One Day Out 2017: "Full stack anxiety" by Joel Califa

I'm nice and relaxed because we're on the very last talk. Everybody seems very chill. I saw how long the beer line was. Thank you so much for hanging out all day and sticking around. Up next we have Joel Khalifa. He is Senior Product Designer at DigitalOcean. I should know this. I know him really well. And he's got a great talk about full -stack anxiety that I can't wait to watch. So please welcome Joel to the stage. Hey everyone. Can you hear me? Is this working? Oh, that's great. This has been a really nice conference, right? Great talks. How about we give a round of applause to the organizers? Yeah! Woo! Yeah, they're all volunteers. They don't make any money out of this. They just do this for all of our benefits. So this is really awesome. Cool. So today we're going to talk about full-stack anxiety. We're going to start with who is this guy up front? So who am I? Why should you listen to me? Who let me in? Then we're going to talk about full-stack anxiety. You'll find out what it is, but spoiler alert, it doesn't sound like a good thing and it's not. And then finally we're going to talk about how we can alleviate it. So let's start with me. It's lined up right. So my name is Joel and I am a unicorn. Everyone say, hi, Joel. Hi, Joel. I love that that works, just the feeling of power on the stage. Or a purple squirrel, as some people say. Or a hybrid. Whatever you call one person who does two things. So basically, I'm a designer who codes. Whoa! We're going to be answering the question today. So I've been doing both for pretty much as long as I can remember. Which is what this slide is. Which is a funny phrase because I don't really remember exactly how it started. But I think I was 12 or so and I wanted to learn Photoshop to make educational Counter-Strike posters. With gems of wisdom like... Or... So 13-year-old me obviously had a lot to say. And this led me down the path to digital art sites and forum signatures and other things I thought were good at the time. But in hindsight, clearly weren't. And just like that, I was a designer. Right? At least I thought so. I was so genuinely proud of these creations that I decided to showcase them online. These are 100% Photoshop. By the way. So around the same time, this site was really popular. Has anyone heard of Neopets? Yeah, a few people. More in the US when I do these talks, so it's kind of disappointing. But a surprising amount of people learned to design and code through this website. So the basic premise of this site was caring for your virtual pets. But really it was basically crack cocaine for nerdy preteens. And I remember checking this obsessively during family vacations. Anyway, Neopets let kids customize their pet pages in HTML. And people really loved custom stuff back then. If you remember MySpace, like this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or whatever this is. Around the same time, GeoCities was really big. And it let anyone, as this demonstrates, have a website. So yesterday's internet was really great at creating developers. There was less to consume, and so more incentive to actually create the content online. And there weren't as many tools with which to create that content. So more incentive to learn the basic building blocks of the web, like HTML. And what turned out to be a great decision, and spent the next couple of years making really shitty websites. Like this one. Who's had this website? Like anyone who started around the same time had like a frameset website with the corners on the left side. Or this one. Or this grungy piece of shit. And just like that I was a developer. So at this point I'm an amateur designer and developer. Amateur being a nice word for really almost impossible. A nice word for really almost insultingly bad at both. So for the next decade I spent a lot of time growing in both directions. On the design side I learned the tools. So CorelDraw when that was big. Photoshop. Fireworks to do wireframing. Illustrator and then After Effects for motion graphics. I learned design by learning the foundations of color theory and grid and typography. And then I got better on the aesthetic side by focusing on trends like grunge and Web 2.0. And the things that were beautiful once but no longer are. And on the dev side I started with FrontPage. Moved over to grown up tools like Dreamweaver. I built websites with tables and then Flash and then CSS, JavaScript. I learned better text editors and back end languages. And all this time I'm also freelancing and making shitty album covers and posters and websites. And at some point I joined a web agency. So I'm getting a little bit better each day. But I still sucked. Right? And at some point you get good enough to realize how much you sucked. And I got to that point. And I figured I should actually learn some of this stuff. Maybe get an actual one of these while I'm at it. So even though I was technically working as a designer at this point. I wasn't really sure what to call myself. So was I a designer? Or was I a developer? I was equally interested in both. And I never really spent much time thinking about titles. But if I wanted to get this fancy