Here's the thing, if you're not motivated enough, get around motivated people. It'll just exponentially boost you. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Hey folks, welcome back to my interview with Dain Miller. Obviously we talked a little bit about being around motivated people and some of the important habits that Dain and I both, that we have developed over the years to increase our leadership abilities as developers, you know, we're all finding our way. That's what we're talking about in these episodes in this interview. Thank you so much for joining me. My name is Jonathan Cutrell and you're listening to Developer Tea. Once again, make sure you subscribe in whatever podcasting app you use. You can do that while you're listening to this episode and you won't miss out on future episodes of Developer Tea. There's some great content planned this year, some really cool guests. And I would hate for you to miss out. So go and check it out. In whatever podcasting app you use, go and click that subscribe button. Thank you again for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. And let's get straight into this interview with Dain. Yeah, it's why these kinds of conversations are so motivational is because I'm talking to someone like Dain who is also extremely motivated, right? Like if you look at the last five conversations that you've had, they are going to affect the way you are thinking right now. So if I say something like green balloon, it's totally random, right? But the amazing thing is just because you heard me say the words green balloon, now you're going to be much more aware of green balloons in the next couple of hours. It's super weird, but it's true, right? And what we hear and what we take in and what we're around massively affects the way we are currently thinking. It's the whole thing like you want to buy a Honda and you see Honda's all the sudden everywhere. Or back there. I had that experience one time and it was actually quite astounding. But I love what you've done in the way you phrase that the last five conversations, let's make this very simple, people are like, what is my social circle? What are the last five conversations you've had? So what you've done Jonathan, that's so cool and then I sort of challenge all your listeners to think about is you're living an integrated life. So you've created a business, a podcast that allows you to have on people that are at different, that are at different varying levels that allow you to kind of get that injection of different mindsets into you and to have that ability to have five conversations that are awesome. You know, most people don't have that type of lifestyle where they can just meet five people and have five cool conversations. You know, they don't have to be amazing people, just five cool conversations a day or a week or whatever. So what can you do to really try to live that integrated life and that's kind of the term that one of my friends coined that I like so much. So for me, when I'm sitting here and I'm thinking about programming things, I'll turn on the YouTube camera or the video camera and record a little video for YouTube and I just started doing that because it resonated with me that, hey, guess what? There's all these programmers on YouTube that I'm really respecting. How can I get around them and get their mindset and figure out what they know? Well, I can do what they do and dress for the job. Yeah, exactly, dress for the job. And, you know, it's not that hard when you think about it like an integrated life. Like, oh, I'm thinking about programming. Okay, well, let me just record while I'm thinking and just think out loud. Okay, that's easy. You know, Jonathan already has this podcast. So getting guests on is just a way that it works and a byproduct is Jonathan's life gets better. Right? So it's like, it's just the way this works. And I find that to be so under-talked about. Yeah, that's a fint. I love the term integrated life. You know, it's, and I think a lot of people are afraid because they think they need to be qualified to start that and this goes back to what we're talking about. You know, turning the camera on is an action that takes a click, right? That's not the hard part. The hard part is convincing your brain that once you turn it off to upload it, right? Convinceing it like I still have video right to be able to upload it exactly in the queue. Because of some fear, some deep-seated fear that people are going to eviscerate you or, you know, whatever it is. And again, most of the time those fears are totally incorrect. Like they're completely wrong. And even if people eviscerated you online, just start a new YouTube channel. You know, like, yeah, who cares? Like we said, what is the worst that could happen? And the funny thing was I posted one of these videos and video is a new thing for me. I've been doing this audio thing for three years now, but you know, I've been interacting with people a lot, but video, it was something that I knew I should be doing, but I've been moaned it. I was stressed over it and it really took a lot of that mental sort of training of my brain to like, say, this isn't that bad. You know, it took a lot of that for years almost for me to be able to do it. And now I'm doing it a little bit. And what's interesting is I got a really negative comment. The first one I ever got on the YouTube video, I've got some for iTunes, but I got like a really negative comment. And what I noticed was my mindset two years ago when I thought about starting this and was afraid because of the negativity I could receive, my mindset now is totally different because we forget that we grow constantly. So now when I got that negative comment, I was thinking, oh man, I'm gonna be upset, but I was like, wait a minute, I've learned, I've read hugger haters, I've learned all this stuff. I don't hate this guy. I understand why he said this. He actually had a good point. And I replied to him and I was like, thanks dude, that's actually a good point. You know, and then he deleted his comment. And so it's just so funny how we put up these artificial bounds on what we think we should or could do and then a few years later we do them and realize, you know what, not that big of a deal. Right, yeah. It's funny for the people who figure out how silly it was, but it's somewhat tragic for the people who never get past it. Right, and so that's kind of the dark turn on the podcast is, yeah, you know, this stuff is really, you