Burnout, Imposter Syndrome, and Soft Skills For Developers

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

all right I am leaving the office it says it's going to be an hour drive home that's nice we like that um just kidding that's absolutely awful but I mean hey that's what happens we got to get in the fast lane and we'll be we'll be okay we'll survive so I uh record parted my video leaving CrossFit and then I did another Vlog leaving uh leaving home and driving into the office I'm not going to post that one though I uh I actually did the whole drive and was like literally 20 seconds away from pulling into the uh the office here and uh there's people crossing and basically I turned it off I just said like I don't I don't feel good posting that um and the reason why is that I I had a pretty foul person uh online that was being uh quite

condescending and attacking me and I decided that I would rant about it and as much A lot of people don't know this I love to rant um like I get I get pretty nasty if I if I get on a on a good rant I like it's funny actually some of my closest friends like growing up from high school and stuff um I think it's kind of funny that uh they used to they used to know me for like they used to get me going and try to rant on different subjects and uh kind of uh poke the bear if you will to like to get me riled up on things because I I think the reason why is because uh I am a pretty logical thinker so uh I'm not just making up bull crap but I would I would rant about things and

so they were like you got a point but I think uh it's mostly because I find ways to to be insulting to people uh and they thought it was funny so I realized I was kind of doing that and I was like you know what I don't want to post this like it's not going to be okay so I'll delete it off my camera which means there was no extra video from this morning I'm sorry but um I was just talking to to Ryan Murphy again I was talking with him the other day because I I had posted something on LinkedIn about people being crappy and I he was like Hey like you know uh and I appreciate this kind of thing you know just like got your back kind of kind of deal and I was saying I'm not really bothered by this stuff

but I think the if I if I clarify my statement I'm not bothered by not bothered in the sense where I get like impostor Syndrome from people being jerks right um that's not what bothers me because I like I know who I am I know what I've accomplished I'm not like I'm not concerned in that regard um but I do have a problem with people especially in public trying to belittle me and being a a jerk um now the problem is that as much as I would love to be like I'll tell you what's up I also can't do that um I won't do that on social media to uh the extent that I probably would absolutely love and I I was recording the video earlier and I was like Hey like whatever it's my Vlog and I'm like you know what I still like

H I don't feel good about that um and it was probably helpful for me to just have the drive and rant and get it off my chest and uh that's already too much energy spent on that so anyway that's why no more Vlog from this morning but oh man don't drive that's a red light what are you doing don't do it you did also get to miss literally I was real pissed off and as I was driving there were a tons of excellent drivers this morning even not even for me there were people that were putting on their signal and just like driving into other vehicles it was awesome like I almost got hit and then watch someone else almost get hit by by a different car this person in front of me was halfway through the the lights just now like this is It's

a good day for for dummies anyway um so this morning I was mentioning that I had to do a I say had to that sounds like it's like it's not a good thing but I had I had a a scheduled podcast interview um which I thought was awesome um it's really cool having guests on and being able to to chat with people and kind of hear their background and different perspec perspective so uh I was talking with dagna I don't believe I can pronounce her last name yet which I have to make sure I can do when I record the intro um but she was on promoting her book and super cool um I haven't read it yet but like the concept is super cool it's uh she calls it like uh I might and I might have the title wrong so I apologize but

um like it's kind of like refactoring how your brain works and the entire idea is about trying to help sof developers kind of navigate some some common problems that we face like things like impostor syndrome burnout things like that but it's all framed in a way that's like literally developers speak is how she was kind of uh demonstrating it so she reads out a couple of uh sounds good couple of um passages from the book which I thought was pretty cool but um like literally things framed like um when you're thinking about your and she she kind of said it towards the end of the the podcast um and I again I might have the the wording wrong but um I thought this was helpful to think about it because when we I say we I'm generalizing I think a lot of us as software

engineers and probably people outside of software engineering when we're trying to think about like reflec on our mental state how we can make changes for how we think about things like our brain is kind of like ourselves right like that's my Consciousness like that's my your some people you're for your soul whatever like that's that's me my brain is me and when she was talking about this she was kind of framing it like some people have a challenge with that because when it comes time to um to make changes or try things out or to reflect on things it can be challenging to look at it that way but if you can start to like dissociate or distance like your brain from just your Consciousness and you can kind of look at it like from it's a weird kind of thing to say but like

