« All Episodes

Interview w/ Julian Shapiro (part 2)

Published 11/16/2018

In today's episode, we're joined again by Julian Shapiro and in the second part of a two-part episode. In this episode, Julian talks about how his past experiences building projects lead him down the Marketing path.

Get in touch

If you have questions about today's episode, want to start a conversation about today's topic or just want to let us know if you found this episode valuable I encourage you to join the conversation or start your own on our community platform Spectrum.chat/specfm/developer-tea

If you'd like to connect with Julian about anything he mentioned in today's episode be sure to follow him on Twitter. Be sure to check out what he's working on over at Julian.com and his past work over at http://velocityjs.org/

🧡 Leave a Review

If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.

Transcript (Generated by OpenAI Whisper)
I pause and said, all of these skills I'm learning, how to get the word out systematically. They apply equally to a startup. In fact, they apply better to startup because you can do so in service of actually earning revenue and you can put money in to put poor fuel on that growth fire because with velocity, I'm at the mercy of my, purely my wits and my resources and my social networking essentially because I'm not paying for any discomfort. And so it comes down to, well, how else can I use these skills? But most importantly, I fell in love with the process and I realized this is the branch in my career that I'm now going to pause at and choose a direction. And I chose yes, use these skills I've developed and pursue growth marketing. We're continuing the interview with Julian Shapiro in today's episode. We're talking about growth for developers, not just personal growth, but growing your personal project, growing projects that you believe in. And Julian has done this. He's done it successfully. We're talking about how Julian accomplished this with his own projects and how he's doing it with other people as well. Thank you so much for listening to Developer Tea. My name is Jonathan Cutrell and my goal in this show is to help driven developers like you connect to your career purpose. So you can do better work and have a positive influence on the people around you. Julian has figured out what his purpose is. Now, it's not something that ends. You don't find it and then stop looking for it. You don't find it and stop figuring things out. And so Julian is continuing to grow and we talk about ways that Julian is growing and learning on these episodes. The last one in this one. So let's jump straight into the interview with Julian Shapiro. It's such an exciting story. And I think a lot of developers aspire to the opportunities that you've had Julian. And it's easy to sit back and listen to this and think, wow, Julian is about a thousand. He hasn't missed a beat here. But I'd love for you to take a moment before we go into this area of expertise viewers and marketing and specifically as a developer, which is particularly important to this show. Having the cultural understanding of having worked on an engineering project, moving into marketing, I think that's going to be a very interesting conversation. I want to get into that. But first, I'd love for you to share maybe a moment that you felt was a dark moment for you or a huge failure, maybe a moment of uncertainty. Take us back to that moment and explain kind of how you were feeling and what happened to put you there. So there was a startup I worked on a few years ago before velocity that was grueling, absolutely grueling. Just wake up until I go to bed, Monday to Sunday. And I was committed because there was a little bit of investor money. And they were my friends. So I don't want to let them down. And everyone thought so highly of the idea. So it was this little concoction of ego on the line and reputation on the line. And I also believe strongly an idea. So it was headstrong about it. And it was completely and utterly bombed in the most disastrous of ways. Like it was gaining some traction. It was mildly successful. And everything went wrong at once. And I thought to myself, I'm 23, 24. And this is the fourth, maybe fifth, like idea I've been chewing on since I was like 16 that I took very seriously that just failed as a startup. And I think part of what was such a clear signal in getting good at growth marketing while working on growing velocity was the realization that the missing ingredient that entire time was the growth experience. I was building a startup in a vacuum, divorce from the reality of if you don't grow, if you don't have a methodology for growing, if you don't know any tactics to grow, you are default dead as Paul Graham would say. So I realized pretty clearly during velocity that I now had the skills to go and build something and drastically de-risk it this time around. And that was very empowering. There was actually interesting conundrum where after doing growth marketing professionally in the form of my agency Bell Curve for 25 companies ever, many, it's been so far in the last couple of years. I've been getting very good at it and increasing my confidence. And now I have so much transparency into what works and what doesn't that it's this analysis paralysis where I'm like I can, I know how to make this, this, this, and this all succeed to varying degrees. What's the expected value and what has the highest upside and like it is just I don't know what to do. And so part of the funnel over the last few months has been working with my team to isolate the best ideas. And now this growth agency which first and foremost was created to help companies grow meaning we become their resident VP of growth and run all their ads, AB test all their stuff, fix all the leaks and they're so called funnel which we can get into. And we started with that and now we're slowly pivoting into other things one of which is training people how to do that themselves. And the others building our own stuff. So this whole journey of just repeated startup failures and never getting anywhere with them is about to come full circle because we are about to start on a couple ideas that we feel are highly de-risked because we know what is likely to succeed or fail when acquiring customers profitably. Hmm very interesting and so I assume that we're going to have to wait to hear about those about those ideas. Yeah. A little bit one is out so far