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So you have to be realistic in some of these situations. You know, people have to be realistic, be honest with themselves. Are they actually doing what's needed to be done, what needs to be done in order to get promoted? Hello, and welcome to the Pibytes 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. Right. Welcome to another Pie Bytes podcast episode. I am Julian. How you going, Bob? Hey, welcome, everybody. Yeah, good. I keep saying it, right. If you don't work the weekend, which we did, luckily, this week, today, I'm fresh and full of ideas and inspiration. I'm fresh and full of chocolate after that long weekend, so. But, yeah, I came today. I wanted to tell a story. Do you mind? Yeah, tell us a story. So grab a cup of tea. Grab a tea time with Julian. Yeah, grab a coffee. Sit down. Let us tell you. Let us. Let Papa Julian tell you, because, wait, before you go into it, the topic of today is to be realistic with your expectations. Frame it a little bit. Yeah, all right, fine, fine. Perfectionism, man, I tell you. Spoiler. Sorry. All right, so for everyone listening, I want to first apologize and say, I'm not rubbing this in, but over here in Australia, we're pretty much open with the whole COVID thing. And so I was able to, last week, go away with the family for a little beach holiday to my favorite, favorite town. Now, this is a beach town I've been going to since 2004, so quite a long time, and a lot of memories, a lot of traditions there. So very happy to take the kids, my wife, and just the five of us go. Now, I was looking forward, and I remember saying this to Bob. Oh, yeah, I'm going to take my kindle. I'm going to take a book. I'm going to read. And I was super excited to get into it. And sure enough, within a day of being there, it became very apparent that that wasn't going to happen, because three kids up at the beach, sunny weather, first time in, like two weeks, they wanted nothing but me, and they wanted the beach, they wanted the pool, they wanted to go walking through bush and whatever else was around the area. They just wanted to be out and about. And it was great, except I started to get frustrated. I started to get annoyed that I wasn't getting my time. It was a holiday I'd just driven the hours up there and I just wanted to chill out. And I remember messaging Bob going, oh, man, this isn't exactly what I expected, so I'm going to dwell on that word expected. Right? But I took a step back and this is the moral of the story. So forgive me, but I took a step back on the second afternoon at some point, I can't remember when it was, and I thought to myself, you know, what is the point of this? And I readjusted my expectations. I thought, well, the point wasn't for me to get hours of reading time. The point was for me to spend time with the family, to give the kids a break, to get them out of the house, to make up for the quarantine time that we did have to go through. And once I reset those expectations and got realistic with it all, I had a much better time. I found myself much more present with the kids. I wasn't trying to rush through things. We were having a fantastic time in the pool. We laughed, we joked, and it was just a much better time. And it just reminded me there were so many similarities that you can draw from that with the day to day, with the job and everything going on that can help us deal with potentially frustrating situations a little bit better. So I'm going to stop there, Bob, and I'm going to let you say something. Yeah, no, I remember the difference in messages because we sent each other audio messages, the contrast between Thursday and the weekend messages and yeah, it's, I think you midway shifted expectations and yeah, you came out super happy. Yeah, that's a great story. And relaxed. Yeah. As it has to be related to dad, I have a similar story. So this week it's Easter holiday and the kids are home. So I'm learning from the master here and I set my expectation soon, in a week. So it's Monday as we record this. And yeah, I already adjusted expectations to already prepare mentally that I'm going to be distracted like three times more and probably get some less work done. But on the other hand, I can be more present with them. So I made that choice and can make it up next week by working 125% or whatever it takes. So yeah, I'm expecting less stress by setting that expectation in my mind. Yeah, you know what, that's a cool one as well because, you know, I think it's very relatable to many people. It's not just school holidays. Right. But quarantine as well. A lot of people are stuck home with the kids. So the other thing you did in that situation was you came and talked to me as well and said, you know, hey, Jose, I always talk to you about mindset, man. I always go, mindset advice to you? No, but I mean, you told me you set expectations with me as well, right? You said, look, the kids are home for two weeks on holidays, on school holidays, so there will be more distractions when it comes to pie bites. Right. And that's when I cried because I said so. Same here. My kids are home for two weeks as well. Oh, no. And because if I say

don't ping me after 01: 6:19

00 p.m. Doesn't matter because you're asleep. So, yeah, that works. Time zones work in our favor. But I think it's important. A good call out there is to set those expectations with your stakeholders. Right? Talking about stakeholders, an important field where you can book wins with this is work, of course. And yeah, you have an interesting example there, right? Yeah. Yeah. I've got an ex colleague that I remember when we worked together a couple of years ago, they were struggling with promotion, trying to get promoted to another job level specifically. So same role, but just a small senior position. And I won't go to the details of the permission of the position itself. But what I will say is that their expectations weren't exactly aligned with the stakeholders, meaning their manager, the customer, the clients, whatever. And the promotion just wasn't happening. So because they weren't working to expectation and also they had their expectations set completely differently to the managers and stakeholders and clients, there was no alignment there and the promotion wasn't happening. So this individual, you know, he thought he was before me and he thought he was doing a great job, but he didn't have that alignment. And he went. Well, two, two points