Hey everybody, and welcome to a special episode. We have panelists from the
following shows, Adventures, Angular, React, Roundup, and Use on View.
So if you listen to any of these shows, they are going to
show up on your feed. And I'm just gonna go ahead and do the
panel introductions like I normally do. If the panelists could let people know what
shows they're typically on, that would probably help people who don't listen to those
shows. So I'm just going to start with the panel. That's furthest left
on Zoom. We have Aaron Frost, Hello, I'm on Adventures in Either
shy Resnick Hello, I'm on Adventures, and as well Divia Saster On.
Hi, A'm Divia. I'm usually on the Views on View podcast. That's
right. You were also recently a guest on Jaonascript Jabber. That is correct.
Joe Eames, Hey, everybody, I'm on Dallascript, Javer, Views
on View and Adventures in Angular. Lucas Heish, Hello, everybody. I'm
Lucas from React, Roundup Tu. I'm on all of the shows, almost
all of the shows on Chat Out. So we have a special guest and
that is Sean Meren. Sean, do you want to say hi. Yeah,
hey Chuck, good to be here. I was. I had the
pleasure of hopping on JavaScript Jabber and my jas story in the past, so
good to be back. Yeah. And you do a few interesting things,
one of which, if people are podcast listeners and they're interested in financing finances
not financing, I think you discouraged financing, you can go check them out
at two Frugal Dudes two frugal dudes dot com. And you also have an
interesting product that you've just launched that is related to what we're talking about.
That's right, exactly. Yeah. So through the two Fugal Dudes podcast,
I had the pleasure of meeting some other people in the personal finance community,
and then ended up at a conference called finn Con for personal finance content creators,
and there I met my co founder of a new product called mastermind Hunt
to help people find mastermind groups. But doing that about a year now.
Nice And for people who are interested, I'm just going to go ahead let
people know. Now we're doing a webinar on January three, right, yeah,
at two pm Eastern time, and we're going to be talking a little
bit more in depth about mastermind groups. But I wanted to get get it
on the show, because what I really care about is helping people find the
freedom in their careers or their jobs or whatever to do whatever it is that
they want to do. So for Angular developers, they want to write more
Angular or they want to write better apps, you know, for React developers,
same thing, View developer, same thing. And one thing that I
have found over the years that has really helped me is either finding a mentor
or finding a group of people that I'll want to learn together. And we
were talking about the mastermind groups. I'm like, this is exactly what I
did, and so I thought, Okay, well, Sean knows what he's
talking about with Mastermink experience. I think some of the other panelists here do
as well, and so I just wanted to give people the opportunity to learn
about mastermin groups and then you know, give everybody a chance to go and
form some master my groups, especially around the beginning of the year when you're
starting to set goals around bubbling up. So do you want to just kick
things off and talk about what a mastermind group is and how they operate,
and then we can you know, the panel can jump in wherever they want
and ask questions. Yeah, sure thing, and I totally agree. You
know, I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for the awesome
people that I've been able to surround myself with around, you know, along
the way, along the journey. And I kind of started off with,
you know, coworkers when I first got into the as an employee in the
career space, and then eventually getting involved in the software development community, going
to user groups and conferences and then wanting to talk to these people on a
regular basis. And actually one of them had introduced me to a concept of
mastermind groups. Actually, my co host, Kevin g I think who you're
familiar with. He's been on the show before. So being a software developer,
I've always been inspired to try and write my own software. On the
side, I've gotten involved in the startup community, so meeting other entrepreneurs and
other like minded individuals. I was introduced to this concept of mastermind groups.
Didn't really know what it was. It's kind of like this gray area.
I've heard about them. You look them up online, You're like, it's
still kind of hard to figure out what they are or how to run one.
But basically it's kind of, like you mentioned, you surround yourself with
a few people with maybe similar goals or aspirations, and you talk with them
on a regular basis, and so you get together maybe every other week.
Maybe you're both trying to either move your business forward, learn a programming language,
pay off debt. Maybe you're both e commerce web developers, right,
and so you kind of deal with similar problems. Not both, Sorry,
it could be anywhere from two to however many people you want. Usually we'll
see them anywhere from four to five kind of work well people in a mastermind
group. But again, you talk on a regular basis, You talk about
what you're currently working on, share something that you learned, and a problem
you need help with. And then you have all these other people you know,
you know, kind of helping you with that problem, giving you their
feedback. And then it builds this a little accountability group that you know,
Hey, by the next time we get together, I better put what they
just told me to work right. So when we do come back and meet
again, you know, I'm taking that advice. I'm learning from other people's
mistakes and hopefully moving to the next level. Gotcha, I'm curious if any
members of our panel today have had similar experience where they've connected with a group
of people and you know, either for a fixed length of time or for
an indefinite length of time talks about code. I tried it. I try
several times, once for business stuff like startup stuff, and one time it
was around code, but not in a structure where just like meeting everybody,
and when it was on like the business side of things. What I found
out is that we didn't have like like a timer on anyone, so we
didn't have like ten minutes that everyone can talk or something like that, which
made it a very like, I don't know, one sided or two sided
kind of conversation where somebody like took the two hours and we just helped him
and then like we tried to make it irritation. But it didn't last.
It didn't survive no more than a couple of times. So I wonder if
you have any advice on how to keep it longer, for longer periods of
time. Yeah. Absolutely, that's a very common problem. Actually, I've
seen that in groups I've been a part of and heard the same exact thing
you just said from other people that were in groups previously and struggle with staying
on pace or staying on track. And I think that's the biggest thing that
people don't remember or forget really fast or really quickly, is that, hey,
you have a set amount of time here, you know, whether it's
an hour at a time every two weeks or whatever it is, and you
need to try and make sure that you get the most value out of that
time and come into that meeting prepared. I've seen a lot of people come
to the meetings and just try to on the fly, you know, in
their mastermind group, come up with what they want to talk about, or
you know, just kind of go now and go on this tangent. You
know, there are going to be times where maybe someone does need a little
bit more time, you know, and you're going to have that time too,
right, and you kind of rotating around that. But it is up
to the other people in the mastermind group to kind of keep that person,
you know, I want to say, in check, but keep the meeting
moving forward. And so what we do is we actually each one of my
mastermind groups has a set of questions, right, and we man we set
a timer on those questions as well, and we say, hey, you
have ten minutes to talk about, you know, how your accountability goal went
last time, whether you met it or not, why or why not?
And then and then we get into okay, what are you currently working on?
And a problem you need help with that you might get fifteen minutes on.
And so it's it's really the you know, unless you have one person
that you which you can do, you can do one of two things.
You can dedicate one person as like the leader of the mastermind group or the
moderator, you can call it, right, that is responsible for that like
that. They're good at that. They're good at keep keeping people moving forward.
They're instead of letting someone randable, they'll cut them off, you know,
because mastermind groups are supposed to be brutally brutally honest, right like,
hey, like you you keep kind of going around the question here, let's
get to the point, keep digging into them. But it's really everybody's responsibility.
