You're probably underestimating what you can actually do if you get the focus when you learn new things over time, that compounded interest. So aim high, and even if it's way above where you actually get, the actual place you end up will be also high. Hello, and welcome to the Py Bytes podcast, where we talk about Python career and mindset. We're your hosts. I'm Julian Sequeira. And I am Bob Baldeboz. If you're looking to improve your python, your career, and learn the mindset for success, this is the podcast for you. Let's get started. Hey, man, how are you doing? Did you get any sleep? I haven't slept in days, man, so thank you for asking. If you hear me snoring throughout this episode, just, I don't know, yell at me or scream or something because I've probably fallen asleep. And for those that don't know, Julian just became dad again. Yep. Baby number three. So I have not slept in days, and. But beautiful little girl, so we're very, very happy. And, yeah, she's just using up all of our time, not getting any sleep, as you can imagine. So one of our key things is to get enough sleep, and I'm breaking that rule. That's right. It's worth it. Parkinson's law, right? You're so limited with time. You're more effective programmer now. Yeah, that's exactly it. Let's just go with that one. Well, on that note, let's talk about goals today. What do you think? I love it. This is one of our favorite topics. Career goals, python goals, setting goals. Very exciting stuff, because it's super important. So, Bob, do you want to kick this off? The first question we're going to ask is, why is setting goals important? Why is it important to have a goal? Yeah, great question. So, having goals, it gives you something to focus on, because especially these days with social media and everybody vying for your attention, it's very easy to get off track. Yeah, totally true. It's too easy to get distracted. Way, way, way too easy to get distracted. So having a goal, having something to focus on will keep you, you know, keep you laser focused on what it is you need to do. And there's. There's more to this. So I won't get into it now. Uh, but what I will say is that without goals, this is another reason why it's so important. Without goals, you're actually probably aiming too low. So just imagine that you're sitting there. You haven't actually sat down and thought out any real goals? You're just getting through the day. Well, you're probably setting your sights too low in the things that you are aiming to achieve, the things that you are looking to do, are they actually going to get you where you need to be? Are they going to help you get to those dreams that you want? Are they the real goals that you're after? So without actually giving this conscious thought of setting yourself some goals, you're probably aiming way too low. Also, your achievements can inspire others. There's some delayed gratification there that the good stuff, the big things happen with a lot of consistent effort and goals will get you to that place, and then you can become an inspiration for others. Yeah, I love that one. That one's really important. You know, one of the things that makes life amazing is being able to inspire other people, being able to help other people. So when people see that you can achieve something that you've put in, the hard work, the time, the hours, the blood, sweat and tears, the lack of sleep with a baby. No, I'm just kidding. But when people see that you're putting that stuff in and you're getting at the other end and you're seeing success and you're achieving those goals, well, then that inspires them to do it themselves. And it's one of the best feelings in the world. To hear someone come up to you and say, hey, Bob, you know, hey, Julian. Seeing what you guys did with pibytes has inspired me to do the same with x, y and z, and now I've achieved this myself, you know, and these are things we hear from people and it's one of the greatest things. Yeah, I agree with that. Like the biggest win, it's not necessarily what we achieve, but if we can inspire others and give others the tools and wisdom to do similar things in the python space, that really is motivating both for them as well as for us. Yep. And speaking of motivation, the goals themselves, they give you motivation, especially if you make them measurable. So this is key and we'll talk about this in a second. But when you make a goal measurable, you can tick it off, you can tick the boxes, almost like a to do list. Right. And as you work your way through the goal, just checking off these tiny little pieces of it to build that bigger picture, to get you to that bigger goal, you're going to feel motivated as you look back and reflect on where you were and go, oh, wow. In the past three months, I've been able to learn X, Y and Z with Python or I've mastered classes over the past month, so. Wow. I'm going to keep pushing because this is working. You know, putting this stuff into goals is actually working. We're actually doing that with a book right now. Right. These gradual rollouts of 50 tips every n weeks and we just about hit 200 and, yeah, that goal was really motivating. Yeah. And I think if doing it upfront, if we were to have said, we're not going to launch anything until we