 Carezone, we're also based in Seattle and San Francisco. We do awesome things and I would like to talk to you about what we do, but I don't have time because I only have 35 minutes and I'm determined to be the first talk to finish on time so far today. So I've been thinking a lot lately about choices, you know, there are times in our lives where we encounter a fork in the road and we have to kind of take stock of where we are or where we want to be and then pick a direction we think is going to get us there, pick a vector if you will, see what I did there. Now sometimes, sometimes the choice is easy, it seems trivial maybe or or obvious like I have a standing policy if someone offers me a cookie the answer to that is always yes, but then sometimes it's a little trickier, the choice is obviously important but we might not even feel as though it's really our choice to make and every several months for the past couple of years now actually I go in for a regular follow-up cancer screening. For those that don't know from Twitter, I had testicular cancer a while back. Now I could probably choose not to do those things but it doesn't really feel like it's a choice I have and before you get too far feeling bad for me with the cancer and all, I had a lot of fun with my cancer. First off, testicular cancer is highly survival and secondly you get to make all kinds of really horrible puns and nobody can actually say anything to you because it's like I you know I have cancer so but my wife is a saint for putting up for me putting up with me during that time. Now for at least the first few days of this the puns the for at least the first few days the puns were nuts. After that point they were just not of course. So all right so so this talk had its origin last year. My friend Terrence who's one of the organizers for KeepRuby Weird, he tweeted this at me one day and I had a choice to make. Now months before this at RailsConf last year I was at a speaker dinner and I was talking to Terrence and Davey again organizers of the conference and I had an idea for a talk and Terrence knew what I was gonna submit if I did submit it but the problem was that it was way more work than any other talk that I had ever presented and I really wouldn't have a whole lot of time to prepare especially since I had some other obligations going on. Now Terrence was a sneaky guy. He convinced me to submit by saying I could always back out. So what was the idea that I had? Well when I was a kid I loved choose your own adventure books. I thought they were the best and you know the thing I love the most about them was that not only wasn't the ending already predetermined but I got to choose how we got there and now for an eight year old it was just really starting to enjoy reading. That sense of control was a really big deal. So the idea that I had was for a choose your own adventure talk. Now at the time I had never seen anybody try to give a talk like this. Now it occurred to me that there could be a very good reason for that. Maybe it's a really terrible idea because there are a ton of things that could go wrong with a talk like this but we're gonna give it a shot and we'll see how it goes. Now before I go to the next slide I want to point out conference Wi-Fi has been a little iffy. So I would encourage you to consider using your phone or if you tether please for the love of all that is holy plug in with a cable and tether and don't just further let the Wi-Fi bandwidth. So I can see whenever you all connect if you pull out your laptop or mobile device at this point this thing should work with all current mobile and desktop browsers. I do find the nice thing about developing an app that's intended to serve presentations to developers is you don't have to support IE8 which is a nice benefit. So wait we've got 20 some people on. I can see if you're not on and I'm gonna have my feelings hurt so I can count you people. All right so people are still getting connected we're up to about 70 some online and so far it hasn't broken so that's good. So we're gonna go ahead and see if we've got the idea at this point. Of the animals that are selected that are displayed here pick either cats dogs squirrel monkeys or Venezuelan poodle mobs as your as your favorite animal and in a couple of moments here we'll see who wins and we'll go that way. All right wow dogs winning and here I thought Ruby people were cat people. All right dogs it is you can stop voting now you get to see the dog and you get to see an extra picture of a dog because you know I'm being nice here. All right good so we've all you've got the idea right okay. So do you remember these things now nowadays I walk right past them I don't even most of the time notice unless they have some really cool toys but when I was a kid these things were the highlight of any shopping trip that I took with my parents and if I had a quarter or I could convince my parents to give me one you know I would stand in front of these things and just agonize over which choking hazard I was gonna buy and one of my one of my all-time favorites were these sticky hands these these are one of the all-time best vending machine toys in my opinion. Well you probably also use one of these this is just a gel wrist rest nothing terribly exciting about it and many years ago I had one that looked almost exactly like this and