know, a lot of our fears are trivial and unfortunately trivial fears stop people from doing great things every single day. And it really is a tragedy. There's so much value locked up and pretty much every single person's brain if they apply it in the right direction and with the right motivation and energy. Really, really interesting stuff and super compelling, I think, just the idea of starting and all of the things you're doing in the podcast. Just so here's a practical challenge. And Dain, you can adjust what I challenge people to do. You tell me what you think of this. I challenge people who are listening to this. This week, you know, the five awesome conversations, I love that kind of take away for people who are listening to this. Simply reach out, you'll be surprised. I promise you you're gonna be surprised. Reach out to the people that you either admire or that you're incredibly interested in the work they are doing. Just find a way to reach out. Whether that's a Twitter DM or a app message, some of those are never answered, to be fair. But find their email. If it takes you 10 minutes to find their email, find their email, send them an email. It's very simple and ask them to have a five minute conversation with you. You'll be surprised at what that can do to the way you think. And people here, it is how to get a mentor, right? This topic, that's what you're sort of touching on. Like, it's easier than you think to reach out and get a mentor, I totally agree. Let me give you a real scenario that I just recently went through for the most recent mentor I wanted to sort of have in my life and how I did it. So what I did was there is this YouTuber that's very big. Programming YouTuber, making a lot more money than me has an amazing business like, has an amazing YouTube. But he's very passionate about his fans, but he didn't have a podcast. So I reached out to him and it took me three emails and then he sent me his texts. And it took me five text messages over two weeks to be persistent enough to get him to let me help him. So I was just telling him the same thing and all these messages it was, hey, I'm going to set up a podcast for you. I'm going to download all your videos, convert them to MP3. I'm going to get the emails and I'll deal with all the podcast related emails. And I'll let you still have editorial control, but I will add so much value to you. And then I gave him numbers on here's what you can get from advertising, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, if you're podcasting. So even guys, listen, you want a mentor that's above your level, guess what? Even when you're trying to add value and literally put money in their pockets, they still are so busy that it's hard. So again, it goes back to that same thing we're talking about. Most people don't apply for enough opportunities. Most people don't put in the work. Most people don't reach out enough. Like here's my tip. The first time you reach out to people is the time that most people stop. Most people stop at that first reach out. And I'll tell you this, every salesman will tell you, it's the second follow up that's magic. The second follow up. And usually the third is even more magical. And if you can get beyond that. So if you can show somebody that you're persistent, it shows them more about your character and trust me, most mentor-menti relationships are based on character more so than value or whatever. Absolutely. Yeah, you could, I could mentor someone who is not even in the field of development as long as the character is correct, right? Like, and that's not the goal, right? Like, that's the hard thing is like, OK, well, Jonathan just said, all of your listeners just heard you say you're open to mentor one of them. Literally, that's what you just said. But how can they get to you? How can they show you that character through this online medium that doesn't have all this visual data like you were saying earlier? It's so challenging. So the tactic of persistence, that's a huge one, guys, because it shows that you're a quality person that's consistent, being congruous, this persistent consistency, it's very powerful. I love that. You were absolutely right. And there are so many things that go into the, I don't want to call them heroes, right? But the people that I want to reach out to are heroes of mine, the people I want to mentor me. It's hard. It's actually really hard for me to decide who those people are in the first place. That's actually a really good exercise to clarify some of the things that you want to be like. Go and find the people you admire. And here's it you. Go ahead. I did not mean to interrupt you, sorry. Oh, you're good. So I was just going to say that the reason it's hard to find mentors is because most people don't realize you need a mentor for every area of life. So for you, Jonathan, you probably are looking at people that have their life like this perfect masterpiece because you're already at a certain level. And I find this to be a problem a lot of people have. They're like, OK, well, I see this guy online. And he's got this master life. He's got this amazing girlfriend, this amazing body. He's got this amazing business. He's a programmer who works at Facebook, whatever, for your listeners it might be. That's not the best way to do it. Because those people, it's almost impossible to reach out to them first of all. So a better way to do it is to dissect that. What if you could find one friend that sucked with money but had the best body you've ever seen? And he's totally aware of every health thing that ever existed. It people often have this cognitive bias where if you're not perfect with everything, you can't be perfect with anything. And that's not true. That's never the opposite of the halo effect. I've never heard of that. OK, well, there's a great topic. The halo effect is the opposite of that. So if you trust somebody, if, let's say you meet somebody who has a significant amount of money, you're going to assume that they are also relatively healthy. And the same is true for any other thing that you trust them with. So in particular, in business transactions, if someone is a really good programmer, this is why people tend to jump ladders that are way up, even though the skill sets are totally unrelated. So you could jump from CTO to CEO easier than you can jump from a junior executive to CEO. The C-suite is you can kind of run around the C-suite rather than moving up the ladder to the C-suite. And a lot of the