Jonathan Cutrell - The Fluidity of Passions in Life, & Thinking Patterns at Startups vs. Large Companies

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Jonathan, host of the Developer Tea podcast and director of technology at PBS. And they discuss how resisting failure is akin to resisting reality, differences in how you plan at a large organization versus at a startup, and being comfortable recognizing the fluidity of your passions in life. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:31) This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:42) So I was curious to know a little bit about your plane, your flying hobby. Can you tell me about that?

(Jonathan at 00:00:49) Yeah. I wish I could carry the camera. Although the plane right now is actually out for maintenance. So back in — I think it was 2000, oh jeez, I'm gonna lose time here — I believe it was 2017, I came to the realization — a friend of mine actually was going to get his pilot's license. He's going to training and that kind of thing. And I came to the realization that I'm an adult now. I can do this stuff. I can just kind of go and get my pilot's license if I wanted to. And I never had really thought about it from that angle. My dad has flown since I was, you know, actually, since before I was born.

(Jonathan at 00:01:32) And we had an airplane in our family, a Cessna that he rebuilt the engine with his father, and it's still in our family. And so I thought, well, you know, this kind of kills a bunch of birds with one stone. Right? I'm gonna get closer to my dad. We're gonna have a shared hobby because I don't know if there's other software engineers that have experienced this, but it's kind of hard to explain what you do. Right? Especially if you're a manager of software engineers. So it's a little tough to connect, you know, on that professional level. And, you know, we don't really have a lot of shared hobbies, but this is something I've been interested in. When I was a kid, I would get sick, air sick, like motion sickness. I thought, oh, let's try it out. Let's see what it's like because I get motion sickness in the car as a passenger, but I don't when I'm driving. So I thought, well, maybe I, you know, getting in the pilot seat, I might actually be able to do this. So I went and got the training. I loved it. Absolutely invigorated with the idea that I'm able to fly an airplane. It's mind-boggling to me. And fast forward a few years, you know, I'm flying Dad's airplane and actually talking to my wife. Because we have this airport that's just down the road from our house. We actually moved to a house that's kind of close to an airport. So if we wanted to hop in the airplane on a Saturday morning and fly to the beach, we could do that.

(Jonathan at 00:03:00) And there's a lot on the airport, like a house lot, land for sale. And I'm talking to my wife and I'm like, would you want to live there? Like, if I could snap my fingers and we're living on the airport, would that be something you would even want? I imagine a lot of people would not want that. They don't want to hear airplanes all the time.

(Jonathan at 00:03:22) And she said yes. So fast forward a few more years, and we're here. I actually live on an airport now, which is just wild. There's so many changes that have happened, you know, in this short span of two years, the least of which is a pandemic, I suppose, or not the least of. But all of that to say, you know, that hobby was fueled in so many ways by the opportunity to work remote, the kind of flexibility in my job.

(Jonathan at 00:03:55) I feel like it really dovetails really nicely with being an engineer. I think a lot of engineers end up becoming pilots. So it's a blast. I love flying, and I love flying with my family, especially. It's a ton of fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:09) That's exciting. Yeah. There's a couple neighborhoods near us that the neighborhoods are flying neighborhoods, so they have their own airports.

(Jonathan at 00:04:16) Yeah. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:18) Yeah. And so I'm curious. Most people listening, they'll know you from other podcasts, from the Developer Tea. Right? And I want to know about that podcast. But first, I want to know about you and what do you do for your day job?

(Jonathan at 00:04:33) So I am a director of engineering at PBS. PBS like the one that you know about, the Cookie Monster PBS. And most of what we do, the team that I work on is responsible for orchestrating a bunch of other services that are disparate into a more centralized service. And that centralized service goes and feeds basically everything but the kids stuff. Right? That's the way you can think about it. So all of the, you know, kind of PBS proper applications, they eat from our API. We feed all that data through to them. So I'm responsible for kind of coordinating those teams and, you know, helping — essentially like I said, it's really hard to explain what you do, right, as a manager. But essentially kind of greasing the wheels on new initiatives, for example, technical initiatives that nontechnical people wouldn't necessarily understand the value of.

(Jonathan at 00:05:37) It's my job to translate that. So I'm working pretty closely with the developers, working really closely with product folks to make all of that happen. Right now, we're in the process of working on a GraphQL implementation, for example.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:51) That's pretty cool. So you identify and execute on opportunities.

