It's easy to look at our daily lives, to evaluate what we're doing as individuals, to think about the people that we are influencing, the words that we say, the actions we take, the code we push, the reviews that we provide, the leadership that we gain, and our influence. But rarely do we think about this from the other side. In today's episode, I'm going to challenge you to think from the outside in. My name is Jonathan Cottrell. You're listening to Developer Tea. My goal on this show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. I want you to think about what is influencing you today. A quick Google search will show you what is influencing you today. The way that you choose your friends is incredibly important. This isn't just common wisdom passed along by motivational speakers. There are studies that show that strong-willed friends can increase your self-control. Close friends could help you increase your longevity. Perhaps the most obvious of these studies shows that friends greatly influence your choices. Of course, there's a ton of research on the subject of peer influence, and it's important that we think about it. But very often, we think about the world in terms of what we are inflicting on it. Not necessarily a bad kind of inflicting, but how we are affecting the world around us. So what happens when we think about the other direction? The truth is that much of your influence, what you believe you are kind of ought to be, is not going to be. You're not going to be blessed with the blessed evolution of evolution. At the very least, you may have evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution is actually heavily reliant on things that are influencing you. Your experiences that you've had up until this point in your life, the things that you expect to happen in the future, all of this is intertwined. The things that influence you are the things that teach you. I want you to think about this reality for a minute. Things that influence you are the things that teach you. It's an incredibly simple concept, and when you think about it for more than 10 seconds, it becomes obvious that this is true. But often we choose our influences without thinking about them as our teachers. If you hang around people who are constantly negative, constantly thinking about their lives through a negative perspective, the lesson that you might learn is that it's normal to react negatively. From a social perspective, it's the appropriate and expected response to react negatively. As a developer in your career, if you spend time with people and with companies that highly value software quality, then you are learning the lesson of valuing software quality. And if you are leading a team, it's even more critical that you're aware of this reality, that your team is teaching each other, that they're teaching each other their lessons. What can end up happening is that a team starts to adopt the same habits of each other. And while at first this kind of feels like your culture is gelling together, you can end up compressing out a lot of the valuable things that those team members brought on day one. That conformity mindset can harm your team's effectiveness, even though it might feel good for a little while. Consider the things that are influencing you, the things that are shaping your perspective. Stop thinking for a moment about how the code that you're writing is going to change your career, and instead start thinking about how the team you're on will change your career. Your surroundings may not necessarily determine your success, but they can certainly catalyze it. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. In lieu of a sponsor, I encourage you to go and subscribe in whatever podcasting app you're currently using to listen to this show. Today's episode was produced by Sarah Jackson. My name is Jonathan Cottrell. And until next time, enjoy your tea.