Hey everyone and welcome to Developer Tea. My name is Jonathan Cutrell and in today's episode we finish out the interview with Chris Castiglione. Of course I asked you in the last episode to reach out to Chris and thank him for being on Develop a T. His Twitter account is at Castig. Of course we already introred what Chris does. He is the co-founder of One Month. He also hosts a podcast called On Books and that's what we start out talking in today's episode about. We dive directly into the discussion about books. I have a bad time reading books which I will detail more in today's episode. Today's episode is sponsored by Hired. If you're a designer or you are a developer or maybe you're a data scientist. Maybe if you're working in the digital space at all and you're looking for a job go and check out Hired.com. We will talk about a special offer that Hired is offering you as listeners of Developer Tea. No it's not for you to spend money. They are actually going to give you extra money if you get a job through them. We will talk about that offer later on in today's episode. Of course there will be special links in the show notes for all of these things. Let's go ahead and get straight into the second part of the interview with Chris Kestiglion. We've talked about goal setting. We've talked about a lot of different things actually so far on the show. I've kind of impressed at how far we've gone on this path around Chris. It's pretty good. Let's talk about On Books for a few minutes because I started listening and immediately subscribed to this podcast because I am notoriously bad about finishing books. Again, I've said this on the show before people who are listening are not surprised. I have a very hard time getting past about the halfway mark before I feel like, oh, I need to pick up a new one. First of all, I want to know, how do you read so quickly? Let's share maybe your schedule on reading because you've read some pretty hefty books for On Books, including the Konnomen book. Yeah, thinking fast and slow, Daniel. Yeah, Daniel Konnomen's book, which is a big, like a really long book. I guess it is. I'm interested to know how much time do you dedicate to reading and is there a schedule that you said or what keeps you motivated to continue through those books when maybe there's a lull? Because with as many books as you've read, certainly you've experienced a lull. This is funny because I feel like in this moment, I love this question. I think I'm realizing that I'm in love. I think I love books because all the other goal-setting stuff we're talking about, those are things that I, you know, I send that to push myself to accomplish or I get distracted. I really, I don't set deadlines. I never took a speed reading course. I don't really have any tricks, but I would say the one thing that I want to convince your audience about and when it convinced you about is that books are amazing. And the reason is, the reason is because for $12, it's like the cheapest thing that you could buy. And when you buy a book, unlike a blog post or a lot of YouTube videos, when you buy a book, you get a physical thing that is likely one author's like four years of them slaving away in darkness to write their ideas and publish it. For $12, you get this physical book. And if you treat that book well, you may one day pass away. Okay. You know how life goes. Well, you will. Let's be clear. I didn't want to break the news. This is the first time someone's hearing that. And that book will maybe even outlive you. That $12, you could like pass on to someone. It's like an investment, right? It is such, I mean, and we have that at one month too. You know, everyone that works at one month, our company here, we have a book club every month, every employee gets $50 at Amazon to buy books. That's great. Yeah. And they can buy whatever they want. It doesn't need to be related to their job or whatever. But it's just, I mean, for us to just inspire people. And that was actually Mattana and I both, like, that wasn't just me. I mean, we both, everyone of the company really just supports this idea. We all got around that idea of how important they are. So I think, you know, if I have any tricks, I think I'm just convinced that it's such a great way to just like to be passionate about it and to learn. And just like the follow up to that would be looking at not the book itself. So like the Daniel Coniman book that you're mentioning, thinking fast and slow, right? Like when I approach a, when I approach a book like that, I'm often again looking at what my frustrations are in life. Like I usually approach a book because there's something going on in my life or in my head that I want to learn, which is why I often buy books that I don't have any intention of reading anytime soon. Because sometimes, I think there's a word for it called the anti-library, which was, I think, Borsh. Luis Borsh came up there, yeah. And so I'll have like maybe a few dozen books. I have a lot of books as well as like a thing. And then, you know, if I'm going through something, like if I'm having a week where I'm having trouble, you know, with management at work or loneliness and relationships or, you know, I'm questioning, I don't know, where I want to escape. It's like having that available really helps me out because it bridges that kind of like, oh, I need to read a book, what should I read going through this, waiting two days for Amazon to deliver it. So if I have any tips, I would say it's just that. It's just