#018 - High Risk Mindset: Going From Marketer to Developer

I don't want to be dialing down my risk at my age. I actually want to be dialing it up. I always. I do this thing. It's deathbed, Pete. Pete's on his deathbed. What's he going to regret? You know, is he going to regret not doing this coding boot camp, or is he going to regret doing it? And I sort of just picture myself through, and it's a bit of, you know, stoicism where, you know, you sort of think, what's the worst that could happen? 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 Baldebos. 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, everybody. Welcome back to the Pyewites podcast. I'm Bob Eldeboz, and I'm here with Julian Soquera. How are you, man? Great. It's Monday. New week. New opportunities. Every week we say the same thing. We should just record this part and just stick it at the front of every episode. No man should keep it authentic anyway. All right, all right. We kept. Kept in waiting long enough. So, another special episode. This week, we have another guest from our pie bites community, and this one is a friend of mine. So, Pete lynch, how are you? I'm good, guys, thanks. Thanks a lot for having me on the podcast. It's always been a dream of mine to be on the same audio clip as you two. Awesome. We're excited to have you here, and we're going to talk about some interesting things. Yeah, you've got a pretty low bar if that was one of your dreams, so I appreciate it, Pete, thanks. Yeah, for everyone listening out there. Pete and I both live in Australia and have caught up a couple of times now, so there's a bit of casual stuff there. I apologize, Bob. Don't mean to make you feel left out. Yeah, it's a complete FoMo year now. So, Pete, maybe you want to introduce yourself a bit like what you do day to day. How do you got into Python? And where did you meet Pybyte? Yeah, so my coding journey sort of starts back in about 2015, I think. I went to San Francisco. My brother and sister were living there at the time, and my brother was just starting to transition, I should say. My brother in law is starting to transition from academia to tech. He's a data scientist for AWS or Amazon I think, but get the two confused. Anyway, he got me really interested. I was doing my masters of marketing at the time and I was thinking, this is awesome, this stuff. I want to learn more. So I got home and sort of back from the US and started looking into things like automate the boring stuff with Python. Then I got onto the 100 days of code course from pyrebytes and talk Python. And that's when I really thought, this is something I really enjoy. But then I sort of sat on that for about two or three years and didn't take it any further until sort of recently, where I've just sort of started to transition careers from marketing into. Into development. That's cool. And we remember fondly how your 100 days of code went, because you were one of those. The few people from the very start of that, that was just consistent and coding every day and sharing it on Twitter. And that's actually when I learned that you're actually an Aussie as well, and that made it even more special. Right. So, no, cool, man. That was a great chance to get to know you and we love that you saw that through to the end. You actually completed it. So that was cool. I remember those tweets. Yeah, you were very consistent from the start, so that really stood out. Yeah. Yeah. I couldn't have done it without you guys. I think I definitely badgered you both in the slack group for some assistance at times. So that was one of the benefits of being early as well, actually. I knew Julian. I knew you were from Australia instantly. Your thick bogan accent, compared to us, Bob or Michael, was a dead giveaway. Yeah, fair enough. I was asking for that. Nice. All right, so we'll hop back to one thing you said that that's going to kick this off was you've mentioned you went from marketing, so a traditional non coding role, and you've moved to a coding role. So the two questions for this. So why and does it include Python? What are the technologies involved here? Yeah, great, great question. So, yeah, just before I was. I was doing marketing, I was marketing ice cream, a brand called Blue Ribbon in Australia. And I think in. In the Netherlands, it's Hertog Bob, and in anyone in the US, it's Bryce. So it was a massive ice cream brand. The thing I actually really loved from that job was building new products and the sort of the process of coming up with an idea, thinking how users are going to interact with that thing. That's what I really enjoyed about that role. So COVID struck last year. Everyone's at home for three months and I sort of started to reflect on, you know, what am I doing and why am I doing it. And my partner had just gone through this exercise of figuring out what your values actually are. I think a lot of us, we have values that we inherit from our parents and we never stop to think, like, you know, are these my values? You know, is this actually the life I want to be living? Because on paper, you know, I was doing very well. I had a great job, high paying, very secure, and I was winning, you know, I was winning that game of life people tell you to play, but I wasn't. I don't know if I was super happy with where I was. So, you know, that's where I sort of had in the back pocket. I do some coding in my free time. I'd automated a lot of tasks at work. So from those values and that sort of work, I figured out, you know, what this coding thing is for me. It lets me build more frequently. You know, it lets me live the lifestyle I want to live. It lets me be involved with the people I want to be involved in. You know, I did marketing because I thought it was a lot about creativity and