Successful, Accomplished, Depressed – A Talk About Performance, Perfectionism, and Burnout in IT

[Music] so I've got another 34 years to live that's what the statistics say in Germany there's this Authority this office that makes statistics the statistics bundesamt and they say that when you're born in 1973 anyone 1973 just one okay that's statistically unlikely but anyway so if you're born as a man as a male person in Germany in 1973 I guess in Austria similar you will be on average 78 years old I'm 44 now so I've got another 34 years maybe more maybe less I'm trying to be optimistic so I have another 25 years to work probably and then another 9 years to do whatever you do when you retire like buy a holiday travel the world collect bottles in the subway things like that and get a turn this on and optimistically I'm somewhere in the middle of my life it's like that glass of water you know the pessimist who says it's half-empty the optimists who says it's half-full and a few years ago I had an incident incident that I'm going to talk about today among other things that made me think about is my glass half-empty already or is it still helpful what did I do with my life am i successful do I feel successful do I feel like I'm where I'm supposed to be because people people around me everybody I know when I look at their Facebook pages or their Twitter stream they're they're doing great they're doing perfectly like everybody's everybody's a stock millionaire or nowadays a Bitcoin millionaire or they own their own businesses are managed high-level managers in some some big corporation and everybody's successful might my neighbors they own two big cars they bought their house I still live on rent I rent you rent your house at forty something apparently I'm not as successful as everybody around me that's what it feels sometimes and on the other hand I have so many things that I've accomplished I've been working in the industry for quite some time I've made a career I used to work for a company which is makes a very good name on your resume and what I was really proud of it I get a decent salary I've got family I've got a wife I've got kids I'm somewhat what you would what you might consider successful but for some reason very often it doesn't feel like it very often it feels like I'm not where I'm supposed to be and I wonder why's that and I wonder what is this thing called success anyway and I looked it up I googled and found out that there's one point one eight billion entries regarding success on amazon.com it's two hundred eighty thousand entries regarding success many books audio books material and I realized that this seems to be a topic that many people are interested in and I know actually there are actual people who call themselves success trainers so this is something that apparently can be learned you see on every blog in every magazine you see the ten tips of the most successful people if you do this morning routine or if you acquire these habits or if you do this kind of kind of productivity system you will become successful you only only have to do the movements only have to go through the movements and success will come by itself so everybody seems to be successful but on the other hand so many people appeared to be looking for what is this thing called success so many books are being written about it people are actually paying money to other people to tell them how they can be successful and there's one of one of these success trainers one of my many thousand Facebook I have so many Facebook friends I have three and a half thousand Facebook friends one and a half thousand Twitter followers it's gonna be my birthday in July and if five people call me I'm lucky and three of those five don't use Facebook but one of these many Facebook friends he's a success trainer and I want to show you what he does and please bear with me this is not gonna be some standing up Chuck I think but I still would like some audience participation so please imagine you're sitting in a car if you're successful your own big expensive car imagine you're sitting in your car grab your steering wheel please do that please everyone I can see you I can see who's not doing now in your right hand you have your smartphone making a picture of your GPS do that please and now make sure that your $5,000 watch is inside the picture I'm look I'm sitting in my car like this all the time aren't you I didn't think anybody anything about this picture this showed up in my facebook stream from a person who is a success trainer and what he posted was just like Sunday's the new Monday I'm already on the road to a great customer and I didn't think much about it until the responses showed up I like your taste and watches and the next one oh that one I have that one too your shoe and car taste isn't bad as well I didn't even realize that he's displaying his that he's flashing his expensive watch which he did and then I know nothing about watches and I'm fine with people carrying expensive watches but I still showed it up and the brand starts at around $5,000 a piece which is fine I carry it well that's a I got this one that's used it's an Apple watch I only bought it because it was used because a colleague of mine wanted the new one I wouldn't start it something it always says things I don't want it to but still it's an it's a it's a somewhat expensive watch I usually don't wear watches at all but okay I'm fine with people wearing $5000 watches or me even more expensive but for some reason this person apparently seems to have the urge to show