[00:00:00] Hey guys, welcome to another episode of easier said than done and how to do it.
[00:00:04] Today what I'd really like to talk to you about is the seven rules that I followed over five long years to help me move from
[00:00:12] a professional corporate lawyer with more than 15 years of experience and then management experience and other stuff and my startup
[00:00:19] I moved from all of that to a professional software engineer in about a year. I started when I was 37 and then by 38 I was an engineer and then at 39 I was at Google.
[00:00:29] Welcome to Easier Said Than Done with me, Zubin Pratap, where I share with you the tens of thousands of dollars worth of self development that I did on my journey from 37 year old lawyer to professional software engineer. The goal of this podcast is to show you how to actually do those things that are easier said than done
[00:00:48] Today I'm in my early 40s and I work globally remotely for a big blockchain company. Now, I'm not telling you this to , as Tony Robbins says, impress you, I'm telling you this to impress on you
[00:01:00] that there are a bunch of rules and principles that have nothing to do with software engineering, but everything to do with career success and fulfillment.
[00:01:09] Because success is not about the money, it's not about the status, it's not about whether you work remotely, it's not about whether you work you know, with a fancy office with kombucha and, and, and foosball tables.
[00:01:19] Success is, are you fulfilled? Are you aligned with who you are? Are you spending your time mostly on the things that you want to be spending your time on?
[00:01:30] We can't always control 100 percent of our time, but most of the things we're required to do are the sort of things we'd want to do anyway. That is true happiness and fulfillment and with that money comes because you'll end up loving it so much you'll do better at it You will outshine others You will naturally spend more time on the things you love and so success will follow from that . With alignment and professional and personal fulfillment comes all the professional and And financial success that you want on the back of that.
[00:01:59] But why do I want to share all this with you? Why do I want to tell you this? Why am I telling you all this stuff? It's because I'm seeing right now in the middle of 2024, a lot of despair and anger and frustration, especially among the folks, I think, under the age of 35.
[00:02:13] And I'm not saying that it's not warranted to justify it.
[00:02:15] I'm just saying in many senses, while these experiences are very real and raw, there have been echoes of this in history, throughout human history, but even in recent history, and I'm going to share some of mine with you so that you can understand that everything you're going through has produced emotions in you that are real.
[00:02:35] Kind of the same emotions that are produced for people before you in generations before yours and mine and onwards back into history. The emotions are the same. The circumstances may be a bit different. Okay, but the human experience the response we have to that is more or less the same.
[00:02:52] And once you really truly understand that, you can then learn from others who have experienced what you have, even if it's not the same situation, they've gone through the same feelings,
[00:03:02] frustration, despair, fear, anger, resentment, a sense of helplessness, a sense of disempowerment. All of these things are emotions that human beings have had throughout the centuries.
[00:03:15] And so we can learn from others on how they've handled that situation,
[00:03:19] possibly worse situations, like the things that have happened in human history that you and I will never experience, and that's a good thing, that's progress.
[00:03:27] I will share with you my personal experience because you see, I've been through two recessionary cycles in 20 years, at least two years, possibly three, right?
[00:03:35] I was at the end of law school at the turn of the century when the dot com boom happened and the dot com bust happened. And while I was not economically a participant, I wasn't in the labor force, I was almost there, just a year or two away. I did Know what was going on. I did experience indirectly what was going on, and I did see first firsthand witness what was going on, though I wasn't earning a salary at that point in time, so I wasn't economically affected.
[00:04:00] And then after that, I was in the great financial crisis, right? 2007 to 2009. In fact, the financial crisis hit a couple of months after I'd migrated to Australia, and
[00:04:09] it was very difficult because I was on a work visa and if I lost my job, I'd have 30 days to find a new job.
[00:04:14] And as you can imagine,
[00:04:16] if you lose your job during a recession, it's going to take you much longer than 30 days to find a job. And this was in 2007. So just to give you
[00:04:24] some context, YouTube was less than two years old. Facebook was starting to get well known Uber, Dropbox, these things didn't really exist.
[00:04:31] Perhaps they were being worked on, but they weren't actually companies yet. Instagram, forget about it, that wasn't around.
[00:04:37] TikTok definitely wasn't around and LinkedIn had barely started up, I think in 2007. I don't think I had a LinkedIn account. I don't think most of us even knew what it was, right? So very different world.