which is really fun to do to work on because it's way more emotionally rewarding than running ads for a startup which is like I mentioned a moment ago training people to be as good as we are at growth. We just we took six months so I merged my my love for writing at julian.com and my knowledge of growth at bellcurve.com and we built a full training bootcamp and that's been so rewarding to empower people to do all the stuff we've done that took me four years and now they can learn to three and a half weeks figuring out the rubrics for compressing that knowledge. So that's one of these so-called products in the sense that it's the separate business from our ads agency. Yeah wow and for people who may be skeptical of something like an online course. How can you you know tell me what is it that that makes something like that work well. You mentioned the idea of compressing that knowledge. You know what kind of things would I be able to you know how am I how am I jumping over the four year gap that you spent and instead how am I getting that knowledge quicker is it is it that you went through a process of of error and and you tried a bunch of things that didn't work and then finally arrived at the things that did work or is it something else. It's a very fair question. So it's succeeding at training people growth marketing to our level is a product of two things. One is the quality of the training and two is how abstracted the training materials are not high level but abstracted meaning it's still very low level and tactical they'll tell you exactly what to do but is abstracted to the degree that it can be applied universally. So we're not giving you like the step-by-step instructions to make an ad on Facebook which we do actually but that's not all we're doing. So you could repeat those that same successful Facebook ad creation across any of these so-called ad channels. So the quality of the teaching though is the most important thing which is essentially mentorship and deliberate feedback. So putting aside my growth agency entirely I just believe strongly in these principles regardless for teaching and learning anything and so you know there's a reason why pair programming is effective both emotionally and the actual efficacy and the efficiency of training someone to learn Ruby for example and you can take some of those same tenants and apply them to training someone on growth which is they write their own homepage they rewrite it and then we go on to we go on to a Slack screen share look at what they've done give them real-time feedback edit it with them explain our internal voice that's justifying all these edits and we do the same process for ad creation for going through ones onboarding flow all these different concepts for growth and so the deliberate nature of that feedback is you get that it's given to you and then we say great try this again but this time do it for another project and so we don't want to beat a dead horse here we want you to keep reapplying this knowledge and we'll keep verifying whether you're implementing and so it's live Slack screen shares one-on-one training mixed with heavy resources and what's interesting about it is for it to be more considerate you should be working on projects that are things you materially need to be working on and so you don't want to work again in a vacuum so if someone joins this program or if you're learning how to pair program Ruby in both cases you should build something you actually want for yourself so people coming through our course are going to build a landing page and ads for the product their company actually sells today and then people someone learning Ruby should try to build that cool thing they always wanted to exist for themselves so it's a psychology of the training and then having in-depth but abstracted materials that I think can really elevate training yeah and I think it's important to note here the what you're talking about with having these these ideas that can apply across multiple systems is is this principles training right and it's not just about you know here is the procedure to create an ad if that's what made people successful then everyone who has access to YouTube would be successful right is Facebook it doesn't have a you know a special route for you to follow to become a successful advertiser that's not really what this is about it's about learning how growth happens how people's minds work the timing and why right it's it's a deeper it's a deeper understanding and I guess I should be really explicit here that Julian is not sponsoring this show in any way and this is not meant to be in you know an advertisement for this course but you know any time that I that I come across a course I always am trying to understand okay what is it that's being taught here is this a procedure that's going to expire you know in a year or two right and there's some value to those courses don't get me wrong sometimes procedures very important but the most valuable things that you can do in your career are almost always going to be based on principles understanding principles understanding mental models systems ways of thinking and then the procedure is how you apply those things if you only learn the procedure then you're kind of doing it the backwards way right and unfortunately that knowledge is not going to be able to stick that's exactly right and that's also how we're able to build a business model off of it so just generally speaking for us to be able to work with clients we have to have an 80-20 approach to nearly everything because when you're running growth for you know 15 companies at a time and each company has multiple channels which I'll define now so channels is usually in reference to a ad network where you can acquire users from so Google search or Facebook ads and so on and so when each of those 15 has seven channels in operation and half the dozen landing page AB test running uh there's just so much to manage and that's where to your point Jonathan abstracted principles not just from the low level tactical perspective but also now from the high level of how do you manage your time what is the framework for knowing which growth projects to work on and so part of growth is really project management or product management and understanding the prioritization of features and the cost that goes into each because sometimes we get really excited an idea and it'll be answered ourselves and say honestly we