments without impacting the wrong end users. Whenever you're ready to actually release those features more widely, it's as simple as updating that flag. Luckily, it doesn't even take an engineer to do that. Your engineering teams are going to be totally decoupled from your release teams if you want them to be. And the changes are made instantaneously, powered by Launch Darkly's real-time streaming architecture. Go and check it out at www.artoumonshidarkly.com. Launchdarkly.com. Thanks again to Launch Darkly for their support of Developer Tea. The second principle I want to talk to you about today in defining your purpose, your future plans, your intent, whatever that vision is that you have that you're trying to get clarity on is specifically to focus on clarity, to turn the clarity dial all the way up. Now, what does this mean? It means that when you're imagining that future state to try to give as much information as you can to that vision, try to put as much explicit information as you can into that home, wherever you're holding that information, add that extra clarity. So what does that mean? It means answering every outlying question that you possibly can. Let's say that you start with believing that your vision is that you want to work at a particular company. And that's all you have on your posted note or wherever you're holding this information. In order to turn that clarity dial up, I would ask you 20 or 30 questions about that situation. What kind of title would you want? Who would you want to work with? How many hours per week? What would your office look like? What kind of computer are you working on? Or what kind of tasks are you going to do on a Monday morning? What does your day to day look like? What does your ideal week look like? If you had to decide how you get the job offer, how would you? The idea here is to increase the resolution on the picture that you have of that future state. As an added bonus, when you do this, you might recognize that there are things that you care about in this future state that you actually could make happen now. When you start thinking about your ideal schedule in that dream job in the future, is it possible that you could apply the ideal schedule to your current job? As kind of a bonus exercise, you could create a second picture. What is an alternative picture that removes some of the elements? What is an alternative picture that you could get to in half the time? What elements from that original picture are really important to you? What this allows you to do by having this vision in a specific home and giving it as much clarity as possible, you take what is an ambiguous point in the future and you turn it into a much clearer set of options. And these options don't have to be way off at some point into the future. Instead, you can start to achieve these things more directly. So these are the two principles. Once again, give your vision of the future a home and give it a specific place where you know you can go and revisit whether that's a home, kind of a theoretical home that you keep in your mind or maybe it's a specific place where you take notes, maybe a reminder that you have in your environment somewhere. So give your vision a home and then turn up the clarity. Turn up the clarity on that vision and answer every possible question that you can about it. And then the bonus exercise here is to create a second picture. Try to imagine an alternative that helps clarify the things that you really care about. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. THING YOU AGAIN TO TODAY. Sponsor, launch darkly. You can get started with launch darkly at launch darkly.com. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and if you did, it will be wonderful for you to give back to the show by going and leaving a review in whatever podcasting platform you use. Of course, the most impactful reviews are the ones on iTunes that's just kind of the state of things. And then of course, the other way you can help the show out is by sharing this directly with somebody that you think would actually benefit from it. If you are enjoying this show, also another way that you can dig in a little bit deeper is to join the Discord community. So to do that, head over to developertea.com slash discord today. It's totally free. There's people in that discord that are reading books, they're discussing episodes, they're talking about their career problems that we haven't even discussed on the show and getting advice from other engineers, other mindful engineers like you. So check it out at developertea.com slash discord. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, enjoy your tea.