 I recall there was a study that people would rather experience physical pain than speak in front of others on average. So fear, everyone is scared of something at some point or other. It's in innate human emotion. Usually it's in a response to a danger or a threat whether it's real or not. It's basically a perception that something bad is going to happen, we become scared of it. What's going to happen that's bad about public speaking? What would happen? Why are we so frightened of this? Why is my pulse rate up right now? But fear basically, it's very healthy. If you didn't have fear you'd be in trouble. It stops you from walking in front of a bus because the bus is going to hit me and that's bad. It stops you from picking up a spider and playing with it because, you know, what could go wrong with that? Different fears manifest in different people. Some people have their own set phobias, others don't. For myself, I'm really bad with heights. My wife is really bad with spiders. Like, don't put me too close to the ledge over there or otherwise I'll start trembling a bit. Some things are inherently scary. This is basically the most frightening thing ever. The animals have picked up weapons and are using them against us. Lobster is bad. It's using the knife. This is what's so frightening. Is it pitted? That's just the markings on the ground. The animals are risen. It's bad. Regular expressions may invoke similar kinds of fear in people. We've all got our own little quirks about what scares us on that. There's no fear of regular expressions which makes me weird. Actually, there's a whole series on these. I've logged every single last one of them. I could have just sat here tonight and clicked through them and laughed a bit. So what's it like not to have any fear at all? There is one person. What are we? Six billion on Earth? Seven? Seven billion? One person known to science who has no fear. She had a problem with her amygdala because that's what's in your brain that controls fear. She's known as SN in the study. She has absolutely no fear of anything whatsoever. Naturally, since she's known to science, she's had a lot of studies done on her to see what she actually does. One of the things they did is they took her to a pet store with lots of exotic creatures in there just to see what would happen. They got her to get some snakes wrapped around her and all sorts of things. She had to be asked 15 times not to touch the snakes that would kill her because she thought it looked fun. So it's got pretty markings. Why can't I just pick it up and what could possibly go wrong? Nothing would work. No problems with spiders whatsoever. So basically she had to be physically restrained from touching the things in the pet store that would kill her. How she is still alive, I don't know. If you've ever gone through any kind of therapy, one of the main things they do for you is cognitive behaviour therapy. And that teaches you how to think to work your way around the problem that you can't solve otherwise. So for her particular behaviour therapy is I shouldn't walk in front of a bus because I would die. But that doesn't scare me. My friends would miss me. So maybe I don't want my friends to miss me so I won't step in front of the bus and I'll just carry on about my life. It's not that she's suicidal or anything else like that. It's just she has no fear. The third test is during Halloween. They took her to the Waverley Hills Senatorium. I think this is in the US and it's basically ranked globally as the most haunted place. And most encounters with ghosts and things where they believe in them or not. They took her with a whole bunch of test subjects and basically let them loose in this old haunted asylum on Halloween at night. They made things more interesting. They got people to dress up as all sorts of scary creatures and jump out at her from doors and the like. She laughed. Everyone else was basically screaming and out of their minds. Even though they knew it was a control and everything else like that, she would just see someone jump out in a vampire outfit or something. And she laughed at them and said that's hilarious. Absolutely no fear whatsoever. It's really amazing. The study about her is online. So if you ever want to look up what that's about, just look for SM Amygdala and then you'll find out all about it. This is Franklin D. Roosevelt, one of the early US presidents. This is a really famous quote from his second induction speech. The only thing to fear is fear itself. He's completely wrong. There are lots of things that you should fear. Fear is very healthy. Otherwise you'll end up like SM and it's bad. Scientifically just on a tangent. She's got no fear. There are other people who have no pain as well. They have to be taught that picking up hot things is bad because you get a burn and then you can't do something. Our concepts of how we work are sometimes really odd. I'm just going to cover a couple of fears. I've got four actually that are really relevant to us as developers. Fear of the Unknown is a really big one. I haven't done it before. I don't like it. I immediately don't want to even have a go at it. Whenever we're confronted with a new technology, there's a new browser that comes along. There's a new framework or something. We don't even want to go near it. And it doesn't really matter what the thing is. It just manifests in different people in different ways. This is a 1980s thing telling parents how basically the TV is going to destroy your mind. If you go back through history when books became widespread, when the printing press made books cheap enough that normal people could buy them, there were people complaining that all these people sitting on buses carrying along, reading books all day, if only they'd engage in society a bit more. It's fear of what's different. We get that now when everyone's mingling about someone who's carrying a mobile phone. If you're not in that mindset, then that's why you're scared of it. It's different from what you used to. The way to get around this is to basically be uncomfortable when you're comfortable. As soon as