134 How Do I Make a Resolution I Can Keep?

How do I make a New Year's resolution that I actually stick to? How do I not get enthusiastic at first and then fail later? How do I make sure I make the most out of 2023? These are the questions we will answer in today's episode of Dev Questions.

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Dev Questions Podcast with Tim Corey. Join us each episode as we tackle the questions you are asking about a career in software development, understanding the industry, and new technology. If you're just starting out or you want to grow stronger as a developer, this is the place to get your questions answered. Now, here's your host, expert developer and online educator, Tim Corey.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

How do I make a resolution I can keep? I get asked this question in different ways throughout the entire year, because a resolution is just a way to say, I want to do something. It's a plan or it's a uh mapping out of this is what I want to accomplish. And so while January 1st is often a time when we say, I'm gonna create a new year's resolution, the idea of setting up a goal or a plan and then failing at it is a pretty common thing. And so let's talk about how I keep a resolution, how I make sure that at the end of 2023, I look back at the resolution or the goal, the plan that I made, and say, yes, I accomplished that. So let's talk first about why most resolutions fail. Because most New Year's resolutions, which are the ones we track the most commonly as far as asking people if they have them and talking about if they've kept them, most resolutions fail in the first month. In fact, if you are a owner of a gym, it's a great time, January 1st, to own a gym because everyone's excited about the resolution. Everyone decides this is the time I'm gonna get in shape, this is the time I'm gonna lose weight, this is the time I'm gonna eat better. And then you get these resolutions. And as developers, we should be making up these plans or goals or resolutions quite often because your career is either going in one of two directions. It's either moving forward or it's moving backwards. And you really want to move forward in your career. And so you really should plan out how you're gonna do that and not just hope you'll get better or hope that you'll be a better developer next year than you were this year. So let's talk about the cycle of a resolution. I use resolution instead of just plan or goal, but that's really the same thing. So, what's the cycle for resolution, especially when it comes to developers learning something? So, step one is typically you decide to do something. So you say, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna learn C sharp this year. Okay, that's maybe that's your plan. So the first thing that happens after that plan is you get excited about the result. I'm gonna be a C sharp developer. I'm gonna be a person who can write code and build applications and be hirable in 2023. I can't wait to get that job. And you start dreaming about having a software development job and about being able to write applications or build games or whatever it is you want to do in C Sharp. And so you get excited about that. And that's natural. But the next step is you decide to go fast. So you decide, okay, I'm gonna start January 1st, I'm gonna study for eight hours. I'm gonna really hit the ground running. And so you do that and you you really pour in. It's the same way with working out. You say, you know what, I'm gonna work out every single day this week. And you do. And then you start to bog down. In software development, that typically comes after you've gone through the first few dozen lessons where you start to say, Oh, this is hard, this is boring. I I want to kind of skip these parts, I want to get past this, I want to get to the good stuff. And so you start to kind of skip over the stuff. You're like, I don't need that. I just want to get to this stuff. And you bog down and you start to go slower, and you start to say, you know what, I can't do this, or you miss a couple of times and you start to miss a week or two where you don't practice at all. Before you know it, you've quit, whether you did it intentionally or not. And sometimes this quitting comes from something else looking better, where you say, you know what, this is hard. I'm not going to do this. But you know what? HTML and CSS, that looks awesome. Let me start there. And you get excited and you start to go fast and you start that cycle over again. And the end result is you never accomplish any of your goals. So we don't want that for you. We want to be able to finish what we start and be able to have something at the end that we can look back at and say, yes, I made significant progress. I accomplished my goal. I have succeeded in making this a productive year. That's our goal for this year and every time we make a resolution or a goal. So, how do you succeed? How do you increase your odds of accomplishing your goal? So, number one for me is to pick a small goal inside of your big goal. So let's take learning C sharp as our example going forward. You want to learn to be a C sharp developer. Okay, so my C sharp masterclass, I recommend that if you're gonna take it kind of slow, because you're working on the side, you're not doing it as your primary thing, you're doing, but if