how successful they are and not only him but the other ones as well and I was wondering if there may be it's a reason if they try to tell a story if they try to show something maybe not even consciously if they try to show something to the outside where that they feel inside like they should show like they feel I have to show this to be someone I have to have an expensive car I have to flash my expensive watch I have to have a lean and muscular body I have to be beautiful even though I'm beyond my 40s or in my 40s still there are so many stories we try to tell other people by posting pictures on Facebook also by just when you go home tonight or tomorrow and you get back to your people to your family to your friends and you tell them about the conference you will tell stories when you're at work you talk about you tell stories to each other you we even have stories that describe the software that we're building telling stories is so engrained in ourselves it's the way we convey information it's the way we convey emotions and in the same way we tell other people's stories we tell ourselves stories and the most important stories are the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves and we start at a really early age with telling stories about ourselves imagine you're a small child your babies have just been born and whenever you're cold you're being warned when you're hungry you're being fed when you're sad or angry or something hurts you get comforted so you learn that there is something someone you maybe don't have a concept of a mother or a father yet you just know whenever I need something whenever I'm in need there is someone there and then at some point there's a there's a situation when your mother or your father can't pick you up because they're doing something else and you cry and they don't come and that's this is the first time you feel something like panic something like chaos and in the next minute your mother comes and picks you up and you feel I'm safe I'm safe again and you learn to trust that whenever you are in need and even if you have to wait even if at some point in time there is no one there there will be someone taking care of you and you learn to trust but there are many children who learn some very different reality there's this concept of letting your children cry themselves to sleep so that they learn that they should sleep and that they learn that they can't just cry and everybody's gonna run but the child at this age probably doesn't even have a concept of I have to learn something it just hurts or it's tired or it's sad or it's hungry and it needs someone and if this someone doesn't come it feels alone and it feels scared and when this happens every now and then something really interesting starts within us because we as human beings we can cope with many different things with very serious issues what we can cope with is chaos it's not understanding why things are happening this is why we invent stories about God about someone being there watching over us having a great plan this is why we invent stories about where people go when they die this is why we have stories about why people die because chaos things not making any sense at all is really difficult for us for us to grasp and if we can't explain to ourselves we start our brain is addicted to patterns we start to see patterns even if there aren't any we start to see patterns and we start to explain the world in a certain way so that it makes sense again so that we don't feel that helpless and this story that we create might not even be true but it could be helpful for us to create a certain amount of structure for us to be certain and this could be a story of maybe I'm too much maybe I'm too loud maybe I don't deserve love maybe there is no such thing as love maybe I'm alone nobody's there or what I subscribe to throughout my life maybe I'm not good enough my parents have separated when I was about five years old and they fought a lot and there were real issues I stayed with my mother the first 12 years of my life but then I moved to my father and my father had remarried does that word in English remarried he had married again and his new wife had brought two of her own children and they had two more children together and I moved in and at some point I realized that I was not part of this family for whatever reason my father's new wife she had her own kids and I was not part of that this manifested in certain ways in some extreme ways one one may be vivid example is imagine me having my room in our house and in front of the room there was this one square metre a square metre a piece of hallway to the right a small guest restroom cold water no heating to the front what was the front door and to the left where there was the rest of the hallway into the rest of the house there was a door this door was locked and I did not I was not allowed to enter the rest of the house because I was not part of the family sometimes when she wasn't there my father secretly let me in so I could take a shower grab something from the fridge normally I wasn't supposed to go in there there was there used to be this light switch which she had replaced by a motion sensor so whenever I left were entered my room that they could see that I was moving moving about of course I learned after some time that when it came out it tried to go up underneath and grabbed up and turned it off that had worked somehow a situation I thought was completely normal for me it was my father some he usually gave me some money so I could buy food for