reason for that is because when you see somebody as valuable in one area of business, you assume that they are valuable in all areas of business. Yeah, that's faster. That's the halo effect. That's really interesting. You'll very real and highly research thing. And you'll notice it with your friends. You tend to trust your friends. If you trust them with a secret, then you'll also trust them with money, even though you may not necessarily need, like maybe they shouldn't. Right? It's possible. That's so interesting because recently, this LazloBock, the head of people at, I don't know, it's a weird department, head of people at Google, has this book called Work Rules. This yellow book, it's kind of like that. And in it, they talk about this concept of no impersonal interviews. And an impersonal interview is like, it me and you talking right now. That's how most interviews are conducted. They do paper science interviews. And I think it might be a little bit because of this halo effect. They want to avoid it. They want to not have you say something charismatic, and then our brains think, oh, you know what? He's also probably good at dealing with stakeholders because he's charismatic on the phone call. That's not necessarily tied together. Yeah, yeah. Again, I'm going to praise this book over and over. If you haven't read it yet, highly recommended. This book talks about all this stuff. The Work Rules. Thinking Fast and Slow. Oh, really? Wow. Talks about exactly that kind of idea. It's a 500 page book. So to be fair, it's like reading three books. So that's why I'm so stuck on it. But it talks about how these decisions end up being really biased, incredibly biased. And having, for example, having a group interview, if you have someone in the room start the conversation off with a particular question, that can change, that can color the rest of the interview. Yeah. Like totally color. So it's one of the experiments they did, for example. It had to do with happiness and romantic life. So if they ask these questions in this order, how happy have you been lately? And then they asked, how many dates have you had in the last month? The two were totally uncorrelated. There was almost no correlation at all. But if they ask them in the reverse order, there's a very high correlation. So if they said, how many dates have you had in the past month? And how happy have you been lately? Our brains are using the information that we just recalled about our dating life to inform this bigger question about happiness. Wow. So super, super interesting stuff. But that's going back to our halo effect and going back to our discussion on interviews. That is, I can absolutely see that Google would be able to take that kind of research and say, OK, we're going to construct our interviews to eliminate as much bias as possible, because hiring is a very expensive process. And that's the thing. Everybody that's listening to this, I challenge you to apply this stuff to your real life. We're talking about all these books and these heavy topics. But the reason Jonathan and I read books like this, I can probably speak for you in that I love to learn about psychology. Because learning about these biases, guess what? You're going to take some of these biases, flip them upside down, deconstruct them, and use them in your own life. So finding mentors, accelerating your career, whatever it might be for you. All of these are on the table to be manipulated for your advantage. But only if you have the knowledge of them. And that's why it's so important to grind through thinking fast and slow. That's like one of those books that I've picked up 10 times and never might finish. So it might be a tough one. It might be an audiobook, everyone. Yeah, so what you're saying is 100% true. If you take this stuff, you can answer questions like, how should I compose this email? Yes. And instead of saying, well, I'm just going to use my intuition to compose an email, I can start with my intuition because your intuition is very powerful. But then you can go back through and say, am I saying something early in this email that could color the rest of the email in a negative way? Another very simple example. People tend to remember the last thing that happens to them. So if you end a meeting on a high note, they will have a positive perspective of that meeting. That's an amazing thing, right? If you know that, you become a magician a little bit. Yeah, and it's a very simple thing to know. And it's so great because you can sort of do this thing that I love, which is narrating the meeting. So not all meetings need a quarterback, but if you can be the person at the end of the meeting that sort of summarized what just happened and make everybody feel productive, if you can do that without everybody feeling like there was a bunch of open threads that didn't get closed, if you can be the person that closes threads, it's not an ego boost. It's not for you, it's for them. Because the team feels closed, like the threads have been closed. And the power of that, I find, is kind of what you're talking about. It's so great, everybody feels so productive. And it's actually valuable. What you're doing is not fake, right? You are closing those threads for those. And I think that's a pushback that I hear a lot of my listeners just ghost listening forward to this episode. A lot of developers are super skeptical of marketing tactics and hacking psychology for your gain. The truth is, doing this kind of stuff, most of the time, it's because you're actually benefiting another person, right? You're not being selfish by closing those threads up. You're not being selfish by ending the meeting on a good note. You're actually leaving a good impression. And there's nothing sinister about that. And in fact, I should have changed the way I said that thing earlier, so earlier I said, you can use these biases to your advantage if you know them. What I should have said is you can use these biases to your advantage to help other people more. And that's how you get above your current level. Trust me, if you want to be more, in pretty much any area of life, if you can just help other people, it will boost you. And one thing that I heard a Navy SEAL say that has been so powerful for me, he had a lot of pain in his life. And he said, so poignantly, if you can fix other people's problems, your problems just magically go away. And I don't necessarily think that's exactly true, but I've actually experimented with that in my recent