creation, but I was actually a professional email sender and PowerPoint builder. And, you know, in development I'm actually flexing a lot of creativity and, you know, thinking about, you know, logical problems and those sort of things and doing so doing that second part of your question, like, what am I using? Python? I'm not actually using Python at the moment. Python will always be my first love. You know, you never forget your first. I mean, I'm doing web development at the moment and it's more just because I'm only interning at the moment, so I've just finished a sort of five month bootcamp and my skills really lie in using react JavaScript and Ruby on Rails. So that's sort of the backend of the application I'm using. And I'm actually at the moment using something called React Native, which is for mobile application development. And it's amazing because you can now develop an app across iOS and Android in the one time, and you're writing it using, you know, quite a high level language. Oh, that's cool. That's awesome. That's. I'll jump in there really quick, or not really quick as everyone knows by now. That's one of the things. Again, I'm going to just, we're repetitive about this because it, it's so common and it's something that's really important to people. So you found your passion for coding after doing it and dabbling with it at work, after solving little problems, scripting little things. And it just ties back to that adage that you can't be passionate about something unless you've actually tried it first. So, you know, people say, oh, just. Just do what you're passionate about, or, what are you passionate about? Well, how are you supposed to know until you've played with it? So unless you've tried it in some long form? So you doing this at work really showed you that the path you'd taken, um, all of this time, this many years, you'd invested into marketing, this many years, you'd invested into that, you know, really seeing your role, man. Um, it's never too late to. To change. It's never too late to find where your real passion is. Something that makes you super happy, something that really gets you excited to get up in the morning, and something that's going to take you down a completely different path. It's. That's one thing we come across with so many people are people who feel like, I've dedicated the last 2030 years to this field. It's too late for me. I'm too old. And so that, to me, just screams, it's never too old. You can never be too old to change paths. So I really love that about your story. A combination, then, of following your passion, but also getting good at something before you really call it a passion. Right. Yeah. I actually hate that term. Like, follow your passion, because, like, what am I passionate about? Like, am I. Am I passionate about web frameworks? No, I think I build passion through developing skill and getting better at something. You know, the more you work away at something, the more you get better, the more passionate you sort of become. Was I passionate about coding when I was automating scripts and stuff? No, I was just lazy. And I wanted to, you know, get extra time to do other things in my day, like go to the gym and, you know, do that sort of stuff. And what I was. What I found was that the. The passion was in the learning and those things that I really valued. You know, if you're passionate about collecting basketball cards, like, I don't know if you should make that your career, maybe, but, yeah, I think you craft and build on passion over time. Yeah, that's good insight. And it also had an impact on your lifestyle. Right, the marketing versus now the coding role. Yeah, 100%, Bob. Like, I get a lot more time to sort of think and work through problems in this role, whereas, you know, like I said, professional email sender, PowerPoint builder, and you know, on the side I'd be a professional meeting taker that was just side gig taking. Yeah, nice. So going from marketing then to this coder job, that's of course pretty tough to get there. And you already said you did 100 days, you started automating the boring stuff. But could you give us some more steps you took to actually get that web development job? Because a lot of non coders don't have that cs degree or not that experience. They might be wondering, wow, how did Pete do that? It's not easy to get a job like that. No, it's certainly not easy. And I'm about 90% there. Sort of just finished, I'm in an internship at the moment and you know, sort of think sort of close to lining up their first official role. But what I sort of did was I was working in this job, like I've said, and I was only because of the constraints and the time that you have to give that role, I was only giving myself, you know, 2 hours a night and you know, the weekends sort of work on improving it development. And so in COVID I really said, yeah, let's, let's try and make sure I'm doing those 2 hours, doing those weekends consistently. And I just found that meetings drop into your calendar, 2 hours goes to an hour weekends. You know, I've got a partner, I've got other demands in my life, so those ideas of 8 hours, of four now and those sort of things. So I actually made the call to quit my job, resign and go into a five month boot camp. So that's, you know, we started off there doing like HTML CSS and you, and build your way up, all the way up to sort of JavaScript. And the big reason I made that decision was, yeah, like I said, I couldn't give myself the time and I knew that that was a barrier to maybe being able to, you know, switch careers. And then once you're in the boot camp it was all about immersion. So I completely immersed myself in coding. So I joined one global meetup a week. So I'd go to any meetup in the world, just listen in. I