diploma. I had to choose, right? So what would I even go to school for? What would it say? Would it be computer science or communication design? But choosing was hard. So I skipped it. I found a program called Design and Technology. Which would teach me, you guessed it, both design and technology. And just like that. Unicorn. Hybrid certified. So these days I lead product design at DigitalOcean. It's an awesome company that provides simple cloud infrastructure for developers. We say design for developers. And design is like a really big thing for us. And there I've done everything from strategy to UX to visual design. Front end development. So it's very much in line with the path I set on over a decade earlier. So that's me in an egg shell. These days you might know me as this sad upside down face guy. So hey. Hopefully in real life I'm less sad and upside down. But this talk isn't just about me. So everyone can let out their sighs of relief. It's about how to deal with being one of these. So a unicorn. A designer who codes. Or a full stack developer. Which more and more of us find ourselves becoming these days. So quick note. Yes. Quick note. I'm going to focus on designers who code. But I hope this is going to be as relevant to any kind of hybrid in the room. So are you a full stack developer? Are you a developer who designs sometimes? Are you an illustrator who runs a business? Or maybe a designer who's also taken over your team and started managing? Hopefully this will be helpful. I also want to say before I start whining. Consider yourselves warned. I'm about to start whining. That we are extremely lucky. We're basically working in the best industry on earth right now. There's a ton of jobs in the tech industry. And it's a seller's market. Preposterously in the favor of those of us with the right skills. But at the same time. And this comma right here is where I'm going to start whining for a while. There are way, way higher expectations. So designers who code used to be rare. But these days it's almost a requirement. There are more startups than ever before. And startups expect their employees to wear many hats. To survive. They have less people. And what that means is becoming a hybrid is more important than ever before. And on top of that. The tech landscape is changing so, so rapidly. And there's a lot of pressure to stay up to date. On a hundred different things at any given time. So I'm going to take a sip of water. And everyone can watch. No! Spoilers. So I remember when the concept of T-shaped designers became popular. Has anyone heard of this? Yeah? A few people? I think it was popularized by Apple. So the horizontal bar represents a relatively shallow foundation in a lot of fields. Say I know enough about information architecture. And interface design. Copywriting. Lettering. Code. While the vertical bar represents deep expertise in one field. Say you're an expert in usability while maintaining that foundation in all of those other fields. And the quote represents really disconcerting employer expectations. Because what they're saying is. I want a specialist. But one who can also do everything else. Sound familiar? So you're laughing, right? You look at this and you're like. Yeah, that's just life. This is not easy. But it's doable. We'll pour in our hours and we'll get there. But first let's consider that. One. Becoming an expert takes years. Malcolm Gladwell famously says 10,000 hours. And that's even without juggling a million different things at the same time. And two. Realistically. You have limited time. So if you spend optimistically just half of your time coding, illustrating, and writing. Are you going to have the time to be the best UX designer you can possibly be? Are you going to have time to read up on new things? Are you going to have time to read up on new design patterns? To build your personas? To polish your user flows? To ask the right questions during your user tests? Will you do your best work? And even if you somehow do. Will you manage to stay amazing at that? While also maintaining all of your other skills? Because remember. You weren't just hired for one of your skills. You were hired for all of them. And focusing on one means you aren't applying the rest. So being a unicorn is great. But having a horn on your head can get a little bit uncomfortable. Pause for laughter. And it's actually worse than that. So T-shaped designers are apparently not even enough anymore. The new hip thing. I shit you not. Is a W-shaped designer. I've heard this from an actual recruiter. A person I trust. So now hiring managers are looking for designers who are experts in not just one. But two fields. Say both visual design and experience design. And maintaining that foundation in the rest. Coding, lettering, etc. And what they're basically saying. Is I want a person who can do absolutely everything. So lame old T-shaped designers just can't compete. And this is kind of scary. How can we possibly live up to these expectations? And these are big, big expectations. So let's say I am a front-end developer. I'm expected to learn. SVG animations. And node or react or ember or view. Some kind of JavaScript framework. And bend principles