you're looking at it from the outside right like if you can be more objective and say okay like these are the things that are happening in my brain like this is my thought process but it's not it's not you you're kind of looking at it like this external thing and doing this reflection on it and thinking through it I thought thought that was a cool way to oh man these people I can't watch first two people trying to to merge into the same spot on the highway not going to work um but I thought it was a cool example because I can think about situations where like you know I'm kind of struggling to do some personal reflection but if you were to put a a system in front of me and you said Nick like go troubleshoot this thing and I can think about

it just like some system some product and she was kind of talking about it like you know you're doing product revisions right so oh that was my bad I cut someone off oops um that person's not going to be happy oh well sorry now this person is going to be probably tailgating me the whole way home but um she was talking about doing like product revisions and I thought it was super interesting because it's kind of like looking at it from the outside in and then you can be a little bit more objective about it but all of the language that she was kind of framing up in her book was was using like developer terminology so that it's more relevant and that way trying to take out like like direct emotional feelings and and things that usually like people want to neglect or kind

of reject I guess so for typical stereotypical software Engineers right it's like talking about feelings is like kind of uncomfortable but okay like if we can if we can find other ways to talk talk about these things it's the same ideas right same ideas but if we can find other ways to navigate these things together then you can be a little bit more proactive so man I'm embarrassed I just after I'm talking about these people cutting other people off and merging I go ahead and I merge into to someone but drives a Bronco so that's his fault um so super cool conversation um trying to think about some other parts in that that I thought were good takeway we talked about burnout and she had a couple of like she read through a couple of things for like identifying burnout which I liked a lot

um different symptoms and like one of the key takeaways there was that like for Burnout um like a lot I don't think I mean a lot of people have experienced burnout and a lot more people will experience it but one of the things that's important is that like burnout can can and is like a thing that's sneaks up on you right um I think sometimes people are like oh I'm going to burn out if I like go onto this project and I work on it for like a week or something like cuz I don't like it or it's going to be hard but that's not really like that's not really burnout um it's a little bit more systematic and so she goes through a bunch of symptoms but like I said I think the one key takeaway out of that section was just this idea

that like because it's something that happens over a period of time and it can look different for everyone uh if you're not having awareness of it and like the things to look for like it can be it can feel like it comes out of nowhere which is I think the shocking part right it feels like oh my goodness like now now it's a straw that broke the camel's back so like it's all like bad and we like we both shared examples with each other and the one that she was sharing and it's going to sound personal but it's like in the podcast and she's happy to share it so she was explaining a situation where she was having um a oneon-one with her manager and like there's a bunch of different life changes and stuff that were going on oh man that person was worse

than me that's not even a lane buddy what are you doing um she having a one-onone with her manager and basically like just burst into tears right and and for her she's saying like you know it feels embarrassing it's so silly but cuz she's like like I you know I consider myself a professional and like yeah like the the thing is though all this stuff is going on in our heads like we're we're human so when you don't have awareness of all this stuff and then it all piles up all of a sudden you have this issue and like it it feels like all of a sudden right and it comes out in her case it was like an emotional response where she was crying and like that's very unfortunate right and uh she had like you know her manager it sounds like a good

leader and everything and it's not like they you know they they helped her through it and they actually recommended like uh they have a a therapist that they they used and had a lot of success with and that's how she got introduced to having uh therapy as well and she you know she said it was like life-changing for her but the point is that it seemed like it came out of nowhere but the reality is like all of the things that were leading up to her having that kind of like that that meltdown moment that didn't come out of nowhere the meltdown moment itself like seems like it but the the reality is it's not it was not like out of nowhere it was a huge buildup and so that was her story kind of leading up to this big burnout moment and sort of