life. And I found it to be very powerful. It not only does it just get your mind off your problems. So what I'm kind of getting at here is this concept of adding value. If you're not at the position that you want to be in your career, it's likely because you're not adding enough value to the company. And you could do that by going deeper or broader. It just, it depends on your specific role and position. So again, these biases aren't meant to boost your ego. They're meant to be able to help other people. And therefore, you just get helped as a side effect. Yeah, you're understanding. You're effectively you're having empathy for the way people's brains work. Like, yeah, well said. Understanding what another person is going through mentally and emotionally, that's not, again, the word that so often I think comes to people's mind as sinister. And it's just not. I can tell you, it's almost eerie. How true what you said is about helping other people and you getting the help you need. This is the whole point behind therapy for I guess war veterans who go through therapy. But also people who have gone through personal trauma a lot of times, the best thing you can do is go and volunteer. It's kind of a strange phenomenon, right? But when you go and help another person, your perspective is shifted. And you start seeing the world from a different viewpoint. And suddenly the problems that you were facing, first of all, they're contextualized, right? So the thing that you thought was so bad is not so bad. Secondly, you realize, hey, we're kind of in this together. The world is full of this pain. And it's full of frustration. And it's full of people who have tried and failed and tried and failed and times 100. And so getting involved, and I'm not saying, this isn't me submitting a plea for you to go and volunteer at your local shelter. Of course, that's a fantastic thing to do. But this is more saying, hey, this failure aspect of where you are, when you isolate yourself and when you stop moving, you're effectively killing your chances, right? When you, when you, when you freeze up, it's kind of the mental picture that I have. When you freeze up in the face of failure or in the face of fear, the worst is happening. You are choosing the worst thing. And you said you're not going to try to push people to go to volunteer and stuff like that. And I totally get where you're coming from there. But I might, I might actually say to your listeners, I really recommend that you keep this in your back pocket like it's a secret weapon because that's how I do it. Anytime in my life where things are going poorly or very badly, and that's something that I've dealt with recently in many aspects of life, what I do is I reach out to somebody that is a listener of mine and I say, I'm going to help you get a job in the next three months. Let's do it together. And I'm not going to charge you anything because I need to fix your problem so that I can better understand my own. And it has nothing to do with the problems I'm trying to solve. You know, as long as I get selfless, it allows me to look back at myself in a selfless way and better understand my own situation and better understand my own problems. And also, somehow the world sort of works out better when you're being very selfless. I don't know why that is. I'm not a very spiritual person, but I've found that to be kind of true. You're absolutely right. It's whatever you want to call it karma or if you subscribe to your religion, whatever. This is kind of a profound effect, right? That you help your neighbor and it turns out that you're helping both your neighbor and yourself. I'm not sure that I have a perfect reason for that that I can offer you. And it's also a great leadership tactic. I mean, look, if you don't want to think about it spiritually, think about it like a leader. What does a leader do? So let's say you're a leader on a team. Let's say you're a mid-level developer and you've got a junior developer under you. How can you lead them? In a couple of ways, fear or inspiration. There's a lot of management and leadership books that give you other ways, but those are kind of two of the basic ways, right? So an inspiring leader, what they do, is they don't try to help themselves at all. At all. They try to have the person below them in as many possible ways as they can. That could be removing obstacles. That could be helping other areas of their life or giving them advice and other areas. That could be any number of things, but it's completely selfless act. And through that selfless act, the team grows. And you grow. So why wouldn't that apply to the rest of life? That's why do we think that only applies on a team or in a work, leadership environment or context? That's because, I don't know why, because it doesn't. It's not true. It actually applies to every area of life. So every time I get on Twitter and I want to hold back, I think to myself, what would a real leader do? He would just say, not offensive things, but he would say things that were selflessly true and selflessly trying to help people. And that's the approach that I take every time I get scared about doing a podcast or a YouTube video. I just think, you know what? I'm going to be selfless for a minute because through this selfless act, things will happen because I'm trying to help other people. For anyone that I'm coaching and leading, one of the main things that I harp on over and over and over is protecting your time. And the person that you need to protect your time against the most is yourself. As developers, we often try to do things that we don't necessarily need to do. Someone else has built something that we can take advantage of. And today's sponsor is a perfect example of this, pusher. Pusher has built the infrastructure for doing real time messaging on web sockets. Now that's a little bit of technical language. Let's cut through a little bit and say, pusher allows you to create real time features in your web apps and your mobile applications. And just a few lines of code, you can have these real time messages coming from your server to your client. If you try to hand roll this on your own or if you tried to manage a server to do this for you on your own, then you're probably going to realize how much of a time-waster it is. And pusher allows you to focus on the application development. Now this isn't true just for single developers. Huge companies are using pusher, intercom, GitHub, the New York Times, mail champs. These