for CSS. I'm expected to write more and more elegant code. Work on my design patterns. Learn new web inspector features. And increase my efficiency in sublime text. Maybe finally learn Vim. But I'm also a visual designer. And I'm expected to stay up to date on trends like material and flat and skeuomorphic. Maybe not so much skeuomorphic anymore. But ones I needed to. And Photoshop, Figma, Sketch. Better typography, lettering and illustration. And my UX design is remote user testing. Best practices for building personas. Information architecture. Android OS design. Some kind of mobile. Origami or frame where I need to learn how to prototype. And I don't want to become obsolete. I don't want to be a 2D designer where all the kids are doing 3D. So maybe 3D environments or Internet of things. I'm a manager. So leadership training. Good one-on-ones. And giving feedback. Accountability discussions. Building paths. Job sculpting. And I'm a teacher. So curriculum building. Getting practice. Forgetting people to learn. And I'm a consultant. So negotiations. And contracts. And setting up a business. And I'm a human being. So I can't possibly learn all of these things. So what do I choose? Do I become a better front-end developer? Better UX designer. Maybe a better manager. What's more important to me? What's going to be better for me in the long run? And if I choose to become a better visual designer, do I focus on illustrations, or do I learn sketch and ramp up my user interface skills? Now this choice isn't easy, because I'm not just choosing what to learn, I'm also choosing what not to learn, where not to grow. So remember, most of the people that we call unicorns, which is a term I actually kind of hate, are actually designers who kind of code, or developers who kind of design. Right, in most cases, every choice to grow in one discipline is also a choice not to grow in another. And these are important life influencing decisions. There's not always a clear winner. Right, all of these skills are in some way relevant to my day to day, and I assume to many of yours. They'd all be useful, but I still need to make a decision. What am I going to bring to the table in a year? Right, what's gonna be my stack? So to illustrate this, let's use a spider graph. Because spider graphs are awesome, I love them, you love them, on this we agree and are friends. So, this is you. Right, in this hypothetical scenario, this shape represents your stack. So here you are, a UX heavyweight, right, you're really solid at front end development, and on top of that you can design interfaces relatively well. You can also, you also have some teaching skills. Right, but really what you were hired for was user experience, visual design, and front end. So these. So let's say, in this scenario, you just transitioned into managing your team. Right, you find yourself thinking, oh shit, I'm leading a team of designers now, and I don't know what I'm doing, and my priorities have shifted. So no more fiddling around with JavaScript or Sketch, I got it. So let's do that, right, let's grow as a manager, let's do the training, let's read the book, let's pour ourselves into this. But now as you spend time on this, you're not putting time into the rest of these skills. Right, you're not learning new UI, or UX or front end stuff, and worse, you're not practicing as much. So they shrink a bit, it's inevitable. So what used to be this, AKA, you, now looks like this. But more importantly, what used to be this, right, the skills that got you the job in the first place, the skills you were hired for, now look like this. And what this means is that getting a job in the future with those same skills might be harder. On the other hand, this, management, now looks like this. What that means is you have a better chance of getting design leadership positions in the future, if that's what you want. Now if you made other decisions, your skill set could also become this. If you focus all your time on UX methodologies, now you're an industry expert in user experience, you're a specialist. Or this, if you find yourself focusing more on development instead of design. So what I'm trying to say is that every decision you make matters a lot. The stakes here are real. What's gonna make you successful? What's gonna make you happy? And so a simple question like this can become really scary. So let's take a look at some of that list again. Do we learn sketch or SVG animations? Origami or framer or view? Get better at one-on-ones, better methodologies for user testing, typography, node, envision accountability discussions, follow aesthetic trends, build personas, grunt, gulp, recursive patterns? Every time I go through this list, I feel so anxious and it's worse. In reality, this list is 10 times as long. You saw Josh's slides, right? And more importantly, is that gonna turn me into this or this or this or this? And what does that mean for my career? And what am I gonna be next year? Is that what I wanna be? Am I learning too much dev stuff for a designer? Am I a designer anymore? Am I pigeonholing myself? Is this gonna get me the jobs I want? What's gonna make me happy? Right, where do I even start? Every single one