started reading, you know, I optimized my Reddit so that it was all the development subreddits, so I just couldn't look away from the stuff. My homepage was hacker News, those sort of things, just immersion and community. So like surrounding yourself with people that are actively doing it all the time, that really helped me build to a point where my skills rapidly increased. And then the next part is all about networking. It's all about, you know, how do you meet people? How do I get past that barrier of not having the CS degree and, you know, this, the CES degree and the roles I'm going for is not super relevant. I like to sort of describe the roles I'm looking to do as a tradesman. You know, I'm in there to build things. I don't need the ability to think through code closer to the machine. I'm using high level libraries where people have an objective in mind to build something. And is it relevant if I know, like, data structures and those sort of things 5% of the time, but 95% of the time? No, that's. That's amazing. So hang on, I'm going to take a step back there for a sec. You immerse. I love this concept of immersion, right? Because that's just throwing everything at it that's not taking a half assed approach, that's going full on in. And I think that's fantastic that you did that. And you can see the results. Right. What I want to touch on there is you talked about, you know, joining the global meetup. She talked about your homepage and just what you were consuming. But what were you doing from a practical standpoint? Because, you know, we're all about building, right? We're all back. There's one thing to consume being tutorial paralysis. But what were you doing to build, to put that to good use? Yeah, that's actually an awesome question because that's. Yeah, something I struggled with in the, you know, before I joined the bootcamp is like, how do I get out of that tutorial process paralysis, that purgatory state where you watch something, you finish and you go, I don't know how to do that. So one of the things I learned really quickly in the bootcamp is, and it's something I think is like, junior developers or people that are just starting out too, is you think you look at these projects, right? You look at, like, pie bytes and you think, oh, Bob and Julian must have just known how to build that from, like, day one to you, you know, day two, it was all they had it. But coding is like, just to use, like, HTML. When you're building something in HTML, right? It's just, you take it div by div. Like, first you build the navbar, then you build the hero page, then you build the text on it, and you just take it bit by bit. It's a really iterative process. So that was the first thing, like, change that mindset and understand that. Like, when you're building things, it's that iterative process. And then the next thing was, yeah, to get building. And that's another pet hate of mine is like, if you're in, learn to program or something and you go, what's the best way to learn to code? And you hear all these people go, oh, just build stuff. You know, build stuff. And these, you know, these guys like, can barely get their syntax right, you know, and you want them to sort of build things. So, like more constructive sort of advice would be like, yeah, try and. All right, you want to be a web developer, try and build a navbar in HTML and css. And then once you've done that, all right, now try and make it responsive. And so it's not just that, it's not just the building that's iterative, but it's like the project's iterative in terms of leveling your skills up. And that's sort of what I really aim to do was take on small little projects and iterate and build your way up. And then as you're doing that, you're just constantly building your skills. And then the last bit to my sort of process and learning was I read this awesome book called a mind for numbers. And one of the big takeaways there was this study they did that was like, people that, like, knew that if they were studying for a test or people that got told they were studying to teach other people. The people that studied with the teaching other people in mind outperformed the people that knew that they were sort of studying for a test. Because the way you have to think when you're thinking, like, how would I teach this to someone else? Is completely different than trying just to rote, learn and chunk stuff into your memory so you can regurgitate it onto a page. So I really went in with that teacher's mindset and tried to write a few sort of posts as I was going along. Teach people what I was doing in the boot camp. I was always talking to people and showing them I built this and this is how I did it. And if you're interested, this is how you can do it. That's great. Very iterative approach, but also being proactive. Right. And sharing what you learn. Yep. Our approach, I love it. Makes me feel good. It's like a reassurance. But, you know, the building thing, I'll just call it out quickly that that's really cool, because, you know, we even say, you know, we need to build. People need to build to do it. But it's a really good point because you have to sort of know at least what track you want to go down because it's easy just to say build. But if you have no idea what the heck you want to do, if you don't have any ideas, then you're just throwing it into the wind. So in your case, you knew you want to go down web development. That's right, yeah. Yeah. For me, like, part of going into development is to look at how to create, like, passive income and those sort of things. And, you know, web development was where I sort of really identified, like, opportunities to do that sort of stuff. Oh, cool. So you were working backwards from the goal. Yeah. Nice. Very cool. I'm