uh led to career change and stuff which I mean in the end I think great for her right like obviously you don't want to go through that kind of stuff but I think she made uh you know changes in her career and what she wants to do and you know a lot of awesome learning and self-reflection so you in the end like positive right and for me what I shared with her and I've talked about this before but when I like my experience for Burnout almost looks like backwards which is weird still got a cough um it looks backwards because I think a lot of people that go through burnout they talk about it like um I'm at you know I'm at work and like I you sick of this project or I have no motivation but it's like a very work Centric thing like

not only caused by work but but also You observe the the symptoms and how they have an effect on your work right so you're procrastinating with projects you're not motivated to do your projects like your performance is dropping like all these things and it's affecting your work so caused by work and affecting your work and for me it was very different because mine was caused by work but I love to work so I was working late nights I was working weekends I was doing this for years I was uh you know like basically replacing all aspects of my life with work and the things that she was mentioning like procrastinating or performance degrading or or these you know all these things that affect work when I was telling her my story she I think very accurately identified and she's like you know you talked about

uh becoming uh like uh developing like social anxiety and like um you know not not wanting to be around your friends it's not want but like that's not really a good way like I'm saying that wrong it's not like I didn't like my friends but um you kind of like putting things off right like but it wasn't work that I was putting off it was these other parts of my life I was putting off meeting up with friends I was putting like uh my I wasn't investing into friendships and relationships and things like that so it's the same thing it's just that it was a different part of my life that was taking the the beating so um I thought that was really interesting that you know the the same burnout Concepts that she was identifying as symptoms and things like that um still very

applicable to me even though mine feels like kind of backwards it just applied to something else so that was really good um the other thing that was talking about with me was impostor syndrome and I'm really big on impostor Syndrome from like like socializing the idea and stuff so that was good sorry I got to merge into this spot and this guy is not going to let me in he's going to have to cuz it's a zipper merge sorry buddy you better figure it out there we go very nice very nice let me in okay um so I like talking about impostor syndrome not because I like imposter syndrome because a ridiculous amount of people go through it and you have PE there's people online that are like oh impostor syndrome is not real like you must you must be an impostor if you have

impostor syndrome and I'm like you literally don't understand the definition of impostor syndrome then so impostor syndrome literally requires you to have the skill set okay it's not it's not a lack of skill by definition impostor syndrome is not a lack of skill it's that you are qualified so if you're like well you can't have impostor syndome you must be an imposter because you don't have the skills no impostor syndrome requires by definition that you are qualified buddy what are you doing you're let's get out of that mess um completely ridiculous now let me in here thank you very much okay um let me get over a couple Lanes here cuz these people are pissing me off cuz they can't drive a motor vehicle I'm fed up with I've had enough I've had a day it's going to be impossible to get into this fast

L even though I'm beside it oh give me a little give me a little entry point come on come on this highway sucks man this person slows down completely okay let's get in here okay now back to the regular schedule programming so impostor syndrome um by definition requires that you are qualified and that you feel like an imposter even though you are qualified okay so if you are the kind of person saying impostor syndrome does not exist you must be an impostor because you just don't have the skills you're just talking about literally someone that is unqualified and it's just a different situation that's all there are people that are absolutely qualified they have the skill set and yet they feel like an impostor and that is imposter syndrome there we go okay so now that we're on the same page for that what was

really cool was with her wa beeping at me with her explanation of impostor syndrome she was saying like she provided a scenario and uh the scenario is not the important part but she walked through a scenario where someone was kind of in a new role and you you know something goes wrong and now they feel like an idiot for it okay so what she was trying to say is like when it comes to impostor syndrome she's like it's not the scenario itself that makes impostor syndrome so she said new role someone has a big blunder in their new role so big project failure she's like the the project failure kind of scenario is not what's going to Define impostor it's like it's the action that comes after and I thought this is really cool so she walked through the scenario and then she said okay

now let's walk through two different responses to to this scenario and the first one was like this this uh selft talk for the person being like Oh man like I'm definitely not qualified now like you know getting promoted like was either a mistake or it was an accident or like someone was just being nice to me to give me the promotion like I shouldn't be here and and you like you basically let the negative selft talk um like take over right and then as a result like what do you think happens like you're it's going to be hard to make any forward progress if you're just now you've seen this this thing that didn't go well and then you just convince yourself like you must be a failure you don't deserve this you're not qualified it's going to be like a self-fulfilling prophecy right and

