How Do You Keep Learning When There Are Endless Things to Do?

About this Episode

Panelists discuss the contrasting mindsets of focusing on the destination versus the journey in personal and professional growth. Dave initiates the topic, emphasizing the importance of a growth mindset that values continuous learning over mere achievement. This theme is further explored by Eddy, who talks about the significance of embracing challenges and discomfort to foster growth. Mike and others delve into educational theories like Lev Vygotsky's "zone of proximal development" to illustrate how discomfort can lead to substantial learning.

The discussion moves to real-world experiences, sharing insights into the rapidly changing world of technology. Kyle's insights about the importance of understanding concepts over tools lead to a thoughtful debate about coding bootcamps, their role in jumpstarting careers, and the importance of ongoing learning. Sergio's experience with on-the-job learning and risk-taking further emphasizes the importance of hands-on experience and the ability to adapt. Everyone shares personal examples of how learning outside of work has shaped their professional lives, highlighting the need for continuous growth.

Transcript:

MIKE: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Acima Development Podcast. I'm Mike. I'll be hosting today. Today with us, we have Dave, Kyle, Eddy, Sergio, and Tyson. I think we'll have a good mix of opinions here. I'm excited.

We are going to be talking about how we manage to stay learning and growing our skills when there's always work to do. There's always something else to do. This is a challenge for all of us.

I want to start, as I like to do, with a story or two. I'm going to start with a kind of a fail story. I was a few years into my career. I was at a company that got into a tight spot financially and laid off the development staff, all but one. And then he quit. And they ended up hiring me back on. [laughs] I came in not being the senior developer on the team, trying to pick up where the lead developer had left off. And, you know, he gave me some guidance and laid out some things he'd been working on, and, like, away you go. Good luck.

So, for about a year, I was running things by myself. So, you know, I had my choice as to what to work on every day. And we were largely in maintenance. We weren't really adding new features. One thing I discovered is there were a lot of manual jobs that we had lined up. And this applies to more than learning, by the way. We had a lot of things that needed to be done manually. This company was a content management system. And we had to set up email addresses for a lot of our customers, as well as some other things. And it was a somewhat manual process. I knew I had to do that every day.

And I noticed after a while that all of the manual tasks that needed to get done consumed more hours than I had in a day, and as well as all the other miscellaneous support requests. And I struggled for that year as to how to prioritize my time. There were things that I let slip because I was working on other things. And I just kind of really struggled to get all of the things done because there was absolutely more to do than I could do as a single person on the team, where we previously had a team of about six.

I thought about that in retrospect quite a bit, about what I would do differently today. I'm going to kind of leave that story there for a second and come back to it. Another story I've got is from the last year, and it's outside of work entirely.

My oldest son went to college. I used to ride a bicycle with him every morning, almost every morning. We'd go out and ride bikes, all-weather. We live in Illinois, so it's winter more than half the year. [laughs] So, we've got bikes that are built appropriately, big, fat tires. We'd go riding in the snow, and we had a lot of fun. And kind of the day he left, my daily rides pretty much went away because I had other priorities. I would be spending a lot more time with my other kids. Well, it's something that I still enjoy, that I like to do a lot.

In fact, this morning, my son is back from college for the summer. This morning, he and I went on a bike ride, and I had a great time. It's something that I really enjoy. But when I didn't have the person who was really engaged in doing it (My younger kids think it's too cold in the winter.), when I didn't have somebody who wanted to do it, my priority suddenly shifted, and it just didn't happen very much anymore. So, I'm not that interested in going out alone.

These two stories, I think, say a lot about me, at least, [laughs] I think also about human nature. When we're confronted with more things than we can do, we tend to latch on to something that's maybe easy to do or that we're familiar with. It's hard to take a step back and look at all of the things that need to get done and prioritized and say, "Well, here's something that's not necessarily urgent, but it's important. And if I don't do it regularly, then the whole system is going to fall apart." And this applies to paying down tech debt. It applies to, you know, a lot of things in life, eating good food, [laughs] nutritious food.

