 Does anybody here know how to play guitar or sing? That's essentially like being asked if anybody here knows how to fly a plane. Does anyone know how to fly this thing? Thanks, firstly, to the organizers, to Ernie Miller. We are going to have some fun this afternoon. We've had some requests. Yeah, sorry, y'all. No, stay away. Denied. I can't talk. I got to go. Don't call me back. I won't get the door. Got to focus on the job, because I got a new job. Climbing the walls. I was grinding my teeth. I was wasting my youth and using up my teeth. It got so bad, and I quit my job, and I got a new job. Climbing the walls. Too much junk, too much junk. Can we please clear out this house in the trunk, in the trunk? Then we'll take it all to the dump. Then we won't need a car, because we'll stay where we are, and I'll have all this room. I got tired of pacing the floor, sick of it all. I'm done with the floor. Walked away ever since I got a new job. Climbing the walls. I was grinding my teeth. I was wasting my youth and using up my teeth. Now I'm done pacing the floor, sick of it all. I'm done with the floor. Walked away ever since I got a new job. Climbing the walls. The deep end, the deep end. People talk a lot, but they don't know. They pretend, they pretend. They don't really know how deep it goes. Now I misunderstood that the walls were just good for staring blankly at. I got tired of pacing the floor, sick of it all. I'm done with the floor. Walked away ever since I got a new job. Climbing the walls. In my nails, hanging my head, chasing my tail. Got so bad, I quit my job, then I got a new job. Climbing the walls. Got a new job. Climbing the walls. Got a new job. Climbing the walls. You will be surprised to learn that that went better than last time. So thanks again to Ernie to the WetWare Track. It's all very exciting. We're going to have some fun this afternoon. I know there's been a lot of talk lately about Back to the Future, but I just want to clear something up. I have been obsessed with that movie to a point where it was added to the DSM-5. So I want to be congratulated on that. My name is Brandon Hayes. I'm to Viking on Twitter. I work at the front side where we try to make nice software for people. Ruby is my first language, my first love, but you'll have to accept my apologies. It's all going to be in EmberJS today. So for some bona fides, it's awesome to be in San Antonio. It's my first visit to the Alamo since I was a young kid. I actually descend from somebody who died at the Alamo. I don't really know the history of the whole thing, but from what I understand, there was some sort of dispute over squatters rights. So my problem isn't really so life and death, right? Even if they do keep me up at night. So why didn't I just play that song? Well, to do that, I'll tell you a little bit of my story. Not a lot of it, but I had a bumpy transition into coding. From the start of 2010 to the end of 2013, I worked at seven different workplaces, and this song haunted me. After six months of working somewhere, I'd start regretting my job decision, and after nine months or so, I would just peace out. But I'm not really here to tell you my story, and I'd probably tell it to you wrong if I was. So I do remember tweeting these lyrics periodically about six months in as this sort of like existential scream, but not so much that my boss would read it and fire me. All right, so we're giving people pretty bad advice. This is a real article. Let's read this. Nothing early in your career is more important than achieving success. And nothing signals success more than working for a successful company. Achieving success. I don't know, but that sentence makes me want to flip this whole podium over. My brain won't even let me parse this without exploding. What the hell is defining success? All right, so I've got some bad news for you, like really bad. So brace yourselves. Achievement and success are a system of control. Win or lose, you are playing somebody else's game. They set the rules, they define success, they manufacture the trophies, and you run the race. And we're made to believe success and happiness are tied together in some way, when really they're completely orthogonal unrelated concepts. But who cares if it makes us feel good to go chase and get those trophies? Why does that even matter? Well, because the other half of this bad news is that the world doesn't care if you're happy. It just wants your output. They want what they want on time, under budget. They're not evil, they're just being pragmatic. Success and achievement are defined by people trying to maximize your output and minimize the cost of getting it from you. And whether that makes you happy is completely irrelevant. If that makes me sound like a fringe nut job, I don't blame you. But did you know this? Starbucks's new red cups are a mind control device as planted by the government to distract Twitter while they put fluoride in your orange juice. Think about it. So whether my theories sound bananas to you or not, bear with me and let's set aside the notion of success and achievement for the next few minutes and we'll wipe the slate as clean as we can and pretend like we're starting our careers over. But first we need to get a foundational concept out of the way. And that's leading versus trailing metrics. Leading metrics are like a gas pedal and trailing metrics are like your speedometer. You want to go fast, but a gas pedal doesn't control how fast you go. It just controls the flow of electrons or gas and then you observe the speed later. Leading metrics are things you have some control over like hours worked, conversations you have, the code that you delete, the value that create are things you publish. Trailing metrics are things that