(Jonathan at 00:05:56) Yeah. That's a much simpler way of putting it. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:00) You can also put a filter in there. You identify, filter, and then execute on opportunities.

(Jonathan at 00:06:06) Yeah. And quite a bit of — I think, you know, you can think about the job as functional. I like to think about it also as environmental, as kind of being available and present, communicating, being kind of a translation conduit in a way. I think it's easy to try to shoehorn a lot of our work into what process does this follow when sometimes the process isn't really sufficient. Right? You have two or three people that are all kind of trying to work together and things aren't really working well, and somebody comes in and tries to institute a process to fix it. And really, it's just a — now it's a process laying on top of all of that conflict. And what you really need is something that resolves the conflict that isn't just mechanization. Right? Nothing mechanical is going to solve that issue.

(Jonathan at 00:07:04) And that's something that I've learned going from startups to much larger kind of legacy organizations like PBS. Very different environments and very different thinking involved.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:15) Tell me about some of those differences.

(Jonathan at 00:07:18) Yeah. Oh, man. Well, so probably the most stark difference between a startup environment, especially early stage, like maybe first round, second round, you know, certainly not public, versus something like a huge super organization — I say super organization. There's a very large, longstanding organization, sustainable, et cetera, like PBS. In the startup environment, everything you do is thinking about the next three to six weeks. If you're, you know, if you're really thinking long term, you're going six months out. And that changes the way that you make decisions about technology. It changes the way you make decisions about team. All of the decisions that you would make, like all of the kind of theoretical correct ways of doing things have to kind of be put on the back burner in a lot of startup environments. And for some people, that's exciting. It's a challenge. It's fun. It's, you know, part of that decision-making process, and you kind of earn the ability to go back and refactor, for example. Right? You earn the ability to pay down the tech debt that you took on to get to whatever that, you know, landmark was that you were trying to get to, the milestone.

(Jonathan at 00:08:44) On the flip side — well, and I should talk about the kind of the positive of that — is you do move quickly. Right? The organization is fluid. You often can suddenly have a lot more responsibility, which tends to go with a lot more experience. You know, spending one year in a startup kind of equates to spending like five years in a much larger organization in terms of the kinds of things that you're going to do, how much you're actually going to get done.

(Jonathan at 00:09:15) If you were to go and join a longstanding — you know, if you joined a, for example, Microsoft, in a more traditional longstanding team kind of role. Most of what you're going to be doing is figuring out how can you make changes that don't break the sustainability that's in place. So much longer-term thinking, much more — very often, there's fragile things that you have to work around. And part of your job is identifying where those fragile things are and trying to make them less fragile. Ideally, something as far as antifragile, which is the Taleb word for it.

(Jonathan at 00:10:02) But even if they're resilient, which is the middle ground between fragile and antifragile, that's much better. Right? So a lot of your job is about slowly kind of cultivating, gardening around an existing infrastructure versus rapidly building something that could easily fall apart under a certain amount of stress.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:24) Are these the type of things you talk about on Developer Tea?

(Jonathan at 00:10:28) Oh, yeah. Well, this stuff certainly. A lot of this show — so it's 975-something episodes now. So I don't know. I think I could say I could safely say I talk about everything now. We've talked about certainly these kinds of differences in long term, short term, and the value and context to both of those. Other stuff that we've talked about on the show, though, especially more recently in the past year or two years, has been much more about introspective, understanding yourself, because it's such a fundamental kind of building block to be able to learn, to be able to improve. Introspective thinking and recognizing, for example, understanding how you, specifically you, are going to fall prey to certain biases. Right? Which ones are you most likely to be hurt by? Right? Or which ones have you used to your advantage? These are things that typically are not really — it's not something that you're taught in school. Critical thinking is rarely taught even in school, much less thinking critically about yourself and recognizing your own, like, confirmation bias, that kind of stuff. So we talk a lot about that, but we also talk about how that kind of — we try to take these ideas that come from psychology or even economics and apply them to your career. Right? How does this actually affect you today in your career? And that's a challenge sometimes. Sometimes it's a challenge to come up with the right kind of angle on a given topic and make it relevant. The making it relevant part — sometimes there's a gap there. Right? And it's not because it's not applicable, but because explaining how it's applicable can be really hard. It can be really hard to explain, like, how specifically this is going to change your job today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:43) Yes. I understand that. When we did the Leader Bits, the leadership training, taking insight and advice and making it actionable to how you can apply it to your job today, that ended up turning into quite the project to figure out the formula on how to do that.