are all companies that are using pusher for their real time application needs. And you can get started today for free by going to spec.fm slash pusher. That's spec.fm slash pusher. Thank you again to pusher for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. So just a thought exercise. If you are at the top of a company, if you're in a top position in a particular department and you're trying to increase the quality of your job or you're trying to increase the quality of your life or at the macro level, you're trying to help the company. There's no more rungs to climb on that ladder. You've made it. But you don't stagnate at the top. Things are quite simply things are not going to get any better and perhaps they will get worse. So what does someone at the top do to grow the company? They grow it beneath them. And when I say beneath, I hate this term because it sounds belittling, but they grow it beneath them. They focus. They're all of their focuses is on the people they are leading. And if it's not, they're going to fail. And I'd recommend maybe or not recommend, but I'd posit a substitution of language there. So let's, what if we substitute at some of that language to be this? As somebody becomes a CEO or CTO or some of these high levels in a company, they sort of transition from their own career rungs to the company as the vehicle that they selflessly focus on. So once that transition happens, they no longer care about their career trajectory. They care about the company's trajectory within the marketplace that it's in. And that selflessness is an important but under discussed point, I think. The only way to affect that change is to start looking at what they can do to help the other parts of the company, right? Like how can I lift people? How can I lift them from where they are to the next, to the next rung on the ladder and thereby making space for more, right? That's actually kind of a growth 101 concept is as people grow, you have more space for entry level and you continue mentoring people upward, right? So effectively, you're creating ladders or rungs at the bottom of the ladder in a way. And since we're talking about mentorship and mentees, I'm curious, a director level in a company typically has some amount of focus on the individuals. So, you know, whereas a CTO might be more focused, it's different in some companies. Some are focused entirely on recruiting. Others aren't at all. Others are focused on growing their market standing in the marketplace or whatever. So for you, are you focused on mentoring the people below you and how do you think about that? I wonder. That's a very good question. Yes. So the short answer is whiteboard is kind of, right now we've kind of locked our growth and we aren't actively hiring anybody where we're actively recruiting, because a lot of the work that we do is effectively, it's consulting, right? So the growth that we experience is not gonna be growth in terms of engineer manpower. It's gonna be growth in learning. It's gonna be growth in perspective. So those are the things that we work on all the time, right? So yeah, absolutely, picking up new skills is gonna be important, but equally important is picking up the ability to work well on behalf of someone and one person can move a lot for a company, right? So the mentorship side of this is really where a ton of my energy goes. And a lot of it is mentoring on two separate levels. So you have this mentoring on the individual level, which is incredibly important. Obviously, you know, at a company my size, you absolutely should know everybody by name, right? It's 25 people. If you're not doing that, then you're certainly doing something probably pretty wrong at a company that's small. The other side of this is, so you're mentoring at a personal level, you're understanding people's problems, you're developing empathy, you're developing, and a holistic understanding for them as an individual, outside and inside of work. So you understand their motivations, you understand, how can I help this person achieve their bigger goals, right? Not just what are their professional goals and how can I move them in the right direction, but what are they motivated by in their life? Do they have children, for example, right? So once you start understanding that, well, now you can say, okay, I have all the different pieces of the puzzle. How can I mentor this team together? How can I mentor the interactions that they have with each other? How can I mentor how they are going to interact with a client in the future? And that is a probably one of the hardest things that a mentor can do is mentoring multiple people in their relationships. It's almost like a counseling, ongoing counseling of the team. That's really fascinating. And I love how deeply you clearly think about this. I gotta give props to you. First of all, as a manager to manager speaking, like going out and finding what their inner most drives are. And I mean, you're not like doing peyote with them and kind of uncovering your deepest desire, but yet, not yet. But you are sort of doing that exploration and a lot of people don't do that. And so huge props to you on that. I think that produces a high performance work culture. What you're talking about, I think that's what it produces. And now I will say, as teams grow and more interfacing between teams happens, that doesn't become the cure all that it once was. That kind of is the cure all for a small team. And I saw that through as we've grown. And what you described there is one of my biggest challenges is mentoring people that don't necessarily want to over communicate, but getting them to sort of free flow communication between themselves. Like you said, it's just counseling, really. And I'm curious, how do you, have you found these tactics or ways to handle that? You know, there's some really interesting things that we do. And I'm adapting these things as I learn more. Let me take a step back and say that if you are a junior developer and you have someone like Dan or myself that is leading you and counseling your team, it's easy to think that we have all of this figured out and that we have all the answers and that our tactics are extremely well thought out and tested and that we're reading from some book that you don't have access to. And that's just simply not true. Most of the time, leaders like Dan and myself, we're flying by the seat of our pants just as much as you are. And that's kind of a vulnerable thing that a lot of leaders