could just spend a tenth of that on making Snapchat ads work a bit better because they already do work so why are we trying to spin up Pinterest ads out of the blue when we don't have any sort of precedent for yeah that's that's such an interesting approach for many reasons I think for any developer who's considering um learning about growth you know I think it's important to start with this understanding that this isn't about doing something that that isn't add on it's not it's not just an extra task it's an entire discipline um that people do for their entire careers right this this is not just a you know a small skill set there there are a lot of things to to really struggle with and and um dive into and you can you can actually develop a true mastery level of of a career in this subject so I'd love to know um Julian coming as a developer into this marketing world and left to know some of the things that you were able to bring over some of the mental models as a as an engineer that you were able to bring into your the work with marketing that you do yeah so the the most the most clear um parallel would be the engineering approach to product features and the engine and the engineering approach to growth or the the prioritization of of of projects and growth in both cases you're trying to figure out what is the most repeatable uh abstracted and high-slabbered implementation and that's also the most de-risk so there's a lot of models there let me tie that down to something more concrete which is I now take a growth first mindset to what I'm working on so and this equally applies to our entire conversation on open source and so let's start with velocity what do I mean by a growth first mindset so if I were trying to repeat my steps again I would look for something that I think first and foremost has the potential to grow now you know you might make the argument but shouldn't you start with what you're passionate about maybe if you're lucky the two things will intersect that's what you really want and that does happen but if you start with what you're passionate about you'll probably be blinded to what's actually realistic to grow because it's a lot it takes a lot more more concerted effort to identify those opportunities than it takes oftentimes moments for you to be like oh yeah there's this thing I'm super passionate about already and so you don't really do much you don't do a real canvassing of yourself emotionally you're like oh but there's this thing I really want to do and you're in the mood and you really want to get it done that's not a good litmus test for whether you should work on something because if you project the half year or a year outward and let's let's project that far outward and let's consider the case of two different people one person shows their passion project where they're a ten or ten on how much they love that project and the other person is a six and a half seven and a half out of ten on how passionate they are about their project but the seven and a half person was growth first mindset and the other one didn't even look at growth or consider it most likely the person who didn't look at growth will go through a slog because the vast majority of startups fail and are a miserable roller coaster and then sometimes they're not certainly there ups and downs but for very many people for being honest with each other it's pure downs the whole startup ride sucks for a given startup people don't like to say that but it's absolutely the truth and so the if you take a snapshot then one year later for both never mind their likelihood of success is putting that aside or even though that's my primary point the way they're going to feel emotionally is going to be very different in my in my scenario the person who actually pursued the thing that is growth first and is actually demonstrating traction meaning people are using it people are happy with it they're giving feedback you're iterating on the product even if you weren't that passionate about that path for yourself what actually sustains momentum in the long term a year plus is the reward cycle and there's no reward cycle when you're failing through a slog but there is a reward cycle when people are using and loving your product and eventually in the long term the way the the curves work out is passions much less relevant and the reward cycles way more relevant and that is what sustains your interest and so that I that I feel very strongly about and then eventually you can find passion and entry in other aspects of building a business but if it's failing there's not a lot of upside to find in it and so that's the growth first mindset and why one should normally pursue it and that's just from the open source perspective but the the rewards and the the risks are much more tangible when you're pursuing it pursuing it in the context of a business right where you have investor money percent perhaps in the line or your own your own funding and you could possibly make a lot of money and change the lives of your entire team and so there's even more pressure to take a growth minded or growth first mindset when building a business and what I've realized in building Belkirk and looking back on all the successes is I can pattern match what is likely to succeed going forward and I can de-risk what I what will likely fail because I have so much inside data so not it not as a pitch for Belkirk or not as a pitch for Belkirk of training just as an interesting realization I have myself personally is I've been in the weeds so deep with so many founders I've been the tactician on the front lines tweaking the Facebook ads tweaking the AB tests that I have a very clear rubric for what is likely to work and I can back out from there and say okay I know what most likely works for acquiring paid customers now what does does those best strategies most strongly correlate with in terms of business models and in terms of what I'm selling to people so is it e-commerce or is it sass and if it's an e-commerce business and I selling socks or toothbrushes I can keep backing out because I have all this data and I can say okay well toothbrushes at a $20 price point being sold to women in middle America on Instagram in particular on iOS devices is probably an easy way to make a million dollars a year very interesting and how do you know how would you come to that conclusion I I realized that the answer is well and you have to have a lot of experience right