myself but I shouldn't tell her she wasn't supposed to know and at some point we lived will we lived near the french-german border the house was on the French side and I went to school on the German side and there wasn't a public transportation in between so my father every morning my father brought brought me to the train station on the German side I took the train over to my school went to school and at night I went back my father picked me up again and we went back home and at some point I was just 18 years old he picked me up I went into the car and he told me Dennis I'm gonna bring you wherever you want but you're not coming home again which is when she made him decide if he's going to kick me out or she will leave and she will take the small kids the daughters they had together with her and he made a decision that nowadays he says he can't understand why Hidde why he made it nowadays he said he kicked out the wrong person but back then his only option seems to be to hope that I will survive somehow so when I tried to finish school which didn't work out because I rather quickly ran out of friends where I could sleep over so I had to work I had to find a job I had to earn money to live off and this was so overwhelming that I never got to finish school that I never got to study even though I wanted to and this story is deeply ingrained inside of me and this story has been telling me throughout my life has me had me telling myself throughout my life that I don't belong that I'm not good enough and just like I have this story each and every one of you does have their own story you have your own story it doesn't matter if it's like this that doesn't matter at all everyone has their story and these stories sometimes are so old and so deeply hidden and so inside ourselves that we can't really that it's hard to find them and I'm asking you or I'm inviting you ask yourselves when you get home tonight this weekend every now and then throughout your life what is your story what do you believe who you are do you believe that maybe you're not good enough for certain things because the more you believe something like that the more you find proof of course she wouldn't she wouldn't go out with me I'm not good enough of course I wasn't able to finish school I'm not good enough of course I'm having a hard time to quit smoking or I didn't get that job or that promotion and the more we see things that seem to prove our story the more we believe announced and eventually it all comes down to self-worth to what we ourselves believe we are worth and in our society a so called in German license gesellschaft where we have licensed raiga and where we have concepts of people having to contribute having to perform to be part of society to be valued we have a very tight coupling between this concept of self-worth our feeling of self-worth and our ability what we can do what we can do we prove by what we actually do how we perform by our performance and this it's deeply ingrained in our society but it's also deeply ingrained in our psychology let me take you back a couple thousand years back in the day when we were small groups of people who had to survive in a very harsh environment let's say you're a hunter as a hunter you're big strong and you eat well you need a lot of food but your ability as a hunter it's not that good most of the time if you bring something home it's mostly a strange foot or something like that and if you come home too often without anything to eat for everybody your hunter colleagues and your tribes colleagues might tell you you better stop eating for now and this is scary because in the small society in a small group of people where you have to really everybody has to do their part so that the group as a whole can survive at all it is very important for everyone to do their part and if they don't they threaten the safety of the whole group back then it was simple to know oh I brought home a bag full of nuts or a piece of meat or I helped build this Hut or something like that nowadays we do so uh the kind of work we do nowadays makes it very difficult for ourselves to realize what what we actually what what our performance is somebody making a tape table they can knock on the table they can touch it and see after a day's worth of work they can see this is what I've done you have some kind of thing a manifestation of what you did so you see what you did in the software industry very often I'm in a situation where at the end of the day I have the feeling that I didn't move forward I move backwards I'm worse off than a week ago we have so many more bugs some things don't work we're still behind schedule we are we are we don't make the sprint of whatever and we're told all the time your velocity went down there are so many bugs but you estimated this and that why doesn't it work now so very often we realize as developers that what we do we can't really our the first ones that are but basically the result of our work it's not tangible and it's the same for any kind of creative or problem-solving kind of profession which is why so many people in management roles in roles where you have to deal with people in roles where we have to do troubleshooting why so many people are having issues with feeling to not be good enough and there one more thing we believe that we only belong to the group if we show everyone what we can do we believe love must be earned through a performance deep in ourselves this is what society tells us all the time this is what many of our parents told us when we brought home bad grades