you've probably performed a premortem before if you haven't we'll talk a little bit about what the premortem is but that's not the entire focus of this episode briefly a premortem is effectively trying to find the the problems from a different vantage point you're imagining that you are yourself in the future and you're looking back on a project or some kind of effort something that you are in real life getting ready to embark on now you're imagining this future self looking back in hindsight and finding out what went wrong or right premortem doesn't necessarily have to be a negative thing although the mortem portion of it kind of sounds negative some people call the positive version of this a pre-parade but nevertheless the the exercise is essentially the same you're imagining what you would look back on to diagnose a problem to diagnose what went totally wrong and this practice is very common in startups in fact it's common in a lot of industries now it is recommended by people like richard taylor and danny conovan and the the basic idea is that we have this interesting ability if we use prospective hindsight this is basically fast forward and looking back exactly what we've already described we have this unique ability to see things from a different angle some of this comes from the social kind of prompting to find a good bad reason in other words you're finding a a the most insightful problems that could go wrong so this kind of flips the the normal social intent of being optimistic so now there is some kind of reward at a social level if you if you come up with the most insightful or the most likely the most interesting way that things can go wrong and so that's kind of the the most interesting way that things can go wrong there was a study back in 2010 uh done by and hopefully i see these names correctly vinot or veinot klein and wiggins uh they compared the premortem to other methods uh using 178 college students and they posed a hypothetical situation and uh the premortem reduced overconfidence all right so that was the main effect that they measured that it reduced overconfidence uh better than the other methods so that's kind of the this is very important because as humans we are prone to overconfidence and in fact if you are kind of excluding yourself from this group that may actually be a signal of your own overconfidence that said i want to talk to you about a very specific use of premortem in today's episode and it's going to be for your career but first i want to talk about today's sponsor neo4j not all data is created equal if your code is getting dragged down by joins and long query times and super complex uh kinds of queries that you need the sequel expert in the company to come and debug to figure out why it's not returning the row you expected to return the problem might just be your choice of database you can try simplifying it with graphs a graph database lets you model data the way it looks in the real world instead of forcing it into rows and columns stop asking relational databases to do more than they were made for which by the way relational databases can absolutely solve many problems but if you're finding yourself wondering maybe this isn't the right tool graphs can work well for use cases with lots of data connections like supply chain fraud detection real-time analytics and generative ai with neo4j you can create a graph database that's going to be able to model data the way it looks in code in your favorite programming language and against any driver plus it's easy to integrate into your existing tech stack people are solving some of the world's biggest problems with graphs now it's your turn visit neo4j.com slash developer to get started that's n-e-o-4-j the number four n-e-o-4-j.com slash developer thanks again to neo4j for sponsoring today's episode of developer t what do you wish you could have told your younger self this is a way of practicing hindsight although it's not necessarily prospective hindsight there are usually an abundance of answers to this question for any given person i wish i could have told myself x y or z about my younger self but i'm not sure i could have told myself about my younger self about my career or about school or about that thing that relationship that i had it's worthwhile to do this exercise to get into the mindset before doing what i'm going to ask you to do next so spend two or three minutes imagining what you would have told yourself five or ten years ago now the next part of the exercise i'm going to ask you to give yourself advice from the outsider's perspective for today now what we've done here by having you do the first bit of advice is i've tried to prime you a little bit i'm trying to prime you so that you don't focus too much on tactical advice things that you're dealing with in this moment instead you're trying to tap into that kind of wisdom style advice i use the word wisdom here to really just mean these larger scale more comprehensively important things to you things that you actually care about in five or ten years from now now i want you to imagine yourself in five or ten years but this time instead of providing yourself advice from the outsider's perspective i want you to perform the pre-mortem and specifically for the sake of this exercise focus it on your career although you can do this exercise beyond that now the reason i want you to focus it on your career is because there's a couple of outcomes that in doing this exercise i had that you might share that may just be a little bit more tactical advice for you to take from this episode but hopefully you come up with your own bits and pieces of a pre-mortem for your own career so if you're imagining some goal you have or maybe you're imagining trying to follow the advice that your wise self just gave you what is most likely to keep you from doing that what kind of thing did you fail to do or what kind of thing uh you know random effect that you didn't have to do or what kind of thing total control over uh came in the way of you progressing in the in your career the way you had hoped now here's the reason that we do this we're not just going to limit this to the things that you can control and the reason for that is because if you're doing a prospect of hindsight you're able to see in some regard the risks that you might have otherwise not prepared for in other words even though you may not be able to control those external risks actually happening you can prepare