As you go through your career, learning about human behavior and how to work with other humans becomes more and more important. In fact, I would say it's important on day one to begin learning some of these basic principles of human behavior. And in today's episode, I want to talk about two principles. You could call them principles, I suppose. They're much more like incorrect beliefs or naive beliefs about human behavior that are very difficult to see when you're in the moment. But if you get outside... If you get outside of the moment, or if you try to imagine that you're an outsider, and a lot of it feels more like common sense. It feels more intuitive. It feels easier to connect to. We're going to talk about those two misconceptions, those two false beliefs in today's episode. The first false belief is that your situation is an exception. Now, here's the important thing to understand about exceptions. And a lot of my principles or frameworks of thinking rely on the ability to rationalize using some kind of model. Model in this case, I mean something like a statistical model. By the definition of the word exception... I'm talking about something that doesn't happen as often as other things. This is the basic idea of an exception. It is something that is not the norm. If you're looking at a normal distribution, the curve, a normal curve, most of the events that you experience will fit in the middle of the curve. An exception is something that fits... On the edges. An exception is something that doesn't happen often. That normal curve would be the frequency distribution in this case. Where on the tails, the left and right side of the normal distribution, you have very low frequency. It's rare. And depending on what level of exceptional you're talking about, something becomes more or less rare. But the exception kind of fallacy, if you want to call it that, this is a type of uniqueness bias. I haven't found any studies that really dive into this, but the intuitive feeling that I've had in my career that I'll share with you, and why this is such an important principle to me, is that we always imagine when we're in these, what we believe to be exceptional situations, that something will change in the future. That somehow the exception is temporary. That this is not really how things always are. That this is an exceptional situation. And additionally, we might imagine that we are in a pervasively exceptional situation. Okay? So, this is... This is not a time-based exception. It's not something that you expect to stop. It's the belief that you are in an exceptional opportunity. Right? This is something that, you know, you might get sold this as a benefit of the role that you take at a company. Right? That you are... That this is an exceptional opportunity. Your company is poised, you know, to be in that, you know, top point. 0, 0, 0, 1% of companies. And you should pay attention to that exception. And the important thing about this... Why am I talking about this cognitive distortion, this belief that you're in some exceptional state? Is because we are willing to make concessions on the edges. We are willing to make decisions that we probably otherwise would not make if we believe... That we are not in our normal situation. We will go to lengths that are unusual because the situation is unusual. We're matching our behavior to our conception of the reality of our situation. Right? If it is indeed true that, you know, this particular situation that you're in is exceptional, then you can act in an exceptional way today, in this moment. I see this very often with people who have trouble establishing boundaries and balance in their work life. Right? And whatever you want to call this, there's a lot of different kind of philosophies. Most of them are semantically different from each other. The idea that you have a work-life integration or, you know, you're trying to find some kind of mix of how you spend your time that doesn't burn you out. Right? That leaves you feeling fulfilled. That both you and your employer are happy with. And we often are struggling to determine what exactly that ratio should look like. And the pervasive belief by most people running businesses, for example, is that if someone is happy working more, then the company benefits from them working more. Right? Think about this. If someone is willing to happily work more hours, then the company benefits in proportion to the hours worked. This isn't actually true, by the way. There's research that shows that this is not actually true. And there's also research that shows that even if you are happy, even if you do feel like you can give those hours, even if you do feel like you can give those hours to the company, that eventually, regardless of that positive outlook that you have, you still will burn out. Okay? So establishing this ratio, establishing this balance is a critical step. And it's not just about figuring out what you're happy giving or not giving. It's about finding a healthy balance. But anyway, so if we're thinking that we're in some exceptional state, right? If our manager is telling us, that this is the last push, the final few inches to the finish line. If we're hearing that, oh, we have to get ready. We have only a couple of days until the big meeting, the big board meeting, the big pitch, the investor pitch. We're trying to win this one client. So we just have to do this last push. My strong belief, and in my experience, my lived experience, is that this is not, it's not typical for someone who normally establishes balance to have those kinds of exceptions. It's fairly rare, right? And it's hard to understand how often those exceptional states tend to run together. If you were to do some kind of objective analysis of this, look back on the last month