information is the currency that you're seeking we talked about this in the last episode and information is moved most readily by questions in today's episode i want to talk about finding places for improvement through the use of strategic questions in your career my name is jonathan cuttrell you're listening to developer t i want you to think about the last time that you heard a question that changed the course of your career this sounds kind of wild that we would have a single question that would change our career because the truth is it's not just a question that would change our career it's a question that would change our career the question itself the question acts as a catalyst or it acts as a magnifying glass or maybe the question is acting as a bumper of some kind or a speed bump something that changes interacts with the world around it none of those objects on their own are valuable in fact none of those objects on their own are particularly useful they interact with the world at critical junctures and that's the kind of question that i want to focus on in today's episode i'm going to give you two of those questions two specific questions and remember we said that information is the currency in your career these questions are going to uncover information hopefully uncover information that you didn't realize was there right maybe the information is actually a clearer picture of your current situation or maybe the information is a stronger sense of motivation we're going to start with the first question and that's actually a category of question i want you to think about the question that would scare you the most and specifically i want to kind of limit it to the working context or professional skills and skills that you have in your career and i want you to think about the question that you have in your career and i want you to think about the question that you have in your career skills or or your job maybe your job hunt uh you know your position in your company whatever that kind of situation is for you your career situation what is a question in that sphere that scares you the most now two things are probably true about this question the first thing is you probably didn't already have it in your head you probably haven't thought about what kind of question would scare you the second thing is you probably didn't already have it in your head the second thing is once you did realize what that question would be and maybe you haven't yet maybe you need to pause and take a minute but once you do or once you did realize what that question is you also have a new piece of insight now the fundamental principle here that we're working from is that fear is insightful when we chase down what we're afraid of and we look at directly in the eyes of the viewer and we realize we learn something now this doesn't have to be a dangerous escapade we're talking about thinking this is all a thought process all a kind of mental exercise a thought experiment if you will what is the question that scares you the most and the kind of natural next question is why are you afraid of that question the question itself once again is like one of those objects that we talked about before there's nothing particular about it but it's particularly special about the question instead it's what the question reveals what is the information that is unearthed by the question let's take for example the question what is your five-year plan this might be the kind of question that strikes fear in you now the question that follows is why are you afraid of this particular question what about this topic of planning for the five years is provocative to you and why are you afraid of that question the question itself is a fear response that the answer is different for every person why you might have a fear response to this could be different from another person for example you might get overwhelmed and the idea of planning itself is overwhelming you don't necessarily uh you know have any insecurities about the future but planning for it is difficult for you or maybe you believe that you're on the wrong trajectory and facing that fact may be difficult because it means there's a lot of a lot of change or ambiguity ahead of you. Or maybe you're afraid that your five-year plan is too rigid. Maybe you believe that you have an idea of where you're going, but you're not really sure that that's what you actually want. These are all different categories of reasons of why that one question is provoking a fear response. Now, I encourage you as you track this down to label the fear more explicitly. For example, some of those feelings are actually uncertainty, or maybe there's a feeling of stress, right? There's different kinds of underlying versions or kind of drivers of that fear. So try to get as specific as you can. And what this does is it gives you a roadmap of possibly things that you could work on. Alternatively, it might give you an idea of areas that are not necessarily your strength. For example, maybe your strength is not in planning. Maybe you didn't realize that before. We're going to take a quick sponsor break and then I'm going to come back and give you another illuminating question you can ask for. Today's episode is sponsored by LaunchDarkly. You've heard about them before on the show. Probably if you haven't, then let me introduce you to LaunchDarkly, which enables development and operations teams to deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn't ready to be released to users. How does that happen? Well, you wrap your code with feature flags. This gives you the safety to test the new features you've been working on or new infrastructure that you think is going to serve your product better in your production environments without impacting the wrong end users. And when you're ready to release more. Why? Because if you're ready to release more, then you're ready to launch your product. And if you're ready to launch your product, then you're ready to launch your product. And the changes are made instantly by their real-time streaming architecture. With LaunchDarkly, you can innovate faster, deploy fearlessly, and make each release a masterpiece, and then go home and sleep soundly at night. Head over to LaunchDarkly.com to get started for free. That's LaunchDarkly.com. Thanks again to LaunchDarkly for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Team. We're talking about asking difficult questions, asking provoking questions. These are questions that unearth information. Amazingly, questions don't have to be that big or that complicated to change the way you think. In fact, we talked about a different question in the last episode of Developer Team, that simple question of what do you want? In a similar vein, I want to ask you a different question that is as simple and as broadly applicable to you as it is to you. It's applicable in many different categories, many different situations, and that is, how does this end? How does this end? At some point or another, everything that you're doing is going to stop. Your job, your current responsibilities, your roles, everything that you can imagine, you will eventually transition out one way or another. Now, we're not trying to get overly morbid here. We're not just talking about ending in the kind of final. We're talking about ending in the kind of final way. But one of our more natural inclinations is to imagine that our work won't end and to work in such a way that we're kind of always working without any specific end in mind. And so it makes sense sometimes to think about how your current work transitions to a different phase. And that means that something will end. We know that our projects will end and we know that our tasks will end. So if you have a plan, you're going to have a plan. haven't thought about an end for, let's say, your current job, for example, it makes sense to ask, how will this end? Importantly, it's necessary for us to think in this explicit way so that we don't attach a negative connotation that isn't necessarily appropriate to the ending of a thing. Amazingly, we celebrate the end of a project. And perhaps this is because we are prepared. We anticipate the end of a project. Take some time to imagine how various parts of your career, various parts of your professional interactions with other people, how those things end. And imagine designing it so that it ends well. This may change the way you think about what you're doing day in and day out in your job, the impressions that you leave, perhaps the people that you influence. This all may be put in a way that you can imagine. And a better perspective if you imagine what you're doing is temporary. Thanks again for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. Thank you again to today's sponsor, LaunchDarkly. If you want to launch with more sanity in your day-to-day workflow and test all of those features that you've been working on without impacting the wrong end users, head over to LaunchDarkly.com and get started with a free account today. That's LaunchDarkly.com. If you enjoyed this episode, or if you enjoyed multiple episodes of Developer Tea, and you haven't yet subscribed, then what are you doing, first of all? And then secondly, understand that this is a very low barrier to entry. I'm doing these episodes. I'll probably continue doing them as long as I possibly can. And this is totally free to you. So there's two things I would request from you. Number one, subscribe so you don't accidentally miss episodes. Of course, you can always skip episodes that you don't think are going to be relevant to you. This is not going to be an ongoing storyline or anything like that. You're not going to miss out on a lot. 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