from school for instance because we don't want to deal with this all the time we have this create this great invention called procrastination of course I had a of course I didn't make the exam I just started studying the night before I have a perfect excuse why I'm not performing as well as I could if I would have I've got this meeting with the car with a customer or a sales meeting and I need just this one piece of information from a colleague and had tried calling him the night before and he didn't pick up the phone and I didn't make the sale of course my colleague didn't answer the phone it's a perfect reason of course I would do great work but I'm just not not developed that well organised and at the same time we have this we have this ideal version of ourselves this other version of ourselves that could do all these things if I would have studied the last couple of weeks I would have passed the exam if that colleague of mine would have picked up the phone I would have made the sale or if I would finally actually internalize getting things done or the Pomodoro Technique or the seven Habits of Highly Effective People or whatever organizational productive is this productivity system there is if I would finally do that my work would be great so we have this classic example of self-sabotage where we create and subconsciously create situations that we then then can use as an excuse to tell ourselves and everybody else oh it wasn't my fault like so many speakers at tech conferences when I'm sitting in the speaker's lounge who in here is the speaker a few when I stood in the speaker's lounge there are people sitting there starting to prepare their talk maybe an hour before they are presenting and they're openly talking about oh I have to price till have to prepare my talk I'm doing it in the last minute because if it doesn't work if people don't like it I have a perfect excuse of why it didn't work because I've just started preparing it an hour before that I've been preparing this talk for about a year and I never wanted to actually give it I wanted to because it was important to me the topic was very important but I was so scared sure I can do technical talks that's not an issue because that's about other things that's not about myself if people don't like it that's because they don't like the technology or the method or whatnot it's not about myself this talks about myself what if people don't like it what if nobody comes or people leave the room or give me bad bad how you call it reviews I was really scared and I never really started working on this talk I headed all in my head but I never really started working on it's at some point a friend of mine told me I'm gonna host a meet-up two weeks from now and you will present this talk and this is when I was finally forced to actually work on it and two days before that date I was sitting in front of my computer and I was working on this exact part of the talk speaking about procrastination and at some point I looked at my screen and it looked like this you can even see the top ten rules for success I mean it must be simple we all wear a mask each and every one of us tries or has an idea of what we think that others expect us to be how others think or expect us to be we have always this I should I should be taller smaller or leaner or more muscular or I should have better looks or I should be more intelligent or more approachable I should be able to do small talk all those things that I don't do but I should we have so many ideas of what we should do or should be able to do which is why we try try to convey something that goes into in that direction even though we ourselves don't really feel like it going to a conference like this is really difficult for me I love speaking in front of people but I'm really having a difficult time with doing small talk and chatting about the weather and how was your flight and everything but it's part of the job and I try to do it as good as I can when we want to meet someone when we are looking for a partner for a life partner and we meet someone we really like oh I hope she likes me so I tried to be a little bit more like I think that she would like me to be when we apply for a job of course I'm very creative I'm extremely organized I'm I'm very good at working in a team but I can work on my own as well I mean there are a certain contradiction in every standard job app that you read that these are all the things that are expected right and on top of that specific skills experience you need to have like I don't know 25 years of of angular experience and all those things and of course I can do all that when I'm sitting in an interview I'm like yeah of course I can do that I've done this I've done a lot of desync and I can learn or rather I will have to work on that but sure I'm gonna do that I've got a lot of experience but inside of me but to be honest employers do the same thing they tell you stories about themselves that are not true and I've have had many interviews myself as a as an applicant and whenever I joined the company I figured out this some things are right some things are not so right I mean everybody wears masks even companies do and that's fine that's perfectly fine because it's not about not caring about others and I'm like I'm just like I am they spin me spin that's not like that of course we have to lean towards each other of course we have to get together somehow but sometimes inside ourselves we don't feel like this is the person that we really feel we are and you might be successful you may