of these options seemed great, right? But trying to choose between them, I'm suddenly riddled with self-doubt because I'm not just picking a new skill out of a bag. I'm picking a direction, right? A possible future. And it always comes down to this one dreadful question. Am I doing the right thing? This is full-stack anxiety. Has anyone experienced this before? Yeah, this happens in every talk. Keep your arms up. Just take a look to your left and your right. It's the worst, right? It sucks. It's cool. That's my talk, thanks so much. No, it's not my talk. I'm not an asshole. So, let's talk about how to alleviate it. Overcoming full-stack anxiety, or at least making it smaller than it is right now. I'm gonna go over six ways that I've learned to do this. to kind of start controlling it. Number one, do the research. So, I have this fun, stressful list that we've gone over a few times. But how did I get it? Right, so before you make your own stressful list, you have to understand the landscape. And I'm sure many of you already do. So, this first piece of advice might resonate most with those of us just starting out. But I hope it can be useful to anyone stepping into unfamiliar territory. And part of the unfamiliar territory is the industry. The design industry, the engineering industry, the fashion industry, wherever you work, wherever you live. So, this circle is you. You may have noticed I like diagrams, so now we're a circle. So, you may have just finished a boot camp or a degree, or just transitioned in from another field. Maybe you've already been in this field for so long, but you've just been heads down and you've lost touch. But the bottom line is you're outside the current industry looking in. And it looks so nice in there. Right, people seem happy. They're smiling and frolicking and rolling around in piles of money. And those could be your piles of money. Right, you just want to be part of it so, so badly. You just need to get your foot in the door. The problem is in this visual metaphor, there is no door. Right, there's just darkness. So, you just take a stab. You don't have a clear way in. That's your stab. So, this stab is analogous. It's analogous to sending your CV to every job listed on Indeed or Monster or similar job sites. Right, you've made your first move into new territory, but it was uninformed. So, now you're lost. Alone in the dark. Right, it's scary and it's lonely. And not having a next move can really paralyze you. Even before you take that next step, what are you really supposed to do? Right, what's the use of a first step if it's in the wrong direction? Now, how useful would it be just to have something out there, just to know what's out there? How much better does that feel, even in this stupid diagram? Right, just generally understanding the lay of the land. And the more you learn about your field, the more precise your direction can be. Even if the actual path to it doesn't end up being what you thought it would be, at least it's possible to start moving in that right direction. So, getting context for your industry won't ensure that you get what you want. But putting in the work and learning the work, and knowing what's out there, can give you so, so much confidence. It can tell you where to search. It can tell you what's possible. And knowing what's possible is the first step to figuring out what's right. It's what allows you to build a list like this and freak out in the first place. Right, so once you understand what's out there, say by actually looking at real job listings in your industry and level, you can figure out what you want. Right, and then find out what's actually required to get there. You can look at the lists of requirements in every job listing and build that list of skills. Right, look for themes. For example, in this scenario, right, you're just entering the industry, you might see theme of general design principles and typography and knowing Adobe Creative Suite. Right, for more senior IC individual contributor roles and leadership roles, they might care more about experience with design systems and CSS frameworks, usability testing and so forth. Right. It's stressful, but it's less stressful than this. Two. Look at the big picture. So this means asking yourself cliche questions like, where do I want to be in five years? Right, this sounds silly, but it's actually really powerful. Being thoughtful regarding who you want to become actually goes a long way. So knowing what's out there is relatively easy. Right, you just use Google a bunch of times and you kind of figure it out. But knowing what you truly want is quite possibly the hardest thing you'll do. So do you want to be a badass design leader? Maybe stay brushed up on UX, get a bit better at business maybe, right? But visual design and coding might not be as important here. Or do you want to be the best UX designer you can possibly be? So for this, it's also useful to ask yourself another question, which is what kind of work do I want to do in the future? Because specializing can be amazing for consulting or for joining a large company. But if you want to join a startup where you kind of need to wear every hat and do everything, this isn't