after many years in the sun it had started to fall apart so I peeled the cover off and I made the most amazing discovery turns out that the gel the gel in the wrist in these wrist rest that that didn't take long the gel in these wrist rest is made from the exact same thing as sticky hands except in really massive amounts now over the coming weeks our office had lots of fun with this with this new toy that we had discovered we even gave him a name his name was Roderick I'm not sure what we called him Roderick I guess he just looked like a Roderick but in any case we would we would fling him around at each other we would grab stuff off of our neighbors desks it's impossible to overstate really Roderick's entertainment value and one day we decided to just see how far we could stretch Roderick so my friend my friend Jeff oh yeah so my so my so I grab an end I grab an end of Roderick and my friend my friend Jeff grabbed the other end of Roderick and he started walking across the room and he got he got pretty far I would say probably about this far from the podium with Roderick now in physics in physics there are two kinds of energy there's potential energy such as the kind you get when you stretch a slingshot or you know you can also store up potential energy by maybe stretching a gel wrist rest across the room and then there's kinetic energy and kinetic energy is energy energy in motion and it's what you get when you release the slingshot or the wrist rest and you probably have also heard of this thing called gravity now about this time Jeff decided he wanted to let go of Roderick I remind you where I'm holding Roderick now potential energy potential energy a lot of you people knew where this was going potential energy quickly became kinetic energy and gravity doing what gravity does you might imagine what happened next I spent the next few minutes curled up in the fetal position while people couldn't quite tell if I was laughing or crying and truth be told it was a little bit both because it was it was pretty funny you know on the bright side these days I have half the surface area for that particular attack back so my point my point is the choices have consequences and you know we tend to think of consequences as a negative thing but the word literally just means a result or effect so all I'm really saying is that you know that our choices change the world in some way because otherwise what's the point of even making choices it's a lot of cause and a cause and effect it's as inescapable as gravity so if our choices are bound to have consequences it makes sense we'd want to optimize but you know how do you really do that I'm gonna go with instincts these wolves are awesome I think that one wolf I'm pretty sure that one wolf looks like he knows something the other ones don't he seems like he's smiling all right so we're gonna use our instincts okay so here's a question for you let's say you're stuck in traffic and the lane next to you starts moving more quickly what do you end up doing that took no time at all right it's not uncommon our instincts tell us to stay put you might not realize it but the instinct to stay put is really similar to a piece of advice you may have heard relating to test taking always have how many of you have heard always go with your first instinct it's much more common if you change your answer to change from a correct answer to an incorrect one and this is not just parents and teachers that tell us this even test taking experts like Kaplan we're giving this advice in books that we're telling you how to take your tests the only problem is it's not actually true and there are actually decades of studies that prove it's not true but if if that's the case then why do we find this so believable I mean why does this misinformation continue to spread and it really comes down to a phenomenon known as loss aversion there's this asymmetry in the way that we feel about getting the wrong answer on a test if we had the right one versus getting the the right answer if we'd previously had the wrong one if we change from a right to a wrong we're gonna remember that answer a lot more that situation's gonna take a higher higher precedence in our mind and that's a big deal because losses are about twice at minimum twice is as impactful as gains psychologically so this is why it seems to make sense instinctively here's another one for you let's assume that the following you people don't even know what I'm asking yet let's assume let's assume that this following sequence of X's and O's represents hits and misses in a basketball game the X's are hits and the O's are misses now do you think this sequence represents someone who's on a hot streak just chance events or maybe a cold streak or something else you know if we if we look at this six of the first eight are hits eight of the first eleven are hits but if you pick any point in this sequence it's just as likely the next character is gonna be an X as it is it's gonna be an O it's completely chance good job audience your your drinking has not impaired your judgment but it's it's a perceptual illusion I can tell you repeatedly the tops of these two tables have the same lengths and widths you can even get out something and measure them right now if you want to check it's not going to change how you feel when you look at those pictures whether it's