If you're a long-time listener of Developer Tea, then you might remember today's guest from a very early episode. In fact, episode number 19 and 20, I interviewed Ben Orenstein. Ben is one of my personal inspirations over the years, in particular as a Ruby developer, as well as a craftsman, somebody who cares about his tooling. Ben has gone on from where he was back in 2015, and now he is venturing out and doing his own projects. We talk more about that in today's episode. By the way, happy New Year's Eve. For those of you who don't listen to this on New Year's Eve, whatever day you do download this episode, welcome to 2019. I hope that you... Your 2018 was productive and rewarding, and that you were able to connect with your career purpose in 2018. And then I also hope that as you look forward into 2019, that you are thankful for the things that happened in 2018, both good and bad, and that you treat everything, both in 2018 and the future experiences that you have, as opportunities for learning. This is hard to do. Sometimes it's difficult to look back on painful experiences and try to draw out a lesson from them, but that is the kind of the best scenario, the best case scenario, if we can look back and draw out some kind of learning from our painful experiences. So I hope for everyone who's listening to this as you move into 2019, that you continue to grow both in your personal life and on that end of the spectrum, all the way to the other end of the spectrum. And you're professional. You're in your personal life, in your career. I hope that all of those things kind of continue to grow for the people who listen to this show. I truly want the best for you. And that's why I continue to record these episodes to hopefully provide some new perspective, some insight that you haven't heard before. And today's episode is hopefully no exception. So let's get into the episode with Ben Orenstein. Ben, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks a lot. Glad to be here. So this is your second time actually being on Developer Tea. Way back in the day, I had to go and look it up. I think it was, you know, episode 15 or something that you were on. Oh, wow. Yeah, it's been a while and a lot has changed for you since then. I believe you were at Thoughtbot when we talked last. And we're going to get into some of that stuff. But first, I want to start out by asking you a question that I don't know if I asked you in the first episode or not that we did together. But the question is, what is your favorite thing about the show? What's your favorite thing about the show? What's your favorite thing about the show? What's your favorite thing about the show? What's your favorite thing about the show? What's your favorite thing about the show? What's your favorite thing about the show? It's really simple and hopefully it kind of drives some of our conversation. What do you wish more people would ask you about? Hmm, that's interesting. I think one of my favorite things to talk about that doesn't come up that often is the fact that I do multiple things in my life that people tend to look at and assume it is a talent-based skill that's affected greatly by your innate abilities. I think one of my favorite things to talk about that doesn't come up that often is the fact that I do multiple things in my life that people tend to look at and assume it is a talent-based skill that's affected greatly by your innate abilities. That is in fact a practice-based skill where the results are coming from a long years of repetitions on that thing. And I can tell you what those things are. So the two big ones that stand out for me are one is programming where people that are I noticed this happens less with people that are actually developers, but it's very common for people that are less technical. When I tell them what I do for a living, they're like, oh, I could never do that. And it's like, well, actually, yes. you could like if you had to you could if it meant your family would die if you didn't like you would figure it out it's just hard and so if you start if you do it kind of casually or like look at it uh lightly you might assume that that's it's it's too hard for you or that there's like some magical uh innate programming ability thing but i don't really think that's that's the case and the other is um music so i sing and that is even more susceptible to this phenomenon where um people will just constantly tell me like oh i'm like i sing i'm like oh i could never do that and i'm like well what do you mean like i'll have a terrible voice and i'll be like well how many voice lessons have you had oh well none okay well has anyone ever tried to teach you how to sing well no okay well i bet you also suck at pretty much everything else that shares those traits anything anything at all that you can imagine practicing at if you haven't practiced at all then yeah you're probably you're not going to be able to do it right you're probably not going to be very good at it right totally and it's beyond that we're like i think most people are kind of willing to accept that um that position like okay yeah there are probably things that you get better at if you practice but there's something about certain skills or certain fields and like programming and singing seem to be two of them at least where people just assume it's like it's a thing where you've got it or you don't