you influence indirectly but actually care about. They measure output, things like your income, titles, your recognition or influence in the world. All right, enough heavy stuff. Let's play a game. So here, is anybody here from New York? Okay, how fast is Little Mac running right now? So I'm guessing like 140 here to be able to cover Manhattan at this rate. So that's pretty good. He's in boxing shape. I'll work up to it. All right, so how to play the game? We're gonna set up a baseline. We're gonna tweak some leading metrics and then observe the trailing metrics that pop out. We're gonna fast forward time and see what happens to those trailing metrics over a period of time. So the stats of your baseline, they're pretty much the way that we're wired. There's three main areas of focus, technical skill, connection and vision. There are a limited number of slots for these so we have to choose carefully. Technical skill represents a strong desire to achieve technical goals. Solve puzzles, level up, teach others, just do high quality work. Connection is the desire to connect new ideas to real world applications, often relying on the other people to produce results while providing some guidance. Vision is the desire to achieve something that hasn't yet been done. It's the difference between the way the world works now and the way it could work in the future. So think of these three stats as the layers of abstraction that people generally like to work at. Technical skill is solving problems at the computer level. Connection is solving problems at the people level and vision is solving problems at like a societal level. So once we set up our skills, we'll pick our inventory, which we have more direct control over. The first item is leverage. That's how well you understand your current value. Basically, somebody needs something that you have. The second item is ambition, which is believing that future you has capabilities that current you doesn't yet have. The third item is education, which is the investment that you plow back into yourself. And the fourth item is community impact. This is the amount of investment that you make into making things better for other people with no expectation of return. The final inventory item is dedication, which is the time and focus that you plow into the previous four items. So that's the formula, let's boil it down. Do these things and you will have a platform. And we'll come back and explain this. From there, we get to see the results. We can't directly turn the knobs to change things like income, stress levels, amount of free time, impact on the world, but they can be influenced. And we're gonna observe those indirect effects later in the game. Then we'll watch for the changes to those results that occur over two, five, 10 and 30 years. So we'll follow the careers of nine different people and see how they diverge based on their preferences and the platforms that they create for themselves. That's a lot, so we'll tell it in pretty broad strokes. We'll pick a mantra for each of those people, give them some natural inclinations, help them build their platform, and then we'll see what happens over the course of a few decades. So, are you ready? Okay, so the first person here just wants to be left alone to code. We get 10 points to start. So we're gonna allocate, this is a pretty skill-based person. And they're gonna have seven skill, a couple of connection, a little bit of vision. But they mostly wanna solve code problems and not get involved with a lot of other stuff. So, we'll give them a couple of, a little bit of understanding of their value. Not a ton of ambition. They don't really see what they could be doing. They wait for other people to tell them what their value is. They'll marginally interested in improving themselves. They're gonna work pretty hard. So let's give them pretty hard worker there and not a lot of time left over for a community. So, all right. Let's see what happens when we do that. All right, so they start off, we'll call this person the code slinger. They start off as a junior developer. Their income starts pretty low, stress, free time. All that stuff is pretty marginal. It's not gonna be a really high impact scenario. At year five, they move into more of a mid-level developer. They're kind of waiting for other people to recognize their skill and reward them. So that's gonna lag a little bit, but the income does come up over time. After 10 years, they're a senior developer. Their income jumps up, stress is marginal. They don't have a ton of impact, but they're pretty satisfied. And then over time, that starts leveling off. The income levels off. Everything levels off because they're, people are getting what they want out of this person, which is code. So, let's see what happened. So we'll call this person the code slinger. It's a relatively low stress, relatively low risk, relatively low reward. And it levels off pretty fast. The only kind of leverage they really get to exercise is leaving their job and getting a new one. And it's kind of a nine to five thing, and that works for them. This might be a signal that someone falls into this archetype, a snarky t-shirt. All right, so the next mantra is climb the ladder and wait your turn. And we have a connector here. So let's give this person lots of connection. And remember that thing where we're doing all the allocation? That's not actually super fun, so we're gonna bypass that part. So this person is a strong connector type and wants to climb the ladder. So let's see what happens for the connector. Let's give them some inventory. They're not gonna have a ton of leverage. They're ambitious and they're hard working, but they don't have much else going on. So let's say that ambition translates to