No matter who you are, there is something that you do every day. And it's not something that necessarily everyone else shares, although there are certainly a list of things that we all do every day. We all breathe every day. Things who are able, most of them at least, walk every day. We likely eat every day. These are things that we always do. But there are other things that we build into our routines. And some of these things have more meaning than others. These traditions, these rituals that we have, it can be incredibly important to our lives. We're going to talk about how you can build meaning through small rituals in today's episode of Developer Tea. My name is Jonathan Cutrell. You're listening to Developer Tea. My goal on this show is to help driven developers like you connect to your career purpose so you can do better work and have a positive influence on the people around you. And one of the things that we don't often focus on is how to take this idea of incrementally seeking your career purpose and acting on it. If you ask someone what their career purpose is, most people will talk about a position, some kind of distant plan that they have. And they don't really know exactly how they're going to get there. Maybe they have some steps completed on the path to that thing becoming a reality. But the point of purpose, as it relates to this show and the things that I want to help you find for yourself, is not achieving some goal, although that may come as kind of a byproduct, but instead to find purpose in your day to day work. This is kind of the stealth goal of this show is to help people connect to their work today, not just find some kind of passion to seek after for the long run, but also for the present moment. We talk about this a lot on the show. We talk about mindfulness and we talk about being in the present moment, caring about your work, focusing all of these things have to do with your purpose as it relates to the work you're doing right this second. But this can be a big cognitive barrier and probably is for most people. To talk about purpose is it seems like a grand concept, like a big concept, like something that we can't really wrap up into a single moment into our day to day work. And so we abstract purpose away from what we're doing. What I'd like to do is encourage you to adopt a new practice today. And you can kind of think about this over the weekend since this episode is releasing on a Friday, maybe you can think about what your ritual will be. But here's the practice. Develop a single small ritual. When I say small, I mean something that can fit even inside a tea break, right? The five to ten minute ritual that you can connect meaning to. For example, the ritual may be as simple as every single day for five to ten minutes. You take that time to journal or meditate. These are kind of self reflective things. Or it may be even more practical than that. Maybe you take five to ten minutes to look over your code and make one small improvement. If you make one small improvement to your code that you otherwise wouldn't have made and you do that every single day while you're working this year, you're going to become a drastically better developer. Or maybe your five to ten minutes is outwardly focused. You take some time to send a thank you message or a message to someone that you haven't talked to in a while. Whatever your ritual is, I want you to find something that you can sustainably repeat. I don't want you to change this ritual for at least a month. That's kind of an arbitrary goal. And hopefully you'll find rituals that you can keep longer than that that are more valuable to you than just keeping them for a month. But I want you to commit. If you're going to participate in this, I want you to commit to doing this for a full month. Because you begin to build meaning into your days in these five to ten minute ritual practices, what you'll realize is that meaning is far less about that grand vision, that long-term vision, some far off goal, and much more about how you treat your time. It's much more about how you cultivate your perspective. I encourage you to take the time to ask yourself difficult questions about your own purpose and to develop rituals to address the gap between where you are and where your purpose is. Thank you so much for listening to Developer Tea. Once again, this show is about helping you find your purpose, but we're also about helping developers become better at what they do. We might get a little bit more practical, specifically more technically practical with upcoming episodes. So I encourage you if that's interesting to you, go ahead and subscribe in whatever podcasting app you use. Thank you so much for listening and until next time, enjoy your tea.