and so you know if you just if you and you can know if you if you don't have it from the outside yeah it's like a some kind of mystical special element um exactly you know dna or something right and oddly enough we often on the flip side um in in areas where we probably should attribute a little bit more to dna like for example some people going to the gym and working out are just going to have different results than you will right there's there's like this uh this interesting dichotomy that we've assigned some things that label of attainable uh given enough work right if you if you you know really focus on it then you can be just as you know cut as x movie star right but then on the flip side these other and i'm not really sure what the line is um you know what is the what is the bucketing why do we do that i wonder if the fitness one is because it's so profitable to convince people that these results are achievable for everyone yeah because there's not really a lot of people that are going to be able to do that right but there's a bunch of uh voice lessons schools on every corner that's right of every city right yeah and like if you show someone a picture of a set of abs everyone can kind of say like oh yeah like i could like i could figure out how to get that or something or like they can imagine themselves doing it i think yeah yeah that's yeah it's worth a lot of money if you can convince them of that yeah that that's that's a very interesting uh dichotomy i think you know it's it is interesting that you mentioned that developers kind of understand that quality of yeah it doesn't really it's not really about talent it's about spending time with this stuff and practicing and doing you know kind of deliberate practice uh learning you know what are the contours of this given language or you know whatever the thing is that you're trying to learn rather than somehow you were born with a natural ability to understand data structures right it's that's not really it's not really built in yeah i think it's this is the thing that i think people it's a conclusion they come to after they've spent some time with it like i think once you demystify it a little bit by like working really hard at it for a little while you start to realize that like the the people at the upper end of the field skill-wise are mostly just more experienced and like yeah there's a little bit of like mental raw mental horsepower that will act as a kind of multiplier i think but yeah i feel like the more that i learn and the more that i see it's it's like the best developers the ones that i admire the most are the ones that are the most experienced and the ones that are the most are not particularly like brilliant individuals they're not like they're on the smarter side of of the median i would say but it's not like they're just like ungodly intelligent it's more like they have really great habits and they've learned really great things from other really great programmers over the years yeah and i'm kind of delineating in my mind right now some of the people that i would say are truly you know uniquely gifted mentally uh people like donald newth right this is a giant in the field and if you read some of uh the art of computer programming you're going to um hopefully come away for me i came away humbled right it felt um i felt so um i felt like i was approaching the craft with a a big jackhammer and he approaches it with a whole you know closet full of fine tools and i'm like i'm going to go get some more of those tools i'm going to go get some more of And this is just such a different way of thinking about computing. And of course, we're in totally different fields. Donald Knuth, if anybody's not familiar, is more of like a theoretical computation, you know, super master. He's kind of one of the industry's godfathers in a way. And he's responsible for a lot of thought on algorithms and that kind of stuff. But Donald Knuth also isn't writing software on a day-to-day basis for money, right? That's not what his job is. He's a professor. And these are totally different things. And I think in programming, in software development, whether you're a web developer, backend developer, whatever, that we conflate the ideas of... Anybody who touches code, we kind of put them into a singular column, right? And that's just not a realistic picture of an industry. And this industry is one that has now kind of spread out and now is no longer a single industry, but is actually spreading into multiple industries. Totally. And I think I'm going to bring it back to music for a second because I think it provides a useful visual. Where if you are like... We can even stay in computer science. If you want to publish the art of computer programming and publish a work that changes your field, yeah, you probably need some amount of natural ability. For you to be in the top 0.01% of something, you probably need a bit of a head start mentally. And if you want to sell out a stadium as an incredible operatic tenor, you probably need to have your skull be the right shape. Yeah. And vocal cords that have the right shape. So you need a little bit of an advantage there. But for most people, we just want to have a good job and a good life. And you don't need to achieve at that level. But that's who gets all the attention. And so you think, well, I could never do that. And yeah, you're right. You probably