(Jonathan at 00:13:00) It's hard. It's tough. And I think the hardest part is it really depends on you experiencing it and then kind of retroactively recognizing that that's where it applied. Right? You kind of have to review a situation.

(Jonathan at 00:13:19) And so I try to find something that's almost like a trigger flag, something that signals, hey, when this happens, try to think about this. Granted, when you have 975 episodes, you're not going to remember all this stuff. Nobody is. Right? It's not really about, you know, creating this catalog of perfect knowledge. I don't remember everything I've said on this show. Certainly not. It's just like reading. Right? You don't remember everything you've read. There's no way. There's frameworks that you read about. You forget the entire framework. Right? There's all these things that we — I think, theoretically, we want to apply all of this knowledge that we've gained, but there's even some guilt, I think, in feeling like, oh, I don't even know how to apply it because I can't remember, you know, how did these things dovetail together?

(Jonathan at 00:14:14) How do these things even fit together? These two separate methodologies or architectures of thinking, how can I even make them work together? I don't know. So I think I'm not even sure where I was going with that other than to say, like, there's all these concepts that we want to hold on to and apply. But most of it, I think, is about building intuition and looking back and trying to improve incrementally rather than trying to revolutionize your life with this new model of thinking.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:47) Yes. I love that you and I have come to similar conclusions on separate paths. And I'll go a little deeper to say that you said that after all of these episodes where your focus has kind of been drawn more, more recently for the past two years, is introspection and working on yourself first. And it, for me, my evolution was if I just know this new skill, if I just figure out polymorphic associations — when I was really young and starting programming, I'm like, if I could just wrap my mind around this — and then I built skill after skill, and then I need to know this language and this framework. And then when I had this — after you go through a decade of it or fifteen years of it and you stumble into this area of improving yourself, you realize, oh, man. If I would have started with myself, I would have started with my health, my fitness, my mindset, my relationships. If I would have focused on all of that first and put effort into that, then it would have amplified everything else and gotten me so much farther. So now I want to go out and tell the world about this. Like, if you want to be a better programmer, you know, do something very physically intense and difficult.

(Jonathan at 00:15:57) Yeah. 100% that. I, you know, when people come to me and ask me, what should I learn? Or really, when they ask me anything, almost. Right? My answer is almost always it depends. And I try to get them as soon as I can to express the things they care about. And that's kind of the turning point for most people. It's amazing. It's amazing how many people haven't even thought about that question.

(Jonathan at 00:16:30) They're going through their careers and I think kind of implicitly following a previously determined path, which is exactly kind of what you're saying is, oh, I know that if I get these skills, then I can get this job, which means that then I can grow into this one. And I think I want that job. Right? Maybe that's as far as that articulation has gone. But if you were to say, well, what specifically do you want from that job? Like, what does that give you? Does it give you money that you want? Is there another way to get that money? And when people think about it that way, they change their path naturally. Rather than saying, oh, well, then I don't need to learn Python. I need to learn Ruby. I don't know. Whatever. So often, the pathway kind of expands a little bit wider. Right?

(Jonathan at 00:17:24) There's more ways to get what you want, which is, I think, more optimal. You become a little more flexible in the specifics of your career. Would you say that that has happened for you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:36) Yeah. I mean, yes. I've seen people try to master the tool specifically and just try to do really cool things with the tool, and that tends to work. It's a long, hard path. I think all the ways are a long, hard path. But I've seen the people go the tool route where I'm just going to fall in love with a tool and figure out how to use this really well. And then I've seen the people that go on the outcome route where I just want this outcome, and then what tool is best suited to get me to this outcome. I am personally — I started as a tool person because I was geeky and it was cool and I like the tools. And then I quickly realized that that doesn't generate revenue. And from the entrepreneurial side of me, realized that I have to switch my love from tools to outcomes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:19) And when I switched my love from tools to outcomes, I started to have more success and then help more people, which is ultimately the thing that feels really good.