there. One, he should have been aligned with what the manager and what the team and what the business expected. Right. But the other thing is, if he's not operating to expectation, he cannot expect to be promoted. So you have to be realistic in some of these situations. You know, people have to be realistic, be honest with themselves. Are they actually doing what's needed to be done, what needs to be done in order to get promoted? And I know this is a very hot cup of tea. There's a very debatable and tough topic to cover. So I won't go into any more detail, but I will say at the end of the day, your expectations, if to be promoted, your expectations have to align with those of your leaders and you have to set your expectations based on that. Yeah, that's an excellent point and you really need to have that dialogue with your manager and maybe even the director, whatever is in the line above. You remember Chris Voss was saying on a podcast that to get a promotion or a pay rise, it was, you cannot just ask for it. That doesn't make sense. Right? Then you come off very selfishly. It's all about the raise you're going to get, but you actually need to ask what are your top profile projects and how can I get involved with those? And then your raise is just a natural consequence of that. So yeah, it's very important to have that conversation and to have clarity. What's of most importance, what has the most impact on the business, and then you're well on your way to a promotion. Talking about work. The fourth expectation story I have was moving teams and I spoke about this before, was doing automation work as a programmer among domain experts for a long time, which made me after a while, senior developer on that team. And then I made a lateral move in the organization to the construction business and I joined a major software team of very professional coders and I had to set the expectation to become a junior again. So going from big fish small pond to big pond small fish again and accept the fact that I was going to have to work sustaining for a while to really get up to speed with the product. But yeah, I learned a lot of troubleshooting and debugging, uh, in those first two years. Do you remember, out of curiosity, do you remember what you told yourself? I mean, I remember when you made this move, but you're going from being the senior to that relative junior. Yeah. I mean, you're still a senior in the sense that you knew, you knew your code, but you're going to a much more extensive code base and everything. Right? Everything was different. So what do you remember what you told yourself to get yourself through it? Yeah, that's a great question. I took it with a growth mindset. Right. Like I don't have the skills yet. I have to go through this period to really get to that senior developer level and. Yeah, so that was just some grit there as well. Yeah. Nice. That's why I love you, man. This is the sort of stuff that it intimidates people. But you know, if you have that, if you go into it the right mindset and set those, be realistic with the expectations, you know, to use that term again, you know, you'll find that success and look at you now, right? Yeah, definitely imposter syndrome. Definitely like those first code reviews. Because in the old role I was just, you know, one man shop. Right. I was writing the code and people came with me with requests, and I didn't really have people to review my code. And all of a sudden, every line of code is being reviewed by two senior devs or, you know, people that know a lot more than you. Definitely intimidating, but you have to go through that, right? Exactly. All right, so I'll jump into one of my ones then, just sharing some more expectation adjustments. So I was in a non coding role at one point, and I already established that I could code. I'd established that, you know, I developed a couple of little things here and there, and I wanted to keep doing it, but I wasn't allowed to. I was told, that's not part of your core job. That's not what you're paid to do every day, to be blunt. And I remember feeling frustrated, man. I was cranky about it. I was like, come on, I've proven that I can code. Why won't you let me code every day? Why do I have to still do this? And almost, if you. Now that I say it out loud, it sounds quite childish, right, to be saying it like that. But at the end of the day, there's a lot of emotion there. I was frustrated. I felt like I'd proved myself. I didn't see why they wouldn't just make the move. But at the end of the day, the truth was I was hired into a specific role. And, yes, okay, I had shown them that I could code. I'd flex those coding muscles. I'd earned that trust and earned that respect, but I still had to do my job. So until I was going to go and apply for a coding job and where I was paid to do it full time, yeah, I had to adjust those expectations and say, yeah, all right, just be grateful that they gave you the chance and that they continue to come to you when they do need coding solutions. But be grateful that that's what's happening right now, because you could be in a role where they don't even let you do it and they just say, no, sorry. Your core job is to do X, Y and Z. There's no time for this. Bugger off. You know, but in this case, I was allowed to do some code. It just wasn't an all the time thing. And as frustrating as it was, reset those expectations and I got through it just fine, and everything worked out perfectly. In the end, I did end up getting to a coding role. So there's a great example. Yeah. And again, it comes back to pre framing it to set, expect things to happen and ingrained it in your mind, right? Yeah, totally. And, you know, the way I got to it in the end was just every chance I could to code. Right? I could get to code, I just jumped in. But once I readjusted those expectations that, you know, I wasn't going to get to do it every day, I was much happier. I think that's a key thing as well, right? You, by resetting those expectations, it's not just relieving frustration and. And all of that, it just makes you happier, right. You don't expect the thing you're missing out on. And the other thing, like your job description won't cover everything you do. Right. Because I was a support engineer, wrote that first big automation project, or it was really just a web tool. So even if you're in a non coder job, if you see opportunity to automate things and you can build tools just on the side or as an extra, then