I like groups where everybody's kind of the moderator and everybody. You know,
you're not just there when it's your turn to like being what we call
the hot seat, like you just mentioned, you're the one talking about maybe
the problem you're dealing with. You're also you know, It's all about participation.
So even when you're the one give, even when you're not in a
hot seat, you're you're it's your responsibility to kind of help make sure the
group is moving forward and help ask the right questions. So so yeah,
usually a lot of that is because of rambling or trying to beat around the
bush. So I do a really good job at trying to make sure the
meaning is moving forward, the right questions or being answered, or just being
hey, you have five minutes left. You know, let's what can we
get accomplished here before we run out of time, because we do need to
get to someone else or at leads, everybody talks and says, hey,
let's go ahead and let's get my mastermind in the group this week or my
my hot seat. I don't need to talk this meeting. I'm okay with,
you know, giving more time to whoever may need it because I realized
they need it. But it's either either you got to dedicate one person to
it or the everyone else in the meeting has to be aware that they are
all active participants and need to help keep the meaning moving forward. Now I'm
getting this concept here about you know, like policing things and how to like
some of the overall organization. But I'm just still curious, like whebber rea's
the road. What are like some examples of things you would say, like
when you start to talk about this and yeah, so do was it you
check that asked if you'd ever done this to talk about good I was originally
said no, but of course I would say that's definitely not true. There's
definitely been part of the times of the past, but it's been at work,
and it's these organic conversations where you might chat for ten to forty five
minutes with a coworker about a very specific code topic that isn't about like hey,
how we're going to solve this one problem and code, but more like
something bigger, right or not one hundred percent directly appl applicable to the job.
So for me, I guess that probably closely fits. But I'm still
curious to hear in these groups that have happened. Humber Me throwed, what
are examples of like all right, we sat down and here's what we talked
about, and we talked about this for this length of time, and the
whole group where we talked about the whole length of time the whole group and
how long was the group. I'm still curious to hear experiences of that.
Yeah. Sure, So what we actually do is I actually have a document
that I create for every meeting and before the meeting. I'll just give you
one example of a masterminding group I'm in. It's been two other software engineers
that are also you know, kind of involved in startups, and we're all
kind of working together on building our own products. Right. So every meeting,
this one, we do what's called like a round robin style. So
we meet for an hour and we all three of us are sorry, we
meet for you know, meet for an hour, and all three of us
get about twenty minutes to be on a rotating round robin hot seat. During
that time, we open up the conversation talking about our biggest win for the
week. Whoever's on the hot seat goes first. And so, for example,
my biggest business win, uh, you know, with mastermind Hunt,
I sold our first uh subscription to a user for sixty dollars a year organically
without any you know, affiliate or anything like that was a win. Maybe
that happened for example, I actually I talked about previously in a Mastermind I
was in and then we'll move on and we'll and the next question will be
did you hit your accountability goal last week whatever it may have been, Because
every meeting you want to walk away with some kind of takeaway task right that
you're gonna hit by the following week. And we like to use the concept
of, you know, smart goals. You may have heard that acronym before.
I can't even remember smart measurable, achievable, I can't remember what the
R are is, probably like realistic, and then time bound goals. So
you say, I'm gonna do X by X, and here's how I'm going
to do it. So, for example, with Mastermind Hunt, like,
actually, that's a great example because as I was building that product, I
actually, you know, I was talking to this this software engineering startup,
Mastermind about it, and every two weeks we would meet and so when I
came in the meeting, you know whatever the next so I was working on
let me think of an example right here. So, for instance, like
billing, setting up subscriptions and billing customers within mastermind Hunt directly. So I
would come in and say, and I'm working on this billing feature. I
need to integrate with Stripe. You know, I was using React actually,
to believe it or not, this is my first React app. I used
Mastermind Hunt as a test to learn React, and so I was new to
that, and some people in the in the in the Mastermind actually had experience
using React in the past. Whatever my last accountability goal, i'd maybe talked
through why I did or didn't meet that. If I didn't, it's a
certain piece of code done right, and then I would problem I need help
with Hey, I'm looking to integrate with React or sorry, integrate React with
Stripe. I see there's a few libraries out here, like you know,
using Stripe elements or there's the Stripe checkout KRT. I forget what the name
of that one was. I didn't use it, right because I got recommendation
from them. Yeah, I used that in the past. You should definitely
use the React elements Stripe elements library. And here's the link to get hub
and you know boom And here's an example by the way that they were able
to send me a code snip. I said, awesome, all right.
By the next time I get in this in the Mastermind group, I'm gonna
have this all written out. I'm gonna have to check out piece working,
that billing working, and I'm gonna have q con code set up for affiliates.
Like that was my goal that I met by I set by the next
time I was on the mask, in the in the in the hot seat.
So I not only got advice from others on you know, how to
kind of uh take a shortcut to be able to implement this feature quickly,
I also was able to kind of quickly figure out the next piece that I
need to work on within two weeks. Right, it's not this big,
you know, rock that I'm trying to hit, you know by the end
of the year. You know, we know what those are. But it's
really what's the small task or the you really think is achievable in the next
by the next time we meet. So it's like a stand up meeting you're
thinking, you're thinking like a scrum like kind of agile stand up meaning yeah,
so yeah, I mean some elements that to be sure. One other
example that I have of this, a bunch of us in the Ruby community
got together and studied structure and interpretation of computer programs by able to It's an
MIT book. It's a rather old book, so the book has exercises in
it, and we would hold each other accountable to the exercises, and some
of them were kind of hard. I think it's actually built around scheme is
the language in the book, which is a list variant. And yeah,
so we just worked for thirteen weeks work through the book, so everybody knew
what the rotation was for the hot seat. And essentially what you would do
was you would come in and you would present your solution to the exercises and
then you would explain things and ask your questions and everyone would give you feedback
and help you learn. And so there was a structured way forward. You
could also do this with like free code cam or plural site videos or just
get together and have people checking in on you to make sure that you're kind
of like what Sean was talking about, where it's like, look, I'm
going to build these features into my side project, and I'm going to go
learn about this new way to test React applications or Angular applications, or I'm
going to go learn about this other feature in view and you can level up
that way together even if you're not necessarily working on the same things. Yeah,
and you're like, you know, you wouldn't necessarily want your manager or
a project manager, you know, or someone else at that kind of meaning.