couldn't. But do you really need to? Right. There's an absolutely excellent article that even a step further down, right now we're kind of talking about achieving, becoming really good at something. Good enough. Good enough that you can be professional at it. But this article was talking about the kind of the praise of mediocre, I believe was the name of the article. And the whole point of it was that we've lost this ability, culturally speaking, to appreciate our very simple abilities. So like the weekend warrior basketball player in the 90s, this was something that could have been, you know, I'm not glorifying, you know, not the 90s. By any means. But at some period in time, there was a sense of okayness with just being good enough to enjoy something. Right. You don't have to be the best cook to make a good meal. You don't have to be the best basketball player to go and get some exercise playing basketball and enjoy yourself in the process. And instead, what we've done in a lot of arenas is instead of being able to pursue hobbies for the sake of, you know, kind of leisure, we've turned them into these kind of pseudo professional endeavors where we're trying really good, even though it's never going to be a part of what makes a living for us. Right. There's not really a reason to become good at it. Yeah. I like that a lot. I think that's that that rings very true. I like I keep bringing it back to music, but people used to sing like socially, like back in the in the 30s, for example, like it was a social activity to come over and stand around the piano. And everyone would just sing. And no one was professional quality. But that wasn't the point. It was you're doing it for fun and you would enjoy it. And you weren't comparing yourself to like Utah YouTube phenoms that you happen to run into. Right. We actually my wife and I visited Ireland. I guess this was three or four years ago now. And there were many, many occasions when you would walk into a pub in Ireland. I encourage anybody who hasn't never gone to to go and check this out. It's so much fun. Walk into a pub and people are just. Stay sitting around with instruments and they're playing music exactly like what you're saying. And it's like this this sense of, you know, instead of everybody minding their own business and just talking at the bar or whatever, you have a community there. And it may even be ad hoc, like people are coming in from other cities or tourists are walking in the door like we did. But everybody's joining in in this kind of, you know, it's more of like a momentary. Momentary. Enjoyment than it is. You know, nobody's recording this. Nobody is trying to make money off of it. The bar doesn't even really care whether it's happening or not. And it just they just host it. It's just kind of there. Yeah, I love it. I think I think the appreciation for doing things as an amateur has perhaps waned a bit. And we could we could rekindle that. I think that would be good for the world. I think so, too. And I think that even for amateur developers, sometimes there's, you know, there are people who listen. I'm going to show right now who you enjoy being an amateur developer and you have another job maybe. And you don't really need to go any further than that. Like, that's OK. Nobody should be pressuring you to, you know, turn this into your career just because you have enough talent that you could. Right. That's that's not a reason to choose a career by any means. Totally. Yeah, I agree. Well, Ben, I want to talk to you about the changes that you've gone through. Over the past couple of years, starting, I guess, back in 2015 or so. I can't remember exactly when it was that you chose that you decided to kind of strike out on your own, you know, to to blaze your own path, I guess. Do you want to tell that story? Sure. Yeah. So this actually started back in early 2017. I believe it was. OK. OK. I'm not mistaken. But, you know, it doesn't really matter. A few years ago. So I was working at ThoughtBot and ThoughtBot was like an amazing job. It was as far as jobs go, about as good as it could get, particularly in the like the latest implementation of it for me, which was I was running a number of ThoughtBot's SaaS products. We had a number of small SaaS companies that we had launched. And I was basically like the product manager slash mini CEO of those tiny business units. And really enjoyed that. But it had been like six years that I had been at ThoughtBot. And I was just I have this thing in me where I kind of need to blow everything up every 18 months or so. Or like I need I just need to make sure I need to have enough challenge happening, enough newness happening pretty regularly. And I had done that a few times. I kind of reinvented my job at ThoughtBot several times. And they were like amazingly cool about that. But I reached this point where I had been there for a while and I kind of couldn't picture the next thing that I wanted to do. And like within the auspices of ThoughtBot. And so I kind of turned it over in my head for a while and then eventually decided that I was I was going to leave and I didn't know what I was going to do. And I decided I'd rather leave and figure it out than figure it out and then leave because I just it was just it felt like time. And so I quit and that sort of started like phase one. And the first thing I did was I decided to make a course