happy. I'm happy. All right. I'm happy to move on. Let's go, Bob. So you mentioned mindset in your previous answers, so let's talk a bit about that. What's the role of mindset in getting here? Because we have the technical skills. Those are mostly all learnable. But what about the mindset? Persistence, dealing with failure, that kind of stuff. How important has that been for you? Mindset's everything, right? Like, I quickly learned as I've gone along that, you know, develop coding is this easy part. Like, coding is the easy part. Once you can get the basics underway and those sort of skills, like you'll. Yeah, it'll get hard. There'll be hard parts, but, yeah, it's really the easy part, whereas mindset is, is the hard part. And especially as you're learning, you know, I think everyone loves to throw around fixed and growth mindset, but, yeah, in this, in this field and, you know, in life, growth mindset is super important. Like, I've all, I think I've always had a growth mindset. I've loved to sort of try and prove people wrong that, you know, I'm not good at this thing now, but I can be good at it. You know, there's nothing stopping me. But, geez, in development, there were times there where I was sort of like, and especially when I was trying to juggle work and do this and you just sort of think, wow, maybe, maybe I can't, can't do this. But, you know, I can tell you, having gone through a boot camp, like, anyone can do it. Like, there's, there's people that started with zero experience and, you know, they're up and running now. It's, it's an industry where anyone can do it, but you need the mindset to be able to do it. You know, there's people that did the bootcamp and had that fixed mindset. Got it early on, got a bit down on themselves, and it's very hard to recover from that. And fix versus growth mindset, that's from Carol Dreck. Right. Yeah. So if you've got a fixed mindset, you sort of believe that what you've good at, you're born with it and you can't change it. Some people are just good at math. They're born with it. I'll never be good at math because I wasn't born with that. Whereas growth mindset sort of says, I can become good at this thing. I've just got to apply myself, work hard, you know, build the right strategies and find the way, and I'll get there. And it might take me longer than other people, but no matter what I set my mind to, I can do with that. So, yeah, having that growth mindset is invaluable. Cool, cool. Yeah. We have this small hack that if we say, like, we cannot do or we don't have, blah, and then we say, like, yet. Yeah, I love it. Not yet, but we can. We will, you know. Yeah, that's awesome. It feels good to say yet. It's almost like scheming. So I love it. So. All right, so that, speaking of mindset, then you told us prior to this, you know, about developing a high risk mindset. So just tell us a bit about that. Yes, I was thinking a bit about that after I sort of said that to you guys. You know, what? Like, high risk mindset? What do I mean? And I've been thinking a lot about it as I made this huge change in my life. And I noticed that, like, people around me, you know, I'm 32, so people around me, they're starting to lock in secure jobs, you know, buy houses, you know, have, you know, have kids and do those sort of things. And when I sort of say high risk, I'm looking around, I'm sort of saying. Saying, I don't want to be dialing down my risk at my age. I actually want to be dialing it up. I always. I do this thing. It's a deathbed. Pete, I think, you know, Pete's on his deathbed. What's he going to regret? You know, is he going to regret, you know, not doing this coding boot camp, or is he. Is he going to regret doing it? And, you know, I sort of just picture myself through and it's a bit of, you know, stoicism where, you know, you sort of think, what's the worst that could happen? So when I say high risk, I guess I'm saying high risk comparative to maybe where other people are at my age in their life. And so for me, it's, yeah, it's saying, like, I want to run a marathon at 32. You know, I'm way higher risk of injuring myself. You know, I'm at high risk of embarrassing myself from doing a terrible time. But deathbed Pete's not going to regret it. You know, he's going to look back and he's going to say, I'm just, I'm glad I did it. So I think that's, that's where I look at it, you know, when, so, like, a really good way to think of it is like your financial portfolio. Everyone tells you, like, you're young, you should have lots of risk in there, and then as you get older, you should dial it back. But with my life, like, I want to do it the opposite way. I think, like, why, why do we dial our risk back? Like, as we get older, like, why do we, why do people, like, settle into these jobs that, like, they don't, like, you can tell they don't like, hey, it's a chore for them to be there every day. And, you know, maybe that's because they're supporting families and things like that, and no disrespect to them, but I want to take more risk into my life. You know, I'm happy to have a family and be working as an intern, as a, as a developer and those sort of things while I can. So I'm trying to dial my, I'm trying to look for areas that I can, like, dial my risk up. Going into my thirties, especially relative to, like, my peers. That's amazing advice because people don't realize, right? They say, like, yeah, the entrepreneur route is high risk, but actually, if you just sit in a job and don't grow and improve yourself, you might get axed anytime. So, I mean, people don't realize that that's actually the real risk, right? There's no, I don't see any risk in trying out new things. Upskilling. And I mean, you only attract more opportunity, right? Yeah, exactly, Bob. And it's like, I think