have a great relationship you may have found a great job but deep inside you feel like nah maybe I'm still not good enough and this is something that many people especially in creative work experience Mara 3 for instance she says I'm not a good actor actress I'm I'm just was just lucky with my roles or Jodie Foster after she got the first Oscar in an interview she said sometimes I really think I didn't deserve it and sometimes I'm I'm actually afraid of them finding out that they made a mistake and I might have to give it back how it rolls the owner of the Starbucks chain he says he has no idea of how to run a business he's expecting it to fall apart every day or Mike Myers the actor who once said I'm still waiting for it to knock on the door and it's the talent police taking me away who knows the Menza the Menza is an organization of an association of people with a certain amount of intelligence measured by a certain IQ test it's a small percentage of people it's a rather high IQ that you need to become a member and you make a test to get in there who thought about making a test who actually did I don't want to know the results I didn't I wanted to but I didn't because I was what what if I don't make it then I've got prove again that I'm not good enough and they actually made a made a survey among men's our members and found out that 85% of men's and members sink believe that if they would have to take the test again they would fail because they were just lucky with the questions 85% of men's are members think actually I'm not good enough I was just lucky this feeling has been researched in psychology and it's being called impostor syndrome we think that we are an impostor we think that we sell ourselves too much that we don't really know what we are doing which we experience all day because when you're doing software development and it doesn't matter if you're actually actually coding or doing operations or doing management all the time we're confronted with our own limitations all the time you're sitting there like I have no idea why this is happening I have no idea how to deal with it this happens all the time showing us I don't know how to do my job and everybody else seems to be perfectly fine with their job because everybody else seems that's no problem for them for the others something's wrong with me and this has been researched as well there was this one study where in the set back in the 1970s where they put a psychological study where they put people in the room to fill out a survey and remember whenever you take part in a psychological study and you have to fill out a survey it's not about the survey so they set them in the room to fill out the survey and while they were sitting in the room they let in smoke through a vent and the wall and looked how people reacted and they had two different configurations of this two different setups one was a single person in the room and the other was three persons in the room when there was a single person in the room it took on average thirty seconds for this person to get up go to the door after they let in smoke to get up go to the door and say there's something wrong here thirty seconds on average in the other setting with three people in the room five out of eight times no one actually got up they had to cut off the experiment because people weren't literally weren't able to fill out the form anymore because of the smoke in three out of those eight trials one person got up and went to the door after an average of six minutes and I've asked asked the people afterwards how did you feel in everybody I was panicking there must be something wrong there's smoke it must be burning there's a fire but the other two seem to be okay and I'm not gonna make a fool of myself I won't say anything I feel I'm wrong but everybody else looks like they're right and we we think that everybody can see that we had totally scared and nervous but nobody can we are really good at hiding this so everybody else looks at us and thinks oh he seems to be fine and the other one seems to be fine it's me I better don't say anything because I don't want to make a fool of myself this is called pluralistic ignorance in psychology which means that you think that you are the only one feeling something but everyone does you just can't see it because you just can't see it in the others you think something's wrong with what you think or what you feel or what do you believe so you're sitting there at work and you have the impression I'm just I just don't know how did I get here and look at the others and everybody's fine and I can't say anything because then they would know that I'm not good enough that's what happened to me about two now three years ago when I was sitting in front of the computer at work with a colleague of mine she was fresh from the University and we were we're working on some Cuban ITA's container and stuff and I just didn't understand anything at all it wasn't even production-ready according to Google but the client wanted it anyway so she fresh from university me about 20 years in the industry I had no idea what I was doing and she was just typing away and she was really great at what she was doing and somehow I got the impression that this is wrong I'm getting so much more money for what I'm doing here the client pays so much more for me than for her for what I don't know I have no idea what I'm doing she does she deserves I don't and this is when something got triggered in my head where really went into this into this mode where all of the sudden started thinking