are not willing to admit. But a lot of times the pressure of leadership is, hey, you said we were gonna do this thing and we didn't and part of my, as a leader, I looked back and like, oh man, I didn't even, like I didn't even remember that I said that. That's huge, man. It's just a moment of humanity and saying, like, man, really I'm just one of you guys. And they hear everything you say. Like, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, a recent mobile developer was like, why didn't we implement this specific server side solution before and I forgot that I had promised we would do that? Month ago, and he listens to every little single thing I say. And we forget that we talked to so many different people. So I guess that dilutes our remembrance or something. And some of it is accountability. A lot of this stuff is, hey, we're gonna say an impassing in a meeting and then it's gonna get thwarted or somehow it's the game of telephone, right? It gets mixed up and what was a suggestion yesterday is now a hard and fast rule today or flip flop that, right? The hard and fast rules that we said yesterday have now become suggestions. And that can be hard on either side of the fence. A lot of this really comes down to being vulnerable. And there's another book that I'm just now getting into. It's called The Five Disfunctions of a Team. I believe that's the name of it. If you Google Five Disfunctions, you're gonna find it. But this is a book about the problems that pretty much any team can face. And they are categorical kind of problems. They aren't really specific. Categorical problems like, for example, trust. Trust is kind of the basis for all of this. So if you are like me and you say something and then you forget that you said it, and your team views that as you broke a promise, right? That's a possible outcome of that scenario. Then you have to gain their trust and be vulnerable and say, hey, I actually just forgot that I said that. And be honest, there's nothing wrong with that, right? And for me, the thing that really flipped my, I stopped calling myself a manager when I read Extreme Ownership. Yeah. And so that is the book that I buy everybody on the team and I don't need to buy them any other books. And here's why, because I could buy you a book for every problem that we have. And I could buy you a book for every solution that I think will solve that problem. Or I could buy you Extreme Ownership. Everybody comes to the table with full knowledge that we're gonna be so blunt about the problems that we do have and have complete ownership. Like, yes, I made that mistake. Yes, you made that mistake. And we made this mistake here and we all made this bigger mistake. And you know what, we all realize that. And like you said, that's being vulnerable and being open to that realization as long as that's there, like we discussed earlier, that conflict can exist. And if that conflict can exist, a solution can be born. But with help that, it's hard. And before I read Extreme Ownership, I never understood that. It just didn't click in my head that you know what? I have to be so, everything that I do, I have to own. If it's a failure, I own it. My team made a failure, they own it. If everybody does that, I can assure you most things work themselves out. In my experience. That fits a right in line with this idea of trust, right? If I try to throw off the blame for a problem, like a mistake that I've made. Or if I don't call someone else out on a mistake they made. Well, now we have this, again, going back to that cognitive dissonance between what we know is true in our intuition. Like man, he really screwed up that one. And what we're hearing. And when we hear something different from what our intuition and what our kind of cognitive wisdom is telling us, when that stuff isn't addressed, there's a problem, right? There's a layer and we have to start reading between the lines. And that's where things get really, really messed up. You can see this in teams when you start seeing like passive aggressive messages. It's the worst. It's the worst. For example, right? This is a super, super big problem. Yeah, see. Because this kind of conflict can cost companies. No joke. Millions of dollars. It's a fact. Millions of dollars. Just because people are unwilling to learn how to trust each other. And it may be that they're not unwilling, but they haven't learned how to trust each other yet. And they might not. And there's numerous problems that that obviously can be the cause of passive aggression over Slack or I am. But one of the big ones, like you said, is not only that, but also I'm not yet fully owning everything I do. I work with some people that they're older and yet they don't fully own every action they take in the code base. And man, it's challenging to be 29 and trying to mentor a 45-year-old. And that is something that I've not ever been able to figure out how to do. And I don't think it might not even be possible. And I'm still super new to leadership and I'm learning every day. And I definitely don't have the answer to that one. That's the whole thing. Well, I'm going to stay in touch with you on this one. I have never had this challenge on my team yet. We're all within a couple of years of each other, which certainly adds to our bias, our collective biases. But nevertheless, if you come across things that you learn in that arena, please do let me know. I'm very interested in how you solve some of those problems. And it's even harder because obviously, them being older and having more experience means you're the mentee at almost all times. And that's amazing because people like you and me, we love being the mentee. Trust me, as a good way for all your listeners, a good way to checkpoint your life when you always have somebody that you're learning from, when you always feel like a mentee, you're in a great place. Just keep it up. And that's why I love being around these people. But when I see things like they don't understand continuous integration, when I see things like they don't understand this or that, and I'm trying to sort of manage up the chain and trying to leave them in a way that I think will benefit them, not me in any way. In fact, it will likely get me fired. It will likely get me fired before it impacts them. That's the challenge of managing up the chain of command. But, and again, an extreme ownership, you can read all about this. But really, it just comes down to that being selfless and saying to