What Sets Professional Esports Athletes Apart From Average Gamers

at the end of the day what is in your mind when you set out to do a task drastically alters how successful you are so today what i'd like to do is uh um share a couple of thoughts with y'all the first is on a very high level how i think about performance so having worked um having consulted at startups having worked with c-suite executives having worked at investment banks having worked at major tech companies uh in terms of like optimizing their performance working with like content creators um you know physical athletes like nfl players football players things like that and also working with like students and and you know medical students things like that what i've come to realize and now having worked uh very intensively with an esports team we've i've done work with esports for the last three years um but this was is definitely like the most intensive engagement what i've kind of realized is that like it boils down to four things and what i like to do today is share what i would call the four pillars of performance and this is where if we kind of take a step back like it kind of goes back to what i was saying earlier which is that at the end of the day you can be an esports professional a physical athlete a student um a parent uh or like a ceo and at the end of the day you're human right so the common element is not the industry it's the human so what can we understand from a human perspective from a personal perspective that will translate into success in any of those fields and too often i think what we have is like we have like industry specific um results like we have industry specific like performance improvement right so for example there will be someone who specializes as a sports psychologist and they have a lot to offer don't get me wrong you'll have someone who specializes in like you know physical sports you'll have you know people who specialize as like consultants for you know investment banks or like consultants for like it solutions or things like that so we'll have a lot of like industry specific support which is wonderful and it's very effective don't get me wrong but i think what's actually missing is some somewhat more of like understanding on a fundamental level what works in all of the industries right and in my experience like the common element is the fact that they're humans and if we look at humans sure humans can be quite different but if we look at humans what we see at the end of the day is that the similarity between two humans is greater than the difference we all have one brain two eyes you know for the most part two nostrils a mouth one heart two lungs two kidneys one stomach and so there's a lot of similarities between humans our brains are all wired a certain way like we all have occipital cortices we all have frontal lobes and so there are common elements of performance which i think transcend any industry and the other thing that i'm gonna so i'd like to share with you all kind of my idea of like the four pillars of performance um so the other thing to kind of think a little bit about and and why i sort of divided it into four pillars is to understand that in my experience when people are looking to improve they tend to focus on one of these things and neglect the others so what i'm going to do is share with you all what i think the four pillars of performance are and then also go through two examples one is a student and one is a programmer of like how how to apply like these ideas and in my experience what tends to happen is that people will get like hyper focused on one of the four pillars and they won't and they'll keep on trying to improve that but that there's like a diagnostic problem so people will like diagnose themselves as like they'll only look at one of these four things and they'll keep on trying to improve that and then they end up getting frustrated because they don't think about these other dimensions so um you know here are the four things that i think it essentially comes down to the first is preparation so this is like what you do that sets you up in a long-term sense for performance on a given day so this can be like studying for example like for a test right how you prepare for the test will result in performance for the test as a programmer this could have a lot to do with for example where you went to school if you went to school what kind of certifications you have what your work experience is so like did you work at this company for this amount of time or this company for this amount of time and i know like a lot of y'all are thinking like oh isn't isn't my performance on a test like doesn't it depend on how much i study like isn't that because that's what we sort of think of right which is exactly the point which is there's way more to it than just how you study so preparation is definitely a huge part and generally speaking when we think about performance i think preparation is the first and unfortunately oftentimes the only thing that people think about so then what happens is when they do poorly on the test like people get frustrated they say like oh i need to study more i need to study more i need to study more the second pillar is going to be adaptation so this is where when i look at people who are successful across different fields what i see is that there's like a big difference between like the the winners and the losers and it's that the winners know how to adapt and the losers sort of don't so i'll give you guys kind of a quick example of this so as a student you know if i like do poorly on a math test what a lot of people will do is like conclude and they'll say like i'm not good at math and they'll sort of like determine some