the alternate version she said is someone basically going you know she didn't change the scenario she said project failed whatever um in a spectacular way and someone going look like okay obviously not a desired outcome but like I acknowledge that in a new role with new challenges there are going to be um failures that come up and that's okay so instead of going and running away and being like this is the worst I'm the worst instead of doing that saying look like okay well let me see what happened let me Analyze This get to the root cause and understand what I can do better for next time right so basically leaning into this um situation that's uncomfortable and then trying to find ways to grow from it so she described it as like growing pains versus feeding into the impostor syndrome and I thought that

was a really cool way to look at it so um I appreciated that kind of uh perspective on so that was good um and then probably the final thing I'll mention uh specifically from our conversation was like uh she brought up you know the importance of of people skills and soft skills and that's cool because I love talking about that and I feel like you know I get on my Soap Box sometimes and I'm like I don't know if people even care to listen to it because it's hard I feel like software Engineers don't prioritize soft skills and they also don't want to hear me or anyone else talk about prioritizing soft skills so it's like whatever like show us more code and like I get it like I love to program too I understand but I'm trying to trying to help I'm trying to

let people know like if you don't have the soft skills and the people skills to go like along with all of your technical skills it will start holding you back and probably a lot earlier than you're hoping for heads up so what was cool is in our in our interview together um she brought it up and she's talking about the importance of it and you know it's all stuff that's resonating with me but she gave an example and she said look like I know this from experience because she said I used to be the the person the typical software engineer that didn't care and she was bringing up the fact that she's from and this is this is sort of her her phrasing of it not not my perspective directly cuz I don't have enough context to make this comment but she was stating that

like you know from she's from Poland she was raised in you know uh with her polish parents and had like kind of demonstrating her um calling out maybe some like cultural or background um influence that causes her to be more direct in communication right and I don't know enough about Polish people as like stereotypes to to have an opinion on this but this is kind of what she's sharing with me and and her her reflection on it so she's stating you know I'm have historically been a very direct person um and she mentioned to oo pops and bangs from the Porsche yeah stated that um she actually had like peers and colleagues that would like kind of drop hints that like you know she's a bit a bit too abrasive in her communication it's too direct and uh we were talking about being like soft

for engineers and kind of being stubborn right where it's like okay sure um like that's nice like let me kind of I know me let me do me um you know you must just be soft or whatever it happens to be but like we think that we know better maybe not all of us but um so she's sharing this and then she was like saying that it literally took her like after she had gone through burnout and stuff uh one of the things that came up in therapy was the the therapist was you know oh man was bringing up that uh brought up communication and stuff again and I don't know exactly how it came up but had mentioned something along the lines of like you know very direct communication and I think for for dagna she was saying that it was around that point

where she was like okay look I've had other people tell me this now my therapist is bringing it up as like a as a focus point and it's like maybe it's time that I actually um start paying attention to this so it's interesting like when I was talking with her I I don't think I and maybe it wasn't long enough or enough interaction to to know but I would never have guessed that she was someone who was like too uh too direct or abrasive or anything like that so maybe that's been uh you know a big change for her but awesome if it is right like I uh I've worked with people that are very direct um and and abrasive and yeah like you don't you genuinely don't want to interact with those people because you're like I don't want to be around that why

do I want to feel like even if the person you like genuinely believe they don't like mean it if it feels like you're being attacked every time you speak with them you're like I don't I don't want that why am I going to put myself in that position so you either avoid it or whatever else but yeah um I think if that's if that's truly the case for her then like awesome work I um I can't imagine how difficult that would be to be at this point like she's um I don't know I don't know her age or anything like that but she was saying like you know she's come to the United States from Poland she's married she has a child so she's an adult and then and then making this change in your adult life and being like look if I'm a aive