(Jonathan at 00:18:28) Right. Yeah. And it is interesting that, you know, you can find success in both of those routes, but that the people who tend to be the most successful, they choose the route you're talking about. They start with outcomes, and then they say, okay, the tools that exist are not good enough. Now I'm going to build something, or I'm going to help somebody else build. I'm going to collaborate on a tool that does reach that outcome. And so it's almost like both ends kind of meet each other in the middle in the best case scenario where you have entrepreneurial work that's happening towards a specific end. Oh, but also, I need this tool. Right? I need something that doesn't exist yet. And so you develop tools and the end goal at the same time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:22) Yeah. Beautifully said. You know, when I go out before COVID and was giving all of these talks, you know, after trying to condense the knowledge I've learned on the podcast, I would keep the talk short. If it was an hour session, I would keep the talk at fifteen minutes and do forty-five minutes of crowd engagement because I wanted to bring everyone comes with their own questions, but usually, the Q&A is the smallest part, and that's backwards. So I said, alright, let's flip it. And I would so often get, like, what's the secret or what's the key or what's the one thing. And so I've tried really hard to come up with a good answer for that. And the best thing I can think of is persistence. Like, it's kind of a balance. You have to keep trying. You have to want to improve. You have to want to grow. You have to have good intentions. You have to want to help others. And then you're going to constantly face challenges, and your reward for overcoming the challenges are larger challenges. So fall in love with that process.

(Jonathan at 00:20:19) Yeah. Persistence can certainly be the fuel. Right? And without fuel, you don't go anywhere. You saying that makes me kind of realize that basically every question that I've gotten is exactly that, just a different form. Right? It's, oh, I've met this challenge. I need to know what the secret is. What is the shortcut, you know, to get me from here to there? And it's funny. Your answer is actually there are no shortcuts, really. Right? That's not really the point, but that it's also okay. It's okay that it's more work because that's true for everybody. Right? There's going to be somebody who has kind of an odd experience. Maybe they jump from one place to another faster than you did. That's okay. That's just kind of the nature of not just the industry, but life. Right? And again, this is why I come back to the introspective thinking. And, you know, of course, we want the short way. That's our nature as humans. We want to find ways that get us the most for the least input. We should, probably. Right? Like, it's probably not a bad instinct, but also recognizing reality. And I think resisting reality is probably the biggest detractor in people's careers that I've experienced. Watching people, for example, be so afraid of failure when failure is just part of the fabric of their reality. And if you can't accept that, you're stuck. And the outcome, as we're saying, outcome is really kind of the goal here. The outcome is the same as if you failed. And if you can't accept it, it doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter because you're basically accepting failure by not accepting failure. Seems kind of counterintuitive, but that's the case. Right? And anyway, so all of that to say, I wonder, you know, in your experience in talking to these leaders that you've had so many opportunities to talk to, did you find that theme with them?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:45) The theme I found with all of these leaders is they genuinely love what they do. They care a lot. They work, and they're persistent. So they have a high quality of standards. They raise their own bar. So they're competing against themselves most often. And for me personally, I found that to be very effective. So those are some of the trends that I've seen across all of these leaders I've gotten to talk to.

(Jonathan at 00:23:15) I wonder what is something that you feel like was totally unexpected or maybe something that, like, when you originally started this, you're saying, okay, I was seeking tools, and now you're realizing that's not really the route to what you know, to your path to success or whatever. What is something that you learned and hopefully even thematically that you're like, wow, I would have never thought that this was the case?

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:45) Oh, one, Jason Warner, CTO of GitHub, used to write fitness books. That was pretty unexpected. He's going to hate me for that. But we, our research team found some old stuff on him, but I'm kind of kidding. The most unexpected thing or the most important thing if I had to, like, pass one learning back to a past self of mine would be I didn't understand the weight of relationships. Relationships are so incredibly valuable, and then how to get those relationships and how to develop those relationships over time. Typically, you want to develop the relationships when you don't need them, and you want to find something that's beneficial to both parties and then just build relationships for the future and go into it with a positive intent and put time into your calendar. Like, block it out. Put an hour on Friday. Here's relationship building time. It's just a block on my calendar. And whoever happens to pop into my head, I'm going to reach out to them, say hello, write a message to them, go look into their profile, see how they're doing, and just caring about people. I literally have a section in my schedule that says love on people, where I just, like, have time where I go seek out some people I know and show them some love.