taking anything that looks like a promotion, and we'll just cruise through all the promotions we can get. So they start as a junior developer. We'll call this person the cat herder. Some of you were going to empathize with this. They move quickly, and the first type of promotion they can take is to a dev manager. Their stress jumps up a lot, but the income jumps up, which is kind of nice. Their impact goes up a little bit. They move at 10 years into an engineering lead position. Stress starts moving up pretty fast. Income is high. And then at year 30, they're running a development team trying to pull all the different strings together and the stress is just off the charts. So let's see what happens. So they like connecting people to results, but they aren't really interested in getting better. So there's a danger that their knowledge sort of ossifies pretty quickly, but that puts them in a world of management, like middle management, a lot of golden handcuffs. The good income is pretty good. Stress levels are obviously off the charts. Anybody who's managed a team at a larger company can kind of empathize with the feeling of that person. And if you find yourself in that cat-herder position, this is probably how you were taught to delegate. You never really learned the difference between delegation and abdication. All right, so the next person just doesn't want somebody telling them what to do. They just want their freedom. They quit a few jobs pretty quickly. They realize they can pick up contract work on Odesk, work part-time, keep the lights on. So let's see what happens to them. All right, they don't want a boss. So they're a little more vision than, they're a little vision dominant. Let's give them some inventory. They're not gonna have a ton of leverage. Again, they're waiting for other people to kind of recognize them, but they wanna hang a shingle up somewhere. So they're gonna work really hard to get what they want, and let's see what happens over time. All right, so they start as a junior developer. I don't know if you're noticing a pattern yet. So we'll call this person the harried freelancer. Quickly, they jump out into becoming a freelance developer. They start pulling stuff off and realize, and they don't like working for other people. Stress goes way up. Income doesn't climb very much. There's not a lot of free time. But at 10 years, that starts getting better. Their income climbs, they're able to kind of manage their workload better. And by 30 years, it looks like a pretty sweet life actually. Income is high, stress is low, lots of free time. They're pretty satisfied. So let's take a look at what happened there. It's just you, your clients, your code, and making ends meet. It starts low, picks up well over time income-wise. And this can be like a really satisfying lifestyle. Anybody that's doing a lot of freelance stuff knows that this can be really great. But caveat, lots of small sales jobs, administrative stuff, it's more of your productive code time than you think. You never get to stop hustling for those gold rings. So the next person has something important to share with us. They totally get that they're high value and they wanna make a big impact. They're willing to put in a significant amount of effort to get there. So let's see what that person does. All right, so this is gonna be a skill-oriented person. And we're gonna give them, they have lots of understanding of their leverage, lots of ability to understand that they have future value. They're not gonna have a lot of time to educate themselves, but they are gonna work really hard and have a moderate level of community impact. All right, let's take a look at the results. Junior developer, we'll call this person the thought leader. And they, as quickly as they can, jump out of the dev track into a role that allows them to take more advantage of the skills they know they have with connecting people or communicating their technical skill. So we'll call that person the dev evangelist. Income jumps up a lot. Stress jumps up a lot. They're gonna travel a bunch, not have a lot of free time. At 10 years, they're gonna keep putting that kind of work in. They're gonna be an author and speaker. Maybe they have the ability to get in front of people and tell people how to code. And by year 30, they'll be a keynote speaker and things get a lot better. That looks like maybe a satisfying life for them. They like it, they're having a lot of impact. Income is high. Let's see what happened there. So having a public persona actually has a big impact on your income. Speaking, authoring books, gathering that authority, having people come to you for answers, they may decide to skip development entirely and just evangelize. It's a lot of work. Ask anybody who's ever written a book. I haven't because I know people who have and that sounds awful. There is a light and a dark side to this. You can slowly build a reputation by teaching others how to create great work. Or you can build a reputation by telling everybody how they're doing it wrong or maybe that computers are stupid. Or you can become an internet celeb and collect lots of hacker news karma, which, if you're unfamiliar, is basically like Chuck E. Cheese tickets for nerds. Except the Chuck E. Cheese is in Mordor. I think it's next to Applebee's. Don't go there. So our fifth person is always worried about how they're being viewed and valued. They wanna provide the most value possible. All right, so how can I provide the most value? Similar to the last person, they're willing to put a lot of effort into it. They understand that they have value to offer. They just don't necessarily know how to make that overlap with what they want. You may see this person feel really guilty. They may come