Right, Like, if you think of the whole daily stand ups,
this is like for you to find others maybe on a similar level or maybe
a little above or a little below you to kind of get together and just
work through problems and you know, pass stuff on each other on a regular
basis. Chuck mentioned mentors, right, you know, I've done one on
one mentors and gotten so much value out of that. Where here it could
be a whole group of mentors and you all kind of bring different skills at
the table because you know there's something you can maybe give your mentor and they
can give you. It's you know, you want to find someone way up
in you know, far away from you that you can't even give back to
them. I mean, that'd be great if you could have them, But
you know, it's finding people with similar level of skills, maybe a little
above and a little below, and just kind of working and talking through things
on a regular basis to kind of just help each other move forward. So
I have a question about, like zoom out question about the benefits of because
you need to get someone into the state or convince people that you know,
it's worth it to you know, invest their time to to you know,
to go or to join a mastermind group. So what is the problem that
in a higher, higher level. So we talked about like specific examples,
but in a higher level that the Mastermind group can solve and that it will
be worth it for people who are more maybe I don't know, shy,
or don't want or want to solve stuff on their own, or you know,
what will make them go from that state into the state of Yeah,
I can see the benefits in a Mastermind group where I go every week and
you know, does it make sense? But I'm just asked, yeah,
no, no, it does. Yeah. So the cool thing about the
reason actually why we did Mastermind Hunt was because it was it was kind of
weird, like how do I find a Mastermind group? How do I start
one? Again? I met my co host locally here in Hampton Roads area
in Virginia Beach, and through that, you know, I had I had,
you know, I got introduced in person, right, But yeah,
we the benefit I saw, and especially when I started getting into the personal
finance world and started doing stuff, you know with my podcast as there was
all these other people out there that already had been doing great things that I
wanted to network with and I wanted to learn from and I and it clicked
with me when I went to a conference FINCN again last year, and I
left the conference and I was like, how do I talk to all these
awesome people that I met on a regular basis? And like, how do
I partner with them? Like it's always hard to kind of just hey,
I'm just just gonna You can't just really email someone, Hey, I have
this idea, what do you think Let's work on it together. You kind
of have to build a relationship with them, right, And that's where I
all the value in mastermind groups helping as a networking tool as well. And
I actually walked away from that conference and I got twelve other people that were
like online idols, honestly, like people like uh, you know, and
I had I had been following online in the personal finance space for a long
time, and I was able to say, Hey, I'm thinking about starting
a mastermind group online virtually, right, So there's you don't have to be
in person, and we could just get together every two weeks and we could
work on and we can talk through whatever your next step is in your online
business. And I was, you know, it was great. I got
them. I got all these people that I didn't even think I could get
and just because I asked and they were excited about the idea they thought would
be cool just to have people to bounce ideas off of because they didn't happen
and no one to really do that with on a regular basis. Then we
build this personal relationship. So then out of that came all kinds of opportunities,
right, So for instance, now we cross promote a lot of our
content together. You know, maybe there's an introduction to some other online person
I want to meet, or entrepreneur or someone in the personal finance baser I
want to get on a podcast, for instance. Now I know I have
a connection that can introduce me the other mastermind I talked about, the one
I went with so other software engineers. So recently we had a thirty thousand
dollars training gig come out of that that wanted someone in that group got because
of knowing one of us in the Mastermind group that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
And we also got one person in that group a six figure job that needed
needed something because you know, money wasn't working out at that time. Yeah,
I'm going to throw a few other things out just I just sent an
email this morning to the main list for depth chat Out TV, and I
basically asked people what their problems were. And you have to realize that about
half of our audience is new ish and the other half is extremely experienced,
And most of the questions I got back from people who were extremely experienced.
So one was basically, I go to work and things are nice and the
organized blah blah blah. But when I get into books and guide to tutorials,
I start getting overwhelmed. Now that's not a new person problem, that's
just you know, a learning style problem. Another one was, you know,
I've been doing this for twenty years and I'm bored, and so I
want to learn how do I go freelance. Another one that I got was,
I'm trying to transition from being a friend end developer to a back end
developer. You know, how do I do that in a way that will
help me get a job. And so these these don't have to be challenges
that are necessarily at the beginner level, and they don't even have to necessarily.
These are all career examples, but you know, you could have a
master my group or or you get together and you go learn all the new
features of the new XMASCRIPT standard. Well you know, and so you just
work through one every week, or have somebody you know ask their question about
whatever, and everybody kind of researches and then you come back. Or you
know, there are a lot of ideas and it just depends on what you
want to learn, what area you want to level up on, and I
think that takes a little bit of knowing where you want to end up.
But having other people there to kind of bounce ideas off of and push on
your throat process around things is really really helpful when you're doing that. And
so the problems tend to be a little bit more personal and complex when you're
more advanced, but they're still there. You still have problems that you're trying
to solve a place you're trying to get to. Okay, so now I
have this idea and I want to create a mastermin group. How do I
do that? Is there a structure? Is there a certain way I should
do it? Yeah? Yeah, absolutely So typically the way I've kind of
learned over the years of just trying to put them together myself. So you
find your members, right, you figure out who you want to be in
the Mastermind group. You can designate a leader if you want to, like
one person that's kind of going to you know, just be the one that
asks the questions every meeting, or that keeps the meeting rolling. Or you
can make it kind of rotating and say, hey, everybody, everybody's a
moderator one week, we rotate every week. Who's going to be responsible for
keeping the meeting going, just kind of making that participation shre it again.
And then then you kind of design on a format. Well, first of
all, schedule, right, So how often do we want to meet.
Maybe it's every other week, which I find works really well. Maybe an
hour at a time, half an hour. Depends on how many people you
have in the group. Again, I've seen you know, most typically you'll
see Mastermind groups around four to five people. It works pretty good. I'm
in one right now. That's three people. That's kind of like really niche,
Like you know, like we have a very specific niche that we work
in, and you know, there's not a lot of diversity and then I
have one that's actually twelve people, and that's that personal finance content creator one
I was talking about because we have that one is a mixture between podcasters,
bloggers, YouTubers, you know we have. We like the diversity, and
so we kept that one pretty big. And then you have to decide on
a format. Okay, so we have this block of space, how are
we going to use it? The one where I have three people in.
What we do is we have each one of us is on what we call
the hot seat that every meeting. So every meeting we each get twenty minutes
to go around and answer a few questions. Those questions we came up with
when we first started forming our mastermind group, like what are the key things
we want to ask each other every time we're on the hot seat. You
know, they can be whatever you want. Typically what they'll be is this
is the ones that I find worked really well. Is first of all,
share something, share a tool, a technique, a book, anything,
you know, start off sharing something with everybody while you're on the hot seat,
something cool that you think you want everybody could get some use out of.
And then after that, did you hit your accountability goal from our last
meaning did you know, how did it go? What happened? Why did
you not hit it? If you didn't? And then usually the next meaning
is or the next question is what are you currently working on? And what's
a problem you need help with? Right? And so from that point and
sometimes you know, did you hit your accountability goal is going to lead into
that. But if not, this is like the key question that I ask
in my meetings because does what you're currently working on even align with your goals
for the year and the problem you're dealing with? Why is that you know
occurring? And we really want to find out, you know why why it's
happening, Dig in deeper, ask some brutally honest questions, be really hard
about it. And then the last question when we leave, after we kind
of all talk through it is setting you know, what is your new accountability
goal by the next time we get together. What are you going to have
done based on all the things we discovered today? So that's the format,
right, and then you have to design on how are we going to meet
some kind of technology you can use like you know, Google, Google,
Hangouts, Skype, Zoom, and what are we gonna are we gonna set
up. Are we gonna record all these questions and answers in a Google drive,
you know, a document? You know, how we're gonna How are
we going to uh maybe talk to each other outside of when we actually meet
for a particular time, or are we going to use Slack or some other
type of check communication program. And so what I found was there's many different
ways to do this. I've even seen like email check ins as a as
a Mastermind group, like let's just every two weeks talk about where we are
in email and then start a thread. Pretty crazy, right, I've seen
Facebook mastermind groups and just create a private Facebook group and go that way.
