Happy Friday everybody, you're listening to another Friday refill of Developer Tea. A lot of times in our lives we pursue without knowing exactly what we are pursuing. We follow a path that we laid out a long time ago and we never revised. In today's episode, I want to help you clear this up for yourself, something you can think about. Maybe over the weekend, or over the coming weeks, even a simple question. What is your ideal? Or you can do this in the plural, what are your ideals? When we say ideals, there's a lot of things that can come as the answer of this. Debateably, a lot of them will come down to feeling. What kind of feelings are you trying to achieve for yourself? This doesn't have to be a shallow or otherwise kind of hedonist approach. We're not just saying find these feelings at all costs. A feeling can be a sense of accomplishment. A feeling can be a sense of worth, self worth, or maybe a sense of pride. Feelings are not something to despise necessarily. But when you ask yourself, what are your ideals, most of the time people don't answer with a feeling. In fact, most of the time people don't really have a good answer at all. But they make sense to walk this path. Understand what are your ideals for some people. The best way to think about this is what are your model people? Who are the people that you would like to be more like? Or that you aspire to a particular aspect of their life or their personality, something they've accomplished, for example. Or maybe just their approach, their general attitude. All of these things can be models for you to aspire to. Other examples of ideals might be a particular goal that you have in mind, a state in the world that you are pursuing and you're trying to affect change in order to achieve that particular state. Whether that state is for you, something that's directly an impact on your life or an impact on other people's lives or some mix of both. Now, once you've kind of identified your ideals and these are not the only things that can be ideals, these are not the only kind of outcomes that you may be seeking. But once you have identified your ideals, you can ask yourself, what are the feelings that are underlying these ideals? And this is important because you can help you understand your real true motivation. When we have simple ideals, when we have things that are as simple as hitting a particular number, when we actually achieve those things, there can be a sense of loss or aimlessness, the sense that now that we've accomplished this particular goal that we had in mind, that now we don't really know what's next. And what I would encourage you to do is instead of having these really specific goals as the only thing, have your goals be an expression of your ideals rather than the comprehensive description of your ideals. In other words, your ideal can be expressed as many goals and is something that is a lifelong pursuit or can be a lifelong pursuit. You might change your ideals as life goes on. Once you've achieved a particular feeling in life, once you've achieved a particular ideal, it's possible that you shift directions. But what I want you to make sure of is that your ideals are not fragile. That you don't lose steam simply because the specifics have changed. Make your ideals something that is dynamic and moves with you, moves with your situation. Then your specific job title or your specific income number, all of these things become less important. You may still set goals on those metrics and you probably should. But those specific goals don't tell you. They don't inform you whether or not you are failing at seeking your ideals. Thanks so much for listening to this Friday Reefle episode of Developer Tea. Of course, we will have three more episodes for you next week. Thank you again for listening to Developer Tea. If you have not yet subscribed, we're almost a thousand episodes in. I can't imagine that you would be listening to this without having known that this show was around or without thinking about subscribing. If you haven't yet today is a good day to do that. Also if you are very much invested in growing as an engineer, becoming a better version of who you are today and seeking those ideals, sharing that with other people is a critical step in that process. One community that you can join to do that, if you don't have that community already, especially, but even if you do have that community and you want to seek more inputs, more points of view, the Developer Tea Discord community is an excellent place to do that. You can head over to developertea.com slash discord where we've opened this up to everybody who wants to be a part of this. If you take the time to sign up, if you take the time to participate, then that community is open to you. It's free. We don't promote anything. We don't sell anything in that community. Go and check it out at developertea.com slash discord. Thanks so much for listening to this episode and until next week, enjoy your tea.