had all 2300 tips, that would have made things much harder on us. So then pivoting into some concrete advice or tips for setting good goals. So, first of all, I think we said before, is making them measurable. What gets measured, gets managed. Right? So the more tangible the goal, the more you can express the numbers, the easier it is for yourself to work towards that. So an example of that is our book, our tips book. We just hit 200 tips and we have been gradually releasing that. And, yeah, we really took that approach of eating the elephant a bite at a time. So we went with the first release when we had 100 tips and then 50 tips sequentially. And, yeah, having that gamification of, like, every 50 tips we're doing a version rollout was really motivating and really kept us on track. Yeah. And if we had limited ourselves and said, we're not launching this book until all 300 tips are done, one, the book wouldn't have launched by now, and two, we probably would have burned ourselves out. Anyone who's done this is a lot to launching a book and just doing the tips and having to be burned out, writing 300 of them would have just been ridiculous. So having that little boost of launching the book at 100 and then tacking on in chunks of 50, that was amazing. Huge boost. Now, that said, and this is a great segue. Thank you. Aim high. When you're setting your goals, aim high. So we all love this quote. We always get it wrong. Aim for the stars, land on the moon, whatever it is, right, you've heard it before. When you aim high, it's inspiring. It's inspiring to think big. It's inspiring to just push yourself. It makes you feel like you can do anything. So, yes, we aimed high with this book. I'm going to bring it back to the book all the time, I guess. But with the tips book, we could have easily said, this is 100 tips and that's it. But we thought, why not make it 300? I don't know why we did that, other than just, that's a grand number. That is a big goal to go for. So we aimed high with that and we're pushing and it's pushing us and it's making definitely tiring us out. Especially you, Bob. But at the end of the day, when you achieve a goal that you aimed high for, it's just, it's a feeling of elation. It's one of the most amazing things you can do. Yeah. And it goes back to what we said with the why. Like, you're probably aiming too low. You're probably underestimating what you can actually do if you get the focus when you learn new things over time, that compounded interest. So aim high. And even if it's way above where you actually get, the actual place you end up will be also high. Yeah. I mean, looking exactly at that, the 300 tips. Right. If we found we could only get to 200 and then couldn't write anymore, 200 is still way better than 100, isn't it? Yep. Our next tip is to break your goals down into digestible chunks or sub goals, because as we've mentioned before, the big goal, you cannot hit that in one go. So you have to break it down into smaller goals and put timelines against those smaller goals. Yeah, that one's really, really key for motivation. When you have those small chunks, it just keeps you fired up and it lets you organize. It's almost a form of program or project management as well, lets you organize what needs to be done. So for example, going back to this book, as always, we had to first look at, well, how do we do it? You know, how do we get it on Kindle? How do we write? What's the best tool to use? What's the. So there was investigation involved. There was. We don't have the skills, or rather we don't have the time to look into certain features of, you know, how to convert it to Kindle, how to. Or the best way to format the book. So do we have to go and ask for help? You know, and all of these little things were tasks or sub goals that we then gave timelines to. And it helped us really get to this end product of launching the book. If we just said the goal, if we'd written it down as launch book by December, well, pretty sure that wouldn't have happened if we didn't break it down. And on that note, writing them down is so powerful. So get in there, find a book, find a piece of paper. What do you like to use, Bob, when you write down your goals? Physical notebook or something? Yeah, yeah, I've got a. I've actually got to move it. I realized I've done it in a 2020 diary. So some of these goals will move over into 2021. So I'm going to have to move them into a dedicated notebook rather than a diary. But I do love having them written down. It is super valuable to do that. And it's nice and powerful when you can open the book and say, here are my goals, you know, and tie them in with timelines, calendars and everything, and you keep those goals front and center. But the act of writing just makes it seem so much more real. Don't ask me why, but not once, right? Like, writing it down every week as well really makes it sink in. Yeah. And that's part of revisiting your goals, right? Some of them you might revisit throughout the year, every week. Some you might revisit every six months to a review of your goals. So when you do that sort of stuff and you keep writing these things down, iterating over them, fine tuning them, scrapping some of them, it's a living and breathing process. So when you do