[00:04:47] And having been through the last 20 something years of being in the workforce, I've lived and worked in three, four different countries. I started off in the UN in Austria. I've been in Indonesia for a while.
[00:04:57] I worked for a long time in India. I worked in Australia. I've done a lot of work within in America, et cetera.
[00:05:03] And so over the 20 something years, I have seen not just in my profession, whether it was law or in management and now in tech, but in other professions, what the impact of these recessionary cycles are. Right. So I want to share the seven rules that I followed when I was transitioning in my late thirties from very senior lawyer to software engineer at the bottom of the totem pole.
[00:05:29] Okay, so I had to start over all over again. And as you can imagine, it's very risky to do that. Regardless of what your profession, it's risky to do it at a later age. Okay, when you're in your 20s, you can take more risks, you have more flexibility, less demands on you, less expectations on you. As you get older and you're in your 30s, it's a little bit easier when it's a start, but by the end of your 30s, especially if you have family, it's a different ballgame.
[00:05:50] And so when I was wanting to make that change, I had to be very clear. That I had to understand how things worked, which means I had to draw on the lessons of history, not just mine. I went as far back as Benjamin Franklin, right?
[00:06:03] I drew from the lessons of history, I drew from the lessons of economic history of the 20th century, because the 20th century was huge for mankind everything that happened between 1900 and 2010 was massive, right?
[00:06:13] And so, there was a lot of learning for me from that, and I learned from my own direct experience
[00:06:18] of what economic cycles are.
[00:06:21] So, when I made the move. I had to be very careful and methodical about it. And so I want to share with you seven principles.
[00:06:28] By the way, I did put these seven principles up on LinkedIn. And so I'm going to share my screen with you now. And you can see, I put this post up on LinkedIn where I explained to people why I had a perspective in this and why I was able to fairly safely transition. And that's why I quit the bootcamp as well, because the bootcamp to me, the coding bootcamp represented, unsafe, far too risky.
[00:06:50] I'm very happy with the gamble. Heck, that's why I was one of those that went to the U S in 2017 sorry, 2018 to join a bootcamp. And I quit in one week. Right. And the reason is once I got there, I realized that the risk calculation had changed for me.
[00:07:03] Hi, if you want a no BS insight into how to change your career, whether to code or something else and how to actually get job opportunities in tech, then please subscribe and like.
[00:07:12] It's no BS because I have zero incentive to mislead you. I just want to help you and give you tons of value so that you will consider working with me to get to your next career.
[00:07:21] Take a look at the
[00:07:22] description text below to learn more about the training I offer. But I do post content here regularly and by subscribing and liking and hitting that notification bell you will get to know when I post new industry insights for you. You'll also know within about three seconds if you want to learn more, but at least you won't miss out.
[00:07:38] Oh, and please follow me on LinkedIn too. I pretty much post there every single day. Just look for my name, Zubin Pratap. All right. So please like, and subscribe to this channel and let's get back to the episode.
[00:07:47] I I realized that the risk calculation had changed for me. borrowed against my mortgage and bought almost 55, 000 to go to the U S stay there for three months in Silicon Valley and go to a top bootcamp, et cetera.
[00:07:58] I lost a bit of money and I ended up coming back after about two weeks, right? So
[00:08:03] for me risk management has always been important. I don't expect there to be zero risk You can't succeed in life with zero risk But what you can do is manage risk a little bit and what you can actually do is make trade offs In other words, sometimes it'll take a bit more time, but it's less risky or it'll take less time But it's more risky
[00:08:21] that's just life. There's a trade off for everything
[00:08:22] So I want to share with you
[00:08:24] This post that inspired this podcast episode . It was pretty well received, not my best performing post, but it had about 20, 000 impressions and a fair amount of traction and lots of stuff in the comments that was quite interesting that made me think, okay, you know, maybe I should share podcast. So let me go through all seven rules one at a time and I'll explain each one to you in a way that hopefully will contextualize and help you decide what's right for you.
[00:08:48] Keep in mind it's actually impossible for me to tell you what's right for you. You have to make up your mind about that. And the reason it's impossible for me is I don't know you. I can't hear your point of view. I cannot ask you questions about your circumstances.
[00:09:01] So when I work with my students in the Inner Circle coaching program and I'm helping busy professionals transition and become professional coders, I spend a lot of time asking them questions and I'm not talking like minutes or hours. I'm talking weeks getting to the bottom of how their lives are built.