everything becomes normal, you need to disrupt it. You need to basically invoke some sense of anarchy into the way that you run your life, just to throw something different at yourself. We revel in things being the same. We want tomorrow to be the same as yesterday. That's our perfect way of doing things. But the reality of that is it's not very good for us. Fear of failure is huge. It's particularly right from some cultures more than others. But basically, instead of trying something new, I'm just going to stick to whatever worked last time and no one's going to blame me for it going wrong. The problem is that, and it gets you so far, this is an error message that's just handled really badly. Not as funny as last time. I'd include it up at the top. It says failure if you can't read that. Basically, there's a precautionary principle which basically says this is the extension of fear of failure rather than actually go out there and try something different. You just have to win every time you cannot fail. The reality is you need to fail often and fast. But when you're driven by the precautionary principle, you're basically given an unfair disadvantage where you can't make a mistake. This might be a project with an unreasonably short deadline in adequate resources, something along those lines where basically you're doomed from the start. It's actually driven from the fear of failure, which is really strange. Rather than acknowledge that something might go wrong, we just take an overly optimistic view of reality and push ahead with that instead. Fear inadequacy. This is one that a lot of people struggle with. Very commonly called imposter syndrome. Basically, you feel that you shouldn't be here because why am I here standing in front of you telling you about fear? What do I know? I struggle with this quite often actually. I know a lot of developers in particular get worried about, like, here I am doing this job, someone's going to catch me out sooner or later because I have no idea what I'm doing. Now I don't know what I'm doing. I'm having a drink break. This is probably the hardest thing to conquer, imposter syndrome, fear of inadequacy. The thing that works for me is knowing that everyone is pretty much the same. If you meet someone who's not really suffering from this fear of inadequacy, then you probably need to question them a little bit because maybe they don't know as much as they really do. Self-doubt is actually healthy, but you do need a measure of it. Kiasu. You're on your seat now. See, I'm old. I don't know things. Fear of being old. Everyone else is doing it. It's got to be good. In our industry, everyone else is Google or Facebook or Microsoft or Apple or something else like that. I got told that Agile, sorry, not Agile, Angular was fantastic because Google had written it. Google don't even use it, so how would they know anything about it? But it's not a good reason to do something just because someone else is doing it because otherwise you're going to end up just like everyone else, which is probably safe and happy, but you're never really going to excel. You're just going to be average and boring in the middle for the rest of your life. Basically, you end up in a cargo cult situation that it's worse. Cargo cult was from World War II when the US Navy would do air drops of supplies on Pacific islands and basically for the locals who were living there, they hadn't really had much contact with technology. These magical birds would come out of the sky, draw from these wonderful things on the ground and then go away again. When the war was over, they wondered where the magical birds had gone, so they built their own planes out of the materials that they had with them in a hope that the gods would come back again. This is cargo cult. They worship sea containers and things like that because they had no idea what they are. We do exactly the same thing when we adopt a framework or follow someone else's suggestion without thinking about how they've done it. What it wraps down to is inaction is inaction. If you just sit there and let things slide, you're actually doing something. This is one of the key outcomes from the Nuremburg trials from World War II. A lot of the guards' defences in the concentration camps was to say that I was just given orders, I just did what I was told, I just followed them, I can't be blamed. The judgement from Auschwitz was that you can be blamed, that you should have stood up, even if it was to be killed yourself. It's not good enough just to stand by and watch something happen. There's that fear that you're going to be caught out and you'll suffer. You've got a choice that you can either keep running and see what happens or you can at some point look at your surroundings and hopefully change course. If we become too safe, then the rest of the world have moved on while we're still basically running off the edge of the cliff. This is basically a fair number of you may work in startups. Does Vicky count as a startup? No. You were once, maybe. The whole thing these days about startups and disruption, it is all about looking for the companies that are Wali Jodi and trying to find out who they are and basically taking their market from under them. Every single one of us does this on an individual level where we're basically left behind on our techniques at some point or other because we're not really going to change. How do we get around this? This is the scientific method. We can fix everything with science. If you've seen the Martian or read the Martian, then you know you can fix anything with science. I'm just going to go through some of the points of the scientific method and how you can basically use them. So I'm not going to go through everything that's there. But go through it yourself. The scientific method is really good. The first thing you need to do is not be a piece of furniture. If you're in a meeting and you don't ever take part, then you are a piece of furniture. If you don't question the decisions that are being made, then you're just basically watching on the sidelines. You need to be careful about taking it too