tables or basketball streaks your instincts are going to override the reality of the situation whether you know it's an illusion not doesn't really change how you perceive it and this is gone to extremes years ago when Apple released the iPod shuffle people started complaining it's shuffle wasn't random because they were noticing streaks of songs by the same artist and so conspiracy theories started springing up people were suggesting that Apple was taking bribes various kickbacks to actually give certain artists preferential play in a playlist so Apple introduced a feature called smart shuffle to the iPod shuffle it was designed to prevent streaks it its whole job was literally to make things less random to make them more random so it turns out that our instincts are really good at making you know snap decisions about things like maybe I should run away from this saber-tooth tiger but they're not so well tuned for making subtle judgments no matter how much we might feel otherwise and it's not just the stuff that we consciously choose either all kinds of variables can influence the outcomes of our decisions now some of them are our internal variables and some of them are external variables story okay so the most influential variables are internal good okay I can get behind that you know all kinds of internal internal variables can can really mess with how things turn out for us and for instance a big one is emotions so in my younger days I went on more than a few hayrides and you familiar with hay I assume hayrides are a thing here you know folks think it's great to load a bunch of kids into the back of a trailer filled with hay and as a longtime allergy sufferer I never quite understood this but whatever but on the bright side you know there's always a bonfire afterwards and you get to have like hot chocolate and s'mores and marshmallows and whatnot so it had that going for us now I'm at a hayride the hayrides over we're at a bonfire and I'm standing off to the side trying to mind my own business and much to my surprise two attractive young ladies came by to chat with me now this confused me because I was nowhere near as handsome as the two gentlemen you see in this stock photo this was me so hmm so emotions set in specifically specifically the emotion of panic so I'm I'm literally at this point I'm actually trying to think what would a cool person do if they were in my situation right now and I don't know where I saw it it must have been like happy days or something the only thing I can come up with is that cool people prop their legs up against the wall you know they just kind of do this and lean yeah I don't care I'm really nonchalant the only problem with this plan as it turns out was there was a basement window directly behind me in the spot that I decided to prop my foot up so I broke the window and sent shards of glass on to somebody's grandmother's who were down there actually prepping hot chocolate for the kids so that turned out that turned out pretty well all right so I'll talk about something a little bit different now I tend to assume that the stuff that's obvious to me is obvious to everyone for a long time you know this actually led me to avoid sharing code publicly because you know how could anybody find it useful and it especially kept me from trying to do any conference speaking you know at least for at least two years I had been filling out those you know the the little yearly review where they where you have to kind of say what your goals are going to be for the next year or maybe quarter or whatever for your employer I had been putting down the public speaking was one of my goals but I hadn't done any speaking if you didn't count a couple of lightning talks and I hadn't even made any real serious attempts to do so and then on January 1st 2013 I made a resolution and I posted it on my site so that you all could keep me accountable I picked the entire internet as an accountability partner because I really suck at boundaries so a couple of weeks later I had two conference speaking opportunities already booked my first ever conference speaking opportunity was at Big Groovy in Texas and that was their first time throwing that conference so it was kind of a first for both of us and I'm gonna be forever grateful for those conference organizers for giving me a shot since I've never done it before and as a result of ignoring that little voice inside my head I ended up getting to visit Moscow later that year and I got to keynote RubyConf later that year even though I had privately I hadn't told anybody this set that as like a five-year goal I got to go to Barcelona last year to speak at full stack fest you can you might notice Matt's is in the audience looking super engrossed in what I have to say to I love that photo it's like making Ruby and most recently I got to go to RubyConf Australia more importantly than that I got to hold a koala which is pretty awesome it's as awesome as it looks let me tell you so but most importantly more importantly than any of that I got to meet so many new friends during all of these travels and they've all you all have enriched my life beyond measure and all of this happened not because I have any special ability it happened because I chose to ignore that little voice inside my head that was saying what will other people think of you I love this quote we