sense of identity around poor performance the tricky thing there is that sense of identity of i'm not good at math or i'm not a math person or um you know something like that like i can't cook is a good example another thing that i i hear you know a lot people say like oh like i just can't cook like it's not something that i'm good at so when people will make essentially identity determinations based on performance they stop adapting right so once you say like i can't cook there's nothing you can do about that like if you say i'm bad at math or um you know if some people will also like in the dating world they'll say like i'm ugly so that's just gg right it's like over like i can't do anything about it and so there's a fundamental lack of adaptation and if you look at the difference between some you know you can have two people who are ugly but the difference between one who winds up in a healthy relationship and one who stays alone is not the ugliness because that's a i mean ugly people are in relationships all the time i'm not trying to be mean but i'm just sort of stepping meeting them where they're at and sort of assuming that that that's an accurate physical characterization what i'm saying is that there there's you know you can take any kind of identifier of the self like ugliness or i'm stupid or i'm bad at math and what you'll find is that like of all of the people who at one point identified as being bad at math some of them will actually be very successful in fields that require math right and the big difference is their capacity to adapt um so someone's saying i'm low iq so here's what i'll tell you i've worked at a lot of startups and places where there are very stupid people at the top and they can still be really really successful right so like for example leadership is a good example where you don't need to be smart you just need to be good at managing people who are smart right so you can that doesn't need to hold you back i'm low iq is also a prime example of exactly the kind of thinking that i'm talking about so people who don't have an adaptive mindset will label themselves with something that is unchangeable they'll say i'm ugly i have a low iq it's like a thing that is like fixed right and so then it's like you're screwed like i'm just bad at dota it's like gg game over there's nothing you can do about it so that dooms you to like low performance once you start thinking about it that way so this is exactly why adaptability is a huge part of this right it's the ability to adaptation is not about like changing who you are it's about accounting for who you are and not letting that get in the way of your performance so the third pillar that we're going to talk about is communication so i think irrespective of what field you're in or i i guess there are a few cases where this isn't true but i'd say for like you know 99 of people that communication is a skill that transcends any industry and that what i've seen is that people who perform well in a particular field are like tend to be good communicators so you can have two doctors for example who have comparable iqs comparable test scores and comparable training and there's a big difference in how well they do in the workplace and if you've worked in medicine in in any way shape or form you recognize you'll know this that like the doctors who get along with other people are the ones that are going to have like like have a better time and do a better job so there are some doctors for example that are very arrogant and they can still rise in positions of power but like if they're the more arrogant they are and the worse they are at communicating like the more abusive they are to their underlings and their nursing staff like the worse they end up doing and that you know generally speaking the best people in the hospital are the ones that like you can communicate with so you know if there's some doctor that you're consulting and they're like a pain to work with then like you're not going to want to work with them and then like there's a part of your mind that's going to be thinking about that and they're going to be like mean to you and so like it doesn't and the patient is the one who suffers and i've worked with some doctors that are just excellent communicators and like they're by virtue of their communication skills their actual output improves and so this is also true whether you're looking at c-suite executives or students even and we'll kind of go into a lot of examples for students and even programmers this is this is actually really really important for programmers especially because there's this idea that like programmers like don't communicate right like we're all about sitting in front of our computer screens and typing things out whereas what i've seen when i work with clients who work like you know work at places like google and amazon and microsoft and stuff like that is that the the programmers that are very good at communicating like if you guys have worked with good product uh you know project managers for example or um like a product dev team that communication is like absolutely vital to a good product uh there's also i forget whose law it is but you know there's a law that says that the number of programmers that you have working on a project is inversely correlated with the speed of the project so if i have five programmers that it's gonna take one year for them to build a product and i add five more people to the project it actually the time doesn't reduce it actually increases to like two years so this is kind of a it's sort of a meme but i think there's actually a lot of reality to this and i think essentially what it comes down to is like communication so um our third pillar is gonna be good