as good. Another good question, what am I becoming by learning this? So by asking this question, my team at DigitalOcean stopped itself from becoming really tech heavy, which we were starting to become due to way too much time spent in the code base for designers. Like we were writing tests in React. Come on. Right, and we brought ourselves back to a more rounded out design team with a larger focus on UX. And we found time to do that. We had time for usability testing and figuring out our user journeys, right? And the other things that designers should be spending their time on, we were spread too thin. So make sure you're asking yourself these questions and paying attention to that bigger picture. Be mindful of what you want long term. And then let that understanding drive the rest of your decisions. Three, create some structure. So, let's take a look at these options again. Do we learn few? Get better at one on one? Better methodologies for user testing? Gulp, Ember, SVG animations? Are these making you stressed? A bit stressed? Is it just me? Well, other than me, I think there are two reasons why this is making you very stressed. One, is they all seem like they have equal weight. Right, there's a lack of structure. They're not the same things, or even necessarily in the same category of things, but they're all treated the same. That's really disconcerting. Right? You have all of these things to learn. There's no way to tell what's more important. There's no way to compare them to each other. There's no way to look at the big picture. When you treat all of the things that you can learn the exact same way, they can be really overwhelming. Having a clear structure on the flip side can really alleviate that. The second reason I think that they might be making you anxious is that they're open loops. Has anyone heard of this concept before? Open loops? One person. So, open loops is a term in psychology. It's pretty simple. It's just things that are in your head that you need to do, but you haven't written down yet. Right? Things inside your head, just thoughts. You need to do them, but you just haven't physically written them down yet. You can think of these as like running processes in your head, or psychic residue. Right? They're thoughts that are floating around in your head, and stressing you out. The more open loops you have, the less cognitive space is left, and the more stressed out you are. This is a real thing. By writing these things down, you're actually getting them out of your head. Your mind closes the loops and frees up that much needed space, just by writing things down. So as anxiety provoking as this list is, it's better than a general vague panic. There might be a lot of things, but they're organized. And better yet, you don't have to keep juggling these things inside your brain. Four, take the decision out of the moment. Create a litmus test for things you should learn, or an if-then rule for learning. This could be something like, if this skill is directly applicable to the jobs I want, if it'll actually help me get a job right now, then I'll learn it. Or if this skill is applicable to other parts of my life, if it's not just applicable to work, but also to my hobbies, or it's kind of a two birds, one stone thing, then it's worth it for me to learn it. Or if this skill would be in demand for years to come, if it's not just a trend for now, if it's going to be for my next two or three jobs, then I'm going to learn it. Or if it brings me closer to who I want to be, who I've decided I want to be. So once you're done with that, make a list of what you might want to learn. Remember, creating structure is super helpful. So I've written this list down, just totally randomly. Now, all of these things are really interesting to me, but I can't learn them all. And I want an actual reason. I don't want to just learn JavaScript or Vim, because they happen to be on the top of the list, because I just jotted them down first. So let's pick some of those if-then rules from before to judge these with. So first, if it'll be in demand for years to come, if it'll actually help me secure a job over the coming years, then I'm going to learn it. And also, if it brings me closer to who I want to be, then I'll learn it. So who I want to be in this case is a design leader, just for this scenario. So these two rules. Let's color code these before we start rating the skills. We're actually going to be rating these things, and we want a way to tell what's what. We can also weight our criteria based on its relative importance. So in this case, anything that can help me get into design leadership is going to take precedence. So now we can start judging the list. So let's start with the first rule, if it'll be in demand for years to come. So we gave things point based on how much it'll be in demand. If you disagree with me, don't kill me. It's just a random example. But JavaScript is probably going to be in demand. It's on the rise. More and more people are using it. And iOS development seems like it's going to stay strong. So learning Swift or learning JavaScript frameworks is probably going to be helpful for me moving forward. User interviews are always