that I'm passionate about it and having them ready for when the need arrives. So I want to be clear about this. I know that as a person who is like really invested in learning, that books are possibly the best way to learn one of the best ways to learn, right? And this is an interesting topic considering that I'm talking to one of the founders of a online course provider. But like this is still a true thing. Whenever I read a book, I'm like really, I get on a really big high about that book. And that's like, if I were to focus long enough to read through all the books that I really think are worth reading through, that would continue. Like that's not going to, it's not like I found the right one and the only one that's worth reading. There are tons of books that are worth reading. There's a lot like in not just about coding and not just about management and not just about my professional life. There's stuff about psychology and actually I asked the CEO of the company that I work at at Whiteboard. I asked him and the other founder, you know, if you would have me read one book this month, what would it be? And for those of you who are looking for a book, this is probably a good idea. Ask your boss what they would recommend to you. And one of them recommended zero to one. The other one recommended the dog stars, which is a novel that's entirely unrelated to our business. And he said, just read a novel. And that kind of tripped my brain back into thinking about reading as this wide expanse, this particularly books, this wide expanse where you can dive into a story that's in a totally different world and really learn something from it. Yeah, yeah, totally. That's a really great question that you asked your boss. This is a great, sometimes people go on for a stay, so they meet people at networking events or whatever and they have like nothing to talk about. That's just such a great question to ask them. You're like, you know, what book would you recommend I read? I mean, nobody's not out of the blue if you don't know the person. But I think like somewhere bridging to that question, it tells you a lot about that person and that's really cool that your boss recommended that. I love it. Yeah, I actually just recently speaking of books to read, I just recently read, I recently finished reading Deep Work by Cal Newport. And I noticed that the most recent episode of on books is actually from his last book, so good they can't ignore you. And that's a fantastic book. I actually, I loved Deep Work. Have you had a chance to read it? No, I didn't. It's on my list. I know that probably not back to back same author is like an unwritten rule. But it is a very good book. And it's been such a long time since I didn't actually read every single page of so good they can't ignore you. I kind of skim through it. But I'm going to have to go back and listen to that full episode of on books to get an idea of what's going on there. You know what? And I think that's fine too. I think it's fine to skim through books. I'll often, it depends like why you're reading it. I think I think that you shouldn't have to read a, this is just my like theory. Like I don't think you should have to read a book start to finish. I mean, you can, sometimes if I'm looking for a specific question or I want to even know like where is this going? Is this relevant to me? It's okay sometimes to skip ahead to the, especially nonfiction books to kind of skip ahead. And the Cal Newport book, the view one, so good they can't ignore you. I mean, he repeats himself so many times in that book. And I don't think it's a bad thing, but it's, I think it's contoured towards one type of reader who wants like recaps every, so, so as a reader, I think I think it's cool that you skip ahead. I don't think there's any like shame in that. Yeah, I agree. And that's actually probably something that's really important for people who have a hard time reading like me. I don't think you should feel bad about like, you know, this, this chapter kind of feels kind of, I'm going to read like the headlines and see if there's anything that's sort of bad, like jump out of the shore and then maybe move on. It's time to like read things that aren't interesting to you. I don't know. And you're not going to have to write a book report. Like, that's, that's the thing is if you're not like if you are going to, if you're on the edge of quitting reading a book because you don't like a particular chapter, but the rest of it was fantastic. You may be missing out on a bunch of fantastic content later. And that one chapter just didn't quite land with you properly. And you could always go back of some, yeah, I mean, it's the book still there. We talked about that already. The book's not going anywhere. Right. And you can reference it later or yeah, absolutely. So thorough review on a better reading habits. Really, it just comes down to understanding the value that books provide that is really kind of unique to that meeting. Yep. Do you, do you listen to any audio books or is that kind of like strict, strict and off the list? No, I do. I haven't recently. I especially love when the author will read themselves. Yeah. That's what I look for. Oh, it's so enjoyable. Yeah. And I find that I often, if it's really that good, I will often buy the book and then read it. Like if it's that good. And there's a few that are just like really good. So yeah. I believe that the obstacle is the way he did his reading of that book and it's on Audible as well. Right