for them better if you anticipate them so this prospect of hindsight is an anticipation exercise you're anticipating what kinds of things should i hedge my risks for how can i prepare for those unknowns a little bit better now we wouldn't judge your decision making in hindsight but we can hone our decision making in the future so if you're anticipating that you're going to be able to do that then you're going to be able to do that in advance if we have some idea of the threats even though we can't control them we can make a plan to mitigate the risks associated with those threats so of course it makes sense to look at all these risks maybe even provide more information or categorization around them like things that i can't control as we just mentioned that you may want to mitigate the risks of things that i can control so why did we fail on those particular things maybe we failed the correct habits or we didn't set ourselves up for success in some other way so what you're doing here is you're kind of creating this uh in in this moment at least a kind of messy map for yourself you've recognized your path by looking back and providing that advice to your younger self you've kind of primed for that uh for that wise vision rather than focusing on the small stuff and then you've given up on the small stuff and you've given up on the small stuff and you've given up on the small stuff and you've given up on the small stuff and you've given up on the small stuff the advice in the present hopefully that priming has done its job and your uh your your your pre-mortem looking back on the next five to ten years in your career life and wondering you know what what went wrong this can be uh an enlightening exercise at the very least the kinds of things you should have on this list by the way uh you don't necessarily have to to use those big vision things but i want you to think about what you're doing and what you're doing in your life and what you're doing in your life and what you're doing in your life and what you're doing in your life and what you're doing in your life think on the longer term scale i'll give you an example from my personal experience when i look back in my career one of the biggest regrets that i have which this is a hindsight rather than a prospective hindsight one of the biggest regrets that i have is that i didn't do a great job of gathering evidence for my own worth so let me let me clarify what i mean here if you go and you get a resume review uh from any you know industry leader myself included honestly one of the first things that i would tell you one of the first things that uh any you know hiring manager is going to tell you is that your resume should have hard data for each of the jobs that you're in some kind of metric that shows your impact the words that you use only tell part of the story but if you can back up what you did with hard facts hard data then you're much more likely to uh garner some legitimacy from from your resume and this is something that i did not do well throughout my career so far i have not done a good job of gathering good facts of gathering good hard data about the impact that i've had at the companies that i've worked at so i look forward uh in my career in my kind of prospecting and i look forward to the impact that i've had in my career and i look forward to the hindsight my premortem in my career and i would consider that a future failure i failed to change that behavior i failed to go back and mine out the things that i could to point to hard facts about my uh you know participation in a given company so your list may have similarly small things these are small things that can have that can make a huge difference in your career or you may be able to do a lot of things that you're not able to do in your career focused on larger behavioral things for example you may look back and say i am unhappy with the way i spent my time in my career because let's say i wish i had worked at a company that i lined more with their values or i wish i'd worked with people that i had more fun with these are things that you can provide yourself the roadmap on and this is one way by the way that you can develop a roadmap for yourself and you can develop a roadmap for yourself and you can develop a sense of values and of your own purpose we've talked about this on the show before that purpose sounds like this mystical massive thing but in fact your purpose can be very simple and it can evolve and so by understanding you know how you imagine you may fail in your career and opening up the definition of that so that you can define failure as a goal and you can define failure as a being unhappy you know at the end of the five or ten year stint and you may be able to identify areas that you're currently ignoring maybe you don't have a pathway to solving that problem yet because you didn't realize that it was going to be a problem in the first place i encourage you to practice this kind of prospective hindsight whether you do it through this specific method or follow my whole exercise here or if you just do it on a regular basis in a more informal way hopefully this will give you some kind of direction that may otherwise be a little bit harder to parse out a little bit harder to identify just through your own intuition thanks so much for listening to today's episode of developer t thank you again to today's sponsor neo4j if your code is in the description below you can try simplifying the complexity with graphs with neo4j you can code in your favorite programming language and against any driver head over to neo4j.com slash developer to see what graphs can do for you that's n e o the number four the letter j.com slash developer neo4j.com slash developer if you enjoyed today's discussion i'd like to invite you to subscribe in whatever podcasting app you currently use and the other ask is a very simple one if you are enjoying this show maybe it's provided some value to you whether just this episode or maybe one of the other hundreds of episodes that we've published the the ask is for you to share that share it by leaving a review the most impactful review platform that you can participate on right now is itunes so leave a review in whatever platform you prefer if you don't have a preference leaving a review in itunes is a huge help to the show it helps other people like you find and decide to listen to developer team thanks so much for listening and until next time enjoy your tea