from a different career track and jump into software development and understand their capabilities as a junior developer don't match up with their previous ability to deliver value in some job. And they jump into managing people so they can produce more value to the organization as quickly as possible. Not because it's necessarily what they want. So let's see what happens here. All right, so obviously they start as a junior developer. We'll call this person the product manager value. Jump out of the dev track into project management. Stress goes way up. Income comes up. Income comes up again at director of product. Stress doesn't really let up. And then finally as VP of products, the income level and stress level stayed pretty high. But it's pretty satisfying. It looks like a life that maybe somebody would like to have. So the result though is you have high stress forever. The income jumps up quickly. The hours are gonna be pretty rough. This person likely finds themselves doing stuff that they don't like. And there's not enough pay in the world to make somebody like something they hate. So they bounce from job to job. And for a certain personality type, the pure connector maybe. If you don't mind taking a bullet for the team and handle meetings and conference calls, I say go for it. If you're like, hey, I wanna be able to work while I'm on a Nordic track, this might be the job for you. So the next person wants to build their dream workplace. They have something akin to a vision, but it's mostly a vision of what they don't want. But that's enough to start a business, make some money, hire some people, and actually start seeing that dream come true. So they want to build the company they always wanted to work at. So they're gonna have a strong vision. Similar to the last one, they're gonna have a moderate amount of leverage and ambition. They're gonna educate themselves, be pretty hardworking, and desire to impact the world. Let's take a look at the rules. We'll call this person the lifestyle business founder. Start as a junior developer, quickly move into senior developer because they understand their value well enough to communicate that to other people and kind of move up and pull teams together. But watch their satisfaction dive here. They're not really digging it. And at 10 years, they jump out and become a solopreneur. They start a business, their income drops significantly, stress jumps, free time drops. This sounds like a really bad idea. Why is this person doing this? Well, it's because they're targeting maybe year 30 where they are a small business CEO and they have all the free time they want and their income is high. It's a very satisfying lifestyle for this person. So let's take a look at what happened there. So you'll notice that for those types, satisfaction just completely nosedives whenever they're working for somebody else. And eventually they realize the problem might be them. There's a big income hit though, when you try to do that for yourself. There's a big risk there, but a solid reward potentially at the end. They wind up cleaning messes all day for other people to make a nice workplace. And that's the curse, right? If you start a business, you get to create your dream job. But then you have maybe year 30 where and like freelancing, you spend a lot of time hustling. However, unlike freelancing, if you stop, if you survive and stick it out, it gets really nice later on as the business takes on its own life. Don't you want that feeling? Person seven wants to teach the world to create great code, solve hard problems and build things that last. They understand their value, they're totally willing to work for it. So let's find out what happens with person seven. Let's build better software together. They're gonna have a high skill level, but they're inventory, they're gonna really have a grasp of their leverage. They're really gonna understand their value. They're gonna understand that they have a lot to give. They're gonna be willing to work pretty hard and they have a really strong tie to community and a desire to impact the world. So they're gonna be less flexible about their value system. And they're gonna be really education oriented. All right, so let's take a look at the results. Start as a junior developer. We'll call this person the chief architect. They quickly move into senior developer through both ability to market themselves internally and technical merit. A lot of income jumps up here, stress jumps up free time. Then they move to a distinguished developer track where they really focus on teaching people and mentoring people. Income stays high, stress is really high, but they're more satisfied. They're having a good time. And then by year 30 we'll call this person the chief architect. The income is really high, but satisfaction is off the charts for this person. So let's take a look at what happened there. Everywhere they go, teams get better. They have a multiplier effect because they can't help leveling up the people that are around them. They're responsible for growing great developers and great code bases. And the stress levels decrease once you reach that level of meta responsibility because they're not directly responsible for shipping a feature by date X or whatever. The demand for this largely only exists in bigger companies, which can be kind of a mess, but for technicians this is basically as much fun as you can have in a job. You really want one of these people on your team. This is definitely Charles at the front side. The feeling of getting that clean test suite right after a big refactor. It's like, it's a pretty good feeling. So person eight is a connector who has a purpose to their work that is not negotiable. They want to point a group of great