communication and if you're good at communicating you're going to like do better no matter what field you're in there are a couple of exceptions to this i imagine like you know i've heard for example that like enya who's you know makes music she's like very isolative i've never talked to her these are all rumors i don't know if this is true but i imagine that there are some creative pursuits and some examples of like you know authors that like historically will like go into the woods and like hang out in a cabin for a while um and and they'll kind of be isolated and maybe that supports creative output maybe they don't need to communicate much but generally speaking i'd say 99 of that of people that i've worked with need to be good communicators the last thing and i know it's kind of weird that i say this for last is mindset so at the end of the day what is in your mind when you set out to do a task drastically alters how successful you are so um you know i'll just give you guys kind of an example from from my experience so like most of what we do here at healthy gamer is mindset so we'll kind of review some reddit posts and stuff like that you guys we kind of like this is our bread and butter but i think uh you know even when i play a dota game like there's like a mindset that you can have of going in so a lot of people will say that if you want to win in in like you know climb and dota or like league of legends the first thing you should do is like mute all other players right and so i think that that sort of makes sense in some ways but in my experience actually like trying to communicate with people and i know i'm sort of talking about communication actually works pretty well if you get good at it right but in the reason i bring it up in terms of mindset is like if you go into the game of dota with the assumption that all communication is bad then it's going to sort of create a situation where like communication is unsuccessful so mindset is incredibly important if you go into a game of dota thinking like oh i can actually try to communicate with my teammates and i know what all y'all are saying y'all are saying lol i've tried that it doesn't work gg noob you can't communicate with these animals and and i think that that mindset is actually like destroying your ability to communicate so there's overwhelming research for example that there's this thing called the placebo effect and what the placebo effect is it's really bizarre but if a human being thinks that something can work it actually objectively increases their likelihood of it working now there may be some interesting example uh exceptions to that so for example like maybe in gambling like it doesn't really matter what you think i don't know i'm not really sure but in most industries and definitely in like scientific studies like we know that giving someone the same medication the results of that medication or the effect of that medication is going to be altered by the mindset of the person and so these are kind of our four pillars of performance and now having worked with a bunch of industries i think it basically comes down to these four things so preparation adaptation communication and mindset so the next thing that we're going to do is go over two examples so we're going to run through the case of a student in the case of a programmer and we're going to kind of talk a little bit about how each of these things impacts these two people's lives so i i picked these two examples because these are um you know examples of people that i've worked with like a lot of people in these industries so i feel pretty confident about what i'm about to share with y'all so the first thing to understand is that generally speaking like i said people have a diagnostic problem so most people who struggle with something will look for solutions not look for problems and i know that sounds kind of weird but if i'm if i'm failing math right i'm not going to google how do i figure out why i'm failing at math what i'm gonna google is how do i succeed at math how do i get better at math so the first thing that we have to understand which i think is a huge like societal problem in terms of thinking is that we jump straight to treatments without understanding diagnosis because like if you if you if you're bad at math and then you kind of say how do i study better like the problem may not be studying right like there could be all kinds of other interventions that you have which will allow you to succeed at math that have nothing to do with studying maybe studying isn't the problem so let's kind of talk about prep because that's where studying is so you know there are some efficient ways of studying and that like you know if you prepare appropriately like if your preparation is good it will lead to a better result this may be super simple when it comes to studying but like basically the more you study you know at a very high level the more you study the more likely you are to succeed so um you know the kind of preparation that you do is going to be also important so like this is where okay so let's just say on a high level the more you study the better you do but this is where it's important to remember that preparation is not just about like brute forcing it right so um one of the big theories that i have in in in esports for example is that mindlessly grinding pubs does not make you better so in in the same way i think mindlessly studying does not make you better so if practice was is all it would take to improve then we should see a clear correlation between the number of games played and your skill at a particular game but we know if you guys have played valorent or league of legends or or you know dota or anything you know that there