for people. So I built like an info program. I did a lot of work on the product, which is about refactoring mature rails applications, which is more or less taking a lot of the stuff I had learned to thought about over the years and turning it into a video course. And this was it worked pretty well as far as a commercial success. Like I launched it and the sales were good and people liked the course and I could see how I could make another one and it would probably be similar. But the the lifestyle was not what I was into. Like I was working solo. Which is never like my favorite thing. But I really did not like it. Like I'm very much a team person. I'm very extroverted. And so I was doing solo stuff because I wanted to just like get out and figure it out. But that was never like I never would have picked it. I never would have said, Yeah, that's what I want to do. That's how I how I want to live my days. So I was feeling kind of down. And so I kind of I was a little directionless for a little bit and I very briefly took another job just because I was like, Oh, I can't figure out quite what I want to do. So let me get a little income and get some social time. But. I knew that I've thought for a long time, like I feel like my eventual destiny is running a software company. And that was partly why I was so interested in doing that a thought bot because I've been sort of trying to orient my career in that direction for such a long time and like learn the skills I needed to learn. But I never had the like confluence of the right idea and also people to do with. And finally, that actually happened back in May of this year. So I was working. Yeah. And so I was working this job and not really into it again. And but I had a friend who I had known for years and we used to get together and talk about business ideas because he he he created startup, sold that startup to a larger company and was like feeling similarly not inspired. And after enough of those sessions, like maybe this, maybe that, maybe this, we kind of came across an idea that we both liked and felt exciting enough that we're like, Maybe this is the one. And eventually. 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I want to do something different. I want to do something different. I want to do something different. I want to do something different. I want to do something different. I'm not really happy with where I am, but I also am a little bit intrepidated by leaving without a plan. What do you recommend to people? Because I know that you said you kind of jumped and then learned how to fly kind of thing, right? But what do you recommend for developers who are in similar predicaments? Hmm. You know, I don't know that I should offer advice on this. I don't know that I would like, like, lift the level of my experience to like, what I would do. But I would definitely recommend it. Advice. Sure. I've figured out what works for me, which is like, I like I kind of enjoy a little bit of that chaos and just figuring it out on the fly. And I prefer it to the like working a job I don't like or feeling like I'm not growing shapes me and I find it very mentally draining and I really don't like it. And so the cost of staying to me is pretty high. And the cost of chaos like I'm single. And over the years I had saved a lot of money. And so I didn't. I didn't have to worry about cash at the time. And so I had a pretty good like mentally and financially, I was in a pretty good place to do what I did. But I would hesitate to recommend the same path because I don't know how other people are wired or what their situations are. Like it wouldn't be feasible for lots of folks, I assume. Yeah, I think that's interesting that you pointed out a few things that people don't necessarily intuitively assume, right? That you are, you know, completely cashless. You know, completely cash secure. And that that makes you in a different category than say the average person who's not making as much as they want to make and they want to leave for that specific reason, for example. So there's a couple of interesting things that you mentioned here. One is that, you know, being in a cash secure position that certainly changes your mindset about where you should be. For me personally, it would be really tough, right? I have a wife and I have a son. And for me to leave without being cash secure would be terrifying, right? But at the same time, you're also mentioning this other piece of the puzzle, which is the cost of staying and the pain that it causes. Not necessarily because you don't like the people or because the job is bad per se. But because for whatever reason. You're unsettled there. And that's a really important thing to try to evaluate. Totally. I actually, I feel like there are actually a number of people. I feel like my willingness to make a change when I want my life to be different is pretty high. And I feel like, I think maybe I would like elevate this a little bit towards advice, which is like maybe see if you can just increase your willingness a little bit. Like maybe it's not like blow up your job and like go out not knowing what you're even going to do. But I have a lot of, I have like some friends. Who will tell me about how crappy their job is. And I'm like, you're a developer. Like the market for your skills is crazy. Like if you're not happy with what's going on, I think you are crazy