would worry less about what others think of us we realized how seldom they do so it turned out really that even though I was saying they were different the hay ride and the speaking thing had a few things in common after all I didn't recognize this until a lot later but almost every time I've opted to behave in some way that's that's inauthentic to who I really am just because of what someone else might think I've missed out on something no look I'm not you this is not a prescription for what you need to do patterns you might see in your life are different than the patterns that I'm going to recognize in mind but I promise you this you are going to spend the rest of your life living with yourself and if that's the case maybe it makes sense to take some time to sort some of these patterns out so which one are we now now when we say we're agents we don't mean we're like Horatio Cain though I think we can all agree that would be awesome what we mean is agency we're talking about agency it's agency is as the power to shape the world around you in ways large and small and it's interesting to note that an agent is something you are as a member of the human race whether you're tried to or not everything you do is going to affect the world choices are shaping that world all the time and it's really interesting that it sometimes is unintentional right it can be completely involuntary behavior it doesn't doesn't mean you're not an agent you don't have agency and if you contrast this with with victim well what do I mean by victim I don't I mean a victim mentality obviously there are people who are actually victimized and I want to be sensitive about that there are people who really have been victims what I'm talking about as an acquired personality trait it's it's it's alert something you learn that makes you believe you have no in influence over the outcome of situations now if it's learned then I believe they can be unlearned and even in situations where you really are victimized you can choose not to be a victim choose not to let that victim mentality take over in your decision now I've been volunteering as a counselor for about seven years now and I've dealt with folks in some pretty rough situations and some that are pretty far towards the other end of that and in my experience there's often very little correlation between whether that person has been victimized and whether they actually are exhibiting victim mentality I've gotten pretty good at guessing when this is gonna be an issue something we're gonna have to deal deal with people who you're already going there I'll give you a second so I need another drink anyway thanks for your patience folks I'm battling a little bit of a little bit of a cough so interestingly people who feel powerless usually resort to being passive aggressive they have difficulty acknowledge I'll look at you also you yeah very good a for effort because they have difficulty acknowledging their anger they don't process their anger directly because they don't feel good about themselves either so it tends to it tends to come out in very strange ways now there are situations that we genuinely can't control you know things happen life happens but we should be looking for things we can or even that we did control again this is another good quote it's never our fault we can't take responsibility for it we can't take responsibility for it will always be its victim so this is something I have to remind myself of time and time again and I also have to tell the people that I counsel you can't control the outcome you can still control your reaction to it the point is that you are an agent and agents make choices I'm gonna make a guess that a fair number of you in this room recognize these two images they are the symbols of the Alliance and the Horde their factions in Blizzard's MMO World of Warcraft I appreciate the awe from somebody sympathetic in the audience how kind right so years ago I played a lot of World of Warcraft and I mean like a whole lot of World of Warcraft this is a screenshot of a friend in me posing with King Magni Bronzebeard we were the only two Dwarven grand marshals on Argent Dawn and if you know what any of that meant we should probably talk later I swear there's a point to this we're gonna come back to it in a minute so we're agents and agents choose they were always making choices and we're making them whether we're conscious of it or we're not even choosing not to choose as a choice didn't take long did it unfortunately doesn't show on Chrome this totally works on Safari you can see the emoji so we make so many choices without realizing it when I was playing World of Warcraft oh I'd like to take a moment to remind you all there is a code of conduct at this conference I have no idea what you are going to do but please don't make me regret this decision this choice that I have made okay so I mentioned I played a lot of World of Warcraft at the height of my my playtime with World of Warcraft I was playing player versus player back then it was something that was called the honor system was you played on battlegrounds and it was basically a time-in gave you effort gave you reward back out and I achieved the rank of Grand Marshal I mentioned earlier at the height of that rank-up period this meant that in addition to the job that I was working every day I had to play a