There's lots of different ways you can just set it up. And the biggest
problem I salw was it's really hard to kind of get started, right,
Like it's just hard for people to find groups out there, or to create
groups, or to put all the technology and pieces together to actually keep them
running. And that's when I said, Okay, I'm going to try to
make this easier. And that's when we build Mastermind Hunt as a place where
you could go and you could find Mastermind groups that are out there that need
people or looking for people, or you could create a new Mastermind group if
you don't see one where you could just leave it out there and wait for
people to join. And then it has it kind of built in like all
the things I talked about, right, so being able to set a schedule,
being able to go into a chat and talk on a regular basis outside
of the meetings, being able to actually join your video call straight from the
application, when the time and when the call starts. And then also set
accountability goals. You can record all your accountability goals, so every week when
you get back together, you'll know if you hit those goals or not and
when they're due by. And it's pretty funny actually, if you don't hit
your accountability goal, the program will actually send a chat to your whole group
saying, oh, you hit your accountability goals, So you get all kinds
of fun questions to answer. Yeah. And as far as getting people in,
I mean, I've gotten a bunch of people that I worked with together
for lunch once a week, right, So we just went to a restaurant
and just did it there. I've gone to conferences and met people, I've
met people online and then just said, hey, are you're just doing a
call So if you have kind of an idea of what you want your mastermind
group to cover or to achieve, then it gets pretty easy to go out
and find other people who are interested in the same thing and then just be
like, hey, look, you know, let's all get together and talk
for an hour and well, you know, we'll make sure that we're moving
ahead. Lucas, you said you had some experience with something very similar.
Do you want to talk about that? Yeah, of course. So in
my combine that work now zokdoc. We have some guilds that I believe they
started based on those Spotify talks that everybody were listening to at some point in
the everybody, I haven't heard those in the development moment. That was a
moment where people were liking a lot of those videos. Can send them to
you Allso it's like basically a while you have a bunch of teams that have
like front end people, back in people design people working on different teams,
it would have the guilds, which is like where everybody who worked with front
end would meet. Doesn't make sense, so like it's every week or every
other week everybody that's working like on the same technology or same domain would meet
people from different teams in these guilds and the way we do our guilds today
at zuck Doc we do a little bit of that. We put some accountability.
So every time we meet someone from front end and they have like an
interesting challenge that either they solved or they want to solve or something they want
to show, we're like, okay, so present it in the guild.
So now you have like fifty minutes in the guild you need to to do
something, and people the fact that there's a day, there's a date,
there's an hour, and people will be there to watch you. It's really
interesting because it creates the It helps a lot with the motivation too for people
to actually go and research whatever they're going to present to So I find that
this accountability and stuff and putting all these checkpoints, I find that it helped
a lot. Like people who are going to the to the guild a lot,
they grow really quickly in their in their domain hour in our case it's
front end, right, So it's interesting to see like one initiative that is
amble to do that outside the company, like for people in more different domains.
Yeah, exactly right, that's funny. I have I heard the term
guild like that used the outside of the World Warcraft. But that's pretty awesome,
yer Jake, Oh, sorry, exactly, but but no, yeah,
perfect, perfect example right there, and it sounds very similar exactly.
And yeah, so now yeah, if you can expand that, right,
yeah, to outside of just your domain or your company, and you get
to talk with other people in the same industry as you that are dealing with
similar types of problems, right, and you know, how are you getting
through those together? What challenges are you working on? You know, let's
let's do something and try to do something cool together, whatever it may be.
But yeah, I think I think it's it's very similar. How big
are those guilds if you don't mind me asking, So our front end guild,
now it's about twenty people, okay, yeah, but every guild only
there are only like four presentations, so not everybody present in every guild,
gotcha. Yes, But it's interesting because one thing that that that that I
think these these meetings create is almost like hacking the fact that we are human
beings, which well, when we are in groups, it seems that we
work better. It seems that when we see people trying to do things that
are similar to what we're doing. We are more engaged, We get motivation,
accountability from other people. It's much more powerful them accountability for yourself.
Like if I am looking at a to do list in one week, I
don't feel as motivated as if other people I look at my to do list
in a week. So it's really interesting. Yeah, and it's like supposed
to be a positive atmosphere too, right, Like it's you know, if
you didn't hit your accountability goal, it's not going to be you know,
bashing you. Oh you know, like you don't have to be like scared
that you didn't hit it. It's people that are going to you know,
we want to recognize the access you know, motivate you, encourage you,
you know, you know, celebrate your wins together. And if you didn't
get through something, let's let's figure it out as a team. Why I
need to get through Like you just said, let's put all of our brains
together. Yeah, what's going on here? Yeah it's interesting that just say
that because yeah, this isn't important part. It's not about bashing, right,
It's like, if you don't hit something, bring it also to the
table, and everybody is like, Okay, so what didn't all work and
how can we do better next time? Like, because for it didn't work
for some reason for you, this is also a learning experience for everybody.
Like the same reason that it did not work well for you will not work
well for other persons. So let's all try to solve this together. Yeah,
and it was mentioned earlier like how someone was you know what about shy
people or people that you know aren't willing to put themselves out there? Right?
I mean, so this hopefully, you know, if you can build
a comfort zone first of all, when you're talking to people on a regular
basis, maybe you know, build the account. Our mastermind, groups,
guilds, whatever, maybe are all about trust, Like it will go nowhere
if you don't have an area of trust. And we use this concept called
a frienda right, so basically, you know, whatever we talked about in
the Mastermind is considered private. You know, we don't talk about it to
other people. We don't we don't share this kind of stuff. So you
know, you can give our personal We could talk about you know, business
plans or things that we're struggling with that we don't want other people to know
about. Right, So we build this relationship with people that we feel and
then we can start to open up with It's a way to kind of tackle
that shyness and hit it straight on, you know, to kind of be
able to come out of your shell. I have I have personally seen that,
you know, many introverts within my Mastermind groups. Now first maybe they
didn't say a lot, and now they're they're speaking much more and they're more
comfortable with us, and you know, they provide some awesome ideas even if
it's just them in the chat giving, you know, typing out their ideas,
maybe not verbally saying some things sometimes, but it has definitely helped people
reach outside their comfort zone. And you see that even with like twitch right,
like people that are scared to program online or scared to put their workout
on GitHub. As soon as they start doing it, they start recognizing how
much the community is the same as them and dealing with the same problems in
same fears, and you know, getting encouragement and finding ways to work through
problems together instead of people just bashing. I mean, you're gonna have trolls
everywhere, right, but but you know, just you just gotta just got
to cut that stuff out. It's the internet. Yeah. When we did
it, you know, I talked about a group of coworkers going out to
lunch and stuff. We called it a brown bag lunch, and it was
these are the things we want to learn, and so everybody kind of picked
one. We decided again what the rotation would be, and about half the
time somebody would come in and basically say, hey, we decided we wanted
to learn about this, blah blah blah, here's what we learned. And
then the next sentence would basically be and here's where I have built this into
the app, you know, the product that we work on together. And
so you know, a lot of times there would be real world examples whereas
people could actually go back and say, oh, this is where I'm seeing
this now. Yep, exactly one other thing and we talked a little bit
about this. I've also been in Mastermind groups that turned into basically a big
chat fest. So we'd all go meet for lunch and then we would leave
two hours later, not having held anyone accountable to anything or having learned anything
because we all just talked about Pokemon or something. So how do you keep
people on task? And Pokemon is awesome? It's true, but two hours
kind of waste the time. Exactly, how do you how do you like
format and manage these accountability goals? Is it just like are they kept in
a place, have they written down? People write them down? Is there
a commonplace you can see other people's Is it up to them to report back?