to not at least investigate and see if you can find something better. Yeah. I mean, there are so many in the jobs are still growing. You know, it's, it is certainly an open field. And I think another piece of the puzzle that I think is important that I'm interested to know how you dealt with this concept. Is like a case study. Is like a contingency, right? So like if this fails, then what happens? You know, in the worst case scenario. And there's some ideas from, you know, even from stoic literature, for example, of, you know, kind of meditating on the bad. Meditating on the possible pain that you might experience. And taking some time to decide like is it worth it to do that? And this concept is really powerful to me. For me, it actually helped me. When I decided to leave my previous job. The worst case scenario for me was that I would end up, you know, living with my parents again or something like that. I don't know what I had decided was the worst case scenario. But that was acceptable to me. And I decided then that, you know, this is not, this is not go bankrupt and end up in jail. That's not the pain that I would experience in the worst case. In the worst case, I'm going to have a new job. I'm going to have a new platform to start from. A new, you know, perspective to start from. And I will be able to recover from this no matter what. Yeah, totally. I think enumerating the worst case scenario is really useful. Because a lot of times your fear is kind of generalized. Where you're like, oh, I can't leave. Like why? Oh, because it's scary. Okay, why? And if you, sometimes when you dig down into that why, it's actually not that scary. Yeah. Or, you know, there's something that you haven't dealt with. Right? And that's actually, that was the case for me. Is I have a, I had a lot of really close, and still do, a lot of close personal relationships at my previous position. And dealing with, you know, moving into a new position away from those close relationships, I had a lot of strife over that. And dealing with the, you know, the possibility that this might hurt relationships. That was the thing internally that I hadn't really dealt with. And it wasn't really about fear. It was more about, you know, deciding how to approach it. And once I had done that, the rest of it kind of fell into place. Yeah. I like that a lot. Working through stuff that you need to work through is huge. That's why therapy is so good. It is. And in fact, you know, this is some, I've been going to therapy this past year. I plan on going next year. Nice. Good for you. Certainly something that I recommend for pretty much everything. Yeah. Pretty much everybody, honestly. Same. Yeah. When I started this company, I actually preemptively like got a therapist and started going. Even though it wasn't stressful at the time, I was like, I'm sure it's going to get stressful. And so, it'd be nice to have this relationship already established. Yeah. It's actually something that my therapist told me. He said, you know, it's best to come to therapy when you're healthy. And I thought that was a really interesting point. He said, yeah, it's really good because you establish the correct way. Like, you could have the picture. Of mental health, but actually have some wrong patterns, some wrong ways of approaching things, wrong ways of coping. And then when something happens, then all of the, you know, the facade of the good health that you had just falls apart. And so now you're left with this, you know, really frustrating situation where you thought everything was great and suddenly it's bad. Right. Yeah. Like you don't, you don't want to refactor when you're under a huge load of stress. Right. You've got to do it when things are calm. That's true. And, and you know what? That, that, that query that you have sitting there that is doing okay with the hundred users that you have on day one is probably not so great with a hundred thousand users. Totally. There's something I want to come back to for a second, which is I think worth mentioning, which is I was able, like the, the biggest enabling factor of me being able to take this, go on this adventure and then later start the company that I did is that I had a little bit of a fear of losing my life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The first thing I did is that I had been pretty diligent about putting away money. I realized this is like kind of a privileged, privileged position, and not everyone can do it, but if you are a, especially if you're like a single person, like you don't have a family to support, and you are, have a reasonably good developer salary, there's so much slack in your finances, like, it's, it's, it's so easy to not put away money. That's the default. That's totally, and it's very reasonable, and I did, and I did that for a long time. That was my default. And then I just kind of started like trying to get a little bit better at it with each like month and year and educate myself and all that. And I just built a handful of habits that over time led to like this decent nest egg that let me go do this. And so I would implore people, if you're in this situation, if you're especially like you're a little bit on the younger side, and you're not used to a super inflated lifestyle, and you don't have people to support, and you're making a developer salary, you can put away a decent amount of money. And