people to a hard important problem and make sure they have everything they need to tackle it. They're willing to put a lot on the line for it and understand how valuable they are in helping connect the dots and get that problem solved. So let's solve an important problem together. They're gonna be a strong connector. Let's look at their inventory. Like the last time, they're gonna pour everything. They're not gonna work crazy, crazy hard for it because part of their thing maybe is work-like balance, but they have a really strong understanding of their leverage and their ability to contribute. All right, let's look at the results. They start as a junior developer. We'll call this person a bad-ass CTO. At year five, they move into a team lead position because they're so good at connecting people that people see that their teams get better at delivering when this person is helping kind of divvy tasks out. The income jumps up. By year 10, they're a VP of engineering at a startup maybe that they wanted to work at, seeing that they can deliver those kind of results repeatedly. And then by year 30, this person is a CTO. And you'll see their free time doesn't get a ton better, but income levels stay high, stress stays pretty high, it looks like. So let's take a look at what happened there. There's very high income potential here. Stress levels never really let up because you're helping run a company. It's not super friendly on allowing lots of free time, but it is extremely fulfilling to solve problems at this scale and feel like you're making an impact on the world. Getting a team to pull together is really fun and satisfying for these connector types when you see things really sync up and something cool happen. The last person on our list looks at the world not as it could be, but as it should be, and is willing to carve a path to get to that future. They're gonna pour their entire lives into it if necessary. Their dedication, their time, their voracious learners, and fiercely devoted to the vision. So let's take a look at what happens with them. All right, well, so we have a person that is not balanced at all. They're not really going to let up on any of it. They describe it to other people and then they feel compelled to follow along because the people around them want to have an impact on the world too. So let's see what happens with those people. All right, so they start as a junior developer. We'll call this person the Visionary CEO. They quickly jump out to be the founder of a company. They realize very quickly this is not getting them where they wanna go. Their free time drops to zero and is never gonna get better. Stress stays pretty high. They crash a few companies into the sides of mountains and that's probably fine. They have their third company by year 10. None of this stuff really lets up, but by year 30, we can call this person the chairperson of the board. They've had that kind of experience necessary to teach other people the ideas of entrepreneurship and their impact is right where they want it to be. This is exactly what this person wanted. Balance wasn't really on that list and that's okay. So they hop out of the dev track at the first opportunity. It doesn't mean they stop coding necessarily, but all that individual contributor stuff does feel like it gets in the way for them. They're gonna fail a few times, sure, but they're always learning and improving and not giving up. It's extremely high risk, high stress, low free time. Not a lot of people can pull this up because balance tends to get lost, but there is nothing like seeing your vision come to life through the work of other people. And after they've built a business or two, some of the most difficult aspects of this level off. It's not all sunshine and roses though. You are responsible for payroll and it feels very much like this. Oh, hey, how are ya? I'm not kidding, that's what I meant. Anybody that's run a business will definitely feel that. All right, so those are the nine paths. They all started junior developer. They all involved learning to communicate, working for sociopaths, and they can all result in a happy life, depending on the role of work that you want to play in your life. These fit generally into three tracks, but to understand them, we are gonna have to jump into management philosophy briefly. I noticed a pattern in effective teams I worked for. These three archetypes that pull against each other and create a productive kind of tension. These three types correlate generally with the skills that we talked about earlier, and they fit together in important ways. First is the technician track. I also call this the distinguished developer track. Technicians are skill dominant. That means they're looking to level themselves up and level up the people around them, solve hard problems. They're often wonderful mentors, and they wanna stay close to the code for as long as they can. The technician makes sure what ships is of high quality. They focus on how and explore new technologies and techniques, and you may find them building stuff on their side just to learn and sharpen their skills at new technologies. Manager types are more connection dominant. They can still be coders, but they're often social problem solvers connecting the people in their network with hard problems. The manager type likes making sure that the right things are being worked on. They gather information about new things and come up with novel ways of combining the ideas that are out there in existence and people to serve a novel need. My dad, who's an entrepreneur type, once told me, son, some day you'll realize you are unemployable, which kind of stung because I worked for him at the time. That is true. A couple years later, he's like, no, no, no. I