[00:09:17] Okay, how their time is being used what their families are like what other dynamics are at play because that's the only way I can give you personalized advice But I can't do in a podcast. Having said that I believe these seven rules will help you make really smart decisions
[00:09:31] Okay, so the seven rules which helped me over five long years that it took me to transition were: number one study nights and weekends And hold on to your job use your job to fund and invest in education and to fund your patients So let's break that down.
[00:09:48] Look guys human nature is like this when times are good
[00:09:51] We all think things are going to be great things are going to be like this forever It's going to be perfect. You know, we have a bigger risk appetite because there's no actual risk in our heads Okay And so people do crazy things like they'll end up quitting their job and they'll go and do a three month boot camp now I was Shutting my startup and I didn't have a job.
[00:10:08] That's why I went and did the boot camp But then I came back and I immediately started some consulting work because I knew the boot camp wasn't the right place Option for me because I didn't think it was actually going to get me professional grade skills, which is a whole different story. You can listen to some of my other podcasts on that.
[00:10:22] And I knew that to compete with experienced computer science graduates and software engineers, a bootcamp wasn't going to get me to the level I needed to, even at the best times, like 2017, 2018, 2019, when the market is so called booming. I could see even the best bootcamps weren't going to give me professional grade skills.
[00:10:37] Unless I happened to live in Silicon Valley and had really great contacts and networks in the tech space, I wasn't probably going to get a job, right? So that's why I quit the bootcamp. So I believe studying nights and weekends means that it's harder work. It's going to take a bit more time, but you're definitely going to get there if you do the right thing.
[00:10:55] If you follow the plan, it's, it's almost guaranteed because, you know, if you follow a recipe, you're going to bake the cake, but it's harder. It's going to take more sacrifice. It's going to take more effort It's going to take more discipline and you're going to take And you're going to have to manage your energy and time better because you're working full time, but at least the money is coming.
[00:11:14] You're not psychologically anxious, right? And if there's a recession, because no one can predict when a recession happens. One month, they just find themselves in a recession and the job market has dried up, right?
[00:11:23] This has happened in every industry. There's nothing new in tech. By the way, tech, I don't believe the job market has dried up. I think it's just returned to normal, healthy levels. I think it was at unhealthy levels for about seven years. I have a whole different podcast on this about the business cycles that I encourage you to listen to.
[00:11:38] If you want to understand how business cycles work, you will see that tech was at an inflated state for the last 15 years. Which is pretty much the whole history of tech as we know it and now this is much more normal. If you study nights and weekends, even if the market goes down as long as you hold on to your job You're not financially insecure and at risk Okay, and that means you have the money coming and you can keep the lights on you can ride out the bad weather Okay, that's why I say fund your education and your patience by having a job It's going to take a bit more long.
[00:12:08] It's going to take longer, but at least financially you're going to be okay. As opposed to, let's say you're earning 80, 000 a year. Okay. You quit that you're losing 80, 000 a year and you enroll in a bootcamp. A good bootcamp that may hopefully get you results or you know You have a reasonable prospect of getting some sort of results is going to cost you about fifteen to twenty thousand dollars Okay, so it's eighty thousand dollars plus fifteen to twenty thousand dollars out there again.
[00:12:33] I've done this on my podcast channel I also i've explained to you the numbers and the costs of actually funding different types of Approaches.
[00:12:40] So by this time you're almost hundred thousand dollars in the hole and you haven't even got a single dollar coming in Then you do three to six months of some boot camp.
[00:12:47] It's probably not going to get you ready for the job So you're going to spend about another six months getting ready for interviews and trying to get interviews A full year has gone by no income has come in and you spent 20, 000 or 15, 000 in the boot camp.
[00:12:58] And for that full year, while you've had no income coming in, you've had to pay rent, pay for groceries, maybe pay for family, whatever it is.
[00:13:05] So your expenses are probably well more than 100, 000, 150, 000, maybe 200, 000 and you've got no income coming in. And that's why people quit because they panic.
[00:13:15] Okay, so don't do that study nights and weekends hold on to your job Take the hard route take the hard away You'll have an easier life because of it and use your money and income to fund your education and your patience So that's rule number one.
[00:13:26] Rule number two do not Fall for the BS promises, the absolute bullshit promises out there about learning to code in 90 days.