(Jonathan at 00:25:02) That's so interesting. I actually have a very similar practice. And as mechanical as it sounds, I'll start in my phone, and I'll start with auto-complete. I'll type A into a text message. And I have a huge contact list. You know, I've been building this thing forever, thanks to Google, I think. But I start out with A, and I'll just say, hey, how are you? And go down that list. And people who I haven't talked to in years sometimes. And typically, the conversation doesn't go very far. Every once in a while, it'll open up a whole new discussion. And it's not always, just to be clear, I think some people listening to this might believe, you know, they might be taking notes on how to improve their careers. Okay. Yes. This is good for your career. Also, this is good for your life. Right? This is not just, like, a sleazy sales tactic to build a network of people that are going to, you know, improve your earning power. This is good for, it's actually quite literally proven to be good for your health. Right? To have a community of people. And so if, like me, this doesn't really come naturally. You know, I don't, I work from home. Right? I don't have a natural community. This is something that you may want to take those intentional steps to step out of what might even be your comfort zone and talk to somebody you haven't talked to in a while.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:37) Yes. The number one request that we got from people reaching out to us had been for a while to create a community, but I wasn't in the community business. I never ran a community. I didn't really have a desire to run a community. I enjoyed interviewing people and learning from great leaders, but community wasn't my thing. So I met this gentleman named Etienne de Bruin who owns Seven CTOs. And they do, like, executive peer groups for technology leaders, VPs of engineering, CTOs. They're on the more, like, premium side where people are paying, like, $20,000 a year, and it's facilitated by a professional facilitator you have to pay and all that. So it's definitely a good value, but he wanted to create something for the mid-level of the market. Like, you know, people that are, they want to become a manager for the first time, or they want to move from manager to director. And that was at a price point that was, like, much cheaper than that, like, super affordable even if they wanted to pay for it for themselves. So I said, okay. Because I have the audience, and you have the knowledge of how to run these communities and the staff and the support. So we created elevate150.com. And the idea was elevate, you know, bring people up to the next level, and then 150 was, like, one of Dunbar's numbers of community size. So we capped the community at 150 people. And so we have 100 people now, and we've grown that over, like, the past eight months. And every week, we have speakers. And then so it's like a ten-minute topic conversation. And then you go into a small group of, like, three to four people, and that speaker has set you up with something. It's not like a generic cycling of speakers that are doing sales pitches. Like, they have to adhere to our format. And so what it does is it gets you in these communities having these small discussions and building relationships. And that's been, like, unbelievable. So now I've got this, like, community where I can go. And then every week or every other week, I'm getting introduced to three or four new peers, and we're having legitimate conversations. And now that I think about it, we should source your podcast for some content or some topics. You should come speak, man.

(Jonathan at 00:28:50) I just actually just want to be in one of those small groups. This kind of thing is lacking so much. I'm so glad you're building it because I really believe we could have about 100 more of these, and it wouldn't be enough. This is just sorely lacking, and it's a huge kind of open opportunity for growth and for business, for making something that could be a sustainable business. I'd love to be a part of that. I think a critical component of what you're saying on that is that everybody's bought in. I mean, it's very hard to do that in a self-organized way. Okay, everybody, we're gonna break out into groups, you know, just on our own without having any format that's provided to us. But having that as, hey, look, this is when you come here, this is what we do. This is kind of the prescribed format. And if you're going to speak here, this is the prescribed way that this group works. I think that's really, really important. And having that kind of structure, you know, it's very similar to what we experience on teams. If your team doesn't have a structure, it kind of devolves. People each have their own way of doing things, and everybody kind of clams up. It's very hard, socially, to build that, you know, kind of organically. So I really love that idea.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:18) Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. It wasn't mine. It was the community. Right? And so I'm just trying to, you know, what we do a lot professionally is facilitate. Right? We allow, like you said earlier, we grease the wheels. We connect the right people, and we help achieve the outcomes. And I love getting to be a part of something like that, and I hope it grows. I hope we have a bunch of these 150 groups. One of the big things that we noticed, because, you know, at first, one of my resistance areas of doing this at first was, you know, I'm a part of Rands and Repose, you know, 14,000 member Slack. He's awesome. And, you know, there's a couple other leadership groups I'm a part of that have four or five, ten thousand people. And what I realized is the reason why I don't spend time in these groups is because they get so big because they're so useful. And then everybody, like, asks the same questions, and then people get, then you get the core group of people, and then they start getting frustrated for these questions. And then it creates this wrong dynamic. So I was like, if we could solve that. And so we did a bunch of research and found Dunbar's number, and we were like, let's just create a community, but then cap it at 150 people and then create another community and just keep doing that.