you're taking kind of slow and just working through in your nights and weekends to learn C sharp, then it will take about a year to go through. Well, that's a long time. And you know what? By week 26, which is halfway through, you'll be like, oh, I am so tired of this. You know, what if I learned about web instead? What if I learned about JavaScript? What if I learned about this or that? It's gonna distract you and drag you away, even if you get that far. Okay, so instead of saying it's a year-long goal, which it still is, but now you say, my goal is this week to accomplish this. So each of those weeks will add up to that 52 weeks, that whole year. But your goal is now this week I want to accomplish this. And so what that does is it will give you that, first of all, freedom to miss a day, and yet still the flexibility to accomplish your goal. It will also give you a win in seven days, not in 365 days, in seven days. And so now you have a win. You can celebrate that win, and you can go move on, have the next week's goal and celebrate that win. And that's number two, leads right into that, and that is focus on your progress. When you kind of pick your head up and look at that far distant goal, where maybe you can't even see the end of the progress or the end of the line, that's hard because it's it's kind of depressing. It feels like, man, I'm never gonna make it. But instead, if you focus on what progress you're making, that's a big deal. I've gotten through three weeks of C sharp training. Celebrate that. Look back and say, I got three weeks in the rearview mirror. I have done this for three weeks. I've done this for four weeks, I've got a full month that I've done this. Celebrate and focus on that progress. The progress of, hey, I've learned these 10 things in C Sharp. I can now build a console application that does five different things. I now know how this, this, and this work. And all of a sudden you're focusing on the progress and what you can have done and not what you can't do and haven't done. Okay, so focusing on that progress will really encourage you. Uh, next up, prepare for, accept, and push through the failure. Failure is gonna happen. You're going to get sick, you're going to just not feel like it. You're going to give up sometimes. You're going to hit a bump in the road where you say, oh man, I don't know how to do that lesson. I'm still not figuring this out. I need to, you know, I need to get this because I need to move on. Push through the failure. And that means stick with it. Don't give up. Because especially as developers, one of the key uh abilities of a software developer, one of the things that makes a software developer a great software developer, is to be able to not give up. And that's really what it takes is just don't give up. Just keep pushing. Even when it feels like nothing is moving, even when it feels like I'm not getting anywhere, just keep pushing at it because you'll break through and you'll have that aha moment or that fix that you're like, man, I figured it out. And so pushing through failure is a big part of making sure you succeed. Just be prepared for it and say, I'm not gonna give up. I'm gonna push through. Okay. Now you're gonna have all these shiny objects, I call them, things that come up where you're like, oh, I want to do that. And instead of making yourself feel horrible and say, I can't do that. And no, I'm gonna stick with my goal and be miserable about it because that's gonna make you feel worse until the point you're like, you know what, fine, just give up. I'm gonna go do that thing that looks fun. Because you're following your goal is not always gonna be fun. But fun things will pop up where you're like, I want to do that, but it's not on my goal list yet. So instead of just pushing them aside and saying, I can't do that, create a list and say, I can't wait to finish because then I can do this thing and have a list. I have a list of all the things I want to do, and I'm looking forward to succeeding so that I can then move on to something else. And it becomes a further benefit of completing your training, of completing your goal, instead of a deterrent to your completing your goal. Uh, number five sounds weird, but be your own cheerleader. This is hard for me sometimes. It's hard for a lot of people, where you see yourself make a mistake. And what you internally start to think is, I can't do this. I'm an idiot, I'm not good enough. All these things, all the negative emotions, all the negative thoughts that come along with failure. Instead of that, you need to be your own cheerleader where you say, No, you know what? I can do this. There is a way forward for me. I have accomplished a lot. And that's where, again, having that progress where you know, hey, I've already done six weeks of training. I can do week seven, I can push through this. I've already overcome four different times when I was really struggling. So, you know what? The fifth isn't gonna break me. Be your own cheerleader. Look back at your accomplishments, not forward all the things you haven't done yet. And with that, encourage yourself. Okay. And number six, accept imperfection. You will never be perfect. It's just not gonna happen. You will not be a perfect developer, you will make mistakes, you will not be perfect at your goals, you will fail sometimes. You will not be all that you could be because