But, in particular, today, we're going to be talking about learning. And I think that it fits very much into this first story of, well, you've got all these things. How do you possibly fit the learning in? And the other story, I think, reveals a lot about how you keep yourself motivated to do something. We tend to prioritize, I think, as humans, things very socially. And if we've got a partner in something, it makes a world of difference as to whether we're interested in doing it.

And people sometimes talk about that as accountability, but I think that's inadequate. It's an inadequate representation. Accountability suggests that somebody's making sure you're doing something that you ought to do, that you maybe don't want to do. But I think it's a little bit different than that. I think that there's some things that we actually really enjoy doing and want to do but only find ourselves motivated to do if we are in some sort of social situation, if there's somebody who's doing it with us because, otherwise, we'll tend to prioritize something else that is also good because there are many good things to be working on.

If there's something that you really care about, one of the best ways to make it happen is to have a partner. There's, I think, a lot to talk about how you manage to get learning done when you've got all of the other things to do. I think that I'd like to start with those couple of ideas, which are that prioritization is hard, and somehow you need to make that work.

And secondly, anything you want to get done tends to happen much more when you do it in some sort of social situation. What are your all's thoughts about, you know, the ideas I've just shared but even, in general, about the topic today?

DAVE: Mike, you mentioned accountability. And there is kind of a sentiment that we have of if I'm not the one making myself do it, it's somehow cheapened. It's somehow it's not enough, right? We lack discipline, and we have a problem. And I got really struck by the book Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and the other Steven. He points out that he caught a lot of people cheating. Now, he's an economist, and he caught people cheating. Because what he'd do is he'd open a spreadsheet, and he would just say, "This is not right. Your averages aren't average. I can tell which people are lying."

He then went around the world, finding different people that cheated in different ways. What he [inaudible 06:19] really shocking to him is that about 3% of the population are incorruptible. These are people who will do what they say. They will not cheat, and by cheating, is you go against the rules. No matter how easy it is to cheat, no matter how unlikely they are to get caught, and no matter how minimal the punishment if they get caught, there's no risk to this reward. And no matter how great the reward, these people, 3% of the population, won't do it. Just nope, that's wrong; I won't do it.

2% of the population are on the other end. They are incorrigible. These are the people that will cheat no matter how small the reward, no matter how likely they are to get caught, and no matter how severe the punishment might be. And that's kind of an interesting thing to find out. But the really staggering thing I see in there is that 95% of the population have a price.

There's an old Calvin and Hobbes comic where Calvin says, "Everybody has a price. Mine is 75 cents." I like that [inaudible 07:24] honesty. What does that have to do with accountability? We are social creatures. And when we have accountability, when we have a friend doing something that is, you know, going to be hard for us to do, but it's, you know, good for us, and we really ought to do it, I don't think it's a lack of discipline to grab a friend and say, "Hey, let's go work on this together." Or "Hey, what do you think about this?" And then get excited about it.

I don't think it's a lack of discipline. I think it's excellent planning and a great understanding of, like, our own conduct and, like, how humans operate, right? At the end of the month, if one person is like, "Well, if I don't force myself to do it, I lacked the discipline," and that person did not spend any time working on the new thing, and this other person that said, "I got to have a friend to get this done," and they worked on it every day for an hour for a month, right? The results talk, and I like the person that got the results in that.

MIKE: It sounds like you're running with the same idea I was that getting a partner in doing something is not cheating. It's recognizing human nature that we prioritize. Just innately, we tend to prioritize things we do together. I'm sure there's exceptions. Some people really don't want to be [laughs] involved with somebody else in something, but that's rare.

We're very social creatures, and recognizing that allows us to use that to do something that we really want to do together. And that's a valid and valuable way to get something done, and pretending that it isn't that way isn't going to help anyone. [laughs] It's just recognizing that's human nature.

DAVE: Yeah. I came across a quote a couple of years ago that said, "Half of being smart is knowing what you're dumb at." I came across this, like, back in the '90s. It was a long time ago. And sometime in the mid-noughties, I had this great epiphany where I realized that I knew what I was dumb at, but I was still trying to do everything that way, or I was letting people bait me into doing it the hard way and then I was failing.

And what I realized was what I want is the results. I don't want the honor of having done it right. I want it done successfully. That kind of led me to a personal epiphany that the other half of being smart is don't take on the world with your dumb.