Yeah? Exactly. Yeah, so we within the Mastermind hat on app
directly, you can add your accountability goals. After every meeting you add it
there, people will see your accountability goal. Everybody knows what it is and
the date that you said you're gonna have it done by, and so if
you don't hit it, you get a nice little chat message that pops up
that everybody sees, Hey, this person didn't complete their accountability goal by this
game. It's funny actually, one of my uh my co founder Eric,
one of his Mastermind groups. If you don't hit your accountability goal, you
have to make a contribution, a donation to the political party that you are
not that you don't like. So so yeah, if you' i'll hit your
accountability goal that you're here, you're endorsing something that you're probably not too happy
about, so that you know, it's just like a small little consequence of
not hitting your accountability goal. You could do fun things like that as and
uh. In another group I'm in, we just yeah, we record everything
in a Google doc. So every meeting we create a new document and we
list all of our questions, all our answers, our accountability goals. So
every meeting we go back to the previous document and see what they were and
talk through if we achieve them or not. So, yes, they are
recorded, they should be. Everybody should know what they are. Everybody should
be checking in on how how it's going. And you'll start to you'll start
to see being people make better goals right if they're not hitting them. If
you haven't hit your accountability goal, you know, to two meetings in a
row that's already assigned. That maybe got the wrong goal or your priorities aren't
right, let's talk through that and get a better goal going. I needed
to shave my head one time. There you go, Yeah, that would
be uh, that would be one that would give you a lot of pressure.
So you can do things like that, right, like I mean,
make bets and stuff. Make it fun. To your question, Chuck,
I know you mentioned about how you know, make it productive, I'm really
kind of like big on this one, because I don't care how big or
small you are. Everybody's time is just as precious, right, And so
when we're in that meeting for that time, this meeting is about whatever the
topic of your you know whatever, whether it's e commerce, you know,
developers, that's all you're talking about in that meeting, not talking about pokemon,
uh, the online personal finance content creator one that I talked about,
Like I'm I have people in there that, again that were like online idols
to me, and I completely want to respect their time, so I make
That's why I think it's important to kind of come into the meeting knowing what
you're going to talk about. If you're on the hot seat, you have
to come in and already kind of know your answers to these questions and you
get right to them. You're not spending time thinking through them and talking through
them like on the fly. And then it's up to everybody else, everybody
else to also make sure that they're not you know, going off on a
tangent or letting the person on the hot seat go on a tangent. That
happens. I've seen people come in and talk about you know, personal wins,
whether they've achieved you know, some kind of weight game loss or something
which is cool. That's great, but that's not what we're here for today.
As soon as the meeting's over, then we can talk about that kind
of stuff. But in respect of everybody's time, let's talk about the task
at hand here, and you'll find, I mean, you still develop a
fun where you can make this. You know, this is a very fun
environment. Don't want to sound like it's strict to nothing, but but you
know, if I'm asking the questions, I'm saying, all right, let's
get back, you know, let's not get off the tangent. Let's move
forward. We got to respect everybody's time here, or you'll just start to
see that people are just gonna start leaving. They won't come back. If
if you if you don't want to go to back to a meeting, if
you haven't gone back to a Mastermind group. Let's say you miss a meeting
and then you missed the next one, it's obviously not value valuable to you,
right, I don't care what you think. You know you need to
leave the meeting yourself. If you if you find don't find the desire to
keep going back and the other way around too. If you see some people
not attending a meeting, you know, more than two times in a row,
then you need to have a talk to them, say, hey,
you know, would you you know, would you be considered consider leaving we
can get someone else in here. Maybe you're not getting the value out of
it that you thought you would, or you're not you know, giving the
value back. Whatever. Maybe you want to have active participants that respect everybody's
time and or here for the specific you know, goal of this mastermind group.
And then every meeting though after at the end of the meeting, I'm
always bs and with everybody else, and you know, we'll go out for
beers and do things outside of what we're just there for in there in our
mastermind session. So so I have a question regarding to this topic, okay
specifically, so it's a hard kind of topic to talk about. But what
happens if you meet a group of people, let's say in a conference,
Okay, you don't really know them that well, and only after you start
the meetings then you realize that, let's say one of them is a psycho
killer. No is like you know someone who just don't doesn't respect the time
or something like that. Something bad. I'm trying to, like know,
just give an example, like taking too much time or something like that.
What do you do? You know, how do you get around that?
Or how do you solve that? Did you did it ever happen to you?
Yeah, it actually has happened, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. We
had people in our group that we never hitting our account ability. I have
one particular individual that kept coming back and being around the bush every time,
didn't really do any prep for the meetings. Still showed up, but you
know, just never really put any of our advice to action. And so
I guess, you know, I didn't want to. We didn't want to
have like a we didn't want to put the person on the spot during a
whole meeting. So the person that had the best relationship with that individual or
whoever maybe invited them to the group, Uh, we asked that person to
reach out and say and just you know, let them know our concerns or
just to say, hey, you know, maybe maybe you're not ready for
the group right now. Whatever you're dealing with, maybe you know, go
ahead and deal with that, and when you're ready, you let us know,
and we'll see if we can get you back in. But I think
the one on one, you know, with someone just kind of saying hey,
you know, do you think you know? We don't want to necessarily
just say hey, you're kicked out. We want to ask them to be
okay and kind of leave, but if we have to, we will.