hell yes, you can do coding activities as long as you're adding value, right? Yeah, totally. The value add is important. So as long as you can get that in there, they generally won't say no. Yeah. All right, well, look, we've talked a lot about the corporate side of it, the career side of it, but there's another key one that, you know, you and I love to talk about health and all of that. So once you jump into one of those. Yeah. Without making it a pie bites fitness podcast. But we do love fitness and currently we're trying to lose some weight. Thank you as well. Right. We're both committed to that. Yep. And actually, we fell off the bandwagon, you know, a bit too much. So the goal is quite ambitious. Let's keep it at that. Hey, mine was. Mine was because the baby was born. What's your excuse, buddy? Yeah. Literally ignoring the alarm and just keep reading books. Label the books. Yeah, I like it. Yeah. Always. No. So now we have quite an ambitious goal. But, yeah, we were brainstorming the other day about this. We spoke about it again. The expectations come in because if you want to lose any number of kilos, do realize that's going to take a long and sustained effort. And not to go too much into the science, but you can only burn that much fat every week without going into starvation, without losing all your muscle mass. And those crash diets, whatever. Yeah. The goal we have, I think it will take us two or three months. Right. So then it's important to set that expectation that in three months you will have that goal, you will see that result and then just plow through it, be consistent and do the things, you know, that work without going too crazy. And once we set that expectation, now it's just execution and we enjoy it. You know, that's the other thing. The goal is fine and the results to get there, but enjoy the ride as well, right? Totally. Yeah. You know, the, the expectation thing works on the flip side as well. Right? I mean, I know this past Easter weekend, I've, I even told you, you know, all gloves off when it comes to the food because big, you know, family gathering, chocolate with the kids, you know, I don't want to, well, they're, they're eating ten eggs at once. I don't want to sit there nibbling on like the tiniest of eggs go, no, this is my calorie count for the day. Uh, I'm not going to do that. So you're, you're weighing those eggs, I'm sure. Yeah. I'm only having 12 grams of egg per day. Of chocolate. Egg per day. Oh, it's dark chocolate, so it's a different count. But anyway, I, um, I set that expectation with myself that this week was going to be a harder week than most because I know that I was going to indulge this week. I knew I was going to indulge this weekend. And so, yeah, I'm not going to be bummed out if I don't lose any grams or kilos this week. I'm not going to be bummed out if I don't see a physical change in my, you know, appearance with all the working out. Um, because I know I, I slacked off on the weekend and big deal. Right. So I'm not going to stress out about it. And this is what I mean about if you reset those, if you're realistic with those expectations, you can relieve a lot of stress, you can take a lot of weight off your shoulders, pun intended. You can take a lot of pain, pain out of your week where you stress and worry about things because you're just frustrated things aren't happening. So for me, this is, I set these expectations and I feel a lot better about everything. Really? Yeah. Awesome. So expectations reduce stress and I think also guarantee a more gradual, long term rate of success. Right? Yeah, I agree. Yeah, totally agree. Cool. So lastly, what, what are you reading? What am I reading right now? Actually? I'm listening. I'm listening. So I can do it while I drive. That counts. That counts. Uh, it's called indistractable. By who is it the guy from hooked, right? Near hooked. Near Al. Yeah. El. Yeah. So great. Um, great, great book. Great audiobook. Absolutely loving it. It's, um, very, very insightful and I just, I've taken a lot away from it. A lot of stuff I sort of knew and it's just nice hearing it in a different way. Cool. That's kind of his counter book on the previous. Booked one, right? Yeah. Which is beautiful. He, he got. Apparently the, the rumor I've heard is just that he got too hooked that he had to write this about. Make sure you're not getting distracted. Yeah. What about you? Yeah, I'm going through several books because I always read multiple books at the same time. I cannot help myself. But yeah, I want to call out Bill Gates new book, how to avoid a climate disaster. Not related to python and all that, but really a book everybody should read just to have some awareness how serious this matter is. And I find that very insightful. And I'm also reading make it stick brown, Rudiger and McDaniel. And that's really just learning how to learn better and it will probably also influence in my teaching. So I think that's a bit similar to mind for numbers or ultra learning. I recently finished all about how to absorb more in this information overload at the age. Yeah. Cool, man. I, you know, being a fan of this stuff, I actually love that you're reading that and how to avoid a climate, climate disaster book. So I got the audiobook for it because I just, you know, easier for me with all the driving and stuff, but. Nice. Yeah, shout out to Antonio who shot that book. To me, I had to buy it and. But yeah, it's, it's mentioned a lot lately, so definitely want to read it. Excellent. All right, man, well, let's wrap it up. Thank you everyone for listening. As always, we really appreciate it. If you have any feedback, if you have any tips, anything else you want to share with us, please just drop us an email, as always and yeah, that's about it. Yeah. Thank you all for listening and I hope this adds some value to your day and your approach and how you're doing things. And if you like it, please leave us an honest review. We really appreciate it and it will help boost the show and get this content out to more people that may benefit from it. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that with more ratings it just appears more right in search results. I think that's how it works. So thank you everyone. And yeah, remember, be realistic with your expectations. Relieve some stress. Awesome. Thanks again. And we'll be back next week. 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 see you there and catch you in the next episode.