MIKE: Taking this idea a little further, I think that most of us want to grow our careers. There's things that we want to learn, we know that we ought to, but then we face the first problem that I talked about. Well, where can we possibly fit it with all of these other things that take up more time than we have in a day? And that kind of leads to the two meeting, right? [laughs]

DAVE: Mm-hmm.

MIKE: These two stories connecting. If you want to get something done, schedule it with somebody. [laughs] And there are a lot of different ways that we can make that happen, you know, find a study partner and say, "Hey, let's get together for half an hour every day." Take a class where you pay for it, and you're going to go meet with a professor. Take an online class where there's some social aspect. You know, take an online class together with somebody that you know. Even better, start a book club.

Any of these involve the social aspect, where you've got something scheduled, and you've got somebody else that you're doing with. It changes the perception of things in your mind and is far more likely to make something happen than if you say, "Hey, you know, I'm tough. I can go [inaudible 10:37]."

DAVE: I like that. There's also people (I definitely fall in this boat.) who are kind of on the other end of the spectrum. Like, I never have to force myself to go learn something. The question of, like, how do you make yourself learn? In my case, it's a little bit like asking a cocaine addict, "What do you like to do," right? It's like, my problem is sometimes I will take on too much unknown just because I want to go learn it all, right?

And so, a lot of the strategies that I've had to learn are, how do I take this really cool, neat thing from a completely missing skill that I'm not skilled at at all, how do I turn that into something that I can sell? And I don't have a single clear, do this, and it will work. But I've got, like, 100 tiny, little hacks that I use that my goal right from the get-go is...actually, [inaudible 11:26] I was going to say my goal is to get to a point where an employer is happy to pay me. That's actually not true.

I just bite straight into the pleasure of finding things out. I just love going, oh, that's another piece of how the universe works. That's another piece of how the world really is. And if I just let myself play with things, that's the hack right there. Let it be play instead of like, ahh, I got to do this thing, right? Back off and say, what do you want to play with?

There's a time in the Atlas skills clinic when we stepped back and said, "Hey, let's look at, you know, game frameworks. Let's look at something silly. Let's look at something weird." And because that engages, like, this sense of play, you get this growth mindset. Instead of having the closed mindset of like, this is what I want to accomplish and have when I'm done, you look at it with the growth mindset of, what can I do to get into this process and get enmeshed and just experience the process, right?

The journey is everything. I don't even want to reach the destination. And ten years down the road, you realize that you've gone through thousands of destinations because you never stopped journeying. Does that make sense?

MIKE: I think so. You're talking about cultivating that child-like sense of wonder [laughs] that is hungry for it. If we didn't all have it, we'd never learn to walk. [laughs] You know, it's fun. I like to think that learning and fun are synonyms. What little kids like to do, well, they'll run around in a weird circle until they fall down. [laughs] It's kind of exploring the boundaries of what running [laughs] can do. It's fun to try out new things. And learning only ceases to be fun when it's kind of mandated, and we're often not actually learning but rather going through some sort of rote activity that has the trappings of learning, but it's not actually very engaging.

DAVE: Yeah. I came across a really fascinating, like, a micro-observation, and all these conclusions came from it that I'm still finding, and it blows me away. So, closed mindset is when you focus on the objective, right? The destination. And growth mindset is when you focus on the journey. And very specifically, if you're playing a game in a closed mindset, the objective is to win.

And, as humans, we want to do everything we can to optimize. We want the victory at, you know, the most victory at the cheapest cost. We want to put the least effort into this. We look at the thing we want to do, we want to get, and we go, ugh, how am I going to get this? What's the easiest way to get this? And when we look at growth mindset when you look at a game that has, like, an open-minded growth mindset, the objective is not to win; the objective is to keep playing, right? The objective on a growth mindset, you know, a journey versus the destination the objective is to keep journeying.

And the conclusions that you can draw from this is that when you focus on the outcome, you actually make it harder on yourself to take the journey because you just [inaudible 14:15], right? And I can give you a really good example of this, which is you walk into school on the first day, and you're excited to learn all of these great things. And then the teacher says, "And this is what's going to be on the final." And you realize I just got to get through this final and move on.

