Hey guys, welcome back. Today I want to talk to you about the three reasons and honestly there are only three reasons why people fail on anything whether it's business, whether it's relationships, whether it's to do with a holiday, whether it's to do with climbing a mountain or career change, especially career change to code. Okay, there are three reasons. Now this is a very powerful framework and when you start to think about the challenges you're having and the reasons why you're not getting to your goal, in the context of this framework it'll immediately help you isolate and analyze the problem which then gives you a step to do next. Okay, so let me get started and as always let me share my screen. So there are only three reasons only why people end up failing. Okay, and it comes down to having the wrong plan, the wrong execution or the wrong expectation. So let's talk about the first one. Okay, this is not going to be a very long episode because it's pretty straightforward to understand the framework and the idea here is not to overbloat you with information. The idea here is to give you a simple framework that you can apply for anything. I've been using this for decades and it really really really helps. Okay, so number one wrong plan. Right, so what is the plan? The plan is basically a sequence of steps. Okay, and it has to be an intelligent sequence of steps and the important thing is that the sequence matters. Okay, just like a recipe how you do things is also defined by the order in which you do it and the results you get just like a cooking recipe depends on the order in which you do it. So depending on the recipe whether it's chicken or vegetables there's a time to add the spices, there's a time to do the other things, there's a time to soak it or marinate it or maybe you don't or there are things you do in the right in the specific sequence that really really matters and of course it's important when you actually apply the heat. Right, so similarly recipes or sequences are very very important and a plan is a well sequenced series of steps that takes you from where you are to your goal which is why goals matter. Right, so the plan that is not directed at a specific goal is not a plan at all and a goal that is not specific is not a goal at all. Right, so a goal needs to be specific. Now a lot of people have talked about smart goals. Specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time bound. Realistic is a subjective thing, the rest of it I think is pretty clear. So you know it needs to be specific, measurable and actionable especially. Right, and time bound is only a way for us to drive more discipline in our self. It's not important for the goal itself. So goals matter and the more precise you are the better. So a lot of people for example say hey I want to go to Canada. Okay, actually you don't want to go to most of Canada, you want to go to some of the bigger cities perhaps or specific places in Canada. You would not be happy if your pilot took you to some other place in Canada that you didn't intend to go. So clearly specificity matters. Okay, well even though you may think of it in vague terms when you're deciding to take action you need to get super specific. So goals matter. Now for the plan or recipe think about it like navigation like your Google Maps or your Apple Maps. Okay, once you have your goal you now need a starting point. A defined and clearly assessed starting point. I spend a lot of my time with my students doing this for the first month or so when students come to me for career change coaching because it's really important to get the goals right, the starting point matters so that we can then build the implementation plan which is the right sequence. Right, so the starting point is really really important. You need to have an honest and objective appraisal of where you're starting at. Okay, a lot of people especially in the coding space come to me and it's quite surprising to be honest telling me oh they're pretty intermediate at code. Why? Because they've done some HTML, CSS and JavaScript and you're like that's kind of beginner level. Intermediate is actually much higher than you realize but if you don't know how high the mountain is you're going to think you're further up the mountain than you actually are and that's going to be very dangerous, probably fatal for your plan because your starting point is all wrong. Okay, now it's really important given I've given you all these map analogies to remember to remind you and remind myself that the map is not the territory. There's this old saying right the map is not the territory. What that means is when you look at a map you don't actually know what the actual territory is going to be like. Sure you may have some of the basic ideas that if it's a really detailed map you have more detail in it but looking at the map and thinking that's how the terrain is actually going to be is a big mistake. Okay, the map is a guidance tool, it's a navigation tool, it's not a substitute for an exact replica of what the real world's going to look like. Now this the map is not the territory I think is a military history phrase because as you can imagine in military history it really mattered that people didn't think the map was going to have all the information and that the real life experience is going to be the same as looking at the map. It's not. Right, so for the map to be useful you also need to have insight into the territory. Again a lot of lessons from military history here right you need to have actual insight into the industry. In military history they use spies to get greater details to increase the the value of the map right and the greater quality of the intelligence the information on the enemy territory. So similarly when you're trying to enter into a new territory a new career or whatever it is you need to have a lot of insight into that industry before you build your plan. Now here's a classic example of why people do this wrong. Recently a friend of mine mentioned that his parent had written a book and this is a wonderful person an incredibly bright person and they've written the book and the the first and only step that people tend to think about is well I thought writing the book is going to be the hardest part and actually that's the easiest part right when you think about well I'm going to write a book what is the thought I'm going to write a book but that's the that's one of the intentions but note how it's very big to be really specific it needs to be well I'm going to write a book and then I'm going to get it published right and it turns out that editing it and then getting an agent and then marketing it and publishing it are way harder than writing the book right often it takes people two to three times do all that stuff compared to writing the book right so if it takes a year to write the book it could take a year or two to just market it and publish it and get it out in the market so that's twice as long as it took to write the book and that's an example of the map not being the territory now you may say okay I have all these steps and in fact in the in a future episode I'm going to talk about the seven stages the seven steps to career change to code or anything else there are seven steps right and most people focus on one because they confuse the map for the territory or they think just like writing a book that writing a book is all about writing the book the real goal is not to write the book the real goal is