(Jonathan at 00:31:36) Yeah. It makes sense. I can just, intuitively, hearing, you know, 14,000 people, I feel like I would disappear. I would get tired of the notifications that are popping up probably. So I'd silence that. That'd be step one. And then nobody knows me from the next, you know, Jonathan on the list because it's alphabetically sorted. And so, you know, I just disappear. And it's not because there's not meaningful things to say. It's just there's too much. I did an episode a long time, or maybe it was a blog, but I don't even remember. But it was the concept was the noise floor. And we know this in audio engineering that you have a floor on the noise on any given channel. Right? In order to have any kind of signal processing, especially into digital, there's some level of noise. And that comes in the form of some kind of static usually. So if you turn your gain up all the way on a microphone, this is kind of insider baseball, but you get a lot of static on that microphone. Right? So one of the measures of quality, typically, kind of a rough measure of quality is signal-to-noise ratio. If you have high signal-to-noise ratio, then generally speaking, the clarity of that audio is going to be much better. And the concept of this blog post is to use this as a metaphor for any kind of communication platform. Right? Right now we're on one. But we do this so much more publicly now that the noise floor has risen. There's a lot more channels to listen to. And so that kind of acts as noise. It's detracting from the signal that you're trying to produce. And so I see this as a way of saying, okay, we're going to cap this both for the relational kind of evidence-based approach for relational development, but also because it quite simply just reduces the noise. Right? You're going to have a higher signal ratio in a smaller group. I have a question for you. It's probably kind of switching gears. Is that alright?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:47) Yeah. For sure.

(Jonathan at 00:33:47) So what is a moment in your journey on this podcast, and not just podcast, but all of the various channels that you participate in, where you were the closest to quitting?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:02) The closest to quitting was when I started making a lot of money. So I started making a lot of money, and then my episodes increased at that same time. And I kind of realized that I had gotten everything I wanted. Right? I was talking to the creator of the Internet and the CTO of NASA and Microsoft, and those were my days. And, like, you know, I'm on text threads with, you know, very popular people, and it's like it feels surreal. And so I got a little depressed, and I realized that this twenty-year goal I had of getting to be in this sort of cohort of technology leaders at the top, I achieved within three to four years. And I kind of got depressed about it, and I was like, that happens. Like, if you listen to people like Tony Robbins, he'll tell you, like, when you achieve these goals, you have to make sure you have another big goal set up after that because you have no direction now. And so that's when it went from me extracting the best knowledge from leaders because I thought it would be cool to these principles that we developed called, why the company exists, and there's three parts of it. It's to educate, entertain, and elevate. So the education part, how do you be a good leader? How do you grow in your career? The entertainment part, 3D printing houses. Right? Elon Musk putting in the Neuralink. You know? All of these types of things. OpenAI. So we have the entertaining part and then the elevate part.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:43) Again, in every episode, there's a section that specifically talks—we ask people that advice about growing themselves and their leaders. And then the community itself, we call Elevate 150. So I said, okay, if we can be doing those three things—have you seen that movie Soul by Disney? It's a kid movie.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:00) Okay. So the professional musician struggles his whole life, dies, then he gets to come back and do this show. And then he's like, is that it? And then she's like, yes, we do it again.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:12) And we do it again. So I got my dream, and then I had to figure out, like, how do I do this more? How do I keep myself engaged, and how do I keep myself wanting to do this? That's the journey I was on.

(Jonathan at 00:36:29) It's great, great story, and also it feels very close to home. And much of my story is similar to that in the sense that my lowest point is at a moment where I feel like the thing that I wanted to get, I either no longer want, or somehow I've just kind of lost whatever that desire was to have that thing has expired. Right? I think back to when I was a teenager and wanting to tour as a musician. That's what I wanted to do with my life.

(Jonathan at 00:37:07) And now I think I cannot imagine—I couldn't imagine doing that. Right? And I think that taught me a lesson about the fluidity of what we care about and being able to follow that and kind of morph it as we move forward, both as people and in our careers. That fluid desire, we shouldn't necessarily try to push back against it, but instead, we should find a way to follow it in kind of a sustainable fashion. Right?

(Jonathan at 00:37:41) It's okay that I didn't want to tour as a musician. I can still keep my gear and play whenever I want to. Right? There's a way to kind of—the metaphor that I always come back to for this for myself is the river kind of flows around the rocks. Right?