in holiday, right? Yeah. I've listened to that. Yeah. It's on Audible for sure. Yeah. I guess this is like a really difficult question. But of all of the episodes that you've done on on books, what book would you say is your favorite or one of your favorites so far? Like a good introductory episode and also book for listeners to go and check out. Good question. It's like picking your favorite child. Yeah, I do the second for that. I would say so many of them, you know, they're very different. Some are interviews. I try to attack the book in different ways. I try to get the kernel of knowledge out of it that I could share in less than 30 minutes. So there's different ways that I approach that. One is an interview of that I do in the book, Mating and Captivity. It's episode number two with a friend of mine, Sarah Peck. And we have a conversation about monogamy, what is monogamy, how do relationships work in this decade? It's a fascinating, astro-parallel that I love. And we just had this really kind of personal in-depth. We all learn a little more about my personal life, Feel For Listen. So that episode, a lot of stuff comes out. And the other one is an episode where I talk with Kevin Allison of the Risk Podcast. And we talk about his favorite book, Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch. And it's about meditation and finding time for art. And it's this really kind of humbling conversation that Kevin, I think, just shares so much about, because he has a very successful podcast right now, the risk podcast. And there was just so much that he went through in those early days of getting it started and being a comedian. And I think he shared so much. And I just took away so many, I learned so much having that conversation. So that's, I feel like if I'm learning, maybe that's what it is. I feel like if I'm learning, then I especially enjoy the episode. So those two are my fifths. And I'll ask you that question that I told you about earlier. If I were to go out and read a book tomorrow, would you recommend one of those two? Or another one? I think it all depends who you are and where you're coming from. It's hard to say that there's any one book that is like, we're all different, right? We all have our own stuff going on our heads and our own lives. But I will say that there are two books that when I started the podcast, I feel like the whole podcast for me has been an experiment to like get to these two books, which I haven't covered yet. I was just like, I need to be good enough so that one day I can like accurately have this conversation. And the one book is this book, The China Study. And it's about nutrition. And it was really instrumental in just blowing my mind about the benefits of eating plants more or less. And it's really deep in science and it's a really dense 500 page read. And I'm working my best to get just like to put it out there with analogies and stories that I think will resonate so that you can walk away from that episode, which hasn't been recorded yet. And just know just just really feel confident in nutrition because I think nutrition is so confusing in this country. There's no, we don't learn nutrition that much. I don't know if you know this with doctors. Like nutrition classes aren't even when you go to Cornell and you go to these universities, doctors, they don't even have to take them. That's true. That's true. Yeah, that's crazy. And so I think bringing that as part of the education is really important. So that one I'm very passionate about doing, I would say that's a great book to read or to listen to the episode. And the other book, the other book which I changed my life and this is a little dark, but this is me. My favorite book of all time is The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker and it's an amazing book. And I also happen to know that I think it's Mark Maren's favorite book. So I hope the podcast gets popular enough that I can one day ask him to be the guest on on books and talk to him. That's like for that specific book, podcast goal is to get big enough that he'll come out my show as a guest to talk about that book because he talks about it a lot. It's perfect. Yeah. So yes. Really interesting picks there. I think it's interesting to hear probably for developers who are listening to this to this episode, you may have expected something totally different from where we've ended up. Right? And I wouldn't blame you because because Developer Tea is about, you know, we say it's about development, but the funny thing is development is so many different things. Being a good developer, you can't separate that out from the rest of your life. Right? You can't separate that from the way that you process any kind of material, the way you process your situation in life. You can't separate that out from, we'll call them soft skills, but it's much more than skills. It's, it's being. You can't separate those things away from each other. So I would recommend for anyone who's listening to be open to learning about those other parts of who you are and what you do in life, be open to learning about those things because I would say the most successful people, they spend a lot of their time, people like Chris spend a lot of their time thinking and talking and writing and reading about these topics as well. Right? Chris is doing courses on responsive web development, but he's also reading about philosophy and he's reading about, you know, denying the denial of death. Right? This is really heavy topic