minimum of eight hours a day to earn enough honor in this system to continue to rank up to get this rank and it was at the point where I had actually started at a new job and on my very first day on the job it was the gonna be the last day of my honor grind and and on that very last day or very last day the honored grind I was I had only slept two hours that night and I went into a meeting with my new boss and my new co-workers and was actually dozing off in this job and I came to realize that I was using my investment my rewards in this game as I got a I'm I'm really surprised you all haven't figured this one out yet oh Adam left Adam you're not helping me much all right so at the height of this I was realizing I was using this as a surrogate I was using this as a surrogate for not feeling like I was going anywhere in my job I had been miserable in the last job which was why I started a new job and I was doing this because I needed to feel that sense of accomplishment and so we work all day sometimes and we run out of time right we don't have time to do do the work that that we wanted to get accomplished and so we think we think maybe we we suck at estimates but we it's not that we suck at estimates necessarily oftentimes it's that we actually made choices to be distracted we fire up slack we fire up IRC we run Twitter or maybe Facebook or whatever during the day we could browse reddit for the latest destiny PVP tips that's a personal problem my my point though is that it's good to make choices and it's better it's better to yes there are private messages you figured it out so we choose to be distracted right that's the point we do things like this and then we wonder where our time went and it's great to make good choices it's even better to understand why you made them but it is the best to understand that there are choices you made that you didn't even realize you made and that you had influence over the outcomes that you've seen even look even some good choices might not be the best choices for instance I'm speaking entirely hypothetically here of course maybe you've got writer's block because you're preparing a talk and maybe you just decide to build a fully functional chat application for a single for a single slide instead of instead of working on your talk all right get your last chat in we're moving on have I made my point is it easy to get distracted incidentally Jonah and this is my meat slide he has amazing hair he has absolutely amazing hair okay so it's there's a word for this for being deliberate and its intentionality it's actively choosing your choices and it's my hope that if there's some area of your life where you've been a little less than intentional lately before today that you're gonna leave here determined to change that and look I I didn't know how this was gonna go when I first started building this application when I said I would build this presentation I didn't even know how it was gonna go when I got up here in front of all of you there are a whole lot of slides in this talk that you didn't see do the choices we made today and plus I wasn't sure the Wi-Fi was gonna cooperate did we choose wisely I mean that's really the thing the real adventure is in is in not knowing how the story is gonna end isn't it thanks for your time so I what's the best slide in my presentation that you didn't see that's an awfully subjective question isn't it didn't see make a choice Ernie up probably it's probably let's see if I can find it quickly it's the meat slide I know the answer no it's that you already saw that the question was what is the best slide that we didn't see that's that's a hard one that's super hard let's say that it is nobody ever chose that oh look at you trying to vote I was there for like a second actually this is my favorite slide and it's self-serving right but I got a chance to work I had the condensed startup experience and I worked in the San Francisco startup for about five six weeks had this picture with my friend Ben Schofield I was super psyched to start working with him and six weeks later the company closed its doors so that actually that actually is probably my my favorite slide but only because it shows that you can't even all the choices you make sometimes you get screwed other questions the question is that I volunteered doing counseling and the question is like can I explain it more yeah so counseling is something where you do where you sit down and you talk to another person about there no so it's something that I do as part of the church where I go actually but it's not specifically like the guy that I'm counseling right now is agnostic at best atheist most days it's just an outreach that we do that's all what is the tech that I used to build this that's a good question this is open source this is an app that I built called venture it's written in elixir it's actually no Ruby in it it's elixir it's elixir Phoenix and reactjs and it is it is on Ernie slash venture on github so go check that out if you want and play around with it anything else anybody up top has any questions I know the introverts are up there so okay I don't see anybody else in good I have stickers come come say hi to me I don't bite I might give you germs if I hug you but you can totally have a hug free germ hugs you heard it here first another round of applause please for Ernie Miller