[00:13:33] Okay. For two reasons. One, that's not your goal. And I'll explain that your goal is not to learn to code. Number two, nobody ever gets good at anything in 90 days, let alone a complex skill. Okay, maybe you can learn to drive in that much time and get reasonably good. But if I were to tell you you're going to become an accountant a nurse a lawyer a policeman a journalist in 90 days, you're going to be like that's crazy.
[00:13:54] That's not how it's not the medieval ages guys It's not you know, you're not learning to shoe a horse.
[00:13:59] Okay, these are complex advanced skills Yes, you can learn to code in 90 days, but like I said, that's not your goal. Here's an example. I can teach someone the basics of guitar chords and guitar scales in about a month.
[00:14:12] They'll probably be able to play chords reasonably smoothly in about two months. Does that make them a professional musician? Even three months is not enough for you to be a professional musician. So why would you expect to be a professional grade software engineer in anything less than six months to one year, assuming you're doing it like 20 hours a week, 30 hours a week.
[00:14:31] So when I work with my students in the Inner Circle private coaching program, I work with very few people for 12 months, I tell them give me 12 months. So I work with very few people for a very long period of time, partly because I work full time as well.
[00:14:43] And I love being an engineer. And I don't want to give that up, but also because it takes time. And I tell them if you can't give me 12 months, 20 hours per week. You're not going to join the program.
[00:14:51] It's just not the right fit, right? So your goal is not to learn to code. Your goal is to become a professional coder There is a very huge difference between knowing how to play a sport or knowing how to play the guitar And being a professional rock star or a professional athlete Okay, so when you fall for this bs on the internet about oh, you can learn to code in 60 days They're not lying to you.
[00:15:14] You got exactly what they told you that you were going to get. They said, you're going to learn to code in 90 days or 60 days or 120 days. And that happened. You learned to code, but then you don't know how to build anything.
[00:15:27] So you know how to play a little bit of guitar, but you don't know how to write a song or you don't know how to figure out somebody else's song and make a cover version. That's what's happened. So you got exactly what you bought. The problem is that most people think that learning to code and being a professional software engineer is the same thing. It's really not literacy and skill are two different things Okay, not your fault that you thought that because that's how our education system has trained us to think , but at the same time, I wouldn't say that you've been scammed by a bunch of people, they were selling you pretty much what you were asking for.
[00:15:57] Now, people, when they come to me, they're like, Oh, I want to learn this language. And I'm like, sorry, I'm not going to tell you what language you're going to learn. When you come to me, I'm going to coach you. And everything required to become a professional coder, which means we are going to research what is the right thing for you.
[00:16:12] And I will show you how to do that research. So I have no fixed curriculum because none of my students have got the same curriculum and they can't. They're different people, different countries, different cities, different jobs, different backgrounds, different level of tech education. Some of them are bootcamp, a lot of them are bootcamp graduates, actually.
[00:16:26] Some of them have never touched code in their life. How can I tell you what your curriculum is going to be? I cannot possibly know that until I spend time with you. Start figuring out your starting point and what your life circumstances are. Okay, so don't buy into these BS promises That's rule number two.
[00:16:41] Rule number three.
[00:16:42] You cannot control when you're going to get hired Okay, so if you think that a job guarantee is worth something you're being naive. Sorry, but you are okay No one can predict for you When a job's going to happen. Okay. Now, if somebody says, Oh, we guarantee we have a partnership and stuff like that. Just think about this for a moment.
[00:17:00] Just think logically, if you ran a business and you had employees. In what circumstance would you tell somebody else I will only take your graduates? You would not do that because you know that the marketplace may have better people. And so if you wanted to hire the best people and you're a quality organization, you would say, sorry, I'm not going to tie myself to one company and take their graduates.
[00:17:29] I'm going to take it out to the open market and find the best I can find. The only reason a lot of these companies have these partnerships is because they're looking for unpaid interns or someone to do work or they can't hire in the market because no employees are interested in joining them okay?
[00:17:43] That's why these kind of arrangements exist. So, no one can control when you're going to get hired. All right, but, but you can influence how likely you are to get hired when the planets align. Okay. Which is another way of saying there is a lot you can do to make yourself highly employable. Now, I spend about six months with my students, teaching them and coaching them and training them on what it is to be competitive in their marketplace, because remember, San Francisco is different from London is different from New York is different from Vancouver is different from Bangalore is different from Melbourne.
[00:18:17] Okay. Every market is different. Okay, you're not going to be able to sell mangoes in the same way in Canada that you would in the south of India, for example. Okay, it just doesn't work that way. So, because marketplaces are different, the planets may align in different ways. You have to know how to work the market.