(Jonathan at 00:38:01) You don't move the rock out of the way, but eventually that rock gets smoothed down. Right? So what may feel like kind of an obstacle or a frustration in your life, if you kind of act like the river, that smooths over over time. And it may change things, but it's not going to ruin—it's not going to stop the river. Right?

(Jonathan at 00:38:24) That's kind of the persistence mindset in combination with, I guess, the acceptance mindset. The river is going to keep flowing over these rocks. No matter what you do, it's going to find a way, very persistent in that nature. But it may not always be the way that you expect it. And to invite that change, I think, is kind of a superpower. It's really hard for people to change.

(Jonathan at 00:38:48) But if we can invite change, that can really change the way we approach our entire life, with certainly our careers as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:59) It's almost never like we imagine it. It's always kind of close, but it's almost the rule that you have to have this vision. You have to go for it. You have to work really hard. You have to get knocked down and get up and try again.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:12) And then you will get something and it won't necessarily be exactly what you imagined, but you'll get somewhere close to it.

(Jonathan at 00:39:20) Yeah, yeah. 100%. And you know, I think you did this really interesting thing by developing these principles. Because what you had to do and what I had to do when I came up with the three kind of goals of Developer Tea is to help driven—oh, man, I'm going to completely—I say it in the beginning of every episode: to help driven developers find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. This is something that's evergreen. Right? And what you're saying is something that's evergreen. You could do that forever and never be done.

(Jonathan at 00:39:54) Right? You're not going to finish that. It's not something that you can check that. Well, I did it. I helped everybody find perspective.

(Jonathan at 00:40:02) You know? That's never going to happen, but it's an ongoing function of your life. Right? It's more about who do I want to be rather than what do I want to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:14) Yes. Yes. We should set up a meeting between me and Etienne. You know, I just got to meet him for the first time in person. We did this whole business. We became business partners, grew this whole Elevate thing for the past, you know, almost a year. And then just last week, he took his family from California to Wyoming, and then I took my family from Florida to Wyoming and we camped out together and made a campfire and our kids played and it was great.

(Jonathan at 00:40:42) Oh, that's a blast. We did something very similar with Spec, by the way. Spec was the podcast network that I started with Bryn Jackson from Design Details that eventually we grew and had like 10 podcasts as a part of the network, that we actually shut down last year. And all under good, you know, situation.

(Jonathan at 00:41:01) It was just time to end it. And so, but we hadn't met each other for, I think it was a year into growing this network. We had, you know, shared bank accounts before we ever shook hands. You know? It was kind of a wild experience, and it really kind of reinforced all of the things. Like, it kind of tested my, you know, what I say about remote work. I had to kind of buy into that. And it was great. I mean, it was one of the best experiences of my life, starting that network.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:31) Yes. I love what you've built over at Developer Tea. I think you're out there helping so many developers, and I was so excited. You know, I think we talked two or three years ago about potentially getting together and then just time is—and that's one of the things I love too, is, you know, specifically with Etienne as well. Like, we had talked, you know, four years ago once, and he was doing his Seven CTOs, and I was doing my Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:57) And then to see someone still doing it and still going after it after three, four, five years, that's the most rare thing ever. And that gives me respect because I talk to so many people, and so many people quit. They start something, they do it, and they quit within a year or two or when it gets difficult, but I like the people who don't give up.

(Jonathan at 00:42:21) Yeah, I don't know what to attribute it to, certainly, and I appreciate your persistence, which seems to be a theme here. And you know, some of me believes that I do it for myself as much as anything—that I can't stop. I know that's kind of a common refrain that I've heard from some creatives that they're kind of addicted to their work. I wouldn't say I'm addicted to this, but it's so gratifying to hear from anybody that something I said helped them change the way they think. That's kind of the most gratifying part of my career is helping people adjust, which seems kind of crazy.

(Jonathan at 00:43:06) Right? It seems like a small thing, but just a slight change in perspective, really, that is kind of my goal, or I guess my measurement. I mean, are people changing the way they're thinking? If they're not, then I'm probably not doing the right thing here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:22) Do you have a book?