You know, if you ultimately have to, you can you can kick someone
out if you need to. I've never had to do that personally, so
hopefully you won't. And then, you know, because you want someone else
that's going to be in their spot, Like if you can't really add just
more people, maybe you can only really get through three four people every meeting,
then you want someone else to be able to come in and take their
spot and give value outside of just you know, someone that could be just
killing everybody's time. So I've been through some of this and I just want
to chime in. One is so Mastermind groups you kind of set an ongoing
meeting schedule unless you plan to sunset it. But in a lot of those
cases, I haven't been in any Mastermind groups that have been permanent. I'm
currently in one, and in fact, you can listen to it it's entreprogrammers
dot com and we're a lot more free form than what Sean talked about with
the structures, so you know, you can kind of do it however works
for your group. But anyway, the point that I was getting to is
that some of the groups have just changed, and so you know, you
wind up talking to people and instead of having a conversation, we need you
to leave. It's hey, look the group's changed, or some of us
have changed, and so we're going to split from the main group and we're
going to go do our own thing. You know. So sometimes it's you
know, you form a group and you have one bad apple right off the
bat, and in that case, you know, like Sean said, you
got to figure out how to make that work so that you can, you
know, move them out and move somebody else in. But a lot of
times this happens to ongoing groups that are big, that have been going for
a long time, and in those situations you just need to sit down and
make sure everybody's clear on what you're still trying to accomplish with the group and
make sure that works for everybody. And a lot of times people will opt
out if you you wind up wanting to go in a different direction, or
if that's just not what they need anymore. And if if the group's changed
to where you're not getting what you need out of it, then feel free
to go find another group. Just make sure that you're communicating clearly what you
need and make sure that you know the rest of the group hasn't moved there
with you exactly. Yeah, you don't. You know, you don't have
to if you need to leave a Mastermind, it doesn't have to die,
right if one person leaves or one person it gets kicked out, it can
still go on a nice thing. If you know you're you know you're not
getting the value out of it, you can leave at any point. You're
not obligated at all. It's a volunteer thing, and maybe but the cool
thing to do. Maybe you have someone else that you can recommend on your
way out, right, Like maybe there's someone that you know it would it
would be a great fit for that Mastermind group going forward. Maybe you have
achieved all the things to the point that you're happy with and you're not getting
the value anymore because the rest of the group is either stayed down or maybe
it's just not relevant anymore. One of the things that mastermind hunt me do
is there's a leave button right there. You hit any any point and you
can leave any mastermind you then you know it doesn't matter. Another thing we
do is when you get people, when people want to join your group,
we have an approval process, right. You don't want anyone hopping in,
so they have to provide an introduction and background about them, so you get
to know them a little bit before deciding on Yeah, I like them to
hop in the call and maybe you set up a one on one call or
something and just talk about your group before you fully kind of let them in
and invite them to the ongoing meeting. And one other thing I just want
to add real quick. If everybody agrees to the rules and structure of the
group, then it also makes it really easy to come to somebody and say,
hey, look, you agreed to this. It's a problem, we
need to fix it anyway, go ahead to this yeah. Yeah. One
experience that that I had two times that was interesting is not it's not regarding
like one person that really needs to leave, but sometimes just see that the
preparation overall starts to go to get worse with time. Like the whole preper
of every of every every presentation they give, like every in our case,
right every the quality of the of the guild goes down from time to time.
You can see that happening. And what what what I did two times
that there was really interesting. The effect was like I got I got it
like to myself to to to like raise the bar again. I said,
I'm gonna put my name. Next week, I'm gonna present, and I'm
going to be make like the best fifteen minutes I can make. You know,
like I'm going to give like a really good presentation. So uh,
somehow when you go to to to this meeting and there is like a really
good one, uh, you raise the bar. There's no way that Like
next time the next week, people will will put a little bit more We'll
put a little bit more on fortt in there presentation, in their preparation.
So this is like a subtle way way of doing things. And for me
it was like amazing. I because being more prepared for something, it's only
good for me, even if it's not for the group. So I did
this to ice and the group got better. Like on the next week,
next time I talked to someone and I said, oh, do you want
to talk about it in the guild. They like understood that, Oh,
like the bar is a little bit higher, like I'm going to do a
good presentation too, And I felt that the level of the whole, the
whole presentation went up by just like an individual contribution, like a little more
forth on your individual contribution. So I think that this works most of the
time. Sometimes we have like people that just need to leave. It's difficult
to do with those situations, But I think most of the time it's more
about people looking around and see that that other people are not as committed as
you thought they were, and then you get a little bit less committed too,
and then the quality goes down. So these these moments I go there
and I just like, raise the bar again. That's pretty cool. Yeah,
it's a good point. Yeah, I mean it's the way we've seen
that you know, we have we use templates, right, so we have
a template document and so it's it's really we make it as easy as possible
for whoever's on our hot seat to just kind of come in and they just
answer these questions beforehand, make it you know, and uh, yeah,
you'll see people that really go to town on that, right, and they
go crazy with all the all the stuff they enter in there, and some
people that just add a few words, And it's kind of hard because it's
it's, you know, on one side, it's like, Okay, maybe
you're just really good at talking and you only need a few points and you're
you know, you're just really good presenting or doing live things and sharing.
Or on the other side, you put way too much stuff in this document
and we're never going to get through it. At the same time, so
but yeah, the quality, that's a good one. Yeah, I mean
the quality the people you have in your group, you know. Uh,
you know this is a good one too, right, Like whoever starts the
meeting, you know, whoever kicks it off, you know, just it's
all that initial attitude can set the tone for the whole meeting, you know,
So coming in excited, positive, you know, that's why I like
doing like the wins and the and the sharing something in the beginning of a
meeting. It just kind of gets people engaged, people excited, and then
you know, I don't know, I guess they're they're feeling like, you
know, they're ready to go by that time. I'm wondering how you actually
tackle Let's say someone comes in with their goals like day in and day or
every single regularly scheduled week, and they are not hitting those goals. So
they're they're they're kind of moving towards the goal post, but they're not hitting
the exact goals that they want. So there's a lot of frustration in these
meetings. Let's say, like, how do you keep people like that engaged
because they are still working towards the goal. They still have like the idea
of wanting to be successful, but they're not necessarily like they might not be
as successful as they want to be. So how would you keep people like
that as engaged without them just completely leaving the group? Right? Yeah,
I mean so I guess, well, obviously the first thing I think of
is, you know, they're just making too big of goals, so they
just need to be better at breaking them down in the smaller task maybe more
smaller tasks, so they still feel like, oh, yeah, look,
I knocked out these three small ones instead of not hitting this big, huge
one that I keep setting myself up for failure for. And that's kind of
where I come back to that term the smart accountability goals, right, you
know, something that's smart, measurable, achievable. That's the big thing,
you know, make something that's achievable by the next time you get back.
And it's really up to the responsibility of all the other members in the group
to say is to say something if they recognize that, like, you haven't
hit your goal in the past two three weeks. Why do you think that
is? I think you're being able to ambitious or it's something else that's getting
in a way. The most common thing I see in all my mastermind groups
is usually related to organization and scheduling and time blocks, and people just don't
know how they work. Like it's a lot of times figuring out what kind
of person you are, you know, like, you know, what how
do you work best? Is? Are you a morning person? You know?
Do you need to make sure whatever your goal is, that that's the
first thing you're looking at every day before moving on to check Facebook, you
know, or social media. That happens all the time, and so a
lot of times, a lot of the reasons we see people not hit their
goals is always related to scheduling, you know, it's just priorities and scheduling,
so a lot of so usually it's just, you know, their priorities
are mixed up. They need to kind of revisit and sit down their priorities.