and people don't like you know working with me or communicating with me I need to make a change man that's impressive cuz I think that a lot of people would be like it's got me this far like must be a u problem right so I think it's super cool I think um I kind of think about personalities and stuff like I feel like that's got to be part of your personality and how how difficult would that be to just be like I'm going to change part of my personality I think for many people they they don't even have awareness of certain traits and personality things right where they're they can even you know start making improvements like how would you know to make an improvement if you can't even acknowledge it so I think it's awesome that she had been it was demonstrated her to

her in a way where she could acknowledge it so that's really cool um and again like I said I think a lot of are probably stubborn and we're like I don't I don't want to believe that like and and she was able to say okay like I do believe what you're saying and not only that acknowledging it and be willing to go make forward progress on it I think that's super cool oh this highway man is garbage so um yeah I thought I thought it was an awesome interview so her book is only I think it's only a dollar on Amazon uh I I'm not I'm I'm not a reader I can read by the way just like I can do recursion I just don't like to um so I'm going to pick it up it's a dollar I had mentioned to her that my

wife does therapy and my wife does therapy for children and uh I thought it was funny in the podcast I said oh my wife does therapy um and I I made a joke and I was like oh yeah but it's you know it's for kids or whatever and I was like actually like that's probably why it works well on me right but um she said that it would be helpful uh perhaps for my wife to even have a read through the book because like my wife and I have I think we have really good conversations about um like I get opportunities to talk with her about thoughts and feelings that like I don't normally kind of like introspect on them in the same way CU I I like to be very data driven like I'm analytical I'm a typical engineer and um when I think

about like for thoughts feelings and like emotions and stuff like that I'm very much like okay but like show me the science here like I want to understand how these things work and not just like oh it's okay it's just emotions and these madeup things so uh my wife is very good at like um it feels like you know I believe what she's saying cuz she's like she's trained and educated in this space but she's able to provide like ways of navigating these things that I can understand so I really appreciate conversations like that because it's like you know um okay you have an emotional response to something right whatever it happens to be say let's pick some negative emotions cuz I think it helps illustrate but say you're angry or you're sad or you're frustrated with something um oh man I hate that you

can't see cuz the camera's on the other side but this person's like Lane this person just went by on a motorcycle lane splitting and like if you're a motorcycle driver and I know you're going to love lane splitting but like oh man you can't see this as well there's a there's a semi- TR beside me okay it's actually it's not a semi- Tru it's a dump truck in tandem okay so it's a huge truck there's not a whole lot of space between me and this truck and this motorcycle just went between us like I don't understand what people are thinking sometimes but anyway you're on a motorcycle you know what you're doing right I've never seen accidents happen that way um so if we take this example of like these negative emotions I think sometimes people feel guilty my apology sorry they feel guilty like

oh I'm not supposed to feel mad I'm not supposed to be frustrated or sad so they try to suppress them or they try to like they feel guilty about it whatever it happens to be but instead and like this is you know from talking with my wife about these types of things instead it's like like you shouldn't don't feel guilty about it and don't try to say like oh it's bad that you feel an emotion like an emotion is feedback right it's it's feedback so like acknowledge it don't try to like pretend like it's not happening like if you're frustrated by something okay acknowledge it doesn't mean like feed into it but acknowledge it it's there so now you go okay like I acknowledge it it's there this is obviously easier said than done especially if you're frustrated by the way if you didn't know

um but acknowledge it's there and then like if you're able to what you want to do is try and understand the source of what that like is triggering that emotion because the emotion is the response to it right like go go to the root of whatever is triggering that and then that way you can be more informed this person is switching lanes into a lane that ends they're going to have to merge back in like an absolute idiot what was your plan no that's not going to work it's not going to work my God like I said today today was destined to be a day of uh things frustrating Nick but um that's okay so the the point I wanted to get across here was that uh like I I really enjoy the fact that I can have conversations like this with my wife and

then kind of learn these things or at least reflect on them and stuff and uh I'm not trying to say like now I'm now I'm an expert or anything like that but you know she had different perspectives and it's kind of different tools for me to kind of think about these things so dagna was saying that for her book she's like hey like you know maybe maybe let your wife read it then she has like other tools for helping communicate with you about different about different things like that um and by the way I hope I'm not trying to make it sound like that like I like I have emotional outburst and that my wife has to coach me through them it's it's more just like General um convers ation right and like reflecting on things so um I realized maybe that wasn't clear but

