it's a little difficult for me to believe that it's been nine years as of the day that this podcast this episode releases it's been nine years since this podcast started and I'm so grateful for everything that I've learned on this show by the way I've got a little bit of a cold you might be hearing that but I couldn't let this particular date pass without releasing an episode cold or not this podcast has meant so much to me over the last nine years don't worry I'm not getting ready to announce that we're canceling or anything like that I just want to take a moment to reflect and say thank you it's very rare that I talk about myself my personal feelings on this show at least anything deeper than my opinions but I'm very fulfilled by the opportunity to do this podcast and I know the years it has changed and it will continue to change just like I will continue to change and that's actually what we're going to talk about after this reflection this moment of reflection for me we're going to talk about how you can configure your brain for change to invite change but I do want to take a moment and just show my appreciation for all of you who are listening right now maybe this is the first time you're listening maybe you've been listening for nine years maybe you followed us all the way through when we were a part of the spec network maybe you've been with us since the very beginning in our earliest sponsored days or throughout all of the many interviews that we've done with the awesome guests whatever your journey with developer t has been I just want to say that I sincerely appreciate that you're spending a few moments of your life listening to me talk on this podcast we may never meet in person some of you I have met in person or I've met you virtually online but this is such a meaningful thing to me it's become a part of my kind of routine my self-reflection routine so many times something will happen in my personal life I'll have some experience or I'll have some insight while I'm just hanging out with my family or when I'm exercising or if I'm participating in one of my ridiculous long list of hobbies that I have this show is always in the back of my mind if I have an epiphany that I feel like is worth sharing it happens in all parts of my life and this truly is an extension of who I am so thank you so much genuinely from the bottom of my heart I've enjoyed doing this so much and I can't wait to do more of it I have been asked many times either implicitly or implicitly how I've done this show for so long how can I keep going for so long and the truth is that I don't feel like I've done the same thing for nine years most of the people who listen to the show you might perceive that a little bit differently because the show in large part when it actually gets delivered when you're when you're hearing the show you're still hearing the same intro music as we started with nine years ago right so there are not a not a ton of things that have changed about this me standing in front of a microphone sharing my opinions sharing insights from my experience in the industry you know interviewing other people all of these format things have not changed drastically we have had some shifts in topics etc but the way that I interact with what I'm doing has changed significantly there have been schedule changes there have been patterns in my life that I've been able to adjust so that the output of the show doesn't really matter to me I've been able to adjust to the show I've been able to change very much but everything surrounding it can change pretty drastically especially my own expectations this is probably the critical factor and the one I want to hone in on in this discussion today my expectations for what this show could or should be have changed on a very regular basis over the course of the last nine years and in some ways that affects what I do with the show in terms of the types of content that I might produce or the kinds of guests I might have on but the biggest thing that it allows me to do is continue regardless of what happens this is the key to persistence at least in this particular case the key to persistence for me and I suspect that the key to persistence for you may look very similar adjusting your own expectations, or a better way to put it is reducing the power of your expectations. Reducing the power of your expectations. Now, this sounds like I'm going to go into some kind of like Buddhist teaching or something here, but that's not really the intention. The intention is to identify areas where you have an expectation of what will occur, whether it's with a podcast, or with your code, or with your career, with your family, your friends. Looking at those expectations and holding them loosely. Because here's what can happen. If we build up an expectation, if we build up an expectation, we begin to wrap our actions and our thoughts around that expectation. And instead of thinking about the thing that we're doing in that moment, instead of thinking about, say, the process, instead of thinking about writing that particular piece of code with quality in mind, we start to think about some expectation. And by the way, expectation doesn't necessarily have to be some irrational load that you're putting on a situation. It can be totally rational. Your expectation of what should happen, what is likely to happen, what could happen, all of these types of expectations. We bring them to the table. We begin to wrap all of what we do around them. And in fact, the purpose for the thing that we're doing becomes