and those seem kind of at odds, but really, and I'm going to be the one to draw the connection here, those actually matter to each other. Like those are not totally disconnected from each other. Yeah, yeah. Yes. It makes a huge impact on the way that you see the world, right? And the way you make decisions on a minute to minute basis is informed by how you learn what you consume and the way that you think. That was beautiful. I love that. I think it's completely accurate. Today's episode is sponsored by hired, on hired software engineers, project managers, data scientists and designers can get five or more interview requests in a given week. Each of these offers has salary and equity offered up front and they have full time and contract opportunities. So this is really for anybody in the digital space. If you're a coder or you do something with digital output, users can view these interview requests and accept or reject them before you ever talk to any company, which helps you avoid any kind of awkward confrontations that you don't really want to have with somebody that you barely know. Hired works with over 3,000 companies, ranging in size from small startups to large publicly traded companies and hired has a couple of really important perks for you, the user. First of all, it's totally free for you to use. 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And remember, you get a $2,000 bonus when you accept a job if you use that special link. Thanks again to hire for sponsoring Developer Tea. Awesome. So, I feel like we've, again, we've covered a lot of ground here. I do want to talk to you about one more topic before we end out the show here. And that is the courses you're creating for one month. Yes. There's a lot of people who are listening to the show who are wanting to create content for other developers. I know this because I'm that way a lot of the people in the spec, a Slack community, actually have talked about creating content. They want to create their own podcast, for example. And I'm interested in what your creation process looks like. How long does it take to create a course? Where do you get the ideas? Does it come from users? Is this proprietary information? Things like that. No, no, I'll share. I'm an open book. I'll share anything I can to help you guys. Yeah. So the question is how do we create courses here at one month? Is that the question? Pretty much, right? Yeah, that's, I guess that's probably distilled down to that. Yeah. No, I get it. That's a great one. I think, you know, where do you start? Like how do you, I guess what do you want to, what do you want to teach? Is this the first question? You know, for me, I get, well, I get a lot of student questions. But let's say, you know, someone out there doesn't have people emailing them with questions. You can go to Kora. I think that's a good one or Stack Overflow. And look for, sometimes we'll look for popular questions that people are asking. And maybe there's an answer already. But if someone's asking it and if it has a lot of follows or it has a lot of activity, then likely there's some demand for it and you might be able to create some video content around it. Well, before I even said that, I might just ask, like, why are you doing this? Like, are you doing it to create your own business? Are you doing it to help someone? I think having someone in mind to help is also really a good way to start. If you think about how Sal Khan, when he started Khan Academy, he didn't just say, hey, I'm going to make this huge business. He was making these videos for his niece and he would just put him up on YouTube. It's such a cool story. And I mean, and similarly, when we started, when Mattana and I started making these videos, it was just because we were frustrated that there wasn't, we didn't feel like there was a great way to learn Ruby on Brails at the time. This is around 2012. And we were just like, there's an easier way to do this, you know? And it just came from a frustration again where it was like, well, there has to be a better introduction to programming course and there has to be a better Ruby on Brails course. And that was what we set out to create. Yeah. So I think first finding the topic, you know, and whether it's a frustration that you have or it's you're making it for somebody or if you're trying to make a big business out of it, like, that's all, those are all great reasons, but just figure out why you're trying to do it and so that you could focus. And then like, I would say as far as the process for making the courses, man, I've seen everything from me and Matan making our Ruby on Brails, the first Ruby on Brails course, in a bedroom with a $90 camera from Amazon and like a blue, you know, like the cheapest kind of, you know, low-fide deal. And that's how we made it and we had our first 5,000 users just using that setup. We just set it up on like Skillshare or something like the most basic thing that anyone could do. So all the way to now where we have producers, we have video editors, we have people making their own notes. So I think the thing that I've learned on the journey of DIY to, hey, we have a budget and deadlines is just being able to, I call it first order retrieval ability, something I learned from Adam Savage of Mythbusters and the idea is like having your equipment ready so that you can grab it like first order meaning like it's in front of you, you can turn it on and go because one of the biggest things that gets in the way is like having