or so of your life, for example, and try to understand, okay, how many times do we end up in the exception? You might find that the exception has actually become the rule. That the exception is actually the middle of that normal curve. And that if you believe that the exceptional state is causing you to act in ways that you otherwise would, you're going to be in a state of exceptional state. And that if you believe that the exceptional state is causing you to act in ways that you otherwise would, but now the exceptional state is the norm, then your life is going to take a turn in a direction that you wouldn't necessarily choose. This is a very critical thing to recognize. That exceptional states should be exceptional. And if they're not, then by definition, they're not an exception. We're going to take a quick break. And then we're going to come back and talk about our second misconception, this principle of working with people that I want to share with you today. One of the things we're talking about today is change. And in the many years since I started writing code, developing websites early on, I realized, I remember, unfortunately, not very fondly, the feeling of learning and then having to unlearn a website builder. And I know what you're thinking when I say website builder. You're probably thinking limited control, poor quality code, having to update every little thing locally and then re-upload the whole site, slicers and all of that old school stuff. What if I told you that I'm not going to be able to do that? I'm going to be able to do that. I'm going to be able to do that. I'm going to be able to do that. I'm going to be able to do that. Instead, it's a node-based builder that lets you add full-stack JavaScript to any site. With Wix Studio, you can spend less time on fiddling with your UI, less time on hosting configuration, less time on security config, more on the custom logic and the functionality that actually matters to you or to your customers. Develop on your performance, preferred coding environment, whether that is directly in the browser in a VS Code-based IDE, or you can develop locally in whatever IDE you use. I use Vim, for example, through GitHub integration. Either way, with Wix Studio, you're deploying in a click. Extend and replace hundreds of powerful business solutions and custom-built features with APIs and integrations. And when you want to speed things up a little bit, Wix Studio's AI assistant is on hand to generate tailored code snippets. Troubleshoot bugs and retrieve product answers in mere seconds. All that is neatly wrapped up in an automatically maintained infrastructure for total peace of mind. You can work in a developer-first ecosystem by going to wixstudio.com. That's W-I-X studio dot com. Thanks again to Wix for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Team. If I had to point out, I would point out that Wix Studio is a very good platform for you to use to create your own software. For both of these misconceptions, it is the theme of inertia. The theme of the difficulty found or inherent in change. And really specifically, I want to talk about the difficulty inherent in cultural change. Changing the way a group of people behave. Most of the time, culture changes very slowly. Culture changes in ways that may be difficult to control as well. But for the most part, culture at a company, culture in a geographic area, culture amongst a group of people who are interacting doesn't change very much. And, this is the second misconception. That your culture at your company is going to change in a direction that you want going into the future. Now, this may sound like a negative thing, and I don't mean it that way. You could just as easily see this as a positive thing. Because, really what I'm saying is not necessarily that it's going to change in a way that you want, but rather that it's going to change in a specific way. In a specific direction. Okay? Most cultural change is slow. Most cultural change is stepwise. You're not going to see massive swings in culture. Even if, okay, this is how we know this is true. Even in situations where you have very coordinated efforts to change culture. Where you have a lot of people highly trained professionals whose entire job is change management. Right? You have people who are responsible for culture change. Most of the time, it is difficult to manage that change and direct it in a way that you prefer. Or direct it in any specific way. Most of the time, culture evolves slowly in response to the environment. Okay, so think about this. What are the implications of this? The implications of, you know, culture not changing very often, not changing quickly, usually changing because of the environment, usually changing in a direction that you wouldn't necessarily be able to predict or control. This means that you should evaluate culture mostly for what it is today. Okay, think about this. Unless you are the one that is tasked with changing it or being a part of the change, it is usually it is usually a fool's errand, so to speak, to try to imagine a different culture at a company. Now, this isn't always true. Perhaps the change that you're trying to institute is an awareness a new awareness of something and that just takes some extra time. All right, but culture is, generally speaking, largely impacted by the values of the individuals that make up the population of that culture. And we're not going to get into the broad definitions or technical definitions of culture here. Really, what we want to talk about is that culture is a part of the culture. Culture is a part of the culture. If people have values that stay mostly static over the course of their lives, one of the only ways that culture changes quickly is for the people in the culture to