not to learn to code the real goal is to get published or in the coding world the real goal is to get hired as a professional developer writing the book is like learning to code it's just the first step of many and it's not enough to get to your action goal right so this is exactly why having the wrong plan is one of the major reasons people fail now next is wrong executions this is assuming that you actually have a good plan okay assuming your plan is viable then you execute it incorrectly and usually wrong execution is a symptom of not enough detail in the plan so it's arguably a symptom of your plan being viable but not of great quality right it's a correct plan but it's not detailed enough and so that'll cause wrong execution typically wrong execution is too little of a critical input now this could be time energy the right kind of material doing the right things at the right time so all of these are critical inputs right timing the quality of the input the timing of the input the amount of effort involved all that is our critical inputs and so you could lack the critical inputs in sufficient quantity think of it this way if you're doing a long journey and you're doing it on half tank of gas and you do run out of gas that's not the journey's fault it's not even the map's fault it's because the critical input was missing okay or you set out to buy a house and you completely read the market wrong and you just don't have enough money for it right in that case you have a critical input that's missing or insufficient typically in the context of career change or learning to code or you know complex transitions like that the critical input is missing and it's usually effort time or money right these are the three currencies that we all have to spend time effort money these are the three investments we all need to make to achieve anything we want in life and so typically the critical input is missing because of indiscipline laziness focus or you just didn't know right i didn't know this was a critical input right so that's these are common reasons indiscipline laziness focus ignorance also environmental factors so for example parents need to make a very different plan and this is how i work with the students in my program is i customize the best in their context their environmental factors parents or people with heavy duty dependencies have a very different context and therefore critical inputs are harder for them to sustainably put in right so i need to make a plan around that or some people especially people who don't have families and lots of free time have a lack of accountability too much time on social media or they're not able to measure their progress in any meaningful time terms they have terrible time management poor energy management very bad focus and so on so forth so everybody's context is different and you need to optimize your critical inputs based on your particular context that's why the second part is important because wrong execution can come out from environmental factors a lot of the times the last one the last reason why executions of plans can be incorrect is because of what's known as closed feedback loop a closed feedback loop is a feedback loop that doesn't have external inputs into it to refresh it and give it new data okay so classic close feedback loops could be certain kinds of learning environments so for example a very common symptom that people complain to me about is oh i'm in tutorial hell i've done lots of code academy but i can't actually build anything from scratch or i've done a bunch of you know udemy courses and i can't build anything from scratch right this is because these are closed feedback loops you do what's there in the program it's the same for everybody you have limited access to anybody to speak to if at all you have any access and you literally follow along and maybe it's it's updated maybe it's outdated we don't know but then you learn a bunch of syntax and you have some literacy but because there's no feedback into what actual building of software looks like you don't build a skill so you get literacy and not a skill because the feedback loop is closed there's no one there to tell you how you're going to apply this to make it a skill what do you need to build to build skills right because you need to build things to build the skill at building things that's a close feedback loop a lot of these learning environments online especially the cheap ones they're not worried or let me put it this way the reason they're cheap is because they mass market and if they mass market they can't give you too many feedback loops because feedback loops depends takes a lot of time and energy and focus and attention one-to-one or you know in small groups or whatever it is so it's not scalable and so therefore they give you the literacy stuff because that's scalable basically they're taking things out of a textbook and put it in a prettier format that's often what happens in these closed learning environments another form of close feedback loops is where there's a standard process for doing something and that process doesn't get regular feedback from external situations like market classic examples are curricular in colleges and boot camps etc right they're fixed the reason they're fixed is because then it's easier to scale it it's like a factory if there's a fixed process you can do more units of production so to speak and standardization works for cars and factory items but it's not great for education for this reason in that it loses touch with the market which we've all seen with college education traditionally and now we're seeing with boot camps they all everybody learns the same thing everybody teaches the same thing and so everybody looks start to look the same and then no one stands out in the market it disconnects you from the market in terms of what's happening in the market and the trends in the market do not get reflected because the curriculum is so fixed that it's hard takes time to change things we see this in school and colleges all the time by the time they change things everything's outdated again so it doesn't keep up with a fast changing market that's a close feedback loop because the feedback loop is internal and disconnected from the market so just to summarize wrong execution of a decent plan can happen because not enough detail in the plan not enough critical inputs in the plan and not enough critical inputs are largely contextual and circumstantial or i'm just not aware this is a critical input and so never put it in this can happen a lot another reason for wrong execution is the close feedback loop and the close feedback loops are from systems where there's a standardization of the process or there's a scaling of the process that disconnects it from what's actually happening in the industry and therefore the feedback loop doesn't include and incorporate new fresh data as and when becomes relevant and then that produces things like a standard output or a standard output plus only literacy and not enough skills that actually building things which is classically proven when people have a symptom like well i have spent six months learning a whole bunch of these languages and you know i can do it when the environment is right but then i can't actually build anything from scratch that is the classic close feedback group problem now the third reason why your plan could fail is having the wrong expectation so let's assume you have the right plan and you have good