it's interesting. Like, we're actually probably, as humans, like, we're terrible at, like, mitigating risk. Like, we're terrible at saying, oh, not, sorry, not mitigating. Assessing risk. We're terrible at assessing risk, like, you know, what we look at and say, oh, this is a really risky thing. It isn't actually as risky as we think it is, you know? Yep, yep. I completely agree. It. It's kind of funny because it's almost like the word risk is the, it's the wrong word, because in your case, like, he, as an outsider, hearing that you left your high flying corporate job to take on this, you know, new endeavor, there'd be plenty of us sitting there saying, geez, he's got guts. That would have taken, like, the fear involved. That would have been so scary to do. But the reality is, you know, you just knew what you wanted, and you knew which direction you wanted to go. So the word risk is more of an external word than other people would use, but in your head, it was probably not even a word. It's probably not a word you'd use at all for that situation. You'd say, I'm just making a change, no big deal, you know, and the word risk for me is not even about me and what I want to do. The risk would be more about how it would affect my family. Would it risk their livelihood? Would it risk their ability to maintain a lifestyle or go to that school or, you know, have food every night? That's the risk. But to my sanity, it's actually exciting. It's actually something that I can't wait to do more of. So, yeah, this is exciting, man. You got, you got me pumped up. Well, it's. Yeah, you touched on a cool point, Bob, because, like, Bob, Julian, sorry, man. What you do is you are, if you, if you flip it, the risk was actually staying in a job for another ten years that I didn't really like. And that's, like, that's probably more high risk to me because time is the only non renewable resource. Like, we. We can never get time back. So that's, I guess, my, I assess everything in time. I don't assess it in dollars and cents. It's. It's like the time that you won't get back. Oh, man, this, this is deep. I love it, by the way. I'll just add in here that deathbed. Julian is a real taskmaster for me. He insists on so many things. So I've got words with him a bit later. I'm feeling a bit tired. That's really true. Like, what's the worst that can happen? I like that you mentioned stoicism. Those are great books to read. Ryan Holiday, Seneca. Yeah, I've got my daily stoic. I should probably start it again, but perfectionism, I'll start it from March. All right, so that's awesome, Pete. We really appreciate all of your input. You know, it's, again, a call out for everyone listening. The mindset is so important in whatever it is you're doing, especially the growth. And on that note, Pete, do you have any tips for aspiring developers, for the audience? Anything else you want to say? But maybe I'll just touch on. I get asked this a lot after I've sort of done a boot camp. You know, should you do a boot camp? And, you know, the cop out answer is, it depends. But, you know, if you. If you're on the fence about it, I'd personally say, yeah, definitely do it. Especially if you. You've been using platforms like pie bytes and those sort of things. And you. You do want to make the switching careers because nothing, nothing will progress you quicker than surrounding yourself with peers that are out for the same outcome. For me, it's, you know, hugely beneficial to have people accountability buddies to sort of keep you going. And I'm quite competitive, so, you know, someone comes to school with something pretty cool, then I've got to top that. You know, that's, you know, I got to shoot my shot and show them what's what. But, you know, I think, yeah, if you think about doing it, definitely, definitely consider it. You can reach out to me and sort of ask more if you have any. Any questions about it. But, yeah, that and the other part, the other bit of advice that was really big for me was that growth mindset and breaking the problem down. Yeah. Like I said, no one tells you when you try to build a project that you can break it down into these little steps. I think most people go in with it going, I've got to figure out how to build this whole thing at the start, but you just got to build each component and then sticky tape and bubble gum it together. Start small, iterate fast. Right. Ship fast. Yeah. 107 bob. Cool. So talking about reaching out to you, where can people find you? You can find me with my tweeting figures. Tweeting fingers, I should say, on Twitter. I think I'm the linchpin au. So, yeah, you can reach out to me there. I have a website, Peter Lunch, because I couldn't get Peter lynch. He's a very famous wall street investor, and my nickname in school was the lunchbox, or had a lot of nicknames, but that's. I grabbed that one. So I like to write sort of some tutorials and mindset stuff on there. So if you're interested in checking out more. Yeah, you can find me over there as well. Nice. We will link those. And you're also in the PI by slack, right? Yeah, 100%. Yep. I love to turn notifications off, but the only ones I accept are the apps. So if you want to chat at me. Cool, cool. Nice. Well, thanks heaps, Pete. We really enjoyed the chat. I hope everyone else enjoyed it. We appreciate your time on this Monday, and, yeah, we'll catch everyone here next week. Thanks, Bob. Thanks, Pete. Thanks for having me, guys. Really appreciate it. Thanks, Pete. Have a great day. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To hear more from us, go to Pibyte friends, that is Pibit 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 Pibytes community, that's pibit es forward slash community. We hope to see you there and catch you in the next episode.