Now. We have also seen where people don't meet their accountability goals because
they're just not they don't feel the accountability, they're not as motivated from the
group maybe anymore. And that has been where we've actually asked someone to leave
because we just don't think they were getting the value out of it. You
know, they liked being there because it was fun, but the same time,
they were kind of you know, just being there because it was fun.
Was was kind of you know, was they were never moving their their
business forward or And the same time, we never really felt like they were
kind of actively participating in everybody else's hot seat because they know they weren't going
through the trials and tribulations everybody else was, so it was very hard for
them to share those with everybody else by them constantly not even hitting or trying
to meet their accountability goal. That's fair. And on that note, I
was just curious, is there do you have a sense of like because lots
of the times people come in to these kinds of meetings, guilds of mastermind
groups with the idea that they want They have this big idea of changing some
part of their life or being successful in one aspect, but then that that
and enthusiasm tapoes away with time. It's the same with like when people at
New Year's it's like, I'm going to hit the gym every single day,
and then by the end of like January, they don't do it anymore.
So, like, how do you keep like members of mastermind groups engaged so
that they're on track constantly without like that taper off, And like is there
do you see the trend of like a drop off rate in these groups?
Yeah, Consistency is the big thing there, right, I mean, it's
just doing things consistently on a regular basis, making it a habit, maybe
part of your routine. That's where I that's where we see the most success.
Even with people you know running a podcast or a blog, you know,
it's like at least initially they need to be consistent, consistent, consistent.
But yeah, I do see people veer off because what we do is
in one of my mastermind groups is at the beginning of every year, we
set big rocks. So we say, by the end of the year,
these are the you know, three big things I want to accomplish. And
so what we do is we keep those kind of on the on the forefront,
right, We keep that we know, we know what those are.
And so as we're going throughout the year and we're setting these small, you
know, week week goals, we're still making sure that they're not veering from
that big rock, you know, or if it did, why did it
have your goals changed? I mean it ultimately it comes down a lot of
time to really wanting it, like you're not you know, if you're if
you want to do something, you have to really want it right. And
if they're not doing it, or if they're not if they're not making any
strides towards that big rock, it's most like because there's something else they want
to do more. They think they want to do something, but until they
actually do it, they don't really know that they don't want to and there's
something else instead. But yeah, I mean throughout the year, you know,
there's seasons too, right, I mean it's summer, you know,
kids out of school, whatever it may be. We do see times where
you know, holidays for instance, we just had Thanksgiving here recently, so
uh yeah, we had some people missed some accountability goals. So uh uh
you know that that's that's kind of stuff's going to happen. You have to
kind of, I guess before looking, before you set your goals and know
they do have vacation coming up, things like that. But yeah, I
mean, it's just making it a fun environment and when you do get in
every meeting maybe a place people want to come back with, congratulating people often,
you know, keeping it motivating and then being consistent, you know,
com meeting on a regular basis. Maybe you're not meeting enough, maybe you're
meeting too much. So h you mentioned you know one group kind of uh
died off or didn't meet, didn't meet meet their accountability goals on you know
every time. Maybe that meat group is meeting too often. Because I know,
even even like with like a podcast for example that I run, it
was really cool at first doing everything once a week every week, but then
it just felt like another thing I had to do. So I became I
I scaled it back a little bit, and now it's fun again because I
have a little bit more time in between. Yeah, I think, I
mean it changes, you know, it's I guess moving with the tides,
anything else that we should discuss before we go to picks. Just to recap
the process. You meet every two weeks and you have a hot seat,
and I just didn't I don't remember if everybody is on the hot seat for
the for the meeting or just like one person at the time, like every
meeting, it's a different person, just that that part. I don't remember
any groups that work both ways. I've been groups that everybody got a hot
seat every time time. Ault of programmers kind of operates that way. Generally,
if somebody has something to bring up, it comes up some of the
other ones. You know, there were like one or two of us every
week when we met. I've been in mastermin groups that met once a month
and and operated that way. So it just it really really depends on your
group and how you want to structure it. Yeah, exactly. I'm in
the three person Mastermind group I'm in. We do a round robin every meeting.
Each one of us is on the hot seat every two weeks. The
other group, twelve person Mastermind group I'm in, we meet every two weeks
as well, but we only put two people on the hot seat for thirty
minutes apiece, so I might not be on the hot seat again for two
months, so much different. So it doesn't have to be two weeks any
any you know, you get I think an initial kind of kickoff meeting is
great with the people that you want in the group. Hey, let you
know what schedule works for everybody? How often do we want to meet?
If we do that, you know, how can we split that time up
and to make sure to either get everybody on the hot seat every time or
maybe just focus on one person for that full extent of time. You know,
it could be just dependent on the niche you're in or what the group's
about that determines kind of you know, how often or how long whoever's in
the and the hot seat needs Okay, cool, thanks, alrighty, Well,
before we do picks, Sean, do you want to give out the
link for the webinar that we're going to be doing, because I'm sure some
people are going to hear this thing'll be like I have more questions and they'll
know where to find us. Yeah exactly, Yeah, yeah, thanks,
Chuck. We're excited. Yeah, we're going to be doing a webinar.
Thursday, January third, at three pm or two two pm Eastern. I'm
already forget but pm Eastern gowo pm Eastern. All right, And the link
is Mastermind Hunt h U n T dot com slash dead of Chat. So
if you go there, you can register for the webinar and yeah, we'll
have a presentation where we'll kind of walk you through the history and what a
Mastermind group is, and then we'll show you some examples of you know,
how we run some Mastermind group, some things that have came out of them,
and give you a demo as well of the app, so you can
kind of see how it will help you find find a Mastermind group, create
one if you just want to start one out there and you don't see one
you like, and also run your Mastermind group every time you meet. Awesome,
Well, let's go and do some picks. Shy, do you want
to start off with picks? Yeah? Why not? Uh So I have
one pick. It's a guy called Bob Proctor. You might know him.
He's a very very famous, I don't know, motivational speaker or like you
know, I call it instant psychology speaker. And he's really into the think
and grow rich book, and every now and then I need a reminder to
realign my thoughts and watch what I'm thinking of and not like and staying positive
and not letting negativity kicks in. So every time I need the boot,
I just google Bob Proctor on YouTube and just watch anything this guy have to
say. It's not like the best I think delivery style. It's like a
very old school style of teaching, but the content is amazing, So really
recommend him. Awesome, Joe, What are your picks? Okay, So
I got three picks today. The first one is a website, cool stuff
Inc. It's a mostly board games, although they sell these other related type
items like magic cards and stuff. But I really like it for board games.
