Happy Friday everybody! My name is Jonathan Cutrell. You're listening to another Friday refill episode of Developer Tea. It's been a couple of weeks since we've done one of these. And I can't really blame anything other than myself. We've had a little bit of a chaotic couple of weeks, but we're back with another Friday refill episode. The whole point of these Friday refill episodes is to send you into your weekend with some energizing food for thought. So that you don't feel run down when you wake up on a Saturday and just kind of lay around trying to recover. That you rest with energy. It seems like an oxymoron a little bit, doesn't it? But that you rest with energy and with some kind of anticipation for the week ahead. So that's the goal of these Friday refills. And in today's episode, I want to talk to you about the sheer fact that you have so much to remember. Even if you were to try to employ all of the best practices or ideas or mental models, whatever it is that you find just on this podcast, you'd be trying to hold in mind something like over 900 episodes, nearing a thousand episodes of this show, that much information. Now, I'll let you in a little bit of a secret here. When I don't have all of that information in my head, there's probably a large number of these episodes that I've done that either I have contradicted myself or have totally forgotten what I said. And I could probably benefit from going back and listening to some of those previous episodes. But the point that I want to make here is that as you progress through your career, especially early on, you may feel like your job, but is to remember everything and to critically remember the right thing at the right time. Now, I mentioned already that I've probably have conflicting or contradictory episodes in this podcast. And the truth is, I think that's okay. I think it's okay to contradict yourself because sometimes two contradicting opinions make sense into different contexts. If that doesn't make sense to you, go back and listen to the last episode of this show where we talk about local rationality. We can contradict ourselves and still maintain some level of consistency in our beliefs and our approach. But the critical thing to understand here is that we have this intuitive response to all of this information that we're supposed to, like a computer might, be able to call up that information at any given moment. And not only call it up, but to be able to apply that information in the correct way. To figure out what specific mental model should I apply in this specific instance? Or to try to apply an entire decision framework to every decision that we're making. Not only is this impractical from purely a time standpoint, but it's also virtually impossible to remember all of these things. So your next question, hopefully, is, well, then why are we listening to this at all? Why are we talking about? Why do we read the books that we read? Why do we study these ideas to begin with? Here's the critical thing that I want you to take away from today's Friday refill episode. Your goal in studying all of what we present on this show, but certainly well beyond this show, your goal in becoming a better engineer and always on that pathway, that pursuit of improvement. Your goal is not to memorize, but instead to develop intuition. Your goal is not to memorize, but instead to develop intuition. So what does this mean exactly? Instead of memorizing every single thing that we say on the show, it's very likely that if I were to present to you an idea or a situation, if you've listened to the show long enough, you could probably guess what I would say about that situation. That is developing an intuition. Rather than viewing all of these tools as if they are a specific tool, we should view them more like colors on that lens. We should view them as changes that we're making to our brains. We're upgrading our software. We're not collecting things and putting them in our tool belt to call up at the perfect time, but instead we are improving the way that we see the world. So even though you may not remember the exactly correct thing in the exact correct moment, what you can remember is the framework, the general idea, the space, some of the restraints and restrictions, you can remember that location of thinking. Hopefully this makes sense to you. If you've done study for long enough, you understand this difference between memorization and intuition. Intuition is something that you'll carry with you virtually for the rest of your life, for the remainder of your career, certainly. And you won't have to go back and reference things as much as you'll be able to say, I know where to go to find more information. Being able to navigate in this profession, being able to navigate, being able to understand what to do in a given problem scenario is much less about categorizing and creating kind of an encyclopedia of information in your brain. And it's much more about knowing the general lay of the land. So if you feel the pressure, if you feel the pressure to memorize things, take a step back and try to understand the essence of what is being communicated. Try to reword everything that you're reading or listening to in your own words, develop an intuition for it that applies to an actual scenario in your life. Rather than making this a script that you try to find a place for in your brain, instead try to relate to what you're hearing. Try to find a place for it in your context and in your world. This is going to help you develop intuition, but it's also going to help you understand how to remember without memorizing. You're not really remembering the specifics, but instead you're developing kind of guard reels of thinking. If I had one goal for the listeners of this show, it wouldn't be that you would remember everything I say. It would be that you think in a new way. And then every time you listen to an episode of this show, you're thinking, your decision-making, your relation to the people around you and your relation to the world and your place in it improves. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. I hope that you will focus on your intuition building over this upcoming week. Thank you again for listening to hopefully more than just this episode. Of course, we released three episodes a week normally, at least. And the best way to make sure you don't miss out on future episodes is to subscribe and whatever podcasting app you're currently using. If you enjoyed this episode, you might enjoy talking in our community, our Discord community, head over to developertea.com slash discord to join that. Today, we never plan on monetizing that community. We're not trying to sell you anything there. It is just a place for driven developers like you to come and connect. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.