I just want to clear the air on it so um yeah and and sometimes this will come up even when we're talking about interactions with other people right like trying to understand like what is the source of the emotional response so anyway conversation with dagna I thought was super cool um so her books a dollar I'll pick it up um I'll try to read it gotta got a brush up on my reading skills but made it this far without reading right like how hard can it be uh yeah so overall pretty good I think that was a very positive part of the day CrossFit was brutal interview was good the uh stuff I was reading online after that not so good super frustrated like my God I wanted to I wanted to punch through my phone when I was reading some of the stuff I

saw earlier but that's okay work was good had a good day at work was in at the office um so I got some some areas I got to focus on coming up just uh was talking to my manager about some some planning we got to do and then how like what his expectations are for executing on it so uh feel feel good about that it's going to be very busy but like busy is good um being busy is better than not being busy I definitely say that uh but it's going to be a lot of coordination and I think that's the that's going to be the tricky part so me tackling that but I think it's going to be really good cuz it's going to involve a lot of the team like even just outside of the the groups that I manage directly so part

of me is pretty excited for that just to have like more more collaboration within our team I think that'll feel good uh I got to I forgot about this I got to see Brad today Brad is my skip level manager and so my boss's boss and uh the other day he was on my live stream so uh and he and he was like in the chat like chatting in the live stream asking questions and stuff and it was funny because when he joined the live stream I I try to make sure that I'm reading the chat actively right I I genuinely want to be engaging with people I want them to be sending messages so that I can be interacting and I remember the message came in it was from LinkedIn and I saw Brad I saw his name come up and I remember being

like wait a second like that's my skip level manager and uh I didn't even get to read his message but I remember being like so caught off guard that I was like man what am I what was I talking about uh so he was like oh I noticed um so it was pretty funny but uh yeah it was it was super cool that he dropped in so I was thanking him for that um but yeah it's uh he just said he happened to be on on LinkedIn at the time and and saw that I was live so I was like oh I'll click on this and join uh but yeah super cool right that um obviously he's a busy guy and he's got stuff like whatever he wants to do outside of work is totally his time and this is not work rated so it's

uh pretty cool that he could drop in and and chat so he was asking good questions around like cuz the conversation was testing right and in particular I was talking about situations where uh you know like gen genuinely what are situations where you don't test code so and then some of the conversation leads into like okay well what types of tests are we talking about like is it it's not just black and white test or not like maybe you'll opt for different types of tests so he was asking questions around like hey like does does AI help with this right like do we get to a situation where um you leverage Ai and you don't even have to be having conversations like this and I think it's interesting because I think a lot of people right now at least from what I hear about um

if they're using AI for for testing and stuff like that I feel like what I'm hearing is people say you you know I'll give a co-pilot or chat GPT some code and say hey go write the test for this but um then co-pilot or chat GPT spits out the code for the test and uh maybe they work right hope let's assume they work and great so you go cool okay now I have test but like do do you understand what the tests are covering like do you understand if they're valuable tests or was it just giving you some coverage like how do you prioritize what to be testing even if AI is writing the test for you where are the gaps um I think sometimes some of the benefits of going through and writing the tests are figuring out like edge cases for things or

like scenarios that you hadn't thought of and like then this is where the interesting part comes in for me is like I think that AI is a ble to help with that but you have to prompt it to do so right if you just say go write the unit test on this and it's like sure um you know is it are you letting it do introspection on on like your your feature area and like maybe edge cases or not not even edge cases in the code paths I mean but like from like how someone's using the feature like are there things that you need to be thinking about differently and I I don't think that that's people are leveraging AI for that it's like hey look it spat out the the tests and like code coverage went up like ship it let's go so I

thought it was cool to kind of chat through that and um yeah I think I personally think that there's that's probably not happening right now maybe some people are doing that and that's super cool but I actually think like it's probably um a step forward in getting test coverage probably a step back in understanding the value of your tests I think if you're just blindly letting AI do it for you probably a step back and understanding it and again for most people I'm not saying this as a rule like probably most people are saying hey AI do this thing that I don't want to do or spend time on and they go great I got the result let's move on but I do think that this is a super interesting opportunity either for tooling or even just us as humans interacting with AI like you

