The 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 Cutrell. You're listening to Developer Tea. I went to 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 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. One 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. 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. 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. Maybe the information is actually a clearer picture of your current situation. Maybe the information is a stronger sense of motivation. We're going to start with the first question. That's actually a category of question. I want you to think about the question that would scare you the most. Specifically, I want to limit it to the working context, your professional skills or your job. Maybe your job hunt, your position in your company. Whatever that situation is for you, your career situation, what is a question in that sphere? That scares you the most. 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 once you did realize what that question would be and maybe you haven't yet, maybe you need to pause and take a minute. Once you do or once you did realize what that question is, you also have a new piece of insight. 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 face, we learn something. This doesn't have to be a dangerous escapade. We're talking about thinking. This is all a thought process, all a mental exercise, a thought experiment, if you will. What is the question that scares you the most and the natural next question is why are you afraid of that question? The question itself, once again, is one of those objects that we talked about before. There's nothing 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. The question that follows is why are you afraid of this particular question? What about this topic of planning for the five years is provoking a fear response? 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 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 change or ambiguity ahead of you. 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. There's different kinds of underlying versions or drivers of that fear. So try to get as specific as you can. 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 response break. Then I'm going to come back and give you another eliminating question you can ask for. Today's episode is sponsored by Launch Darkly. You've heard about them before on the show probably. If you haven't, then let me introduce you to Launch Darkly, which enables development and operation 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 widely, what you have to do is update the flag status. And the changes are made instantly by their real-time streaming architecture. With Launch Darkly, you can innovate faster, deploy fearlessly, and make each release of 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 Launch Darkly for sponsoring today's episode of El Brutee. 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 than last episode of Developers He that's simple question of what do you want? In a similar vein, I want to ask you a different question that is as simple and is broadly 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 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 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 into better perspective if you imagine what you're doing as temporary. Thanks again for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. Thank you again to today's sponsor, Launch Darkly. 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 at 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 an ongoing storyline or anything like that. You're not going to miss out on a lot. You might miss a reference or two, but pretty much every episode you can listen to on its own. Secondly, leave a review in iTunes. This is an incredibly important part of the lifeblood of any given podcast. So not just for me, but for the other podcast that you listen to if you want them to stick around, then this is the best way to help us out. Leave a review in iTunes, and then of course any other podcasting platform that you use as well. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, enjoy your tea.