far. If you question everything arbitrarily, you become really annoying. The common term for that is a quiet, I think. There needs to be a rationale behind your questions. You need to think about what you're doing. You'll get better at that when you have experience, but experience isn't everything. Questioning is basically the start. You form a hypothesis that something may be different from what it is. This is from DigitalOcean, who are well aware that as humans we have a built-in resistance to change. This is something that Facebook found out really quickly early on. Every single time they change something, they test it out and they find it didn't test as well as they thought it would. The reason that happened is anything is different is bad as far as humans are concerned. DigitalOcean are fantastic because they know this and they basically force you to click the button that says, not fear change when they give you the change notice. There's no other option other than to hear that. Research. Once you have your hypothesis, you need to basically dig a bit deeper into it. That may be looking into peer review. You may be looking into a text spec somewhere. It could be something else. You might just go for a walk and hope for an idea to pop into your head, which works. You might search for something. Research is possibly one of the hardest things to do. You can be stuck on something for weeks, potentially depending on what the topic is and the time and so on, especially if you're not very good at that particular area. Sometimes things will just pop out at you. It's just immediately obvious what's going on. The value of research is it's the opposite of HIPPO, which is the highest paid person's opinion. This is something that rules pretty much every single company that's going out there. Your boss walks in and says, no, I want to do it that way. Everyone says, okay, that's fine. They get paid more than you do. They've never actually worked in your field whatsoever and you're just being overridden because they get paid more than you. Remind them of this. Tell them about this when they do that and see if they stick with their decision or not. But you do need to research. Opinions with nothing else are about as useful as this article. There's a lot of stuff about how ads are really invasive and all over the place. This article is so bad there's no actual content to it whatsoever. There's a headline at the top and it's like, epic slide deck from Yahoo, which is nothing. Even if it's from somewhere else, you need to find out what's going on. Opinions can be useful because opinions can be based on experience and other people's research, but you need to actually provide evidence for it to ultimately win. The conversation needs to change from, I think that this should be this way, to my research shows that this is this way. Research should actually win, doesn't always, which is why I'm building a carousel for a start right now. I spent hours writing up the reasons why you shouldn't use a carousel. The short answer is don't. Sent it to the client, they went to their third party and the third party said, I really like carousels and they just went with that. I can't even call the highest paid person's opinion because it doesn't count this one. But you need your references to back up what you're doing. So we have a hypothesis, we have a research and now we need to actually build something. Prototyping for me is one of the most important things to successful programming and development. You need to go out there and just build a thing. You've got half an idea, you've done a bit of research and different methods, you need to actually create something. This is scary when you're on a really tight deadline but if you don't do this, then you're just going to do the same thing as you did last time. The key thing when you are on a tight deadline, which is every single time, is to pick and choose which thing you're going to change this time round. So next time we're going to have a look at dropping jQuery from our project because we don't think we need it anymore. The time after that we're going to drop Bootstrap because Bootstrap is bad and you don't ever use it or else. But you need to basically try just a little bit and have it fail. If you spend two days working on something that might work really well and it doesn't, that's not a bad thing. At least you've learnt something from it, even better if you can blog about it or tell other people about it. This is Brad Bird. He's done a movie or two that you may have heard of. He's pretty awesome. One thing he said on Twitter a few months ago is that this last movie of his flocked commercially, every single one of them prior to that was basically swept the floor of anything before. Maybe not read it to him so much, but he's one of the key guys behind the Simpsons as well, which you may have heard of. He said sometimes you don't know something is going to work until you've actually gone through every single phase of it and finished it. That's the essence of prototyping, is to try to get to that stage as soon as possible. This is a guy who's one of the key creatives behind Pixar who has such success out there. Even they fail, everyone will fail sometimes, but you have to be willing to have a go to get there. Otherwise, you're just going to end up with really bad things like Ice Age 5, I saw it with you two months before. Once you've got your prototypes, you've got a bit of a product built, you need to start testing it. This bit gets done very badly very often where someone will look at the specification, they'll see if it does the thing and then they'll just move on. It's done by a route. You need imagination as a tester. You need to think about how on earth you're going to do something. If you don't, then we have one of the many, many examples of where things have just clearly not been tested properly. Here we've got use temporary walkway go that way or maybe go that way. I think you need to walk through the ditch in the middle to get to safety. I don't know. Crazy Australians. Once you've built it, you've tested it, you've deployed