meant that as a compliment because you get tired of working for idiots, and then you start realizing they're all idiots. So I guess entrepreneurship is the act of volunteering to be the idiot. And with the best of intentions, he was using his value system to impose on me the value system I should use to measure my own life, even though he and I want different things. Entrepreneur types look for that gap between the way things are and the way they could be and the way they see it working in the future, and then they try to describe that gap to people in a way that lets them build it. Entrepreneurs dream of beautiful technologies to solve big problems. This was actually the foundational idea of the most successful startup company I ever worked for. We call it the magical taco fairy and the IPO for $3 billion, so. Laugh it up. All right, who here is a fan of oversimplification? All right, I see some hands out here. All right, you are in for a treat. You know those subway tunnel maps that bear no resemblance to reality in order to simplify the concept? Well, this is way more oversimplified than that. But it does communicate the idea that you have a lot of options and some of them sort of lead more naturally to other opportunities more naturally. On the freelance track, people, it looks like an island there, but people bounce in and out of that all the time, but it is a leap to get in and out of it. All these tracks start at Junior Developer, which, depending on your background, can feel like a step down. It's tempting in the first couple of years of especially switching careers into development to think, hey, I have other skills. I can be more valuable in a non-dev role. But if you stick it out and level up as a developer from junior to at least mid and preferably senior, all kinds of doors just magically swing open to you. Everything from freelancing to management to entrepreneurship will go better because of the skills and empathy you develop by shipping great software as part of a team. If you're certain you know what you want and it isn't code, I say go for it, but bailing out early can lead to unexpected results. Okay, so which one are you? That's a trick question because we have aspects of all of them, but one is likely dominant. I'm not much of a problem solver or a big dreamer, but I love connecting new ideas to people who can help. I think I fall pretty squarely in the manager type. What you do when you're stressed can tell you a lot about where you enjoy spending your time. When I'm stressed, I talk to people. When I have a problem, I think, who can help me solve this? Each dominant type is pretty passionate about their value system. My technician friends say, do it right. My entrepreneur friends say, hey, go try something new. I will always ask, what's the practical application of this? When it's based on mutual respect, this is a very healthy and productive tension within a team, but when it's rooted in a sense of intrinsic rightness, things can break down pretty quickly. Many others noticed the emergence of this pattern. You can read more about this stuff online. It's pretty fascinating. The difference between the various outcomes within a track happened because of the kind of inventory that we start with to build a platform. Again, it's really important to strip these of any value judgments. Some people simply have more of these to give than others. So what's a platform? Basically, your platform is the connection between what you can do, what you want to do, and what other people believe you can do. And they can be amazingly cool. You can build your platform every time you create something and put it out in the world, every time you help someone or do good work worthy of recommendation. As your platform grows, it actually starts fighting battles on your behalf. If you feed it right, it will open doors and create opportunities for you. So back to the formula. Understand your present value, your future value, invest in yourself and others, and then you'll have a platform. All right, so I'm gonna talk to you from a marketing perspective for just a moment. You're with me. You need to know your value in terms of real dollars. The absolute minimum is to understand what the market pays for your kind of work, but that is not enough. The next level up is using value-based pricing to avoid being priced like a commodity. I recommend you look into value-based pricing as this is the very definition of leverage. In a developer's case, often you can know the actual profit you generate, but you probably bring a lot more to the table than that. Almost all developers outsource this understanding to their bosses or even abdicate it. That means bosses can pay exactly just enough that people aren't complaining and quitting. If you understand your value, though, you can actually get creative about adding more value and feel good about taking more of that and asking to keep it. But more than money, knowledge of your value strengthens your platform because it makes it more portable. I can't know how much time you have to devote to learning, but I can say that having a curious mind means that every interaction you have is an opportunity to learn. Everything you learn, you get to keep. It becomes part of your platform. The community impact, investing in others can be kind of tricky because it's almost all extracurricular. How you do this and how much is different for everybody. I'm more of an organizer than a pull request opener person, but everything you put into the world to help somebody else goes into your platform. Effort means carving out what you can to focus on these things. If you can make a few meetups a year or experiment with a new programming language or turn an office conversation into