about what if they find out now they will find out that I'm just not good enough for that job if they find out I will lose the job if I will lose the job everybody will know nobody will hire me again if nobody hires me I don't have any money anymore if I don't have any money anymore I will lose my family if I lose my family I'll lose everything and all of a sudden I had this doomsday scenario and this is what we do in these kinds of situations we imagine the worst that can happen I have this doomsday scenario when I was back in the day when I was 18 years old and I wasn't allowed to come back home anymore and I had nothing and I lived in the streets I was all of a sudden thought I will have to go back to that I was really scared and the fear made me not be able to concentrate not be able to focus on my work and the more fear I had the less I could focus and the less I could for who focused the more I had the impression that I'm and I went down this this this this vicious cycle and at some point my body just started breaking down some point what happened to me was what they call a panic attack I went to the hospital I went to the psychiatry and this is where a doctor told me after long me talking a lot she told me that what I was suffering from was actual actually a serious form of depression I'm not depressed I don't cry I'm not sad oh really when way you're happy the last time oh happy I don't know maybe when my kids were born you're supposed to be happy then right but I'm not I'm not that kind of I'm not that emotional oh do you get angry some yes I can get angry and I went through therapy and all the things I've been talking about today I learned after that many things meant as stories that I told you today I couldn't even remember back then and what I learned is that all these things have a certain thing in common me not being good enough to be allowed to stay at home my stepmother she always told me we don't want to do this to you but if you if you were just different we can't because you are like you are and I tried so hard but it was never enough or me thinking I have to be what I do needs to be perfect and I sabotage myself so then it when it isn't I have an excuse or me sitting there and expecting for myself that in every minute of my professional life I know everything well my clients expect that too but I just can't all this comes down to perfectionism and perfectionism this is this unwitnessed that you tell when you're applying for a job when they ask you and what's your weakness because that's actually that's a good thing isn't it no it's not it's when you have so high expectations that you cannot reach them that you must fail and to overcome this I created these four steps to overcome this first whenever whenever I have the impression of no I shouldn't do that or I'm not good enough or maybe I shouldn't even try I asked myself who's that voice in your head instead I said your voice inside your head or is that your grandfather who told you that as a boy you don't have feelings you don't try or is it your friends who told you you want to quit smoking everyone not you is it your teacher who told you that you're not worth the money that's being put into your education is it all those people from your past telling you for some reason or another what they believe second question what if this voice wasn't there what would you say and very often I reason I would like to do that and what's the worst thing that could happen and not that doomsday scenario but this this realistically what what's the worst thing that could realistically happen if nobody likes this time well nobody is gonna come I'm not gonna die from that it's gonna be a shame of course but still what if I succeed and there's this excuse me for the ones who want to make a photo and there's this great quote from a speaker colleague of mine success it's never having to say I wish I had and maybe it's the wrong question with this glass half-empty or helpful maybe it's not one glass throughout your whole life and you have to keep the stale old water from back in the day and drink it until the end of your life what if you have a new glass every day and can fill it up every day with new stories with your own stories what if it doesn't need to be water every time because everybody drinks water I like beer not everybody likes beer it doesn't need to be what everybody likes and you can drink whatever you want everybody else should be fine with that my question for you imagine one thing for yourself that you always wanted to do but never did you never did because some voice in your head told you I know don't even bother it's not for me what if that voice wasn't there what would you say what's the worst thing that could happen what if you succeed what is it that you always wanted to do but never did please think about this be yourself thank you [Applause] thank you thank you well thank you amazing thanks to your friend we are so happy that he forced you to put this talk together to help you here today he's a real friend amazing show thank you so much thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: WeAreDevelopers

Views: 14,167

Keywords: burnout, depression, successful, accomplished, performance, software, cloud, developer, programmer, development, programming, conference, congress, success, story, Europe, IT, tech, technology, people, code, future, coding, WeAreDevelopers, WeAreDevs, software engineer, software developer

Id: C84h5e9cOZY

Length: 47min 41sec (2861 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 29 2018