it, don't let go. You need to actually review it. If you're running off agile, agile basically jumps off to the next scene and you're on to the next cycle and you never look at what you did, never look back. But you need to look back because otherwise you've created a hypothesis, you've tested it out, but you don't know if it's the right answer or not. So you need to actually monitor what's going on. Software is never finished. There's going to be a bug at some point or maybe you should have done something slightly differently, but you never know until you get there and you need to review it. Your users won't come to you and tell you what's wrong, you need to tell them. The ultimate point that you can be as a software developer is when the person phones up and says, hey, it's broken, it's for you to say, yeah, I know and we've already got the patch ready for deployment. That's this Chinese medicine guy, obviously. The problem with that is that sometimes you'll have a bit of pressure. A lot of these things is basically you having the individual initiative to do this on your own. You will not get support. You may get support for some things, you won't get support for a lot of other things. So even though Dear Leader is looking on and just move a little bit to the left, click. You have to just go ahead and anticipate a firing squad or something. If you don't review, then you'll never know exactly how you ended up. You won't know how successful you were. Failure is usually pretty obvious because things just don't go very well. With Amazon, creating the Kindle, they sent it out onto the market. Every bookseller was basically in a panic thinking that the end was nigh. No one was going to buy a book anymore because why would you? You can just download it and it's there and it's fantastic. The reality is really different. The reality of the Kindle is it's actually a niche product. It's now basically plateaued at a really small level of the market amongst certain types of readers and no one else uses them. And that's fine. When Amazon created it, they created it and they threw it out there just to see what happens. You could look at it and say, well, it's not dominating the market completely so it's a failure, but that's not correct. That's where your review process comes in and says even though we didn't meet the original goal for whatever that was, it's still a measured success. And you'll see a lot of criticism at the moment for the Apple Watch, which has just done estimates for about 12 million sales and about 6 billion net profit. Rolex made in total 4.5 billion last year. No one's telling Rolex that they failed. Yet everyone's saying that Apple did. It's all relative according to what you're doing. Apple won't tell us what they're trying to do, which probably means they think it's a failure themselves a bit, but you know. The question what it really gets down to is what have you possibly got to lose? And if I ask you this, then you'll give me a ton of reason. I can tell you lots of things that you've got to lose. But you've got an awful lot to lose even if you're not aware of it. This is one of the first digital SLRs that was ever created in 1989. Steve Sassen was working at Kodak and he invented the digital camera in 1975. He showed it to all the bosses that he created that gave him the funding, built the thing. I think it did about 100 pixels by 100 pixels. Pretty awesome first digital image. And they said, yes, but we're a film company. We don't do that. And sending back to his lab to carry on with it. See if you can come up with something, nothing. 1989 he invented digital SLR. Every other camera maker on the market ended up making the DSLRs and what you've got on your phone these days. Kodak went bust in 2012 because they just lost it. They were so obsessed with what they were trying to do that they were a film company, not a digital company. That their entire company disappeared underneath them. If you don't change, if you don't take that leap then everything you know will be gone even before you know what's going on. And this is a fictional character and we can always trust fictional characters. Until you've lost your reputation you never realise what a burden it was. In Saving Private Ryan maybe, more fiction. Let's talk about what makes a successful soldier. And basically, if you want to be a successful soldier you have to assume you've already been killed. If you sit there on the battlefield and want to save your life you're in the wrong spot because everyone's trying to kill you. If you assume that you're already dead then you can do anything. And this is pretty much how you need to go without at the same time if you're getting that you've got a mortgage or something like that of course. We've lost so many musical legends this year I can't really avoid quoting one of them. And this is Bowie who made me really upset when he died. So I don't know where I'm going either. I don't know where I'm going from here but I promise it won't be boring. And this is basically the attitude that you need if you want to be not average and not vanilla or not dull then you need to push yourself into that discomfort zone and do something different. Thank you. Anyone with questions about fear? No scary questions for me. I have these slides up on Slideshare so if you do want to have a look then please come ahead. After you told me not to use Slideshare? Yeah, I've already got so many things on there that it's my fear of leaving the restaurant. So how long have you been so far with this fear of being part of this sort of shit? This talk was... We had a thing at my work where we had to do a talk based on our little section and I had to do one on UX and I thought about what's UX actually about and UX is basically applying the scientific method to stuff and then it was like what's the scientific method really do for developers and that kind of thing it's really about getting rid of fears that helps you not worry about stuff like that. So it's a really random reason that I'm up here talking today. This talk actually got cancer because I was sick and then couldn't finish it