[00:18:34] You have to influence your appearance in the market. Basically, you have to learn how to market yourself in a certain way, but not in a deceiving way. And you have to know how to get the opportunities that you want. Come to you most people that I've seen who've learned to code never get hired as professional coders Not because they're not good enough.
[00:18:51] It's because they never got a single interview. Okay Cannot control when you're going to get hired. You can only influence how attractive you are in the marketplace. That's rule number three.
[00:19:01] Rule number four. Unfortunately, the planets don't align in economic downturns The inverse is is kind of the opposite, right?
[00:19:09] That's what inverse means when the economy is booming Your planets are much more likely to align fast and things are just going to fall into place because there's that much demand in the market In a downturn, it's not just tech guys. Every industry at the moment is not hiring In fact, not for profits are bleeding people people in logistics absolutely bleeding into the workplace Okay, lots of people getting laid off in multiple industries tech gets a lot of the attention because it's on the nasdaq because there's a lot of The biggest companies in the world today, the top five biggest companies in the world today are all tech companies.
[00:19:40] 17 years ago, only one company in the biggest top five in the world was a tech company. Okay, so now that the nasdaq and the stock market is dominated by tech stocks Obviously the journalists are going to report on them and obviously that's going to spotlight and bring into sharp focus on All the tech layoffs and ignore all the other layoffs and happening in the other sectors of the economy. So in economic downturns things aren't good.
[00:20:03] We know that all right, and therefore it's really not predictable as to what's going to happen which means When the market's down, it's not personal. It's not that they don't like juniors anymore. They never, believe me, the market would always prefer a mid to senior level in any industry. This is true when I was a lawyer.
[00:20:20] I've seen this happening in GPs and clinics and nurses. You would do this too, guys. Come on. If you were getting a plumber to do something in your house, would you take someone with experience or without experience? So we all do the same thing. We all want the best experience our budgets can buy. So it's not personal.
[00:20:38] And if the market's down, it's going to get worse for a little while. Which is why I talk about Rule number one. Rule number one is study nights and weekends and hold on your job Use your job to fund your education and your patience because you do not control the market Which means you cannot control or predict when there's going to be a downturn.
[00:20:57] So why would you give up your job? Okay. So any rule number four the planets don't align during economic downturns. It's not personal. It's not predictable. Hence rule number one That's rule number four.
[00:21:06] Rule number five, hope is not a strategy guys. I cannot tell you how many people are coming to me saying, oh yeah, I learned to code and then, you know, I'll, I'll get a tech job and I'm like, you just skipped four steps.
[00:21:18] What happens after you learn to code? Oh, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll have to do some interviews. Okay. And so what's going to be a problem? Oh, well, you know, I think yeah cracking the coding interview is hard I've seen there's a book on it. What comes before cracking the coding interview and most people can't answer this Here's the answer getting an interview That's what comes before cracking the interview after you've learned to code and before you actually do interviews You have to get people to give you the interviews to invite you to the interviews.
[00:21:43] That's really hard So you know A lot of people just rely on hope. Oh, I'll do this and then the other stuff will sort itself out. That's not the way it works. It's a bit like trying to cook a fancy dish and say, I'll do half the ingredients and then I'll figure out the rest while the dish is on the stove.
[00:21:57] You're probably going to burn the house down if you try and do that, right? So it's not a good idea. So hope is not a strategy. Jumping around is not a strategy This is another thing I see people do they're guessing on what to do. They have no plan. They have no structure They have no insight and it's not their fault again guys.
[00:22:12] I'm not blaming you here I'm trying to tell you that if you don't know something that's not a fault. It's not a flaw. It's a Problem to be fixed. It's not a flaw. All right, And i've talked about this extensively on other episodes in my podcast jumping around happens when you're Not clear on your plan when you're not clear on your goal when you don't have confidence in the steps You've decided and that usually happens when you're guessing or you're letting some algorithm on the internet on Youtube or Google or Tiktok tell you what you should be doing.
[00:22:40] Obviously, you're going to jump around the world has no shortage of information I've done an entire episode on why people are stuck in tutorial hell because of SEO .Because you guys are being used to drive advertising dollars . There's an entire episode where I talk about how coding related content ends up being created and it's not to help you guys Go and check out that episode, right?