um but how would how would you come to that conclusion and maybe the better way of asking this question uh for the format of the podcast is let's say I meet you on a on a two hour or let's say maybe a 10 minute plane ride and ask you hey julie and I really want to know I want to get better in this 10 minute plane ride can you tell me you know what should I be thinking about what should I be paying attention to what are some things that I'm not doing that I'm not paying attention to that I should be you have a maybe a list of two or three things that you would respond with in that scenario yeah I would say to answer that question specifically I would say make sure the market is big enough make sure that the people in that market are willing to pay you enough for what you're selling and make sure what you're selling is wanted badly enough that people are actually willing to fork over cash and if you can find something that satisfies those three criteria then you at least have a contender with your contender idea you then need the experience I have which I distill for free on julien.com I would hold guide on growth marketing and one of the pages is called ad channels another one's called ads and also the intro page so there's three pages in there that give you a lot of this context and so you have your contender and now you pair it with the context meaning for each of these ad channels I mentioned earlier Pinterest Twitter Kora there's so many what did they most commonly succeed with what type of business what is the contender that they most often produce success for and really what we're talking about is what is the audience that is that is located on Kora engages with Kora ads and after flipping a Kora ad actually goes through and buys something from you and so if you if you match what's being sold to the right audience to the right ad channel that is the sort of trifecta that that's the pattern that I'm speaking of when I say I'm pattern matching to do risk things that's what I'm doing and I have enough data points to have enough confidence to know the likelihood of one thing being more likely to succeed than the other and I share a lot of this on julien.com and so it would make a lot of sense for somebody like me running a podcast the people who are listening to this podcast they they are exchanging a value with me it's not dollars but it is absolutely attention and then we have sponsors this is the behind the scenes really complicated business model we have going on here but we have sponsors that sponsor the show based on the interest that we attract right and so it would make a lot of sense for somebody like me to go and read about you know how can I pattern match in the find ways to to grow the show and I can do that on in your goddess so. that's right and so how would you get that data how would you have enough data to pattern match off of right that's the real question because I haven't grown a podcast that's what you're doing and my guide doesn't talk about podcasts explicitly so as a more abstract that approach to this problem. recognize what it is your building so you're building a podcast now recognize who are you selling this to you're selling it to developers let's say aspiring developers or senior developers okay maybe you want to make a distinction there and then you can keep going down who is this audience where they exist yeah yeah once you have the audience right then you can figure out who is like me so what other podcasts for one to target the same audience and now you can start identifying the other pieces of data the other data points that you can go and do develop customer development on or you can just call it market research or you can call it is dev and so what you're doing because you don't have a growth agency right you are going to go and proactively talk to people who are already doing what it is you're doing successfully and you're going to pick their brains you're going to say hey real quick what the top two things working for you you can write that down you're then going to pattern match across all those or identify the commonalities and then you have some sort of prioritization list for what you should be doing yourself to say get more listeners and or get more sponsors and so that applies to any business any idea you do not want to live in a vacuum where you say I'm limited by the blog posts I can find through Google yeah to actually know how it is I can grow myself that's crazy if I wanted to repeat the success that I've seen for Belcher's clients I would not spend a minute googling and looking for blog posts I would go right to the blog post I would go right to the people who are responsible for success at similar companies that are non competitors to my clients or competitors but they've since left the competitor right and then I'll go and pick their brain and say well what worked for you and that is what actually that is the answer I give very often to clients asking questions that are outside the scope of our services like hey how should I do x y or z and I'll be blunt I'll say I don't have the answer because that's not what I work on but go to LinkedIn go through your network and ask people please ask people so don't just start from some point and this applies to low level growth tactics on a website or anywhere so for example if you're trying to spin up a landing page for your open source project don't do it in a vacuum go look at 20 other landing pages for other open source projects which you have some reason to believe are successful that may not in itself in and of itself be enough of a signal that these pages are any good but it's a start to proxy and you can identify the commonalities and go from there and so you don't need to have worked with clients like I have you just need the the resourcefulness and the hustle to actually go and do some competitive analysis and quite frankly those the two words this entire rambling speech comes down to and the reason I'm taking so long to sort of accentuate this is because no one is going to do it is because nobody does it is competitive analysis is the most boring way to successfully de-risk anything you're working on yeah and to do it in a way that is that is not just about differentiation right I think there's there's a little bit of a falsehood that we try to believe about ourselves or about our product that we are 100% unique and while there is probably something hopefully something that is