are people out there who have played 10 000 games who are lower ranked than people who have played 1000 games and so if we kind of think about it how the hell does that actually work right it's a very very eye-opening revelation that brute practice does not equal results and so a lot of times what we'll do is like if i if i do poorly on a test what am i going to say to myself oh i did poorly because i didn't study enough like i studied two hours a day and i should have studied four hours a day so we default to making preparation one dimensional and brute forcing it so there's been a lot of research on deliberate practice right which is a mindful or intentional practice so back when i was tutoring people in the mcat which is the medical college admissions test it's the standardized test that you have to take to get into medical school i had a big revelation which was like you can take a bunch of practice tests and up to a point it will improve your score but then what i noticed is that some people would top out essentially and that despite taking more and more practice tests their scores were not improving and then what i kind of realized is that like oh this is kind of interesting because they may study more so like they may do poorly in a particular subject so they'll go and like read the chapter again but that doesn't actually improve their performance and essentially what these people need to do is sit down and this is essentially what i you know what i did myself and what i taught other people to do is like look at the you know why did you get the questions that you got right right and why did you get the questions that you got wrong wrong right what is the reason for the question you got this question right and the question you got this other question wrong so as a student a lot of times what i find people will do is just like increase their studying time or they default to increasing their studying time but actually being a little bit more thoughtful about the way that you study can actually be very very helpful and actually lead to an improvement in your test scores so other examples of like optimization like this so these are examples that i would put into preparation are memory like taking advantage of memory consolidation so memory consolidation is op so a lot of people for example will cram the night before the test or what they'll do is like have these marathon study sessions of like eight hours at a stretch right whereas like when i was in medical school what i would do is basically study for two hours a day and then like take advantage of memory consolidation by taking a nap in the afternoon so i would have uh you know colleagues who would like like wake up at 8 a.m and they'd like study from 8 a.m to 8 p.m because the more hours you study the better you're gonna do and what i tended to find is that i'd study for two hours a day i'd take a nap and then i'd wake up and i'd like chill a little bit i'd studied for a couple more hours maybe um and when preparing for a test but on average i only studied for two hours a day and those like that those two hours were like ideal studying kind of systems and so as you ideal ideally study like you actually don't need to study more you can study less and still get a good grade so i think there's a lot of sophistication and you can take advantage of a lot of physiology and neuroscience and psychology to improve your actual preparation so other good examples of this is like when i work with traders for example like i'll sometimes get um you know consulted by a group of traders and what they will they'll all do their kind of research and stuff but like doing research on your own and doing like 10 hours of research may or 10 hours versus 20 hours of research you may not get a whole lot out of 20 hours of research and what i actually found when i worked with like day traders and and things like that is that um for example spending five hours trading and one hour discussing what you've learned with your colleagues leads to an improvement of performance over six hours of just doing research right so there's some things that you can do to optimize your preparation beyond brute force so that's the preparation category so we talked a little bit about study habits um and so what you know the key thing here once again is like when people think like oh i just need to study more that may not be correct you may actually be studying more you may be studying enough it's just the nature of your studying may not be like optimal in some ways or it's not even about optimal it may actually be like horribly deficient in some ways and another good example of this is that a lot of students when they study they'll just passively read instead of like taking notes and even their notes will be like very passive so what i recommend to students who want to to learn actually is to like you know read let's say a chapter and then sit down with a blank piece of paper and write out what you understood about the chapter because this is the key thing that people don't understand about like a test so the skill that you need for a test is information recall it's not like information going in so there's actually like a difference between recalling stuff that's implanted and like putting stuff in so it's actually more efficient to instead of read a chapter twice to read it once and then spend time actually trying to recall it so then what you're actually doing is like that's training the skill of information recall and then when you try to recall and you try to write down like all the key concepts then when you go back to the chapter at hand and you kind of like look at and then then what you do is you're like very focused right because you're gonna say okay the