I've heard a student straight up tell a teacher, "Just tell me what I have to do to get an A." And the teacher got mad, right? Because the student did not want to learn the material. She just wanted to optimize and get out. She was basically telling the teacher, you are not important, and this subject matter does not interest me. How do I get out of your class with the minimum amount of hassle? Even though she said, she wanted an A, right? She wanted the highest grade possible, but, you know, she wanted to do 93% of the required effort to get an A, but she was not going to give 110.

MIKE: That ties into this idea of what we prioritize. I think it'd be helpful to expand the group talking here. Eddy, if I could ask you, what has helped you? I know that you're somebody who has really grown your skills. What is something that's helped you keep learning and growing despite, you know, all the constraints of things you've needed to get done?

EDDY: It's really just putting myself in uncomfortable positions, challenging my skill set in order for me to make sure that I'm learning something and just staying out of my comfort zone. After transitioning to full-time development, I realized, hey, you get assigned tasks about things you don't know anything about. Well, time to look up and try to figure out other blogs on Stack Overflow, et cetera, to figure out, oh, someone else ran into this problem. So, I'm constantly learning because the job...[laughs] that's the job requirement, essentially.

MIKE: That's really interesting. You point out something we haven't really talked about much yet today, which is that one way to make sure you're learning is to deliberately put yourself out there—maybe not quite jump in the deep end and drown—but put yourself somewhere uncomfortable and make that conscious choice. Choose to embrace that discomfort, and then you find yourself growing a lot. Is that a fair summary?

EDDY: Yeah, it's basically how I was able to learn as much as I did. Because the listeners may not be wary of this, but I'm just about completing my two years since I started coding, right? So, computer science or programming has existed for decades, right? So, starting a career path two years ago is basically drinking from a fire hydrant. But it is the only way to learn, at least for me, was just embracing it and just putting myself in situations where it wasn't comfortable.

MIKE: And I think there's a lot of power in that, and it connects some to what Dave saying. If you embrace the discomfort, it kind of changes what happens. Because if you're never uncomfortable, you're probably not going to stretch very much. Once you realize, you know, discomfort maybe isn't so bad, then it opens up a whole new world.

You know, I've seen you grow a lot. I've seen other people who have grown dramatically. It's because they've done something similar. They've been willing to put themselves in a situation where they might look dumb, where they might feel uncomfortable, and had to trust that it would work out. It means that you've got to be in a supportive environment.

If you're in a hostile environment where people are going to treat you badly, you're probably not going to learn very much there, and maybe you should go somewhere else. When you have a supportive environment where you have people willing to work with you on that, you know, jumping in is just so vital, [laughs], you know, to be able to grow quickly.

I believe that I've mentioned before on the podcast...it's such a powerful idea that I visit in my mind a lot. I know in education theory, there was a theorist named Lev Vygotsky. He was in the Soviet Union, and I don't know that his work was very much embraced there, but it's come to be widely used in education in the years since. And he suggested that people learn the most when they are in the space between what they can learn alone and what they can't learn, even with help.

So, between what you can learn alone, which is fairly limited, and what you can't learn at all, even with help because it's just too hard, in between there, there's a range. They call it the zone of proximal development. That range is where you learn a lot. You know, getting yourself in that situation means that you have to have people who are there to help you, and it means that you're going to be uncomfortable. That's where most of the learning happens.

Kyle, where have you found success in growing your skills, even though you've always got an endless pile of work to do?

KYLE: In my endless pile of work?

MIKE: Uh-huh. [laughs]

KYLE: That's about the simplest answer. I always say that DevOps work is very breadth work. You can be somewhat provisioned in a few things, but you have to know about everything. And I feel like I'm constantly working on stuff that I do not know that much about and I'm not an expert in. But, you know, give it time and trial and error. A few days later, and it's not half bad, and you've figured the system out.

MIKE: Interesting. So, you're in a position where you're frequently being confronted with new and challenging things.

KYLE: Yeah. I would say that half the job, if not more than half the job, is troubleshooting. It's either troubleshooting or spinning up new tech, or upgrading old tech that has new features. And with that constantly happening, you're having to pivot all the time to learn. You might get comfortable with one tooling in DevOps, and as soon as you get comfortable with it, there's a new tool out there. It's so rapidly changing. I mean, we've discussed this in previous podcasts, but DevOps today, compared to DevOps even a few years ago, three, four years ago, it's a completely different environment.