you're going to have problems in your life. There's things that are gonna come up. You may have this perfect plan of, you know what? Maybe it was six months. I got the whole plan mapped out where in six months I will learn everything I need to to become a C sharp developer. Something's gonna come up. You know, your dog's gonna get sick, or your mother, or you know, you're gonna have a baby, or you know, you're gonna change jobs, or you're gonna move, or whatever the case may be, something's gonna come up. COVID might come up, and all of a sudden, you're not going to be perfect in that, and that's okay. You accept that and say, you know what? This happened. It's okay. I'm going to adjust. Those adjustments are key. Okay. In the C Sharp Master Course, I have a separate course called the Year of Coding, which is a bonus course if you purchase the C Sharp Master Course. And in that course, I take you through and break down everything into one week increments. We have 53 weeks, yes, 53, one bonus one, um, that covers the entire year and what to study, what to do in that big course, but down to the one week level, because it's important to have those successes. But more than that, there's other things baked into it as well. For example, I have quarterly check-ins where for the entire week, all you do is evaluate the previous quarter, what you've done, the previous six months, the previous nine months, the previous year, where you evaluate what you've done and said, okay, where was I? Where am I now? What are the things I've accomplished? What are the things that I've learned? What can I learn from this process? And I go through a whole bunch of other things. We have different things every quarter we talk about, but we have those check-ins. There are two weeks in that whole section where I don't have anything for you to do. And that's important too, because it's important to take a break and say, you know what? It's okay to have a vacation. It's okay to have a day where I don't do coding or I don't do practice. Those breaks are important. I also encourage you at the very beginning, when we're talking about the lessons, I say, don't go beyond what we've covered in this week. I know it can, it can feel like, oh, we're going so slow, we want to do more. Take your time. If you want to spend more time coding, then practice more on what you've already learned. Because if you rush forward, just like sprinting at the beginning of the marathon, you'll end up falling behind eventually, because you'll be too tired. So give yourself some time to kind of take a break, to go, oh, it's okay. Or maybe to catch up because maybe you had to take a break before and now you're trying to catch up and run ahead. Relax. It's okay. You can either reset your time and say, you know what? I'm just going to do next week, even though next week has been waiting for me for two weeks. No problem. Just do the next week and catch up eventually, or don't. Just make it longer. That's okay. All right. But that's the reason why I created that year of coding to kind of show you this is how you can pace yourself to get something accomplished in one year, but at the same time, not overstress yourself where you end up becoming burnt out and fail at your goal. Your goal needs to have some room to breathe. You need to be able to look back at your success and say, yes, I have done something, and realize that you have made major strides toward becoming a developer. Now, if you want a further resource, just so you know, on this topic and on the topic of being able to complete your goals, I have a book. I don't typically recommend books because usually books are fluff. They really are. They have some good stuff in them, but it's surrounded by mostly just filler material, it feels like. But I do recommend this book repeatedly, and there's a reason for it. So if you check out Finish by John A. Cuff, I definitely recommend this. Read this book. It will make you feel better about your goals. It will make you accomplish more goals because it is a book that is based in reality, not in this perfect world of, oh, just do these things. It talks about cut your goals in half and you know, be okay putting something down in order to pick something up and things like that, where it really helps you succeed instead of just pretending like you're going to succeed by doing these perfect things. Okay. So it's not a paid recommendation or anything. It's just check that book out. It will definitely make an impact in how you accomplish your goals. Okay. So that's my thoughts on kind of starting the new year right and planning out those resolutions and making sure that you set yourself up for success instead of setting yourself up for failure in your resolutions. All right. Thanks for listening. And as always, I am Tim Corey.

SPEAKER_02 17:41

Thank you for joining us for this episode of Deaf Questions. Tim is committed to making it easier for you to become a developer. If you would like to help make more content like this possible, please like, subscribe, rate, and share Dev Questions. You can also send your questions to questions at Iamtimcorey.com. Until next time, remember, you are too smart and your time too valuable to waste it making all the mistakes Tim did. When you're ready to learn to think and code like a professional developer, head over to imtimcore.com and enroll in a course.