in time. So then since we had no one else speaking tonight I thought I'd polish it off. It basically was a bit of introspection for myself and one of my co-workers thinking about the things that we face within our jobs and what we can actually do about them. It's not me standing up here and saying I'm perfect at anything because everyone fails at everything sooner or later but it's just basically things that have helped in the past. It's like I was talking about cognitive behaviour therapy. This is basically our own developer cognitive behaviour therapy. So it's actually very interesting because the fear is everything we face in different ways. Yes. So your presentation is really useful for us. Thank you. Just like a philosophy of discussion the idea of fear is very scary because it's unknown and therefore it is scary so you're disproportionately. But otherwise, do you think a body fear is actually nothing because there's nothing there really in imagination? Yeah, it's entirely in the mind. Yeah. I wonder what that person without fear would be like as a software developer. Let's just build it. Nothing could go wrong. It'd be fine. Who needs backups? It'd be fine. We don't need source control. Let's do a test over this one. Yeah. But it's always about the balance because you're talking about not having fear is wrong which is why I did the intro with SN. So I'd heard about her before and you don't want to be without fear. Fear is really important. You still need to know what your fears actually are. What are the things that are holding you back and you won't get it right every time because when something new comes along you will be scared of that change. But when you're aware that you're scared of the change you can actually do something about it. If you're not then you can't. If you believe that you can reverse the change you can kind of know yourself really well and you know that you can reverse change to this level then you really can take that amount of risk to change that bit. Yeah. And for people with phobias that's exactly what they do, the decentralization basically. So you try something new. For me, like comparing my fear of heights has involved me. That's the same thing, right? I climbed to the top of Sydney Harbour Bridge. My legs were gone. Yeah, I was a mess. But I did it. Having done that I climbed to the top of a tower in Sydney and you know how when you look at the glass there's nothing. It's really bad. I walked on that and it wasn't as bad. But yeah, it's even scary talking about that stuff. I did the same thing for a height because I had a rope. I mean, now it's much better. I'm still afraid of heights but then I imagine that and you know this stuff. Because you think about it sometimes fear makes things that much... Fear is an emotion of a certain magnitude, right? So you can put it to your positive use or you can put it to negative use. So if you fear something very much it makes it that much more exciting. Yeah. If you take it around it makes it that much more exciting. One of the things and the reasons that I... One of the things that helped me tackle my fear of heights was science. Yeah, science. The study into how the brain works when you're scared. The only difference between someone on a rollercoaster who's really enjoying themselves and me is there's a switch in the brain. The things that are happening are exactly the same. You pulse rate is up. Your eyes are like... You're basically really wired. One person is petrified the other one's having the time of their lives. I have the really bad fortune of having a son who loves rollercoasters a wife who has a couple of rods down her back that prevents her from going on them and a dear old dad who has to go with him. Luckily I'm not that bad at those things anymore but I still find it pretty scary. But yeah, there's no difference between fear and excitement other than what your brain tells you that you're experiencing. People give themselves before you do it. Yeah, that's priming. Yeah. I'm doing a... I'm writing a thing at the moment on waiting times and progress indicators and things like that and the psych on that is basically you prepare someone for what's happening next. When you are scared of something and you know it, you're preparing yourself to be scared. When you prepared for it and you've got a different tactic to try this time around then you're going to have a better chance of success. The other thing is the way how we see the problem. So basically we're afraid of fear because we think this is something we cannot do. Yeah. If we can change the way maybe we we lie ourselves, okay, I can do this and then we can start to get motivation to find the fear. You can ask about reframing something. And just... we didn't put it into a joke. I don't know. Then Google it. And... I'll not be through CBT, I don't need to hold it. It's that all the challenges can make man. Yeah. So if we can combat our mind if there's a problem instead of fear we can make this one happen and it's something benefit of man then maybe we can change to fight this fear. Yeah. And Monty Python has a very good quote that like, when we came from nothing we go back to nothing after all. Sounds very Buddhist. Very cool. Since we're on codable quotes I don't know how many people are involved in martial arts but if you have ever spark with anybody, you will know that if someone's going to hit you in the face it's actually to step into a situation where you have to spark another person voluntarily. Actually it is quite scary and the the matter of fact is some fighters said they can't remember who but the fact is that courage is not the absence of fear it's acting in spite of fear which is to say that Chris said you can't you can't function without fear but what the I think the measure of yourself is can you do something in spite of being scared? I think that's the key the expectation is not to have no fear but to act in spite of it I guess that's it. My subject about it is a lie my subject so fear. Have some fear but not too much anyone else before we get into wrap up no wrap up time I'm getting to that it's alright