going to be in demand. Prototyping seems like it's on the rise. Then user journey and design recruiting, people want that. And so the things that don't have any points here, that doesn't mean they're not going to make me better at my job. It doesn't mean that they're less good than any of these in any other way other than this rule, which is literally recruiters looking for the best. So if a recruiter doesn't see vim on a CV, it's not really going to matter. Now let's judge these with our second rule. So if it helps me become a design leader. So user interviews and journeys, being able to model users is pretty important as a design leader and being able to lead other people in modeling users. Now budgeting and one-on-ones have points here, but not in the other one. And that's because no one is looking for these things specifically. Can you do good one-on-ones? Things are going to make you a great leader, so they get points. And design recruiting is always sought after and also very important, being able to build teams. So now let's reorder these based on the points that we gave them. Isn't that awesome? It's just starting to get an idea of what's more important to us. But we still can learn all of this stuff, obviously. So let's bring in a more realistic list. Like anything analog, it always exists next to a coffee cup. So this list only has six spots, because we don't have unlimited bandwidth as much as we'd like that. So let's move our top things over. Magic. Was that cool? Whatever. Cool. So the rest of these things could be useful, right? They definitely will be useful, but not for what I've decided to pursue. And to be clear, I really want to learn those things. And that's exactly the reason why I'm taking the decision out of my mind. Because I don't have time for everything. Let's get rid of those. Seriously? No one? Just whatever. Anyway, so now I'm left with the things that are most important to me. And man, does that feel good. It's so relaxing. I've made a list that basically thinks for me. So next time I hear about that cool ebook, I won't buy it on a whim and then feel guilty for months about not reading it. Instead, I'll just do with the list. That's what the list blissfully tells me to do. All praise the mighty list. So Kierkegaard said, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. Or angst erd smivelhil afrihil. So setting up a framework will mitigate that boundless freedom and with it, your anxiety. Five. Six. Out of six. Stop chasing trends. So we all know this story. Sketch kills Photoshop. React kills Angular. BEM kills OOX. And apparently functional CSS already killed BEM. Atom kills Sublime. Rails kills PHP. And JavaScript swoops in and kills Rails. And so forth and so on until the end of time. There's always going to be a new thing. All of these tools are likely going to die at some point. So just use the tools that are convenient for you. Is that something new? Great. No? Still great. Don't worry about being an early adopter. Instead, get better at things that are tool agnostic. So this can be typography or programming patterns. It can be user research or management and so forth. If you look at this, you can see a ton of these are tools. I don't know how long these will last. Will they be around in a decade, for instance? So build skills that aren't dependent on the now. The current tools. Your current role. The more longevity a skill has, the better an idea it is to learn it. Finally, as these talks go, and perhaps most importantly, be happy. So remember, you get one life, at least if you subscribe to the same belief system that I do. At the end of the day, life isn't just about work. So when I first delivered this talk, probably about a year and a half ago, my work satisfied me completely. Learning new tools and ways of thinking was always challenging and fun, and growing as a manager was really fulfilling. But these things ebb and they flow, and I slowly became exhausted with the design industry. With hundreds of new things to learn and new ones popping up all the time, with new opinion pieces on Medium every day. Being laser-focused, always building the right, sensible thing. So I got to a point where I was running on empty. Product design just wasn't giving me energy anymore, and I was completely burned out. I desperately needed something new. So I started working on a game with a friend. A Hollywood hacking roguelike. Everyone knows what that is, right? I can explain later. And this game has me neck deep in maths and physics and canvas performance, JavaScript architecture. I spend a good chunk of my time now just watching games and learning about mechanics. And the truth is that not a ton of this is directly applicable to my career in product design. And something that took me a long time to come to terms with is that that's okay. Sometimes a job can just be a job. Sometimes you can take a break. Rat races never made anyone happy. It's a sad realization that we live in a culture where your career isn't a job. Your career is your life. Where having enough engineering side projects is a standard way of judging engineering candidates. And you're expected to always be focused on your career rather than going on