MIKE: And that's not so different from software development, generally. It's such a rapidly moving field. You're always a little bit behind, right? Always something to learn.

KYLE: I actually question sometimes with some of the training materials, right? I always wondered, in school, like, why are they teaching me concepts? You know, why are they teaching me theory? I want to know how to program in C#. I want to know how to program better in Java. Why aren't they teaching me these tools? Well, I mean, you get looking at it, and if our schooling taught us how to just use tools, we wouldn't be very far along. It's that there is just the concepts that we really needed to understand to move forward and be able to adapt to all the changes that we've been faced with.

MIKE: Amen. I've seen that be true over and over again. And I've seen some schools that focused a lot on skills say this, even something like a coding bootcamp. And this is not a criticism of coding bootcamps. They're focused on skills, right? They'll get you proficient in the skills you need to get going. But those concepts and fundamentals still have to be learned.

And the people who are very successful coming into software development through that skills-first approach take a lot of time to continue to learn those concepts as they go. There's a price there that must be paid. There's really no shortcut. You have to actually be seeking out, oh, what is, [chuckles] let's all say, Big O Notation? You know, how do I figure out how fast this algorithm works?

You know, it's something you probably weren't taught in your bootcamp, but understanding that some things go faster than other things [laughs] and learning to recognize the difference is going to be really important throughout your career. And actively seeking to grow your awareness of those concepts is going to make a huge difference.

DAVE: I had a really interesting epiphany about coding bootcamps. I think they're fantastic, but you have to know what they are. I don't really think of them as a way to jumpstart you getting going. They're a way to jumpstart getting paid. You can go from working at Walmart (That's what I did.) shelving product...and then, in my nighttime, I was, you know, doing everything I could to learn everything I could, but I was still working at Walmart.

And then I did kind of, like, a bootcamp induction-type thing. Back in the '90s, bootcamps weren't called bootcamps back then, but I did a thing like that. And it jumped started me into a programming job. I was still behind everybody. You know, I would go home and drink from the fire hydrant because I wanted to learn that. And so, the skills, the general concept knowledge, came. I had to fight for it the entire time.

But now I had cash flow, right? Now I could make my rent payment. And we live in the real world, right? Sometimes you got obligations that prevent you, you know, from going places you want to go. And having a coding bootcamp to say, "Oh, hey, you want to get out of that job and get into this other thing? Great. Here you go." But again, growth mindset. If you think the coding bootcamp the objective is to finish it and get a job, and now you're done, you're going to be back at Walmart next year.

MIKE: Yeah, I think that's well said. And again, this is not a criticism of coding bootcamps.

DAVE: It's also not a criticism of Walmart. That was honest work when I was doing that there. I'm just saying if you want to move into knowledge work, you have to recognize that your knowledge portfolio has a half-life of about 18 months. That's a phrase I heard, like, 15 years ago. It's probably shorter now. And what I mean by that is half of what you know to do your job will be useless to you in two years. I don't use Vagrant very much anymore. I use Docker.

And five years ago, I didn't use any container technology, and how much of what I know, right? You can pick any weird aspect of something. How much do you know about Chef and Puppet? We don't do that anymore, right? But it was an essential skill at the time.

MIKE: That just illustrates this vital importance of looking for those concepts, you know, and actively prioritizing some learning. One thing you mentioned there is you go home, and you drink from the firehose. I think that there is real value, real value, important value in taking some time outside of work hours to learn something beyond what you're doing at work.

I would say that most of my learning has been kind of the way that Kyle said, you know, at [laughs] work. There's a big pile of work, and you'll learn from it as you go. How could that not be where you learn most of what you know? Because that's where you spend your time.

Sometimes, in order to learn something new, something that you haven't done yet, well, you might have to do some learning outside of what you are paid to do because they might not be paying you to learn that technology. Now, it might go back and benefit you [laughs] in your career, even your paying career. But I do think that it makes sense to schedule some time every day, if possible, to learn something that interests you, you know, someplace that you want to grow your career, or, you know, just your skills, or even if it's something that's outside of monetary compensation. It's something you just want to grow in your abilities.