second time i read the chapter i'm gonna see what did i miss and what did i get okay i got that i got that oh i missed this and then you don't jot it down there oh i missed this i missed this i missed this okay let me close the book let me take a brand new sheet of paper and let's see if i can put everything down and so you're actually practicing exactly what you're going to need to do during the test and so when people start to study in a situation like that it improves their preparation and their grades go up the second thing that we're going to talk about is adaptation so for students like i was saying a lot of people will make and will claim a particular identity around something like i'm bad at math or i'm just not good at studying or these kinds of things and so what i want y'all to understand this is really important is that there's a big difference between successful people and non-successful people and that big difference essentially has to do with like what they do when they fail so for unsuccessful people what they tend to do is they'll say like i am a failure or they'll make some attribute of their identity instead of adapting so instead of concluding that i'm bad at math the question that you should ask yourself is what can i do to get better at math what can i do to get a better grade here right and that's it's like it's such a huge problem not only within our community but within society as a whole you can ask people like all the time and they'll make like all these kinds of interesting statements about themselves that define who they are oh i'm just not good at relationships sorry oh i'm sorry that's just the way that i am like if you can't like you know i'm just someone who sometimes loses my cool you know yeah like i just like sometimes when i get drunk i do stupid things sorry and so these are people who when faced with failure don't ask themselves the question how can i actually be better at this there's a complete lack of adaptation and so as a student if you do poorly in a class it sort of doesn't matter whether you did good or you did poorly the main question that you need to ask yourself is how can i do better right what can i do differently and so when i work with top tier esports teams and you all will see this if you like if you you know watch tournaments it's like some teams will be one-trick ponies and then like they can get like halfway through the tournament but they can't make it to like you know they'll come in with like a very clear strategy that they practiced and drilled a ton but it's the teams that are that are able to adapt that are the ones that consistently go the mo you know the the long distance and that's also true in life like you can look at people who will get hamstrung by a particular thing it's like if i just say that i'm bad at math and i'm good at these other subjects and i've just got like one c on my transcript that's going to tank my gpa and decrease my chances of getting into like medical school or whatever it's the students who are able to ask themselves the question what can i do differently how can i get better at this how can i adapt to this situation even if i am bad at math even if you accept that as true what can i do about it those are the ones who end up succeeding so if you're a student and you have these like defined qualities of yourself about yourself like i am bad at this or i'm good at this i'm just not a morning person there may be some truth to that you may not have quite the gift of mathematics that someone else has you may have a circadian rhythm that's a little bit harder to control than other people but that's not the important thing the important thing is how can you adapt to that circumstance okay so if i'm not a morning person how do i need to adjust to make sure that i i can perform well on a test that's like scheduled for 8 am right you have to ask yourself that question and then that's going to be the first step to like actually figuring it out so the next thing is communication so this is where i hate to break it to you but like students that communicate amongst each other and are good at communication tend to do better than ones that are bad at communication so i'll give you guys just a couple of examples so like study groups are really good ways to like anchor you to like forcing you to study and and so what we find is that generally speaking people who form study groups tend to outperform people who don't and so a big part of forming a study group is like you know because it kind of forces you to study you show up other people show up things like that so it kind of helps with the issues of procrastination and motivation and stuff like that but if you really look at it the formation of a study group really comes down to communication so one person usually organizes it other people are like communicative enough to um you know kind of like show up and let they'll be like yeah i'll be there or whatever and then there's a lot of like informal communication that happens some people talk to each other in class and things like that and as students start to communicate better amongst each other it also gives them like particular advantages so like students that are socially well plugged in and have a study group that they show up to on a regular basis if you're sick or you need notes like you're much more likely to get them if you need help or you're struggling with something and you ask for help which by the way is communication you're much more likely to like get it right whereas you'll have other students who are not very good at communication and so if something bad happens if rng screws them by getting sick then their recovery is like way harder than the student who's the good communicator the