[00:22:59] So jumping around is not a strategy and then worst of all confusing Coding literacy with professional grade skills is also not a strategy and the reality is getting good is going to take you way longer than learning But most people think Learning the basics is good enough and all they think that learning the basics is all there is that's the whole game, right?
[00:23:21] The truth is that there's many more skills to software engineering than just knowing how to write a language. Guys by about year two You're probably reading and especially if you're in a big company and there's lots of product and code That's already been built your job will be reading and debugging code and writing code to fix existing code You're not gonna be writing brand new shopping cart apps or you know, youtube clones.
[00:23:43] That's not what's gonna happen, right? It's a much more advanced skill than that. So getting good ticks time it's going to take much longer than just acquiring some basic skills. Okay, so get away from the basic skills mentality and say, how do I get professional grade?
[00:23:58] The mentality that most people seem to work with is I need to learn how to play basketball No, your goal is to get into the nba remember? So you need to get professional grade skills at basketball have a professional grade diet you know have professional great fitness diet lifestyle and habits Sponsors this that there's a kit.
[00:24:15] There's all kinds of things that goes into being a professional. Okay, it's not just about the basics So that's rule number five don't confuse hope for a strategy Don't think jumping around is a strategy and don't think learning the basics is a strategy.
[00:24:26] Number six rule number six play the long game again You can see an echo of rule number one here Right and and rule number five because most things take longer than we realize and certainly longer than we hope. Because that's a fact of life And because the market doesn't care about your secret hopes and desires the market really doesn't care about you It's not thinking about you.
[00:24:47] The market is not a thing. It's not a person. It's a dynamic It's an interaction of all kinds of forces that human beings don't understand because of that You Your secret hopes of a rapid victory or getting a fancy coding job in three months or six months is probably not going to be real. Which is why you need to expect that you don't know when this is going to happen But you know that if you go in the right direction because direction is more important than speed If you're going in the right direction, it becomes a question of when not if but you can't answer the question of when right?
[00:25:18] We've talked about this therefore Assume you're having to play the long game how long it's actually not possible to know But when you work with the right plan I think most of you should do it within eight months to about 12 months If you work with the right plan and when I say eight months to 12 months I mean 800 to 1200 hours because when I work with people I get them to do between 70 and 100 hours Every four to five weeks Worth of work and training.
[00:25:43] Okay. That's how I work with my students in the inner circle program. And yes, it's a lot of work. Why? Because you're competing with professional engineers. Remember your competition folks, your competition is not other career changes like you. Your competition . are professional coders have been doing this for a few years and have computer science degrees That's who you're competing with.
[00:26:08] So if you think doing 20 hours a week is a lot think about it Your competition is doing 40 hours plus every week. 20 hours is half of that It's really not a lot and it only works when you have a really strong plan Which is why I work with my students for one year Okay, and those who stick to the plan get it within one year.
[00:26:22] It's as simple as that. So it's doable You just have to have the right plan So rule number six just to recap play the long game.
[00:26:28] Rule number seven. This is important We've already touched on it Most people quit because of fear and because they run out of money or time or patience it's usually two or more of these things actually, okay It's not because they cannot code.
[00:26:43] Like I said, A lot of people that I know have learned to code.
[00:26:46] Most of the people in fact have learned to code. And by that, I mean coding literacy, not professional grade skills. They've learned to code, but they're not good enough to get professional grade jobs. They don't have the proper plan and they run out of money, time, patience, or courage.
[00:27:00] Okay, but they can code. So don't put
[00:27:04] yourself in a situation where you're out of time where you're out of money We are out of patience and you're out of confidence.
[00:27:10] Like I said, it's, it's a recipe, the right things in the right order at the right time with the right level of intensity and energy will get you the results, but it's not going to be in 90 days. Okay. The best I can do for my students is eight to 12 months if they're starting from scratch, right? The best student I ever had in terms of speed, did it in eight months from nothing at all.
[00:27:29] Right. Some students, like I said, about 30, 40 percent of my students are from bootcamps. Some of them, depending on what they learned in the bootcamp. Don't get it for 6 to 12 months, right? Some of them may get in 4 depending on how well their bootcamp dropped them or how well they learned in the bootcamp.
[00:27:44] Yeah, there are all these factors that go into it. So don't, don't put yourself in a situation where you quit from lack of money, lack of courage, lack of time, or just because you've run out of patience. Okay. Don't put yourself in that situation.