this setup the mic every time. Having to, oh, do I have this, we screen flow for recording, you know, so like do I have screen flow on this computer? Do I have enough space on this computer? I'm, Jonathan, I'm sure you making this podcast note, you know, just as well, you know, that like if you don't have the right equipment going into this, there's going to be all these breaks and that stuff is so discouraging. So talk to somebody, feel free to reach out to me. I mean, anyone, if your listeners can feel free to reach out to me, maybe I can make a blog post about, you know, detailing how we do it. I'm really happy to share that and talk to people you know who've done it, whatever it takes and just get down a process that works for your budget and your timeline and then just set it, you know, set that camera up, get screen flow, put it on YouTube, like decide those kind of production things and then just go with it and consistency is I think the third thing that I would say is like the most important, the first thing being pick a topic that somebody's going to actually want. The second thing is like figure out your equipment and then the third part is like just practice and do it consistently. I would say once a week would be rule of thumb, puts, puts something out at least once a week is going to make you get better over time and help people than audience. Chris, you are describing Developer Tearight now. It's actually kind of incredible how many overlaps there are between those three things and what I have here in my home office. Basically, and I'll just echo what you were saying and explain how Developer Teaworks, I had the idea in the beginning, which the very first episode actually proves this, that the idea was to come alongside all these fantastic podcasts, these other developer podcasts, podcasts that are focused on developing, developer topics and come alongside them and provide a much shorter version that talks about slightly different things. Basically the link of the show initially was one of the most important things to me because that was the problem I was having. I didn't have enough time to listen to the longer episodes or at least I wanted some of the episodes to be shorter, which is really what Developer Tea is today. We have some longer interview episodes and most of the monologue type episodes are a little bit shorter. That was the need. That was that number one thing that you mentioned and I was creating it for, if I could have created it for myself, I would have. Obviously, it doesn't really help for me to create my own podcast for myself, but I was experiencing that need and I knew that others were as well. That's number one. Number two, all of my equipment stays set up and within about three clicks, I can be recording a new episode. Beyond that, all of my show notes, I keep actually in an app called Quip and Quip is available everywhere. If I'm at work or maybe if I'm on the road, I can pull out my phone and look at the most recent show notes and I can also create new ones. Obviously, you don't have to use Quip to do this. You can use any note application that you want to, but the idea is it's always available to me. Then that third piece, the consistency Developer Tea, just to prove the point, again, I've never missed a single week. It's not me bragging. That's me saying, what Chris's method here, there's some weight there. Consistency is so important, such an important part of the process. You know what? It's so important and also it really comes back to you being passionate about the thing that you're doing because it's like, why are you doing this? Because I'm going to be so honest. I have not missed a week either and there are so many weeks when I'm like, I don't know, I don't know if I want to do this. It's like going to the gym, but it's knowing that it's knowing the audience, even when we were just like 100 people per download or like a thousand people per download, it doesn't really matter the size. It's just knowing that there's somebody there. I email a lot with my audience. It helps me connect with them. I put them every episode of my emails on every episode, so almost at least the more recent ones. I'm like, that's just something to me that Keecey motivated knowing that someone's waiting for me to make this thing. Because otherwise, it's so easy. If you're just doing this, like, I don't know what other reason you do this aside because you want it to, but if maybe you think fame or money, I don't know. I'm not even sure that those are really realities so much. You have to really work to get to those levels to make something substantial, but you just got to do it because you love it. I think that's about the worst for development too. If you're coding, it's like, why are you making this thing? Hopefully you're learning and you love it. Yeah. I mean, people who are listening to this show, I tell you this at the end of every episode, but you are the reason the show exists. There's literally no exaggeration at all in that. Without people listening to it, I would have almost no drive to create it. That's what you're saying here is, you're doing it for someone. If you're doing it for no one, then you're not even doing it for yourself anymore. It's your literally just wasting time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Although I do enjoy it. I do enjoy it. But yeah, yeah. I know what you mean. At that point, it becomes more like a diary, like a journal. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Or like a way of marking time or keeping those notes, particularly for your podcast, keeping those notes so that you can go back and reference what you've read in the past. And actually, and actually, that's how it started. I mean, just to go back to like the podcast and like, I was making all these notes on my own and ever know because I read a lot of books and then I'm like, I'll try to send people quotes or send people notes or citation something. And then I was like, why don't I share these with people? So on my site, so don't don't want to plug it, but it's on dashbooks.com. Oh, plug away. Plug away, please. Is that behind? Absolutely. So to any of these books, if you're interested, like my whole goal was like, how do I share this? So I have notes on all the books on the site. And that was for me. And then I was like, well, some people learn better, you know, through video. Some people learn better through audio. And so then I started making the audio. And even on YouTube, I have some videos up there. I'm really just, again, it all comes back just innovating on like, how do people learn the best and how can I put aside a few hours a week to share what I'm learning because it's just such a privilege to be able to connect with people and talk to people about those things. Yeah. Sharing knowledge is a privilege. That's the best word for it. It's so enjoyable to be able to talk about. And I think it's a personality type thing. Chris and I share this particular part of our personalities, I think. I get super excited when I get to share with somebody else, something that I've learned. Like, it's just, it's really, really enjoyable for some reason. Some people may not necessarily be that way, maybe a little bit more private about those things. I'm an introvert, actually. Like, my alone time. I don't really like talking. But if you give me like a topic to explain or to create analogies about or something, oh, that's why I started this podcast, right? Like, I've got topics to talk about all the time, stuff that I've learned. And that's such an enjoyable thing. I would recommend those of you who are interested in starting, you know, starting your own thing, whatever it is. If you want to create courses or maybe you want to start a podcast or I don't know, write a blog, whatever. Start exploring those parts of your personality that you're naturally already really excited about. And that's going to be where you can drive your content from. Yeah. I love that. Well, this has been fantastic. I have two questions left for you, Chris, and then we will round out the show. The first one, and I actually prepared you for these, but we'll go ahead and roll right into it. If you could give every developer one piece of advice, 30 seconds worth or so of advice, what would you tell them? I would just say be confident with the skills that you have and be transparent and communicate the skills that you don't have. I had imposter syndrome for the first five years when I was developer. And I think it was just like, I don't know what I'm doing. I had this feeling and then I had this five years and I talked to some friends of mine and they all felt that way. We're like, oh, yeah, we don't really know what you're doing. But then after you're doing it for a few years, you actually do know what you're doing and maybe you're not giving yourself enough credit. But the other hand of it is anyone that I work with, if they come in and they're super cocky and they say they, I would rather someone just say like, I don't know that. And I'm going to, I'm like, cool. Let me show you because you don't know everything. So to me, communicating and just being honest with what you know and what you don't know really helps. That's great advice. And we, again, it's another topic. We've just reviewed like 50 topics that we've talked about on that. I'm pumped. Developer Tea, we have two episodes on imposter syndrome. So I will include both of those in the show notes. One of them is actually imposter syndrome in the experience developer, which actually happens more than you would expect. There's a lot of people who are experienced developers and they see younger developers moving very quickly and adopting new tools left and right. And then they start to feel a little bit insecure about that. You know, I talk about it in that episode. Go listen to it. But, yeah. So, imposter syndrome is very difficult to overcome in this particular industry because we don't really have, you know, like a degree hanging on the wall reminding us, hey, you know what you're doing. Like, and even if you even if you do, that doesn't mean it. I don't know. I mean, there's so many, I can go on for this matter. If you don't know what that means, that the imposter syndrome, look it up as soon as I heard what it meant, I was immediately just like that's me. That's me. That's me. I felt like someone else in the world understood and I was able to build up the confidence that I needed to, yeah, to start my own thing and feel good about it. Yeah. It's very powerful. And so, let's go ahead and go straight into that second question. What topic do you wish more people would talk to you about? I love talking about ideas and I don't know if that's a topic per se, but I just noticed the people that I have the strongest connections with in life. They don't, I just, this is like just an observation on my own life that, you know, they're not always just talking about like what happened or who or what or when, but really, I don't know. I