unique about your product or you're offering how you differentiate yourself right it's almost definitely true that you have a lot more in common with somebody else than you think you do there are other shows that cover very similar things to Developer Tearight it would be foolish for me to sit here and say well no we're the only ones who do what we do right we may be the only ones who do all of the things that we do but we are not the only ones who have a short podcast you know targeted towards engineers for example I think that's that would be ludicrous and so the reality is if we can go you know this is kind of like a very accelerated form of evolution in evolution or a you know formal evolution maybe not but in in you know survival of the fittest the best win out and therefore when they breed they breed more like themselves and therefore the best they're going to continue to get better with this strategy of looking at who is successful and you're you're essentially mutating to be more like the successful ones and so you're you're without having to die you are evolving it's amazing things that humans are able to do is we are aware we are able to change our environments were able to change the things that we do not just as a result of you know something that we've inherited but also because we look around us and we can emulate the things that we see that are successful and the distinction you're making between differentiation and competitive analysis is a very astute one so it comes down to the expression you have to know the rules before you can break them and you have to know what so similarly you have to know what is the minimum instantiation of this idea for it to be good that is the first thing you want to look for when can the sing competitors if you're having a podcast it should sound decent you should be able to articulate yourself clearly you should have interesting topic selection and so forth figure out what is the minimum viable product of the thing you're doing and then worry about differentiating because no one's going to use you if you're bad to begin with unless you're just a very very novel like in a very novel to wave focusing on differentiation maybe that works but that's pretty much the definition of a fat so you know the distinction you make is a very wise I think it's also like you may get lucky right and you've probably heard stories about people who say you know the most important thing is that you're unique and they are successful somehow right it's not necessarily because they did it the right way it's because oftentimes this this is the their survivorship bias right you didn't hear about all the people who tried their unique idea out that weren't successful because they aren't around anymore they're not doing the thing that they were doing anymore because they they weren't able to sustain it just based on some unique feature so if especially if you if you make your unique feature something that isn't sustainable or that goes below that MVP quality for example if you use you know if you were to go and make your selling feature that you're the cheapest whatever thing on the market and you're undercutting everybody and that's the way that you're getting any of your business in the first place that's not sustainable you're not going to be able to stick around with that differentiator so it's extremely important that you think about differentiation as kind of an additional kind of the final piece of the puzzle rather than you know this is this is the I don't know where that myth came from it's it's a commonly passed around myth in business and in marketing that differentiation is key but it's it's absolutely a color apart of what your business is but it can kill your business as well that's right and there's so many examples of startups that were almost identical to the ones that came before them but they were the ones that took off so many examples and why is that because they grew better they probably had a better methodology for growth they may have just been lucky but the through line for most of them is they had a better growth methodology Facebook is that maybe the best and biggest example of a growth first internal mindset after they built up Facebook and they started hiring their first round of execs they put together a team that made every decision based on growth and it paid off yeah I love that I love that idea by the way that perhaps one of the best takeaways from today's episode if you're writing notes or whatever what you're listening to this episode the idea that you start everything with growth in mind that you you I assume you've and prioritize your tasks with with this idea that what are the things that are going to yield the best growth out of this list and because you're in that situation now where you have everything on your list yield some kind of growth you're even saying alright what which of these is going to yield the most growth of all of the growth things that I have on my list to do yeah and again I think it's worth calling out that we're not talking necessarily about growth for growth sake we're talking about growth for the purpose of implementing a healthy rewards so that you can actually sustain your interest in that thing or you can experience the byproducts of its success like I did with velocity to go back a couple talking points you were you were wondering how did this myth of differentiation first come about almost like we can we can label it the differentiation first mindset right versus the growth first mindset and here's just you know I'm just throwing this out there I've thought about this very deeply but it might be a reflection of the American individualism sort of everyone is a snowflake thing where individuality is is herald is a virtue and being different is herald it is a virtue in the US and maybe that carried over to this newer generation of startup founders to feel like everything that you have to be not just world changing but also unique yeah some expression of individual individualism yeah you know how you should be unique you should be uniquely good at growth that's how that that's the most effective way to be yeah that's that is an extremely important reality to face that sometimes you know the things that we face are egos talk about this on the show all the time our egos will absolutely get in the way of making good decisions of even making decisions that are in our best interest things that we really care