that works well. When you write them down, do you write them in the present tense? Yes. Yes. Tell me more about that. If you write them in the present tense, that almost becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, like, if you already have achieved the goals, and I think, and there might be some science behind it, that the mind actually doesn't distinguish. So it's already in your mind that you already have achieved it. So it's very powerful. I think psycho siberian etics is talking about that as well. It's really tricking the mind into believing that's actually possible. So, yeah. Recommended to use the present tense as if you already had achieved the goals. Yeah, that one's really powerful to me, and I've been using that with one of my goals, which I'll talk about a bit later. Ruin it here a bit. But it was about moving houses. I really wanted to move houses this year, and so it was really nice to be able to talk like, we are moving houses. It's happening. It's happening right now. This is the next step. And because I kept talking about it and made it present tense, made it like it was in the process of happening, it just made it so much more achievable to me. And we'll get into that in a bit. But the last tip we wanted to throw in here was to have an accountability partner. So, obviously, my accountability partner is Bob. That's pretty obvious. But the thing is, when you have an accountability partner for your goals and you share your goals with them. You can be as blunt as saying, all right, we're going to have a goals check in in a week and you're going to tell me or you're going to ask me how have you progressed with these goals? And you share the goals with them so they can see what it is that you're up to and what you want. Um, Bob, do you want to tell everyone about our goals, doc? Yeah, we have our own pie bytes goals, doc, where we roll down our big goals and we really. Yeah. Spend some time thinking big and, and we go back from time to time. Yeah. So that's, that's unique because these are shared goals with the two of us, but we also know what each other's goals are and we constantly harass each other about it. What are you doing? Where are you at with that? And leave me alone, man. It's been a hard week. Haven't slept in days, so that sort of stuff happens. But either way, find yourself an accountability partner and make, you know, form a relationship with them and really make use of them. It's a really powerful tool. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about our goals then. What we achieved this year, 2020 and what's on the roadmap for 2021. You want to get started? Definitely. So I think the first one and most of you listening have probably heard about this in some way, shape or form, but this year we launched our coaching program, the Pie Bytes developer mindset program. We did that earlier in the year, like, I think a month or two into the year. And it was rough, it was tough, it was difficult, but we kept pushing and we broke that goal down into chunks. So it wasn't just a matter of launching, it was a matter of making it successful and doing whatever we had to do. So we like to think we've done that based on the data that we have and the amount of people that we've helped and supported and coached. That was a huge win for us. Massive win, yeah. And I went full time pivots in July, so I left Oracle and went full into the coaching and the business. That was definitely a goal I wanted to achieve. Of course, after a lot of steps and the things we discussed so far, but that happened and definitely related to goal setting. Yeah, that's amazing. And I remember, you know, we had a finite date written down for that. Like there was a. We were really pushing for that date, so. And congrats again, man, I'm clapping here, but I don't think the mic's picking it up. So that was a huge win. I think that was a win for both of us. All right, I was rooting for you as well. But the other goal, this one was one of my goals to do with pibytes, was with the developer mindset program. And pibytes as a whole, we saw just how much the mindset piece of the career, of learning, of everything, was. We saw how powerful it was and how many people out there in our community really engaged with it. So integrating mindset into what we do, into what we teach, into what we write and what we talk about was a huge win for me, really pushing that. So it's one of the things I'm championing, if I'm going to use a corporate term, one of the things I'm pushing harder than anything else, because mindset's proven to just for us, for our clients, for people that we work with and talk to, it's super powerful with helping you achieve your success. Love it, man. If I'm Mister automation, you are a mister mindset. Mister mindset. Mm, I like it. I'll take it. And lastly, some other goal related things, is that we launch more products. So we got an introductory python course, the tips book, which we already talked about, and now our podcast. And so those are big goals we had to really break down, we had to work on consistently, and then they happened. But it all stemmed from specific goals. Yep. It's funny. I'm really glad we got the podcast in before the end of the year. That was something. We've been. We've