One of the things I believe strongly and I propose on this show, over and over really, is the idea that lessons are everywhere. That we can learn something from almost every area of our lives. This is not a novel concept that I came up with. This is the idea of mental models extended. And the idea of mental models that we've talked about on the show plenty of times before. This is the concept that you can have some kind of system in one discipline or one area of life. And that same system can exist. And can either metaphorically or otherwise apply to another situation. And today's episode is inspired by one of those kinds of situations. I was recently at a karate lesson. Not for myself, but for my seven-year-old son. And in the lesson, one of the things that the teacher was doing was teaching some basic self-defense. Self-defense maneuvers. Rather than the offensive maneuvers that we would kind of think are the flashy maneuvers. The program that my son was a part of was teaching some more practical self-defense maneuvers. So I want to kind of paint the picture. I want you to imagine that you have been accosted on the street. You've encountered someone who means... Who means to do you harm. And they're trying to get you to come with them in a direction that you don't want to go. And they have somehow gotten a hold of your wrist. And they're pulling on you. And you are trying to pull against them. Now, you've gotten yourself to the point where your wrist is extended. Your body is kind of bent over. You're pulling with all that you can. But unfortunately, they are still... Kind of gaining on you. They're pulling you when you don't want to be pulled. So what should you do? The intuitive thing to do, you've already done. You've tried to pull away from them using all of your bodily strength. Pulling your body weight against your wrist. But it's to no avail. Now, let's imagine that the grip of this particular person is not going to break anytime soon. What happens? There's another option for how to get out of this. Now, of course, this podcast is not a self-defense podcast. This is not a martial arts podcast. And I'm probably going to show quite a bit of my ignorance in talking about this. Because I am just a spectator as far as this sport is concerned. But I found this maneuver incredibly interesting. The simple answer or I guess explanation of this maneuver. Once again, from a layman. Layman's perspective is to jump towards your assailant. The idea is to jump directly towards them in the direction that they are pulling. While simultaneously bringing your arm or more specifically kind of bending your elbow towards your body. And the hope is that you do two things with this maneuver. One, you kind of reset yourself. You're going to be able to pull your body over. You're going to be able to pull your body over. So that you're not pulling your body over. But instead, you're kind of pulling from your center of gravity. And then also pulling your arm into a stronger position where it's closer to your body. So now you can kind of hold your arm closer to your torso in a bent position. And this gives you a more advantageous position, a better base to work from. I thought this was a good idea. I thought this was an interesting maneuver just on its own. But the counterintuitive factors maybe look at this a little bit closer as a metaphor. You've probably felt pulled around in your career or in your life in some way or another. And you may have felt like the only answer, the only way to respond to that kind of pulling is to pull back. To try to resist. To resist with. Everything you've got. To push away from the thing that's pulling on you. But what if the best option for you, if you were to consider all of the factors, was to reset your base? We're going to talk about that right after we talk about today's sponsor. How long? How long? How long should it take to write seven lines of code? Seven minutes? Maybe an hour? Or what if it takes five days? You might be tempted to think the developers on your team need help writing code. But that's not usually the case. The biggest drag in software development isn't writing code. It's having enough context to know what code to write. You probably already know this if you're listening to this episode. And in a perfect world, your engineering team wouldn't waste time. And you're going to spend days and weeks searching for the context to understand your application. But on average, most developers spend more than two hours a week trying to find information about how a code base works. That's why there's Unblocked. To give your engineering team the answers they need to get their jobs done at the speed they and you both want. Your code base is a compilation of thousands of past decisions and discussions that live across tools like GitHub, Slack, Jira, Confluence, and more. Unblocked surfaces this history next to your code. So everyone on your team has the context they need. And when someone has a question, Unblocked answers with the accuracy of your most experienced engineers. Get started today at getunblocked.com. That's G-E-T unblocked dot com. Thanks again to Unblocked for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. What does it look like to reset your base? In this episode, we've been talking about this simple maneuver. This idea that if something is pulling on you, trying to pull you in a direction you don't especially want to go. That perhaps the strategy that you intuitively want to use, which is to pull against it, could be the wrong strategy altogether. Instead, What if you thought about the reset, what we've been talking about in this episode. The idea that you're resetting your position by moving the direction that you're being pulled. So let's say, for example, that you really have been pulling against a policy on your team. Maybe the policy on your team is a certain way that your work management system, you've got it set up a certain way that you don't particularly enjoy. Let's say, for example, that the workflow is not exactly the Kanban standard that you've come to love. Maybe there's one extra step in the process or there's checks that you don't necessarily like. There's something about it that you've been pulling against. You've made your case to your manager. Your manager has even made your case with you. They agree. They agree with you. But there's some organizational kind of pressure against it. And so you've been pulling against this pressure. You've been pulling against the policy that has been set out by whatever team. Now, the important thing here isn't necessarily whether you're right or wrong. This is something critical to capture as part of this discussion. It's not so much a question of pulling against the policy. It's pulling against someone who is certainly wrong. This is a perception that you have about this kind of process. And we're especially talking about situations that are not necessarily unethical, for example. This is not an applicable strategy when you're being pulled in a direction that is against your values in a core way. Where you would develop a sense of severe regret or you would feel like you're going against your own identity if you went this direction. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about choosing a path that you think is not really optimal. That you wouldn't choose if you had all of the cards in your hand. That you wouldn't choose if you were kind of leading the charge on all of the decisions. The truth is, you're not going to get your way throughout your career in every decision that you make. And so, in this case, what would happen if you chose to reset? And this reset would look like accepting that this process is not going to change. At least, not right now. And instead of pulling against that process, maybe you can redirect your energy. Maybe. Even the direction that you're being pulled by accepting the process itself. Choosing to align with the process. Even if you don't necessarily agree with it. Even if you don't think it's going to produce the best outcome. But now that you've chosen to align with the process, you can start to focus on other ways of improving. Maybe your problem with the process was that it made the teams, feel like they couldn't get code at the door fast enough. That it slows things down. It slows down the flow. Well, what are other things that you could do to either point this out, to expose that this direction is causing flow issues. Maybe you align with this process long enough that you gather the data so that it's not just your word, but it's also this amount of data. That you have to explain the problem. Or maybe you start focusing on different problems that are causing flow issues that are not necessarily just your work management system set up. Maybe there are other things that can improve the flow of your work. But here's the key insight. The energy you were spending pulling against this, that energy was not going to yield the result that you wanted. This is the kind of situation to use this strategy in. When you feel like you are up against a tidal wave, or when you feel like you know that what you're saying or what you're trying to do is in vain. Now notice that we're not, you know, proposing that you give in. That's not the point of this discussion. Instead, we're looking at this from a, you know, from an outcome perspective. The outcome that you care about is not necessarily that you did everything you could to avoid this problem. Right? If you were only worried about walking away with that kind of story, that narrative that you pulled as hard as you could, even though you knew it was in vain, then that's one direction you could go. But most people are not looking to just tell the story. Most people are looking for outcomes. And so if you want better outcomes, in this case, pulling against the tidal wave, or pushing against something that you know is inevitable, is not a useful strategy when you're trying to get the best outcome. So instead, redirect your focus into an area that it actually has some kind of impact. Don't pull against this tidal wave. Reset your base. And consider, what are my options now? Now that I've chosen a different starting point, now that I've changed the kind of center of gravity, the dynamics of the conversation, now that I've aligned with the thing that I've been pulling against so hard, what opportunities are presenting themselves that otherwise, previously, my old strategy, were taken up by, my energy was entirely monopolized by pulling against something that I was never going to move in the first place. Think about your energy as an input. This is very often the way that people tend to choose what they will do, the way that they prioritize their time, the way they prioritize their work, even the way they prioritize the people that they're around. We think about the inputs as the goal. In other words, my job is to write code. My job is to have one-on-ones. My job is to deploy code or test things. These are all inputs. These are on the front side of the total equation of what your job is about. And most people, people on the outside of you, the people who would evaluate whether you're doing your job, and especially those who are paying you to do your job, the people who are invested in what you're doing, they would not characterize your job in this way. Instead, they would look at outcomes. Now, at first, maybe the description of your job may include writing code. But you have not necessarily provided the return on their investment by just writing code. Those are inputs. And if you can think about your efforts as inputs rather than the sum total of what you care about, then you can change where you're putting your efforts without necessarily violating your personal values. Think about it like this. Imagine you are an advocate of a particular framework of development. Maybe it's a team philosophy or something like that. And you want to put that into place because you believe it will yield good results for the team. But the team keeps pushing against it. Now, in the input-driven mindset, you would think that this is a failure. That the fact that you can't implement this particular strategy is a failure. But the output-driven mindset or the outcome-driven mindset is looking at what that philosophy was going to gain you in the first place. And, importantly, what are other ways we can gain those same outcomes? This kind of thinking opens up a whole new world of opportunities. And it's a way to set down the things that ultimately are those tidal waves. You're pulling against something, and it's an input. If you can start thinking in terms of outcomes, in this case, if we're going back to the metaphor of self-defense, the outcome that you actually care about is not going a single inch that direction. That seems like an input. The outcome you care about is getting away from it. That's the outcome. Getting away from your assailant. No matter what direction you go, no matter how you move from now to the point that you get away from your assailant, that is the outcome that you care about. And so if just pulling in a direction that they don't want you to go is a pure input, then choosing a strategy that goes beyond that input could mean going the direction they want you to go only to get a stronger base to move in a direction you want to go. Whether you're an engineer, an engineering manager, your developers know how to write code. What they're probably missing is the context to know what code to write. And Unblocked gives engineering teams the answers they need to get their jobs done without having to wait on or interrupt their teammates. Get started for free at getunblocked.com. That's G-E-T unblocked dot com. Thanks again to Unblocked for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, enjoy your tea.