when I was doing it, I didn't know what I was going to use it for. Like it wasn't in my like, this is for X fund. It was just like, someday, I'm going to be really glad I have this. And it turns out I was so right. Because like being able to like bootstrap my company right now is wonderful. And I'm really glad I'm able to do that. So let's take a few minutes then. And I want to trade advice here with you back and forth. And I'll say, you know, some of the things that I've done to help me do exactly that. I think developers actually need to hear this because you're right. And here's this is a unique thing about developers. Developers, generally speaking, you know, coming out of school, especially if you're going to one of the big tech companies, you're suddenly faced with a pretty big paycheck. Like it's and typically, it's pretty young, you know, young developers that end up with these relatively large paychecks. And sometimes, and I would say perhaps even often, you are. Outpacing what you even your own parents made at the height of their careers. Right. Sure. So and that's that's just kind of a reality that that software developers are facing. And it's a it can be a good thing. It can also be a really crippling thing for a couple of reasons. But the important thing to notice here is that you don't have the many years of, you know, financial experience. We'll say I won't even call it wisdom, but just experience that someone who typically is making the salary that you're making at, let's say, 25 years old, they're making it at 45 years old. Right. So they have this this 20 year gap. Now, that's not to say that you can't learn how to deal with money when you're 25 years old. But it is to say that a lot of 25 year olds don't do that. They don't go and learn how to how to deal with money. Because a lot of your life expenses, for example, your health is generally going to be good when you're 25. And we're making broad assumptions here on the show. So I apologize to anybody who this is not true for. But your health is is relatively good. If you're single, then you're not really supporting a lot of, you know, dependents, for example. And so you have a lot of potentially a lot of disposable income. And it's easy to do a lot of dumb things. Things with that. Right. Just humans do really dumb things sometimes. So I personally was lucky enough to, you know, stumble on. First of all, I have a little bit of a like a compulsion to protect my money. It's like part of my personality. And some people have that. Some people don't. But I was, you know, lucky enough that I stumbled on some financial resources. I was lucky enough to have some resources early on and realize that, hey, you know what? The most important thing I can do. And this is my first tip. And then I'll turn over the floor to you, Ben. But my first tip was or is to, you know, set up some kind of automatic saving. It's that seems so dumb and simple, but any kind of automatic saving, it can literally be, you know, $100 out of your paycheck. Every time you get a paycheck. Put it off into an account. It's free to access. And that's it. And if that's the only thing that you do, you're going to be actually pretty far ahead from the average person in a year or two. Yeah, that's that's funny because that's my tip to that of all the things that I did over the years that made the biggest difference. It's making it. Yeah, it's making it automatic. It's making it so that it's opt out or that you'd have to like do additional steps to fail that goal. That is what pushes over the edge. Like no matter. It didn't matter. Like when I set savings goals. And like kind of obsessed with what was going in and what was coming out that had way less impact than like literally just setting it up. I did it with direct deposit. So it was even more annoying to undo. Like I would have employers like you have to submit a written form that says like, please deposit 10% of each paycheck into this account or something. Yeah, it was annoying to change. And so I just I made I wanted it to be annoying. And it was that was just like what that steady drip. It's just like, oh, like I it's like just as you like humans are amazing adaptation. You're amazing. You're amazing. You're amazing. You're amazing. So if you go from being a poor college student to suddenly making $10,000 a month, you will be used to $10,000 a month in two months. So fast. It goes by so fast. Like it'll take almost no time at all. And then so like that hurts you that that adaptation kind of hurts you because it makes your default to not save because what used to feel like a ton does not anymore. But you can take advantage of that in the reverse direction, where if you say, actually, JK, I'm going to put $2,000 a month in a savings account automatically. And suddenly your disposable income goes from 10 to eight. And like that takes like two months to get used to. And then you're used to that, too. Like we're just good at adapting to whatever the current situation is. So like use that to your advantage. And adapt ahead of time. So that would be my next piece is don't try to adapt after the fact, because what you'll end up doing is you'll adapt your lifestyle by, for example, and this is something I wouldn't recommend, but taking on, you know, big vehicle debts or something like that. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. You extend it. You extend everything out to where everything kind of meets your budget right at its limit. And then you try to cut into that budget with savings. Right. And now you're in this position where, well, crap, like, do I sell that vehicle? And then you're going to take a loss on the sale. And there's just a lot of reasons to, you know, any time, for example, you know, throughout your career, you will hopefully assuming that you're working for a good a good company. You're probably. You're probably going to get a raise when you get that raise. Decide then, like, decide up front. How much of this do I want to use to increase my quality of life today? And how much of this do I want to save for later? That seems like such a simple thing to do. But as it turns out, it's hugely important. Yeah. Couldn't agree more. I like this so much. And you sort of touched on this, but this if you when you do that, then you're avoiding like the the really pernicious force here, which is lifestyle. Inflation, which is like when you're like most of us were probably like if you think back to a time, you were really happy in your youth, like in college or high school or something. Or I can think of for me personally, I really enjoyed college. I had a great time. I was totally happy. I think I made like $8,000 a year or like or like a few years after school. I mean, I remember being like I was making like $32,000 a year and was like, this is great. I have great friends. I'm having a good time. I felt like I was living fairly. I feel like I was living fairly lavishly, honestly. And then like a few years later, I'm making three times that or and it's like, oh, yeah. And this is this is also great. I feel the same amount happy. But now I'm used to things where it's like, oh, like, well, I would never like do my own laundry. Now I can just do wash, dry, fold and someone else will do it. And that just becomes like, oh, I need this. This is this is now an essential expense because I'm I'm used to this this feeling of laziness or convenience or comfort or whatever. Yeah. Or like, yeah. Oh, now I'm the kind of person that should have a car that is this a certain amount. Nice. And I should I should care what people think about that and what I think and all that. And it's just you. It's so easy to let that creep into your life. Yeah. And it's much harder to eliminate it. You know, once you especially because there are sometimes when you've actually made commitments, like you've actually gone and bought that car. And even even if you could eliminate it, man, it's it still is. It's going to be a much more of a headache to eliminate it after the fact than it would have been, you know, to say no up front. Mm hmm. Totally. Yeah. So if you can find some friends that like are not developers or like that have like less making less money, that's I think that's a good influence. Like, that's a good way to do it. And then like they're like, those sort of keep you in line. They're like, oh, should we do this thing? Like, oh, that's expensive. Like, oh, yeah, that is. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Let's not do that. Just adjust your perception. That's actually one of the benefits of being a remote developer. A lot of my friends and a lot of the developers that are around where I live are not paid the same that, you know, a developer in Silicon Valley. Might be. And so now you don't have that same, you know, status kind of war or at least comparison, you know, habit. Totally. Yeah. I like that a lot. Okay. So and maybe a couple of last really small tips there. One of the things that my wife and I did really early on is we really focused hard on paying down our debts. And I don't believe that this is the best. You know, mathematically speaking, the best decision to make. But for us, psychologically speaking, it had a profound effect. So we know that we have, you know, a very small list of debts. The house is pretty much the main debt that we have. And so because we were so, you know, focused on that, you know, now we don't have the kind of the barrage of snail mail coming in, and reminding us just, you know, how much of our money has to go out. So that's really, at least from a psychological perspective, has been really profound for us. Yeah. I like that a lot. Do you want my like 40 second spiel on investing? Sure. Yeah. I'd love to hear it. Here's the quick and dirty. I mean, educate yourselves and all like this is of all the advice you take on the internet, like investing advice is probably the worst thing to listen to. But here's my version. And then like, go see if this matches with you. Max out your 401k match with your employer. That's probably the worst thing to listen to. That's pretty essential. Try not to put your long term investments in anything that's like a managed mutual fund. That's all garbage. The only thing that's worth putting your money in is Vanguard funds. They're by far the cheapest. They have the lowest expenses. Expenses matter more than almost anything. No fund manager can pick stocks. No fund manager can pick bonds. Everything in that industry is bullshit. And stay away from financial advisors that make money based on a percentage of funds that you have invested with them. There you go. So yeah, most of the most of the. Most of the services kind of the on demand 401k services. If you're working for a startup, a lot of these are using