execution you've set up the systems correctly you have open feedback loops and you have your context and circumstances designed and curated in such a way that it enables you to actually execute on a good plan okay so you can do the right execution and you have the right plan now you may have the wrong expectations and this is again a classic symptom of the problem of mistaking mistaking the map for the territory right so you think that oh now that i've got a plan now that i've got the right execution it's just going to all fall into place and that's not true or you think it's going to be super easy and super quick and that's simply not true right often this can also happen because of the assumptions that we make based on social media influencer posts which is a more modern problem but it's still and it's actually quite a serious problem because there's so many people out there saying this is what i did so it'll work for you that's not true just because somebody does something doesn't mean it's going to work for you in fact nine times out of ten it was their context that made that thing work for them not the thing itself okay so the fact that they did a certain kind of javascript or a certain program or a certain boot camp or a certain college or did it themselves or whatever is only evidence that it worked in their combination of circumstances another big assumption that people make is you know that the social media stream is is actually evidence for example a lot of what we see in social media is that people are there's lots of people are self-taught and it may seem like that for example if i if i show you a hundred people which by the way is a lot i don't know 100 people self-taught i know maybe eight or ten you know but let's say i showed you 100 people are self-taught that sounds like a lot of people sure but there are what 40 50 million developers in the world right so that is a tiny fraction of people who actually made it to development who are self-taught now i also have another problem all the people who are self-taught but never made it to developers which is the vast majority aren't in that data set so now sure there are 50 million developers out of which maybe a hundred were self-taught that we know about in social media and thousands perhaps even millions were trying to be self-taught and never made it okay so the real data says something else so never make assumptions based on social media look for actual data if there is a huge number of people who are actually getting trained in some way to do it there is a reason for it it just increases your success rate okay another thing social media will tell you learning some html or sql or python is what is all that matters it's simply not true no one's ever gotten a job for basic literacy no one's ever going to get a job for basic literacy especially not in the complex tech world okay and it's not about the languages so this is another assumption that people have is that okay i've got a you know i've got a plan and this wrong expectation can create the wrong plan you see how all of these elements these three elements the wrong plan the execution the expectations are all linked the wrong expectations lack of industry insight are all things that can make a bad plan right and even if you do happen to luckily stumble upon a good plan it can't be because somebody else put it on a blog somewhere it's unlikely to be right for you because it may not help you execute it correctly and even if you execute it somewhat correctly if you have the wrong expectations it'll cause impatience frustration or discouragement because you have the wrong expectations and it'll make you fail okay so another very popular one that really annoys me is you know we can learn to code in 90 days or 120 days 150 days it makes no sense okay if you do one hour a day even for 150 days that's 150 hours if i do 10 hours a day for 150 days that's 1500 who do you think the more likely to get the role right obviously the person who does the 1500 hours not the 150 hours so measuring things by days makes no sense and again that's a wrong expectation that's disconnected from the execution execution being how many hours per day are you doing right so if you're doing 10 hours a day then yeah maybe 150 days is very realistic is is quite achievable provided you have the right plan to actually get interviews it's one thing to learn the skill it's a different thing to get interviews right so all these social media assumptions just stay away from them because if they're giving you information that's not clearly thought out that's not based on direct experience or that reflects only their experience then it's probably not going to work for you and that's the nature of reality okay when people ask me about how i get into google i tell them it's irrelevant i can tell you how i do it and i've talked about it i've written about it in freecode camp etc i talk about it and i do share it but i always say this worked for me okay because it was a specific set of circumstances i know how to do it for other people i've helped other people do it lots of people in eight countries so i know how to help other people do it but i can tell you every single one of them at a different context a different execution a different plan and i had to set their expectations based on their temperament and their circumstances i've had people in small countries with no local tech market and their expectations are very different okay it's not going to happen in six months i've had people in the middle of san francisco or seattle where you can have tons of more strong expectations and much better results faster because the market's different but the plan has to be tailored to the situation you're in okay now the final wrong expectation i want to talk about is that most people seem to assume that if they're finding it really hard there's something wrong with the material or there's something wrong with the instructor as opposed to that thing is just really hard there is a third option which is hard things are hard and you're finding this hard because this is a hard thing not because the material is shit not because the instructor shit you know what i mean so that's another wrong expectation that people have and what this results in this particular expectation is that this causes people to jump around right they keep looking for the next thing they keep looking for the next shiny object the next sugary hit the next framework the next influencer the next blog the next book whatever it is to jump into because the existing one feels too hard when actually even the new one's going to feel that hard because the topic is that hard this is not to say that some instructors some materials aren't better than others they absolutely are they absolutely are but unfortunately when you don't know the topic you're not in a position to assess the teacher that much nine times out of ten like if they're really bad they're clearly bad but a good teacher who's not getting results may not be because the teacher it may be because the thing is just that hard and you're not putting in the right inputs the right execution into that plan so covering a lot here like i said it's a it's a really important topic there are really only three things wrong plan wrong execution wrong expectations if you can diagnose what the problem is and it's usually a combination of all three and then tweak it you'll get much closer to your goals hope that helped and i'll see you next time