know be more Curious like use it for analysis get it get it to be creative I feel like AI can be can be helpful in Creative scenarios and uh I think when it comes to like testing and exploring different things like that could be a huge opportunity or even like and again I don't know how you would do this easily but having AI like kind of uh understand the surface area of your product or feature or service and and helping guide you down the path of like hey look like this is where you should be spending your attention and over here probably lower priority to go invest in in fact like maybe you can do like a risk analysis for you like this is the spot in your code you better pay attention to it and how does it know maybe it's able to use

um a I don't know more more context about like commits for bug fixes or churn for areas of code like that could be pretty powerful um versus just copy and paste a a class in and then it's like go write the the test for it so I don't know I think I think there's a long way to go but I think it's going to be super cool in the next few years it's already super cool so I'm looking forward to it I still don't think my job's going away um hopefully just the boring part s for now and maybe I'll do something later but maybe I'll be ready to retire by then right please we'll see yeah I think I think those some of the major things I wanted to talk about I know for me what's on my mind right now in particular is

crumble cookie crumble cookie if you're not in the US crumble cookie is a like a franchise and they have these enormous cookies they're like 1,200 calories each and they're like the size of your hand and they're thick they usually have icing on them and they're like underbaked almost like they're super soft they're so good no you're not coming in here buddy you got to wait your turn and uh the other thing they do is they have six cookies uh one that keep consistent so every every time they have chocolate chip by default but they have I think the five other cookies rotate every single week that means when they announce which cookies are coming it kind of create some fo oh it's genius marketing they do really well I'm sure and um so you you have these cookies that get announced and there's five new

cookies and um they'll bring back ones you know periodically and stuff but this week it's not even a cookie this week they have a brownie and it's enormous it's definitely bigger than my hand and it's a brownie and it's got icing on it and then it has fudge on top of the icing it's insanity and I'm going to eat that this weekend and I'm so excited that's all that I'm thinking about it's what's keeping me going right now so I told my wife we'll go to CrossFit on Saturday CrossFit on Saturday is not at 6:00 a.m. which is excellent cuz 6:00 a.m. is pretty early I don't like that we'll go to CrossFit we got to go to Costco for our shopping on the weekend but what's near the Costco is the crumble cookie and we're going to get the brownie each I'm not sharing

a brownie there's absolutely no way I would share that I need my own and that's what's keeping me going otherwise I didn't get my YouTube topic picked for filming that was the other thing I think I mentioned this morning is I got to get some YouTube topics picked didn't do that which sucks I guess I got to film something um so maybe I'll have a a creative burst in the next couple minutes as I'm pulling into the the driveway here in just a sec um and then other than that I got to get filming on the next course with Ryan so a lot of the material and stuff we need to get like uh slide decks and stuff together so I'll be I'll probably spend time on that and then just Crush some filming on Saturday it's probably my plan I I think is uh

I don't know if I'll film I don't think I'm going to film it tonight maybe tomorrow um Friday is going to be newsletter time so maybe tomorrow I'll film but definitely on uh on Saturday oh man I'll explain this in just a second but our neighbors suck so there's like 50 people that live in the house next to us I'm exaggerating a little bit I like to do that there a lot of people um I feel I'm not exaggerating there's probably at least four families that live in the house next to us and that's not my business but the part that is my business is that they have tons of vehicles they also have a driveway on the other side that they don't use okay and they Park their vehicles in front of our house which is totally legal for them to do there's nothing

wrong with that but it P PES me off because what happens is that they Park in the spots that mean that when I need to back up into our driveway if there's another car remotely close like coming down the road I have to just wait because I can't like swing out and like back into the spot because they're in the way I I I need to wait for the car to come by so that I can maneuver around their stupid parked cars because they don't use their own driveway like a bunch of dummies there's a lot of dummies today but tomorrow will be a better day so um I'm not making a vlog tomorrow because I'm not going to the office but I'll have a better day and I think until then I'll see you next time