[00:27:55] Remember that's why most people quit, not because they can't code. And because that is true, because most people quit for these other reasons, other than their lack of confidence, because everybody can code. Anyone, sorry, let me rephrase that. Anyone with the right plan can learn to code. Okay, as long as you're not below average intelligence, you don't even have to be particularly smart to learn to code.
[00:28:16] But because this is a law of life that most people quit from fear or running out of time, money, or patience, that's why I say rules number six and one are important. What is rule number one? Rule number one is that you want to learn to code. Always hold on to your job and study nights and weekends and rule number six is you want to play the long game If you combine these two then you're not going to quit because you're out of money time patience or energy, right?
[00:28:39] You're going to keep sticking with the plan until you get there and that's what I encourage my students to do.
[00:28:43] So guys , these are my seven rules that I followed and I had engineered in my own head. They're in my diary. That's where I got this from. As to the rules I need to follow for me to make the change.
[00:28:54] And because I had this approach, I wasn't needlessly disappointed. I wasn't falsely discouraged too early. I knew it was going to be a long game. Don't get me wrong. There were times when I was absolutely sunken in despair, like absolutely hopeless.
[00:29:08] I'd always remind myself of these seven rules that has it been long enough? Has it been an unreasonably long time? Have I put in an unreasonable amount of effort? And I always knew that there's more to go and I always knew that this is going to take time. And when I reminded myself of that, I felt comfort.
[00:29:23] I felt a bit of peace and I realized that all I had to do was go to sleep, start again the next day. Detach a little bit from my secret hopes of when it's going to happen and the timing and just trust in the plan that I put into for myself
[00:29:36] and when I did that, I went from not knowing very much code at all, like barely having done the boot camp entrance test level,
[00:29:43] I went from that to getting all four of the jobs I applied for in eight months. Okay within eight months I'd applied for only four jobs again I'd applied a very careful strategy about how I approached my jobs and I got all four offers and I chose the best one I could
[00:29:55] and less than a year later I accepted my offer at google.
[00:29:58] Okay now that was five six years ago.
[00:30:00] So I'm talking from real experience, guys. It's not stuff that's special to coding. How did I know how to do this? Not because I'm particularly smart or genius or anything. I had good coaches. I had good mentors along the way. I paid for very expensive coaches and mentors who are not technical, right?
[00:30:15] I paid for expensive resources to educate myself because I had a job to help me do that I could put a little bit of my money into education into self improvement and that's why I knew how the world works That's how I knew how job markets were worked. So by the time I was ready to switch to code I understood how recessions work how the boom cycles worked I understood how to read the signs in the economy and I knew
[00:30:36] how how jobs worked and how recruitment works Okay, it's not how you think It's, it's a system.
[00:30:43] It's a marketplace. There are dynamics and forces. You have to know how to stand out. You have to know what they're looking for. All of the stuff, by the way, I teach my students in the Inner Circle program.
[00:30:52] Code is a very small piece of the puzzle. In fact, there's another episode I've done in my podcast talking about the seven stages of career change. Just a coincidence that this is also seven rules. That's seven stages of career change, where learning to code is stage two and stage three, literally some of the beginning stages, right?
[00:31:06] So I'm encouraging you guys to take a holistic view. I don't want more and more of you people to be getting frustrated and feeling despair and anger and sad and miserable and losing confidence in yourself, because it's not your fault. If you're losing confidence in yourself, it's because you don't understand the rules of this game that you're trying to get into.
[00:31:23] These are the seven rules that will help you understand the rules of the game. Okay? So that's the purpose of this this podcast now if you think i'm the right person to help you By all means there are details in the show notes You can reach out to me and if you're a fit for the inner circle program and if I You know think that we're going to get the right result.
[00:31:39] I don't work with people unless i'm sure I can get them the result if that is the case then great. You're welcome to join me, but I'm not for everybody. Okay. For some people, college is the best thing or giving up the job for a bootcamp. Maybe the right thing. If you have the financial resources to do it great, do it.
[00:31:53] If that's what you want, you've got to take some risks. Not everyone can do that, if you're willing to work really hard, you're willing to make some sacrifices. You're willing to be patient and play the long game and be disciplined. I'm a hundred percent sure you're the right person for me and I'll be happy to work with you.
[00:32:06] So with that said, hope you have a fantastic day. And I really hope this helped. Take care. Bye.
[00:32:10] Just subscribe, you know you gotta do it.