It's oftentimes even better pricing than Amazon, and they have a lot more
like the newer stuff than Amazon does, and better reviews and such. So
if you're looking for a place to buy board games online, I can highly
recommend cool Stuff Inc. My next pick is a board game, of course
luck I think I picked this in the past, but Luxor is an amazing
board game where you basically get to play Indiana Jones. You're competing with everybody
else to go and find the most things in a like a temple or a
pyramid or something like that. And then the final my final pick is we
just launched today. That's really awesome, a new initiative at Energi COOMF and
so at Edgie COMF. We have twenty minute talks and we have some longer
talks. Mostly these twenty minute talks, and that does seem short, but
when you're a busy person you want to consume a lot of media. Even
twenty minutes can be a long time and you're not really sure if it's a
talk you want to watch the whole of or what so. Engi COOMF is
now producing a thing called Enngi Comfminified, which is short versions of all of
the talks about four minutes. We cut them down and edit them down to
about four minutes from what their original twenty minutes was, and you can watch
those and find either maybe you get all the content from the talk from NGI
comp which of course these are angular related talks, right, Maybe you get
all the enough of the content you don't want to watch the whole thing,
or in the four minutes you find out that, yeah, this is good
enough talk, I want to watch the whole thing or there's more content in
here. I want to see all the details. And so that's what we
launched that today. It's I was really excited. We had a big live
event and a lot of people have responded very favorably to it. So that's
my final pick. NG comf minified. Nice. Do they get obfiscated when
they get auglified? We had some comments about uglified and such was pretty funny.
Nice. I don't need I don't need the auglification. I'm Lucas.
Do you have some pick for us? Hi? Yes, they have so.
I in our life as devs, where we always are dealing with other
people, right, and we're always dealing with feedback to to to other people,
be either like to a cold review or just working with people in the
same the same team you're being a leader or not. This is a constant
in our lives. And one friend of mine he we were talking about it
and he said, like, oh, there's this bestseller book in business called
Radical Candor that is like a really good book about feedback, and I'm listening
to it right now. It's an audiobook and it's really it's really good.
It's like illuminating in terms of she talks about giving honest feedback but not being
like the importance of being giving honest feedback and ways to deal with that situation
that we usually try to avoid because we don't like conflict, and how important
it is even like we don't like conflict, we don't like to give negative
feedback, but she talks about the importance of it and of course like a
time ways of doing that in a better way than just being blunt and aggressive.
So it's a I recommend this book. I'm in the middle now and
it's really good. Awesome Vian, what are your picks? Cool? So
my first pick is related to the Bob Profter one. Actually it made me
think about I listened to Alan Watts, like a lot of Alan Watts,
and he talks a lot of his talks are about spirituality, and so if
you're not like someone who's into that, that's totally fine, because he also
talks about the human condition and in terms of like the way that your mind
works, which I think is really interesting and it's just things to think about.
And that's a really great one that's completely not software related, but really
nice to just like ponder. And then My second is actually something related to
what Joe organizers, who just Frameworks on It. He mentioned videos that came
up for ENNGI KONF, but he didn't mention the videos that came out for
Frameworks of It, which is a conference that he organizes, which is wonderful
because it brings all of similar to what this podcast has done. It brings
people from different communities across the JavaScript world together to talk about similar things,
so componentization, routing and so on. And that the videos are all up
so you can look at the content for that. It's really good quality stuff
if you get the chance to see it. And then my other one is
about writing. So I've been trying to improve the way that I write.
And one of the book that I really like is called Several Short Sentences about
Writing and you can find it online. Keep forgetting the author's name. But
it's nice because it is written in short sentences, but it's snippets and food
for thoughts, so you don't have to read the book cover to cover.
You can just read it in pieces and it's something to just it's a way
for you to kind of reassess the way that you're writing. And the whole
point is that we have grammar structures and sentence structures that were beaten into us
when we were in school of how to write a specific way, and this
book tries to change that notion of that to be like, there are different
ways of writing that can make you more creative and make you more legible or
understandable. So those are my picks. Awesome, I will plus one framework
some that was that was a ton of fun and yeah, it was fun
to see you on that. It was good. Yeah. I think the
entire panel for Views on View except for John Poppa were there or was John
there too? No, I don't think you was anyhow, John was not
there, but yeah, so we we all got to hang out. That
was a lot of fun too. I'm gonna go ahead and throw out a
couple of picks. One is the week after the webinar, I'm going to
be in Las Vegas for cees, So if you head over to dev chat,
dot tv slash events, I should have information up there about where we
can meet up one evening and snacks some food. I'm still waiting to find
out when all the press events are because I get access to those, so
it's a little bit up in the air as we record this. But this
should come out within the next few days and I should have a better idea,
So I'm going to shout out about that. And then the other pick
that I have is modern freaking medicine. I got an infection over Thanksgiving and
was feeling pretty terrible. I couldn't figure out exactly what was going on.
Went down to the doctor's office Sunday morning because I just couldn't take it anymore.
They ran a quick test, prescribing an antibiotic and I was on my
way. I was out of there in like a half hour. It just
went to the pharmacy and things are starting to get a little bit better.
So, yeah, modern medicine, it's amazing, Sean, what are your
picks? Yeah, So I just recently left Austin, Texas after being there
two years, originally from the seven five seven area code area, So shout
out to them. That's in the Hampton Roads kind of uh Virginia Beach area.
And so one of the things that I mentioned earlier, I was kind
of involved in the user groups and conferences here and it's cool to still see
him going and Buddy Kevin UH and a few other great people in this community,
like Linda Nichols and Eric and a bunch of awesome other people are still
running a conference called Revolution Cof. It looks like it's gonna happen again here
in June. Their their website is revolutioncomf dot com. So yeah, I'll
go ahead and pick that. I'll just go ahead and give a little,
a little little shout out to the local conference. Actually it's a regional conference,
so it's and it's one of those you know, it's just for developers
uniting, so we'll have all kinds of stuff there. I know they've had
javiscrip, dot net, you know, database stuff. It's it's been all
over the board. So it's really cool to see everybody coming in from a
Northern Virginia, uh, North Carolina wherever. Maybe we have people come from
overseas and speak. So yeah, Revolution comp check it out. Yeah,
a guy you know submitted to talk, so you should put in a good
word for him. I'll get you into the name later anyway. So Sean,
if people want to find you online, where do they go? Yeah,
you can uh check out my podcast Two Frugal Dudes. It's me and
Kevin Griffin. It's one that started out of the community. So me and
him, after running some user groups, we would go have pie after pie
and bacon for those who know us, uh, and we just kept talking
about money, you know, outside of outside of those meetings, because you
know, so many of our software development peers and us at the time,
we're making good money but didn't really know what to do with it. So
eventually we started recording those conversations and that turned into a podcast, Two Frugal
Dudes. That's number two Frugal Dudes dot com. You can check us out
there or on any you know podcast player, uh, and otherwise you can
find me on Twitter at Sean maren s e A N M E R R
O N. All right, can we get that link one more time?
It was mastermind hunt dot com slash dev chat. That's right, that's it.
So yeah, I'm gonna be on the webinar, so you know,
I'll make fun of Sean and Eric while they're staying smart stuff. It'll all
be good, that's right. All right, Well, let's go ahead and
wrap this one up. Thanks to our palace for coming, and we will
be back at you next week.