been working on this for months, and just with the book and everything else happening, we just kept procrastinating it. See, we do it as well. To procrastinating. Yeah, yeah. Everything else, you almost forgot about it. Like did we came in last week. Oh, by the way, shall we launch this podcast we have sitting there for two months? Oh, yeah, let's do it. We had everything set up. The back end, it was 95% done. Unbelievable. All right, so on that note, what didn't we achieve? Well, we almost didn't achieve podcasts, but I'm glad we did. So, from a personal note, my, what I didn't achieve this year is what I touched on before, and that was moving houses. It was really important to me that we did this and we didn't get it done. And there are a few excuses that I would gladly throw in there. COVID happened, and. But the reality is I had to choose the priority, and for us, the priority was the baby. And with that came, obviously, a lot of expenses and just a huge shift in what was important to us as a family. So moving houses had to move into 2021, but still came good this year, I think. Yep, it will happen. I didn't hit my 50 books a year reading goal. I do think I read in 50 books, but didn't complete them. And that's okay. I did a ton of reading. Just couldn't be that much as I wanted because all the pie byte stuff. But it's fine. Probably read like 20, which is still a decent number. So I think that's a good example of aiming for the stars, landing on the moon. Yeah. I mean, you read so much and I want to think you opened more than 50 books this year. I just. I'm going to take the blame for this one, man. I didn't hold you accountable. I'm sorry. We also had a mutual goal that we were both working on this year, and that was to, you know, know, get our ideal workout volume in. And what we mean by that is exercise. We love exercise. We love breaking it down almost into troubleshooting scientific type things like, okay, let's see how far I can push myself with this many reps, this many, this much volume, you know. And so we were doing really well. We really smashed through the first half of this year. We got towards the end of the year, and then I don't know what happened, man, but things just started falling off the radar and we started choose other priorities. I'm going to say chose priorities because we're taking ownership of our action here. It didn't just, we didn't just forget this was us making a conscious choice that we weren't going to make this a priority. So we got to the past month and neither of us have really done anything. We've only just started to pick it back up in the past week. So we're copying to that. We didn't achieve our working out throughout the entire year consistently. So I find this fascinating. I think workouts can be an episode on itself because I think what does happen here is that with the workouts, we not really setting goals, like measuring our performance in the gym and then see if we can improve that next week. I'm not sure if you're weighing yourself. I'm not recently, so not having that intel or data. The motivation is not following. Right. But if I would say, like, I want to drop like five pounds, then I have this very specific goal and all the other stuff is going to align, right. I'm going to get up and go to the gym. I'm going to watch what I eat better. So I think the workout thing is, it's a great illustration and definitely something we. I hope we get back on track next year. Yeah, totally. And we will. We will. So everyone else here, I think listening is going to hold us accountable now. We don't have a choice. We're on dangerous grounds now, which is a nice segue into next year. What's on the agenda then, Julian? So we'll go back to the coaching program. Pibytes developer mindset program. Of course, that's going to be one of our big goals because that's what we're working on. So we want to grow that to be five times its current volume. And the exciting thing about that is that that means it's unmanageable by us and that means we need to leverage some support. We're going to be looking at acquiring a team. So having people come in and help us with the program, do some of the coaching, and it's exciting and scary at the same time. Big goal for us. There's really a stretch goal and it's the first time we cannot really deal with things ourselves anymore because of the volume. And I think that's a really exciting thing for our business. And to start thinking about team outsourcing, that's really what a business is about, the growth and the new challenges. Right, exactly. Cool. Well, the tips book then, as we're hitting 200, we always said with 300, you're going physical, so that inevitably is going to happen. Well, if we stay on track, and that's why we have the goal. And so once we are at 300, we're going to put that in a physical edition and it will be sweet. No, I cannot wait, cannot wait to hold that book. It's going to be amazing. I want to have a stack on my desk. Yeah. Just for no reason other than to have a stack on your desk. That's what people do, right. If you have a book, it's a major project and definitely, again, goes back to that concrete number, 300. And we're really having that in mind the whole time now. Yep, yep, exactly. And on that note, we have