new adventures, focusing on your passions, or spending time with your friends. By the way, this is what you get when you Google millennials having fun. It seems pretty accurate. So no, none of that. Instead we have the expectation to always be growing, always stay up to date, always move towards your next goal, always compare yourself to every other person in the room. And these kinds of expectations are unsustainable. And they cause so, so much anxiety. The simple truth is whatever you end up learning, you'll probably be okay. A friend of mine I really admire is Devon Koh. A few years back she found a lot of success as a designer in tech, working at places like Dropbox and Codecademy. And most people, myself included probably, would have stayed the course. But one day she left. So on her website she writes, I spent my teenage years staying up until 5am engrossed in design and code. To the point where her dad had to shut off the internet only to find her coding locally. She asks, where did it go? The intensity of that wonder and curiosity. So three years ago she picks up 3D for the first time. And she calls it the best day of her adult life. And look at her recent work. You can tell how much fun she's having. You don't produce this much work on such a short time without being truly fulfilled. So now she's got a niche for herself. She teaches designers 3D full time. With all of that wonder and curiosity she was describing. And if you're interested you should definitely check out 3D4Designers.com. Elle Luna, another product design expat, also talks about this idea in the crossroads of should and must. The idea of choosing between what you should do and what you must do. She writes, should is how others want us to show up in the world. It's how we're supposed to think. What we ought to say. What we should or shouldn't do. It's the vast array of expectations that others layer upon us. And if you look at this list again, all of these skills are tied to career trajectories. Right? They conform to what our culture has taught us. What our culture has taught us is the right path. They're what we should do. Now must, on the other hand, is who we are. What we believe and what we do when we are alone with our truest, most authentic selves. They're the things that energize us. The things that keep us running. Now working on this game has been the most energizing thing I've experienced in the last year. It puts me in flow state. Right? Where I'm fully immersed. I'm fully energized. Enjoying myself so deeply that I can lose myself. Lose track of time for hours on end. And so another question that's hugely important to ask yourselves is what puts you in flow. What gets you energized? What keeps you up until 5 a.m.? Now this part might seem like it conflicts with the rest of the talk. Which admittedly focuses squarely on should. But it doesn't need to. So yeah, sometimes it's a trade-off. Right? Happiness and success can adversely affect each other. In these cases you'll need to decide what you want to optimize for. But I think more frequently it's a false dichotomy. Things that can make you happy can also make you very successful. And it's up to you how to balance that in your life. So work can and it should be fun too. You're not a robot. Right? You're not learning all of this stuff just to get ahead in life. If you ask me, I think your end goal should be a career that you're fully satisfied with. So that means do the things that make you happy. And what I mean is that a rule like this is totally legitimate. So if I really enjoy doing it, or if it keeps me up until 5 a.m., then it's worth learning for me. Right? So do you love illustration? Or lettering? Or coding up your side projects? Maybe what you really love is working at that leading edge and always learning the new thing. Right? Even if it's not a skill that's relevant to your current job, or one that's directly going to help you, you should make time for the things you love. Find a way to build passion into your work. You can grow in your field and you can have fun while doing it. So, these are the six things I've found. So do the research. Get an understanding for the lay of the land. Right? Build knowledge. Use that knowledge to look at the big picture and build an understanding of what you want. Right? Build structure around it. Found that understanding. And then use that structure to take the decision out of the moment. Stop chasing trends. And prioritize your happiness. So if you've been listening, and I hope you've been listening, I think you'll understand that most of this stuff really boils down to being more thoughtful and intentional with your decisions. And what that means is that don't just wing it. Right? Your career in its entirety deserves the level of care that you put into each and every one of your projects. Your life in its entirety does. So put some time in and design it. Thanks so much. Applause Amazing. That directly speaks to something I feel every day. I have a computer in my projects folder, a folder like learn React, learn Yarn, learn whatever. And all of them have nothing done. You actually answered. I wrote down a lot of questions. I'm like, ah, this. And then you answered