change. And usually this happens primarily by way of people leaving or new people joining that particular population. Unless you are adopting a new value, or if you are finding some new alignment where an existing but dormant set of values can be expressed. Think about this. If culture and the behavior within a culture is largely reflective of the values of the individuals that make up the population of the culture, in other words, the culture is likely going to be reflective of the composite of the culture. Of the values across the people there. Then the only way that you're really going to make a significant impact on the culture is to either remove, add, replace the people so that the values change or to find some kind of new alignment, some incentive, something that changes the situation in such a way that an existing but dormant value, in other words, something that somebody cares about or a bunch of people care about but have not been expressing through their behaviors, that it somehow wakes up those values. You're bringing back or bringing to life, you're waking up some kind of alignment in values that had gone dormant. Okay. What does all this mean? In practical terms, as we already mentioned, what this really means is that your evaluation of a culture is, I won't say entirely static, I would say is largely going to follow the people. All right? If the mix of people stays largely the same, you should expect the culture to stay largely the same. This is especially true especially true when you're for people who are in leadership positions. If a leader, if someone in a leadership position is changing, then you have a higher likelihood of culture shifting. Okay. The values of whoever is in that leadership position have an outsized effect. You can imagine that it's essentially like weighting those values that that person has higher than the values of the other person. Okay. So,! So, if you are evaluating a culture, let's say that you are trying to decide if you want to work somewhere at a company. You're interviewing for two or three companies and one seems really exciting, but you have questions about the culture. You're not really sure, is this the kind of place that I want to work? Are they focused on the right kinds of quality? Or are they focused on the right kinds of, you know, even technology? What is it that I'm getting myself into? One way you can evaluate this is to look at their plans for people. This seems intuitively obvious once you say it out loud, but most of the time when people ask about culture, they are very rarely thinking about, okay, who is at this company? Who is getting ready to leave? You know, are we getting ready to grow the team? In what ways are we going to try to grow it quickly? Are we changing the culture by introducing, you know, contractors, for example? What is the makeup of the people? And how will that change? So, for example, if you find out that there are no major plans to change the staffing situation, but the company wants to change the culture, then you realize that you have your work cut out for you, right? Because we already mentioned that culture is a part of life. Culture is unlikely to change without having some kind of people change. It's hard to change culture. It would have to be a very coordinated effort. And even then, it's going to be difficult, right? But if you know that there has been a, let's say, a recent leadership change, or if you know that there has been, you know, major hiring efforts, then there is an opportunity for culture to be shifting. Whether that's good or bad is entirely up to you. You as the evaluator, right? You know, good or bad in this case is really just a reflection of how your values align with that culture's. But again, the misconception that I want to outline is the idea that culture is going to naturally evolve in a direction that you want it to. We want this to be true, right? We want the company that we work at or the group that we work with or the group of people that we're involved with, we want them to grow in a direction that matches our own personal values. And we can influence that to some degree. But it's unlikely that it's going to change as quickly in a direction that you prefer. It is more likely that it changes more haphazardly or accidentally to better reflect the composite total of values with a weight towards leadership. In that group. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. I hope you enjoyed these two misconceptions. The ideas here are really about inertia and our expectations of things evolving in directions that are beneficial to us. This is something that has to be done very intentionally. This is true both for those exceptional states where we imagine that we're in some kind of exception and then also for cultural states where we imagine that our culture is just burgeoning. It's getting ready to change. It's going to grow. It's going to blossom into something positive in the future. These things tend to be harder to actually make happen in reality. So I would encourage you to evaluate things kind of in place. Evaluate things for what they are because it's harder to change things than it feels like it is. Thank you so much again to today's sponsor Wix Studio. Website builders are not the way they used to be. They've changed and you can find out firsthand with Wix Studio. Spend less time on tedious tasks and more on real functionality that actually matters to your business. You can develop online in VS Code based IDE or locally via GitHub. You can extend and replace a suite of powerful business solutions and ship faster with Wix Studio's AI Code Assistant. Go and check it out. Wixstudio.com That is W-I-X Studio dot com. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode and until next time enjoy your tea.