about sometimes our egos will prevent us from making decisions that are healthy for us that are good for us and we can often you know fall victim to this idealism that is at odds with our ultimate goals and a good example of that is a lot of people sort of a refrain among B2B enterprise founders that are young and seeing a lot of growth is they'll say I never a lot of them are founded by developers and a lot of them will say I never thought I'd be starting a startup that sells to these old boring enterprises right and but it is wildly successful wildly interesting and wildly reward yeah like you know much fun the stop guys are having and the envoy guys are having there's just two examples drop ox three examples of young founders in the Bay Area who founded something that they never thought they get into sorry not sigopt I mean centering and so these are something there's something to huge enterprises and they are much healthier and much higher revenue businesses than than many of their than the average non B2B enterprise counterpart that's that's very important that our perceptions of what a wonderful life looks like our projections of what you know this plays out as how we end up impacting the world or the things the specifics of what we do you know it's probably a good idea to remain flexible in the specifics and the things that you want to be inflexible on are those more principle oriented things perhaps your values right the the specifics of how those things play out the more flexible you are the more likely you're going to see those things kind of fulfilled right those self expectations or desires or long term like we were discussing earlier in the show is a long term you know forecasts of things that you care about if you remain flexible in the specifics of how that happens then that vision can kind of you know manifest itself a little bit easier I think that's well said. Julian I'd love to ask you two questions real quick to wrap this show up first of all though I want to thank you so much for taking the time I know the people who are listening to the show are going to be grateful for the candor that you are presenting with and the kind of awareness that you know when you come into a group of Developer They've heard everything about marketing that they want to hear oftentimes right it seems like developers can be at odds with marketing as as a discipline but hopefully this episode and I know it has for me has changed some of the perspective that developers made by default have and I want to thank you for doing that here on the show. I am my pleasure I just hope it is useful I kind of feel like I was just rambling so yeah hopefully there's something let me ask you these two questions and I can assure you that I found value out of this and I know that the people listen to the show will as well but the first question that I want to ask you to wrap the show up is what do you wish more people would ask you about I wish more people would ask me to validate the growth potential of their startup idea because I can save them so much time now doesn't mean I'm going to be right. And I don't know everything I have work with every type of business but I have enough of a rubric to say you're getting yourself into the hardest user acquisition strategy possibly cut or not and more because I can't literally answer everybody's questions although I do if you send them my way I actually would love to but if you get to to have a volume what I do is I point people to Julian dot com because I've written a lot about this actually. On the first page of my growth marketing guide you can get a good quick feel for whether you're in the right direction. Excellent excellent so send send at Julian on Twitter a bunch of tweets with your startup ideas and no. Yeah go for it go for it I'll give it awesome all right and the second question that I want to ask you is if you had 30 seconds of advice to give two developers at all stages in their careers young developers or season developers what would you tell them. Let's see that's a good question without having premeditated this what's coming to my mind is be where the trap of inertia so I spent most of this podcast talking about the benefits of inertia that flow state that is in part a result of the reward cycle. But conversely it can be a trap and is all the time for myself included so there's no merit in putting your head down and hustling super hard without ever taking a breath and pausing to ask yourself am I actually in the right direction and my is my inertia pointed in the right direction. Or has something new change in my life is there new interest new inputs new realities new economic situations why after rethink things I'm choosing to work on and my priorities of things and so that is sorely under under executed task actually what you must basically advocates is wonderful interview on what why talks about his process for thinking of the world in this way where you have to repeatedly check where the outside world is. And ask are you still in the right direction with it always considering the context yeah that is that is extremely important and it's important that we do this for ourselves it's important that we do this for employers you know there's some wisdom in this idea that you know this is the same trap that gets us into situations where we're over optimizing right where we're refactoring code endlessly and then that code all gets thrown away because it was on a temporary project. And then we put a bunch of energy into this thing that ends up being disposed of or otherwise devalued very important and excellent advice thank you so much Julian for your time today. Yeah thank you so much for having me Jonathan I appreciate it. Thank you for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea and a huge thank you to Julian Shapiro for joining me on the episode head over to julian.com and sign up for updates when Julian writes he releases these guides. They are completely free and they're incredibly useful head over to julian.com. Thank you so much for listening if you heard anything useful anything valuable in today's episode then it's probably pretty good bet for you to subscribe and whatever podcasting app you use because we do episodes like this one on a regular basis three episodes a week and subscribing is the best way to make sure you don't miss out on future valuable episodes. Thank you so much for listening and until next time enjoy your tea.