Take some time that you dedicate that's not even paid that you're just going to learn it each day, whether that's reading a book, whether that's taking a class. I do think that taking some of that dedicated time makes a really big difference over time. You know, it's probably not going to make very much difference if you do it for a week. But if you're studying for an hour a day, if you do that for a year, that's hundreds of hours. If you do that for ten years, it's thousands of hours. Thousands of hours of study in any topic is going to really push your skills forward. I would argue that doing something like that really matters.

Has anybody had a lot of success with having something to just schedule, whether it be a class, or a book, or newsletters? There's many different ways that you can get some of that information. What have you done outside of work hours to grow your skills?

KYLE: I thought about an example as you were talking. So, here at work, for my work environment, I work a little bit different than most of my team where I have a Windows box. And I would run a VM through VirtualBox, and I would use Linux on that. And I did that for two or three years with the newer releases of VirtualBox. And drivers in Windows, I was having quite a few issues with that.

And this is where I segue and say I'd gotten to where WSL 2 had come out. And on my personal rig, I'd been exploring that for quite a while, and just how seamless that was between that and Windows terminal, being able to use all the different terminal options, just from one window. And I know these things are available on other OSs, but I was stuck on Windows.

But I then utilized what I'd learned on my personal experiments and the transition from using a VirtualBox VM to using WSL for all of my work here. And I was able to dump that VM. In doing so, I have a lot more resources on my machine that have been freed up because I'm not running two machines, technically, now. So, that was just kind of an example I thought I'd throw out.

MIKE: It's one that I relate to a little bit. I used to always run VirtualBox as well [laughs] to run Linux. I had a work machine that didn't have it. And once again, you know, those experiments help. Thanks, Kyle. Anybody else have any experience with doing something outside of work that ended up providing a lot of benefit later?

SERGIO: I have something to tell you. I think the way I learn is by doing stuff. Yeah, for example, two years ago, I wanted to build my own house. So, I hired some people to make this happen. But in the process, I found I can design wood furniture, so I just started to design small things. I guess feeling that sense of accomplishment is what motivates me. So, when I feel comfortable, I end up doing nice things. So, I guess you need to understand yourself, yeah.

Something that I find nowadays, knowing smart people, makes you think, oh, well, it makes me think that I need to improve. Yeah, there is a good example in this company that I found people really smart, and see how they work, see how they do things. Yeah, it made me think I need to improve in some areas. That's something.

Also, when I was a teacher...I don't know if you know, but I was teaching in a university here in Honduras. I had this idea of make people live better through education. What I mean is, here in my country, there are a few resources. If you are a good teacher, you try to do your best to your students till they get or learn difficult things the best they can.

So, I guess something motivates people is, well, when thinking in the position of a teacher, yeah, I guess that opportunity to help people, and the people will understand you that you are really interested in they. It is nice for them to getting in shape really quickly on doing some stuff. So, I was a teacher from attending classes for software engineers.

MIKE: I think you hit something really important there. We're talking about how you learn something. We've talked about how we learn things on the job. And a lot of the reasons we do learn things on the job is that we're doing them, right? When we're doing something hands-on, we learn it very quickly, in a way that you just can't do when you're just reading about it or studying about it. Yeah, to your point, Sergio, you got to do it.

So, if you're really interested in learning how to do a new language, well, go and pick a project that you want to build and the language you want to learn and go start building it. And you'll learn far more building it than you would reading about that language. Not that you shouldn't do some reading, but the actual getting your hands-on, right? And working on it.

SERGIO: Yeah, I agree with that. Me working in this company is a real example of that. I don't know if you know, guys, I am being hired here without having so much knowledge about Ruby on Rails. So, I had to negotiate with me of the lack of knowledge that I have in certain areas. I know that I don't have to be perfect, but I made this negotiation and just keep forward.

Right now, I feel so nice with Ruby on Rails. I guess Eddy helped me in the process. Many people here is helping me, and yeah, that's awesome. But you need to understand...how much risk you are able to handle. [laughs] Yeah, it's [inaudible 30:45] in the professional environment, right?