yourself, okay, well, even though I'm so much younger than you, I have a lot of experience with this one specific thing that you've never done. And the fact that you've never done it for 30 years means you're even blinder to it than you realize. So how I uncover that blindness is something I've yet to learn. Yeah, you know, you're mentioning a lot of things that are triggering just so many thoughts. This idea of mentoring up the chain, so on the flip side of this, if you are up the chain, which, you know, whether it's by title or by age or by some other metric, right? If you are up the chain, it is incredibly important. Not just kind of, and sometimes important, it's incredibly important that number one, you hire people that you want to be mentored by. Pay attention to this, it's super important. Hire people that are better than you at something, okay? And number two, that when they do have that chance to mentor you, that you not only are okay with it, but you invite it and make space for it, okay? I have engineers in my team that have, on many occasions, had to deal with my bad code, okay? And this is, you know, so story time for developers out there. You're not always going to be the best coder on your team, and your position will not always be directly related to your talent, okay? That's another kind of side lesson. But when your position is not directly related to your talent, there are going to be developers on your team who make your team better, and you need to listen to them. So I've had to have so many lessons, and so many, for example, best practices that are brought into our team because we have talented engineers who want to make things better. And you as the mentor, you as the up the chain leader, you have to be open and willing to learn from the people you are leading, which feels, again, we're going back to that word dissonant, right? It feels weird that you are actually being mentored by someone that you are leading, but it's absolutely a common thing. It's an amazing thing that happens, but it is common. And that's a very difficult and challenging thing, but even for the reverse role. So let's say the same scenario, but let's say you're a mid-level developer, but you have a lot of experience in something that your team manager doesn't. And let's say it's continuous integration. You have a hypothesis that is, if we add continuous integration to all of our projects and automated deployment, we'll save X amount of time, and let's say we're a consultancy, so we save X amount of dollars, right? So you have this hypothesis. How is it that you take your ideas that are selfless, not egotistical ideas, any egotistical ideas cut out of this conversation because it's not part of this? Selfless ideas like what we just described, how do you manage up the chain such that your boss is inspired by your idea, even though he understands, so let's say your boss is Jonathan. He understands that he doesn't have some knowledge that you have, because you're a specialist, he's a generalist. So how is it that you can tell your boss without damaging his ego, that you have the specialist knowledge, and it can apply to just our team or to other teams across the company. I find a lot of your listeners are perhaps in that position, that just normal sort of skill upper position, having that skill of influence or being able to passionately persuade. I find is something that I've learned throughout my career is still probably the number one thing I'm learning. It takes a lot of practice, and it goes back to what you were saying earlier, and really the theme of this episode, which is developing empathy and learning how to provide value to other people, that's how you're going to persuade. You don't come into that meeting as a junior developer, meeting with a senior developer, with this idea that you have somehow conquered something. That's not gonna be persuasive. It may be for one or two kinds of people, but it's not going to be universally persuasive. The things that are universally persuasive are the things that provide an undeniable value to the person you were talking to. With limited downside, with limited downside. Here's the thing guys, mitigating risk, mitigating risk is possible. Huge. So offer things up as an experiment. Yes, here 100%. When you, so here, maybe we can end on this or something. I hear so much from people that write me, that say my environment is toxic. The environment that I work in is not ideal. And they list off a bunch of conditions. We don't have this buzzword or this buzzword or this buzzword. And then my manager does this negative buzzword and this negative buzzword and this thing. And therefore, I'm in an environment where I'm not acting the best developer I can be. I get the email all the time. People just negative about where they work. And guess what? It's probably true guys. Most of you probably do work in environments that's a little bit subpar. And it could be that all these emails are true and you're really living in a negative environment. But the reason that I really wanted to touch on managing up the chain is because it's the most important skill for you in every job you have. Because guess what? Every job is going to be suboptimal. Because every job is not focused on how can we make the most amazing environment for people. It's usually how can we make money? How can we get this company bigger? And that's just the reality that we live in. There are some companies that have more focus on culture and we love those companies. Me and Jonathan probably look up to a lot of those companies. And in fact, I read blog posts from those companies and want to learn more about them. But the reality is you're going to work way more at the former than the latter. So you're going to be dissatisfied often. You know, as a developer, a technical person, you're going to be dissatisfied quite often, especially if you don't have the social skills that allows you to understand why the dissatisfaction took place in the first place. Why did the team get toxic? Well, it's not because this person's a bad person. It's because the natural evolution of a team is towards disarray, towards entropy, towards toxicity, towards these things that are negative and not helpful. So as a developer, you have to understand, managing up the chain of command is your number one, well, it's your number two commodity, your number one commodity is lines of code. Number two, it's persuasion. And I find people forget that. Yeah, and we like to say this at