have, I have these idea groups that I, we meet sometimes, a bunch of our friends and we'll just actually last night we met and there's a question and the question last night was like, am I doing enough good in the world basically versus like, am I enjoying my life enough? Right. And it was just like put that out there and then we just shatted over some tequila about that for about an hour. So I love just like, because there's so much to learn from different people and yeah, I just love connecting over that. So yeah. Yeah. It's the sign of one of the signs of intelligence or I don't want to use culture because that can have a negative tone. But one of the signs of a person that you probably want to be connected to is someone who is zoomed out and not focused on their own life as much as they are focused on the life of lives of those around them, those who they are impacting. Right. So if you can adopt that idea of zooming out a little bit and starting to think about things that are a little bit bigger than yourself, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would say even from the business side, let's just say like you're listening to the show and you're trying to figure out how to get a raise. Like, we're just totally fine. If you're listening to the show and you're trying to figure out how to get a raise, the very first piece of advice I would tell you is to start thinking about everything else other than yourself for the next week, right. And immediately you start realizing there are these places that I can do better for the people around me or for my company or, you know, et cetera, et cetera for my family even. There's so many ways that I can influence the world around me and that may actually culminate in that raise. You're right. Like zooming out and looking at it and saying, hey, you know what? I can do this a little bit better. That may actually make you a better employee. And I would say empathizing is a skill, another skill that we don't necessarily teach or have, having an emotional IQ. Yeah. And as far as like, you know, putting yourself and asking, you know, not thinking about yourself, which is what you're saying and thinking about other people, I mean, has a boss right now, you know, as like someone who manages people that I get like when people are managing me. Like I get the other side of it now. And so being able to empathize and be like, you know, what are my bosses needs? Like why is he acting this way? Why does he feel this way? Why does he? And there's probably a lot of depth to there's of course, ever there's so much depth to every single human interaction you have. Sure. And and that's such a fascinating. Yeah. I love that. I think that's so powerful. Empathy. Like. Yeah. Empathy is very strong. If you can learn that without having to be a boss before you learn it, that will take you a very long way, not just in your professional life, but also also in your personal life. You're just going to be a better person. Like your life is just going to be in general just a little bit better. The people who are, for example, a generous, I talked about generosity for April Fools. I asked everybody to be foolishly generous to another person. Instead of doing a joke, do something that's a general, like a joke in such a way that that they're like, what in the world, why are you giving me this or why are you doing this for me? The people who are generous, the people who act on behalf of others tend to be happier than those who do it. Oh, there's so much research. There's so much research on that. Yeah, for sure. We aren't blowing smoke about this or like trying to be fluffy about it. This is real like proven stuff. You know, go out and buy your friend a meal and instead of focusing on your, you know, whatever it is that ruined your day to day. And it will blow your mind, actually, how much that will change the way you think about everything. Yes, I love that. I love it. This is such a good podcast. Awesome. Chris, I've really enjoyed every minute of you on this show. And of course, I'm going to be listening to on books. Tell people where they can find you and tweet at you and do all those other things, find your content, et cetera. Totally. Yeah. So I'm on Twitter. I'm at Castig's CIS TIG. The on books podcast, you can get it on iTunes. It's free. So it's just on with a space books. And the website is on dashbooks.com. And my email is Chrisiton-books.com. If you want to shout out. There you go. There's all the ways. There's all the things. Yeah. And every one of those will be in the show notes as well. Thank you so much, Chris, for being on the show. For sure. Yeah. Thank you, Jonathan. And thank you, everyone, for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. I want to apologize for missing an episode on Monday, by the way. It was my wife's birthday. And I ended up spending my time with her. That was my priority for the day. So I ended up getting a little bit behind and missed an episode. But I promise you, we have a lot of content locked and loaded and ready to send your way. So stay tuned to Developer Tea. Of course, you need to subscribe to make sure you don't miss out on any future episodes of Developer Tea. We send out three episodes per week, except for this week, of course. We send out three episodes per week. So staying subscribed to the show is the easiest way to make sure you don't miss out on those episodes. Thank you again to today's sponsor, Hired. 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