a few more things that we want to create for you. Products, if you going to use that word on Python, but not only just python, we like to move into mindset and career as well as those are our three pillars. So you'll see a lot more from us in the next year as well. Yeah, some really exciting stuff coming. Yeah, definitely. All right, Bob, so your turn. What's a personal goal for you next year? Yeah. Quickly on the personal side, then definitely want to learn the basics of investing. I think that really resonates with you. Yeah, I'll help you budget. Yeah, it's just fascinating. And I think, you know, if you talk about goals, I think you should really aim to have goals in all areas of life. So that's family, work, spiritual and finance is one of those. Like, how do you manage your money? And if you can save some. I don't want to have that money just sitting there in the bank doing nothing. Can. Can you leverage that? So that that's an area I want to dive into. And secondly, and that depends on COVID, of course, is to get some more travel with the family. But again, that's all depends. Where do you want to go? Well, at least to Paris. The correct answer was Sydney, but that's okay. That's fine, man. Don't worry about it. Ash, can I, can I edit this up? No. What about you? What about your personal goals? Well, I got a couple here. So the first one is just a flow on from last, this year's goal, which is move houses. And so that, that's a given. So I won't go into that. But one of the things I've noticed is my kids with school, they're sort of, they're learning computer skills, but they seem to be learning on just tablets. And so when I sit them in front of a computer, they get, oh, yeah, the mouse works like this, but they don't know how to type. They don't understand what, you know, a word processor is email, all that stuff. I don't know what's going on with the schools. I can always ask, but I want to show them. I want to introduce them to that. Introduce them to windows and to Mac Os, you know, let them make up their decision. No influence from Uncle Bob. So it's kind of exciting to me, bringing them into my world a bit. And I'm hoping that will then lead them into programming. Like, I hate to say it, because daddy likes programming. My son, he's not a huge fan of programming. It hurts. It hurts so much. But we'll get him there. We'll get him there. And speaking of programming, the last goal that I have for next year is to really take on OpenCV. This is something that I started this year. I didn't, it wasn't a goal. It was something I just randomly picked up and I started learning it and I really enjoyed it, but because it wasn't a front and center goal. I had to table it a bit. So coming into this year, I really want to dive into OpenCV. That's awesome, man. Yeah. And I probably want to look into data a bit more after doing so much web development, but as we just said, I need to quantify that. Yeah. All right, so now our favorite part, the call to action. So what are we going to ask everyone to do? Write down their goals and have fun with it. Yeah, I think that's the important part. Have fun with it. And make these extravagant. Get out there, aim high. Start writing them out, break them down into chunks, give them timelines, assign months and dates to them. Have some fun with it. Get excited. You should, because once you have those goals written down, you can start working towards them. And this is not a new year's resolution thing, right? No, no, not that rubbish. We inspire you to make it a habit to write them down every week, every month, and revise them. Yeah. In fact, wherever you are now, pull over the car and start doing it. Now. No, I'm just kidding. But start today. Don't wait until. Don't fall. Rely on this crutch of, oh, January 1, New Year's resolution. No, not that rubbish. Start now. Why not start tonight? Just pull out a book, sit down with a beer or a wine or a coffee or something, and just take 30 minutes a to yourself and just start writing. Have some fun with it. That's the goal. And that was totally a pun. So the last thing I'll throw in here as well is that if one of your goals happens to be python related and career related, we want to talk to you. Come and talk to us. This is our bread and butter. We love talking about it. So there will be a link in the show notes that you can click on that will take you to a form that allows you to come and speak with us, with Bob and myself. So we love to talk about goals. We love to talk about your career goals with Python and what it takes to get you there. So come and chat with us. Right, awesome. I think that's a wrap. So we covered a lot of ground. We hope this was useful and inspiring, and we cannot wait to record the next episode. Yeah, I think it's been longer than I thought, but it's worth it. That was the goal. All right, Bob, you take these men. Thanks so much. All right, man. Thanks. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To hear more from us, go to Pybite friends. That is Pybit es friends, and receive a free gift just for being a friend of the show and to join our thriving slack community of Python programmers, go to Pybytes community. That's Pybiton es community. We hope to see you there and catch you in the next episode.