the expectation. Think about this as it plays out in your normal life or in your life as a software engineer. Let's imagine that you are working your job as a associate software engineer, whatever your entry-level position or mid-level position software engineer. And in no uncertain terms, you really love your job. You enjoy your day-to-day work. You enjoy the people you work with. You enjoy the kind of problems that you're solving. You feel sufficiently challenged. You feel excited. But that little expectation starts to grow inside of you. The expectation of getting a promotion, of achieving a particular title, or maybe even a salary. Your work continues. You keep on enjoying every day that you walk into work. But now the expectation is kind of living alone. You're not going to be able to do anything. You're not going to be able to do anything. You know that reviews are around the corner. You're going to be either up for promotion or not. You talk to your manager. They put you up for promotion and you get a rejection. Now this expectation that you had has created a differential. It's created a picture of something that you ostensibly thought would be good for you or would be desirable for you. This fork in the road. But it's all a fiction. It never actually happened. It's just a comparison point that you've created in your own mind. It's all a fiction. And so now you're in some kind of suffering. You're experiencing a negative feeling. You're experiencing frustration or maybe you're feeling a sense of imposter syndrome. Maybe you begin to develop resentment towards your manager or resentment towards your boss. Maybe you're feeling a sense of resentment towards your manager. Maybe you're feeling a sense of resentment towards your manager. Maybe you're feeling a sense of resentment towards the people who ultimately made the decision not to promote you. And what otherwise was an excellent job that you were enjoying yourself, you could have continued on. The promotion, had you not developed an expectation, a promotion would be a bonus, right? Something that you appreciate. Instead, your expectation turned it into something that you felt like you lost. Now let's think about this for a second. You obviously didn't lose anything. But because you've trained your mind into thinking about an expectation, your mind is an incredibly powerful thing, right? You've developed this very thorough story about yourself in a future world where that expectation has been met. And now you're living in a world where that expectation has not been met. And because your brain can't really tell the difference between imagination and reality, you actually feel a sense of loss. When I first started Developer Tea, I actually had the opposite experience. I didn't really know what was going to happen with the podcast. I was very fortunate. I was very lucky that the podcast gained the traction that it did. And I had the opposite experience. It was my expectation that I would continue working on the podcast for years before it ever gained traction or something like that. But it gained traction very early. And so, something broke my expectation in a positive way. But then as the years went on, the previous performance of the podcast, I thought I was having a rational response as I was looking at the numbers. Like look at the listenership, for example. And if one episode dipped below another episode, I realized that there was a differential between my expectation of how that podcast episode should have performed and how it happened. Actually performed. And now I'm trying to rationalize in my mind the reason for the differential. Just like you might do that if you didn't get the promotion. Well, why didn't I get the promotion? Maybe I'm not good enough for the promotion. Maybe I screwed something up. Maybe I said something wrong. Maybe that particular project I could have worked extra hours on, and maybe that would have impressed my boss's boss's boss. All of these things are born out of the differential between reality and our expectation. And so, I would spend time trying to analyze what kind of content is it that has a better listenership than other content. What kind of seasonality should I expect? There's all of these things that I was trying to calibrate my expectations. I was trying to change the way that I would expect so I could be more accurate with my expectations in the future. And this is, again, a rational thing to do. We want to be able to predict the future. That's one of the things that we really want to do as humans. Because predicting the future, allows us to reduce risk and also take advantage of benefits that we can see coming down the road. So, predicting the future is a natural tendency to want to try to evaluate our expectations and tune them so that they're better. But what I realized is that all of that tuning was not really the core of why I started the show to begin with. I didn't start this show, as crazy as it seems, in the pursuit of making money. Podcasts are not the money-making tree that you might expect that they are. I've been fortunate enough to make some money with this podcast. You know that because you've heard episodes in the past where I've had sponsors. But I didn't start this with that in mind. And so, the listenership of the show started to compete for the core reason I started this podcast in the first place. It took me a while to find the tagline, that you all know, but I didn't find the tagline, that you all know, but I didn't find the tagline, all probably have heard. But to