(Jonathan at 00:43:26) I don't. Not yet. I have certainly thought about kind of collating a lot of these ideas, but so much of what I want to say, or would want to say, has been said in different ways. And so I've struggled with what is the right angle to present this. And I've thought about doing almost like a devotional style. I'm not sure if you're familiar—or you probably are familiar with this idea, but it's kind of a daily thought, like a way to ponder a concept that hopefully, again, is kind of a—it would change your perspective even slightly for that day. I've thought about kind of creating that kind of thing. But I haven't really committed in either direction yet on which kind of thing I want to actually build for that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:16) Yeah. I think taking your most popular episodes and looking at those topics and developing a chapter outline, that's one of the strategies that we're using here is, like, which topics do people respond to the most, and then how can we—you know, it's like music. You have the same argument in music. Right? You could say, oh, that chord progression's been used before.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:36) But it's when you sit down and dedicate the time to doing it, that's when it comes out.

(Jonathan at 00:44:43) You're absolutely right. And there are definitely themes. You know, I did something called the Developer Career Roadmap. I guess that was probably four years ago now. And the whole idea was I'm going to commit to a specific pathway even though it goes against every fiber of my being. Right?

(Jonathan at 00:45:04) Because I really believe so much of it is about context. But, hey, if you want to become a developer, this path would work. Right? It's intended to be something you can memorize and just follow that. And you can find yourself on the path.

(Jonathan at 00:45:19) Right? You can say, okay, where am I on this? I'm step one, step two, step three. And you can identify, okay, if I'm at step three, this is what I should be thinking about. This is what I should be doing next. And I think that was very useful. And what's interesting is it's very boring in terms of, like, it's not really changing much. Right?

(Jonathan at 00:45:41) There's not a lot going on with that concept, but so many people don't have that. They don't have the basic guidance of this is kind of a step through your career way to get into this industry. And they rely on, you know, I guess, osmosis. They look at what other people are doing. They try to emulate it maybe, and develop some kind of implicit goals like we were talking about.

(Jonathan at 00:46:07) So that might be an angle that we explore a little bit more in the future. I've thought about doing a revised version of it as well for manager kind of higher level career roadmap as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:19) Yes. This is good. You know, the thing that excites me most about this conversation and us getting to know each other a little bit better is not any sort of immediate business thing that we might do together. But just knowing that the odds of you still doing this in 10 years is really high, and it'll be so great to see what you learn in 10 years to talk to you again in a decade. One of my favorite things about you was when I saw that you're a long-term thinker.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:45) And if you look at our company website, one of our core key values is we think in terms of decades. That helps us make better decisions.

(Jonathan at 00:46:55) It's the only way I think—well, it's the only way I can think. I know this is what I was talking about outlining the differences between startup and probably why I'm not at a startup anymore right now. It's because my brain kind of breaks a little bit when I have to think about what's going to work for three weeks. And I love that you have decided that that's of value for you and for all of your ventures. The thing that has stuck out so much about you to me, I think probably the most present and continuous publication that I've seen, has come from you and your team, of course.

(Jonathan at 00:47:39) There's no way—

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:39) Yeah, you could—

(Jonathan at 00:47:41) You could do it alone. But when you said persistence, I thought, yep. That's exactly if I could sum up what I've gathered from your body of work, it's that you're persistent. And the changes that you make won't ever be to stop something.

(Jonathan at 00:47:59) It'll be to change it, to morph it. Or if it's going to stop, it's going to be replaced with something else. So that's really inspiring.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:08) Or hand it down to the next generation. You know?

(Jonathan at 00:48:11) Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Grow it further. Right?

(Jonathan at 00:48:15) Expand it and—

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:16) Let them make their mark and make it their own. And as long as—you know, that's what's so great about the foundation and the principles and the values something is built on is those things will continue to occur. As long as—I often consider myself a gardener. Like, I can't make the plant grow, but I can put the seed in the right soil, and I can make sure that there's the right weather happening around us, and I can make sure the water happens correctly, but I can't make the plant grow. But I can just create—I can curate an environment where things can grow.

(Jonathan at 00:48:47) You're not going to believe me when I say this, but it's wild that you say you think of yourself as a gardener. This is exactly the metaphor that I used in my interview to join PBS, actually. They asked me, you know, what is your management style? And I said, I think managers are gardeners. They cultivate the ground for the engineers that they're working with to grow under.

(Jonathan at 00:49:06) They can't force them to grow. Right? You can't look at a flower and scream at it and say you need to be taller or you need to bloom prettier. You know? Your job is to focus on the soil.

(Jonathan at 00:49:16) Your job is to focus on the sunlight. Everything that's going on around this—that's your job. So it's kind of strange. It's not that strange, I suppose. We do think a lot alike in some regards, and that seems to be a very big overlap there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:34) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email: [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.