MIKE: Yeah, you kind of tied several things together there that we've been talking about, taking risks, right? Being willing to get out and take those risks, getting yourself hands-on, but also getting yourself involved with mentors. You talked about, as a teacher, you know, really getting a lot of sense of reward in going and helping other people. That's so true. [laughs] It also is true when you are the student that you have to engage. There's a lot of reward to you personally in being willing to engage and getting those social engagements active, that when you do that, you tend to progress more than you would otherwise.

DAVE: I think there's a subtlety there as well, which is sometimes when we are trying to learn at work, right? We've got this key problem of, like, how do I get paid? How do I get my employer to be happy to pay me to learn this thing, right? And so, Sergio is coming in, and he's got to learn Rails because we're a Rails shop.

And, Sergio, there's something you did in your interview that convinced us to say, "Oh yeah, yeah, we're happy to teach you this particular skill because we know you can think." You sell your ability to think. You say, "Hey, I'm good at this general field," or "I'm bringing these other things to the table." And we're like, "Oh, we're going to have to teach you our database naming conventions anyway. It's just an extra couple of hours to learn how the Rails generators work," right? And down the road, you go.

It's really good to recognize, like, what skills you can bring that are, like, horizontal, like, wide-ranging skills that you can bring to the table, and they're going to apply everywhere. And then when you go to an employer and say, "Hey, I want to do this, and I want to use this specific technology," then the employer is like, "Yeah, yeah, I know you can get things done. Go for it."

MIKE: To maybe go back to the first story that I told [laughs] about my job where I really struggled with prioritization, in retrospect, I've learned when put in a situation like that, when put it in a situation where there's more to do than you can possibly do, it turns out that's pretty common in life if not the norm. You need to look at what needs to get done, realize not all of it is going to get done, and choose what you're going to work on each day. You need to make a conscious choice. There is going to be an endless pile of work.

And if there's an endless pile, it means you're not going to do all of it. You're going to be making choices, and embracing that choice means that you know you're going to work on this and not some other things. And it's very liberating to realize that, hey, there's this work I'm never going to get done, and maybe that's okay. And if that's the case, then it means that you can prioritize some things that maybe aren't quite as urgent but you know need to get done.

If you're feeling like you're not making very much progress in learning, in growing your career, well, maybe it's time to take a step back and look at those priorities and say, well, I'm not getting everything done. And maybe I would get more done [laughs] if I grew my skills in some way. If it's impossible for me to get everything done, then I shouldn't even try. What I should instead do is prioritize, work on the most important things first, and take some time to do something I really care about. In this case, take some time each day to learn something new, something maybe you're not going to do in your typical daily work.

Hopefully, you can do that at work. Hopefully, you can do something at work that maybe is from the other inbox, right? Some work that you're not usually doing because you can grow your skills there. That prioritizing makes a huge difference.

Secondly, we've talked a lot about social environments and how...with other people that can really help. I know that when I've taken classes with people, I finish, and I enjoy doing it together.

Finally, some people also brought up some really interesting ideas about being hands-on. If you really want to learn something, you have to pick a project and work on it so that you can actually have that experience rather than just kind of knowing about it at a distance. Also, about, you know, there's some talk about mentorship and that sometimes the best way to learn something is to teach. [laughs] And paying back is a really valuable thing to do as well.

KYLE: Just a thought I've had during this. Hopefully, the rain outside isn't terrible. [laughs] But I was kind of thinking, one thing that drives me that I've had to become okay with is the idea of imposter syndrome. I've ran into impostor syndrome, I feel like, for most of my career. And it has taken me a while to realize that's not a bad thing, and that's a driving point. And that is something that can keep you learning, and don't be afraid of it.

MIKE: Thank you. Talking about getting yourself in that uncomfortable situation, right? [laughs] Recognize that's okay, and that's how we learn. Thanks, Kyle.

I think that's a great place to end our discussion today. Remember, you're not an impostor if you're actually trying. An imposter isn't trying. If you're actually doing the work, getting it done, well, you're not an imposter. You're somebody who's there getting the work done. It's been great talking to you all. I've liked hearing all of your different perspectives.

We'll be here next time on the Acima Development podcast. Thanks.