help developers find clarity, perspective, and purpose is my core reason. Now, if I can help more developers do that, then even better. That's great. But what I failed to do was recognize that the number of engineers listening to the show, the number of audience per episode, the number of unique downloads, I was starting to tune myself towards that number rather than allowing that number to be an outcome that I don't have any control over. I was trying to control that outcome. I was trying to align my expectations and correct my process to improve the outcomes towards my expectations. Sometimes this is a reasonable thing to do. Sometimes you should do this. But in this case, I was losing the plot. I was losing the core reason why I started the show in the first place. So, one of the things that I'm doing, I've been doing it for a couple of years now, is I'm actively trying to reduce my expectations of developer T and in other areas of my life. Reduce the leverage that my expectations have over my life. Because the truth is, in that situation where you didn't get that promotion that you thought you were going to get, it's very tempting to say, you know what? That's it. I'm throwing in the towel. I'm leaving this company. I'm going to go somewhere. I'm going to go to a company. I'm going to go to a company. I'm going to go somewhere that actually respects me, you know, respects my experience. And it's going to give me the title that I want. And this is how your expectations can stop you from continuing something that you really love doing. You really love that job, but you decided to stop it because your expectations created a differential between your reality, which, by the way, you really enjoyed, and some other reality that never was. True. When listenership has waxed and waned over the years of this show, I could have thrown in the towel. I could have said, you know what? I can't attract the same number of listeners. I can't attract the same kinds of sponsors anymore because my listenership is down and therefore it's not worth doing. My expectations of the show have failed in that case, right? I expected to have X number of listeners, therefore I could get Y number of sponsors and I've had to wait for the last five years. I've had to wait for the last five years. I've had to wait for the last five years. I've had to wait for the last five years. I've had to wait for the last five years. had less than X, therefore the show is no longer worth doing. This, again, is losing the plot, right? So evaluate those expectations. I really encourage you to take a few minutes, whether you're doing it now or later, write down some areas of your life where you have, maybe in the past year, upon reflection, you've had some expectations that you failed to meet. Whether it's expectations of yourself, maybe it's expectations of other people, something that was significant. And try to imagine what it would have been like had you not developed expectations. It's very hard to do, by the way. Don't get me wrong. This is not something that's easy to do. But when we develop expectations and then we invest in those expectations, that's really where we go wrong. Expectations on their own are kind of a natural byproduct of our thinking brain. We have some expectation of what will happen. But when we start to invest in that expectation, when we start to plan on it, we start making changes based on it, that's where things can get a little bit wonky. Now, briefly, I want to make sure that you understand, I'm not talking about creating plans. Plans are these longer-term expectations we have of what we might do in the future. Instead, think about this as the meta layer. For example, I expect that I will fulfill all of my plans. This is a meta expectation that I have of what's going to happen with my planning process. My planning is going to be perfect. That would be an expectation. The plan itself is just what you think about doing. What you're planning to do is not necessarily an expectation of how things are going to go. Probably the easiest line to draw in the sand is expectations are about outcomes that you're going to achieve. You can't control while plans are more like inputs that you can control. Our expectations reflect what we believe about the efficacy of our planning. But our expectations also mask our inability to recognize all of the many factors that may impact outcomes beyond our control. Ultimately, I've been incredibly happy to do this show, and I expect to continue being happy to do this show. I'm going to be happy to do this show. I'm going to be happy to do this show. I'm going to be happy to do this show. I'm going to be happy to do this show. I'm going to be happy doing this show. And the way that I ensured that that will happen is that I focus on that core reason why I started doing the show in the first place. And if that disappears, then I will. I will shut the show down. But I don't see that disappearing anytime soon. And that's because of all of you. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. If you'd like to discuss this episode, or if you'd like to just chat, come and join us in the Developer Tea Discord community. That's developertea.com. That's developertea.com. That's free. It always will be free. There's tons of other community members in that Discord. Come and check it out. Developertea.com. I'm in there. You could send me a message, ask me a question, ask me for advice. I'm there to chat, as are other members of the community. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.