it immediately a slide later. But what I'm most interested in is how do you find the time? I think that's the hardest thing for a lot of people is we want to learn something, but it's not just work. Do you have any strategies that you use to pick up skills? Or do you just tinker in every moment you possibly have? I think how do you find the time is a really good question for this because you don't find the time. You have the time that you have and it's limited. And it's less about finding the time and more about figuring out how to use your time. So the things that you learn are also going to have to be balanced not just against each other but also against Netflix and things like that. Which is fine. Everyone makes their own balance. Maybe like ten hours of Netflix a day is like what keeps you going. And that's fine. But you don't find time. No one is superhuman. And every idol that I've talked to which is like how do you do it? They're like I just learn. I use my time. That's fine. And they're just like regular people and they build it over time and it's great. So give yourself time and breathe. I like that. Don't beat yourself up about it I guess. Yeah. I'm very curious. Do you think it's okay to focus on getting okay, like really good at one thing rather than jumping between trends? Because that's the thing I hear a lot is oh, why am I not good at JavaScript and PHP? What about just being like the guru of, I don't know, .NET? That's not cool. That's something cool. I mean something cool. Woo, .NET. Yeah, the cool thing always changes, right? Yeah. But you talked about the fundamentals. Yeah. I mean, like where are you seeing React and not Vue? Oh, this is literally what I had this conversation this week. I don't know. I mean the best person at .NET is like a fucking successful person right now because like you need him for .NET. I don't know. I mean this entire thing is about just like making the decisions that are right for you. So if you find that like .NET makes you happy or if you find that like you see a lot of roles in it and suddenly like you're kind of a specialist and you get, you can be successful in it, then do that, right? We're kind of in a bubble, I think, a lot of us who work in startups and are like everyone needs to do everything, right? But if you go to somewhere like Google, you don't need to do everything, right? You can do your thing and you work with other people who do their thing and you kind of collaborate and make a good thing. Yeah. So I don't know. I don't believe in like dogma. Yeah. I like that there's some like wistful Coldplay playing in the background this whole time. Can anybody else hear that? Like when you're talking, that's in your head. Swear to God. One more question. Long day. You talked about I guess like focusing on the fundamentals and like understanding that kind of thing. And I don't know about anybody else but every time, I think the new thing right now is yarn, right? And every time I see something new, I'm like, oh, yarn. Why do I have to learn about yarn? Why am I learning that thing? Like how do you see the forest for the trees? Is there any way to even like assess these things early on? I remember like four years ago, everybody was saying, nah, no JS is shit. You just learn PHP. And now it's huge. So is there any way to like early on make that call or is it better to just wait? Again, like it's a dogma thing. Yeah. I don't know. I mean have people you trust. Like I couldn't tell you that. Yeah. I have friends who could maybe tell me that. That's another thing that I haven't added to the talk yet but I kind of want to. I recently went through like a pretty difficult decision myself and after like a year of doing this talk, I was just like, I don't know what to do. I don't know. And getting like other people who know more about things or even just other people you can bounce ideas off of. You know how everyone like is always really good at giving other people advice, right? But not as – that's fine, right? That's not hypocritical. It's just like you see more clearly other people's problems. You're like, oh, I can be objective about this. I can figure it out. But with your problems, you're just like, I don't know. It's just like fuzzy. So getting someone else to like start applying some of these frameworks for you and like working with you to figure out your shit is like really useful. And I think that's one of the things. Like you can't always know these things on your own. I'm like – I'm always like a very late adopter of things. I'm really bad at judging others. I think we all feel that way though. Did you learn anything recently? No. No, yeah. No, yeah. I have. I've been learning Framer. Well, your pronunciation of the quote was pretty good. So you learned that. Yeah. That's what I've been learning for the past six months. Sorry. Just how to pronounce that one quote. No. I've been learning Framer. That's been really fun. Before that, I learned Meteor. That was cool. Nice. Yeah. I don't know. I wanted to make an app, so I learned this. I wanted to prototype, so I learned that. It's always kind of like leading towards something. Awesome. Yeah. Well, another amazing round of applause for Joel.