something like Vanguard in the back, you know, back office and really for their benefit as well as yours, because for them, they aren't having to pay those those management fees. Really, what you're paying for with those is convenience and your company is likely going to be paying the fee for that anyway. So most people, luckily, you can kind of trust the 401k. That your company offers. And I agree 100% that match maxing out your 401k and then, you know, really seeking at least I would say seek some advice from a financial financial advisor, you know, once or twice. You don't really have to go gung-ho and go talk to a financial advisor all the time. It's not the same thing as therapy, right? So sure, you can probably set up a long-term plan. Plan that's going to be a little bit more expensive. But you know, that's the thing. You can probably set up a long-term plan with a financial advisor and pretty much be set. Very little is going to change about that. The most important thing is exactly what we said at the beginning of this discussion about money, which is set it up automatically and then don't touch it. Try your best to act like that money isn't even yours yet. Because that is that's kind of the key to that long-term growth that makes investing actually worth your money. Yeah. So let's go back a little bit on one of the things you said, which is I've worked for good employers who had crappy 401ks. Sometimes it just happens because good 401ks can often be expensive. And so normally if you have a company that doesn't have a ton of money, they want to offer a 401k for their employees, but they don't want to spend a ton of cash. And so the way the 401k plan makes this money is by pushing you into funds that have really high fees. So just just watch out for that. The fees matter. They matter a lot. And then also on the go ahead. I was going to ask you what do you do in that scenario? Is there a way to pick the funds better? Or how can you address it? Your host. The only thing you do that I'm aware of is to talk to your company and be like, yo, these funds suck. Can we get better funds? Because often as like the amount you have under management grows, like if you add employees and people save more, you get access to better funds. So the best thing to do is just make no noise that I'm aware of. Also, am I able to do something fancy with like a self-directed IRA? But I never dug into that enough to really know. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Okay. And so. So the important thing in that is to really just to know where your money is going. Right. Know what your what those expenses are. I would still say even if you are even if you have a crappy 401k, it's probably still the best place to put your money, although it's still it's suboptimal. Right. But out of all of your investment options, it's the only one that's that's sheltered from tax and all of that stuff. This isn't a financial show about. Yeah. We got deep on money. Yeah. Yeah. There was something else you had that you were that you were going to say, though. Yeah. One last thing on this, which is like there are also financial advisors who are paid not by you, but by they get a cut for what they have you invest in. And those people are not your friends. Like you are the product in that situation. Like you want a financial advisor that you pay every time you see them a certain amount and then they don't make a cut based on what they recommend to you. Yeah. Yeah. So it's more like a therapist than than a, you know, somebody who has invested interest basically in where you put your money that that would be. Yeah. So so don't go to somebody for free. It's actually is not bad advice. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. And thank you again to Manifold for sponsoring today's episode. You can get $10 worth of credit in the Manifold marketplace. Head over to Manifold.co. slash dev T. It's Manifold.co. slash devtea. I want to tell you about something that we're doing in 2019. We're calling them developer T, T break challenges. These are very simple, straightforward messages that I have written over the course of the past couple of months. And there's going to be one every single day. Now we're going to start it out very simple. And you can learn about, you know, the future offerings of the developer T challenge. We're hopefully going to expand it as it grows over the next couple of months. But we're going to start out very simple platform that most of you probably use Twitter. And we're also going to be cross posting over on the spectrum community spectrum. Chat will be cross posting each of these these T break challenges. They are very short. They're actionable. And hopefully they will help you as you continue to grow in your career throughout the year of 2019. There should be a new one ready every day. Now this is an experiment. So hopefully this will go as planned. Hopefully people will catch on that. It'll be helpful and we'll continue doing it throughout the year. But of course, we have to treat it like an experiment. I'm not going to pour a bunch of time and energy into something that isn't actually helpful. So I encourage you to follow developer T at developer T on Twitter and go and check out spectrum chat. You can find the developer T. Community there. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. And until next time, enjoy your tea.