whiteboard. And really, it sums up exactly what you're saying. The best way to change culture is to create more of it. If you find a problem with the culture you're in, pointing out those problems is. Work, how to play. Yeah, it's worse. Everyone can see the problems. And when you point them out, you may feel like that's and this is this kind of a soapbox for me. So forgive me. But you may feel like it's an intellectual process. But it's actually more of an emotional process. And it's an important emotional process. Don't get me wrong. You do need to be able to identify problems when you see them. It's incredibly important. Going back to the honesty, brutal honesty, bluntness, and owning an extreme ownership, what Dave was talking about earlier, incredibly important that you can see the stuff. But even more important is that you start to create change in the organization you're in. And you do so not by coming in as a renegade and trying to flip the system on its head and create anarchy in the company. It doesn't work like a government and a company. You're not going to overturn the government. You're just going to get fired. You're just going to have to get fired and go somewhere else. Instead, you create change by inspiring it and living that change. And so things like the tactics, Dan and I have been talking about, take all these tactics, write them down, and then find places where you can use them. Create experiments in your company. Have interesting conversations. Eliminate your negative relationships. All of these things that we've discussed today are just little pieces in the larger puzzle that says effectively go and do something. Start here. That's Dan's podcast. Start here. Start today. Get some momentum going. Make those decisions. And just to leave you with a bit of inspiration, if you are writing me, or Jonathan, and saying that you work in a toxic environment, I challenge you to do the following. Go home and work on the hours that you're not being paid to work on and try to do one little action like implement continuous integration on your current project. It might take you four hours that you're not being paid for or whatever. Do that. If you're not willing to do that, then you're not allowed to write us those messages. Because if you're just to consider the problem guy, and what you got to do is you really have to focus on the 1% change. Like Jonathan said, you can't come in and flip the whole company into continuous integration overnight. You have to say, hey guys, last night I was just packing around and really implemented this cool pipeline on our current project. And I did it in this dev branch. It's not on master at all. Do you want to check it out? I've got it up on a screen share right now. You want to see how it works. But in at the end of a team meeting that Monday, do that. That's how you manage up the chain. It's not by complaining. Yeah, yeah, investing. Yes. And putting the blood sweat in tears. Fantastic, fantastic piece of inspiration. Go and do that and stop listening to podcasts. Or well, I guess we'll go and listen to Dains podcast next. And then go and do that for our projects. Uncontinuous integration. Thank you so much for joining me today, Dan. It's been fantastic. We didn't get into everything that we had discussed. But I think this was actually a more compelling conversation than I could have hoped for. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I'm honored and grateful to be here. And I'm very appreciative. And Dan, let's talk about a few of the things that you are doing. You have Start here on Twitter to start here at FM. Where else can they find the podcast? Yeah, so you can find me on Twitter. I'm at Dan Miller at DAIN in my LLER. And I love to talk to you guys. I love to help out. So any questions that you got, feel free to hit me with them. And then it's everything else is StartHere.fm. Awesome. Thank you so much again, Dan. Yeah, no problem. Thank you. That wraps up the interview with Dan Miller. I really appreciate it. Dan coming on the show. I want you to go and check out the things that Dan is creating and doing, especially for those of you who are just now starting out learning how to code. Head over to StartHere.fm. That's your first homework assignment. I have another one for you today. I would love for all of you to take just 10, 20 minutes maybe out of your day, sit down and write out the five things that you are responsible for. And I want you to put them in order. The five things that you are the most responsible for. And there's only five spots on this list. You can't list all 25 things you're responsible for. I want you to list the five things you're responsible for. And those are the things that you own. I want you to take that list. And I want you to put it in your backpack or put it in your computer bag or put it in a frame on your desk or take a picture of it and put it in the background of your phone or on your computer. And I want you to refer back to it and always check yourself against that list. Are the things that I'm responsible for thriving or dying? That's your homework. Are the things that I'm responsible for thriving or dying? I want you to do that on a daily basis. And it shouldn't take very long to take a list, take a look at a list of five things, right? And these can be anything. They can be for your personal life. They can be in your work life and everything in between. So write that list out. I'd love to see pictures of these. If you can mention me on Twitter at Developer Tea, you can also find me on Instagram or on Twitter on my personal handle. It's Jay Cutrell, J-C-U-T-R-E-L-L. I'd love to see your list of the five things that you are responsible for and that you're going to be checking. Are they thriving or dying? Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. Thank you again to pusher for sponsoring today's episode. If you don't have real time features in your application, then you're probably missing out on some incredible value that you can provide to your users. And you can do it pretty easily. That the hard part is taking care of for you. You can focus on making those features as awesome as possible. That's the cool part of being a developer, isn't it? Go and check it out, spec.fm slash pusher. You can get started for free today. Thank you again to pusher for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. Thank you again to Dain for being on Developer Tea. And until next time, enjoy your tea. Until next time, good bye.