a new blog post, you keep those things for your platform. You're the only one that can make these decisions for you. And no, you're not gonna pick the right job all the time. You're gonna work for sociopaths and idiots, and in my case, a half dozen points. And no, it's not going to take your career. All this stuff, the app, the jokes, the song, it's just a fancy way of trying to get across three main points that have been transformative in my life. The first thing I learned was to look for the climbing the wall's anti-pattern. I would take a job, six months later, I'd realize, oh my gosh, my boss is a jerk, and I would quit after suffering for six more months to make the year so I didn't look bad on LinkedIn. But maybe it was me, maybe I had a tight. Just realizing this can give you the awareness and patience to wait for the opportunity that's actually different and make a deliberate choice rather than just trying to escape. The second thing I learned was to understand your preferences to really embrace them and not feel guilty for having different inclinations from other people. Because of those difference, we can fall into the trap of spinning our lives hustling to cover for our weaknesses instead of playing to our strengths. Learning your preferences can help you find creative ways to compensate rather than spending your life trying to be something that you're not. Your career is more impactful and more fun when you start pouring your energy into your strengths. The third thing is to be intentional about building your platform, which is going to be different for different people. But the most important part of building a platform is that it forces you to be explicit about what you really want rather than just doing what other people expect of you. Speaking at conferences is a great way to build a platform, and I love it. It's so fun to get up here and talk at you and act like a thought leader. However, this is a picture of my son last night finding out that I wasn't coming home so that I could come here and speak, and my daughter consoling him and telling him it's okay. So I plan to speak a lot less in the near future. If my platform was just about leveling up in terms of my authority, that would be harmful, but my platform is about being happy 30 years from now and having a relationship with my kids, so that's a crucial part. If your platform is barely enough to shelter you and your loved ones right now, that is okay. Maybe look around for somebody to be of support to you right now so that you can do that for somebody else in the future. At the minimum, just do the best work you can and be kind to who you can. So as achievement, what we really want, money, influence, recognition, does that stuff make us happy? Is it possible that instead what we actually want is to be the kind of person that we've seen achieve things? You can do that on your own terms and in your own time. There is no one path to success because there's no definition of success, but that doesn't stop us from making one up and whacking people upside the head with it. Well, your code's not clean enough. Not one, nobody, not me, not anyone has the right or authority to make you feel bad because you aren't following the path they did or you want different things. So the world defines success mostly as the overlap of money in your bank account. I like to define it as the intersection of what you want to do and what you feel capable of doing and what you're actually doing. So I'm not telling you to jump out and quit your job. I am asking you to please check your compass. Is it pointing toward what you really want? Are you checking on it from time to time and following it when two roads diverge? I'm gonna level with you. I've done the witness sample of these career tracks by now. I'm 36 and I still have no idea what I wanna do when I grow up. And you might feel like this dog sometimes. You probably, if you're a programmer, you probably feel this every day. But if so, I promise your powers of intuition are stronger than you are giving them credit. You're not computer dog or helicopter dog, you're calculus dog. So I wanna take one last moment to tell you how grateful I am and ask something of you. Anything I have that a person could label success, I owe to people who reached out to me. From the person who introduced me to programming at work to the people at the Utah Ruby Users Group who reached out to me, took me in, mentored me and helped me get the guts together to go for my first programming job. Every job sense has been found through the community. If I could time travel back six years and go find this sad, frustrated, upset, broken down marketer and try to show him what my life is like right now, he would not believe me or recognize it at all. That's just six years. I couldn't have done this talk without help. My friend and coworker Lydia stepped in and helped me build the time travel app. A lot of the graphics came from Jen Schiffer's makeitbitart.com and a lot of inspiration for this and advice came from Sarah May. My friends have done the work that changed my life. Up here on stage is not where that work happens. My most meaningful interactions have been when supportive people nudged me and challenged me because they knew my goals and wanted to see me succeed. And think of somebody, please, let's done that for you. At some point, you'll have an opportunity to contribute in a meaningful way. You'll recognize it when it arrives. You won't feel ready, you won't feel qualified. But my hope is that you'll have a clear enough memory of your experience that you'll be that hand for somebody else. Because wouldn't it be cool if these amazing, powerful, Voltron-like platforms we go build for ourselves had a heart? Thanks very much.