other thing that's absolutely op is that students who are good at communicating will also communicate with their tas professors and that is a huge advantage so when i'm writing someone a letter of recommendation it's the communication that the student has had with me that ultimately determines like how good the letter that i write is right so like writing a good letter of recommendation as someone who writes them is all about knowing the person right so like i can have two people like if i if i'm teaching a class and they both get a's it's even gotten to the point where if someone gets a an a in my class like i won't even write them a letter of recommendation if i don't know who they are i'll tell them hey i don't know who you are like i can all i can really say about you is that you got an a in my class i can't really say much so what i've really found and i don't know if you guys have known this but like if if you're if your professor like knows who you are and you communicate with them they're also much more likely to give you slack and this is where you can say that that's unfair and i'm not saying it is unfair but unfortunately it's like human and we as like social animals tend to um we tend to value like communication and personal relationships so this is also where like networking comes in and so we'll talk about that for programmers but um you know communication is absolutely vital to like like success and performance in the case of studying it's about forming studying groups it's about forming relationships it's even about communicating your needs and asking for help because that all falls under communication the last thing is mindset so this is where you know we talk about this a lot but generally speaking when i think about mindset what i what i really think about is uh you know things like action orientation versus outcome orientation that's all up here so you can do all of the other stuff right you can communicate more you can prepare more you can adapt more but what's in here is ultimately going to shape all the other three okay so in the case of mindset like being able to adapt has a lot to do with mindset do i understand that like my identity as a human being is not determined by certain outcomes so if i ask 10 women out and they say no does that mean that i am a reject or i got rejected by these 10 women so there's a huge difference there in terms of like what's your mindset is it egotistical and what i mean by egotistical is not like arrogant but when things happen to you do you attribute them to like personal qualities of the self or do you attribute them to like potentially external factors so if i ask out 10 girls and like they say no that may have nothing to do with me one of them may not be heterosexual one of them may be in a relationship one of them may not be looking for a relationship one of them may have just lost a parent to covid you know one of them may like be racist like you never know like what's going on in the other person's mind and so your mindset and what you identify with in terms of like why things happen to you makes a big difference another example of mindset is outcome orientation versus action orientation so this is a growth mindset versus performance mindset which carol dweck has done a lot of awesome research on and so the main thing that she sort of discovered and the yogis discovered this a couple thousand years earlier is that like people who devote themselves to action as opposed to outcomes are the ones that perform better so when i focus on studying as opposed to the grade um you know that actually makes like a big difference in terms of like what happens after the test so if i am focusing on the grade and i'm shooting for an a and i end up getting a b if my attitude is okay what can i do better like how can i grow from this then it's actually going to boost my motivation and i'll try twice as hard on the next test if i'm focusing on getting an a and i wind up getting a b it actually tanks my motivation and then i do half as good on the next test it sort of dooms me to getting a b next time so mindset literally with the same result a different mindset will lead to an increase in motivation or a decrease in motivation so the other thing in terms of mindset so for example when you look at communication mindset matters there too so there are some people who will form social connections for like personal gain and like that's really what's in their mind oh i need to like form a study group so that if i get sick people will be able to give me notes and that's the kind of thing where like you can do that but i think other people will pick it up so why are you socializing you know what is the nature of your preparation so even when it comes to communication like professors are pretty good at picking up you know who's a student who's here to just like kiss my ass and brown knows and who's a student who's here who's genuinely trying to do good in the class and is like trying to learn this subject and so i've seen this a lot you know teaching at harvard medical school because everyone has to do psychiatry and there are two types of people who are like tryhards at psychiatric or three types of people who are tryhards of psychiatry so type number one is like genuinely interested in psychiatry and wants to be a psychiatrist tryhard type number two is like wants to be an orthopedic surgeon and needs to get honors in this rotation so they're going to try really hard for a grade but actually don't give a crap about psychiatry and tryhard 3 is actually my favorite kind is these are the people who don't aren't actually interested in psychiatry like they're not interested in becoming a psychiatrist but they're genuinely interested in learning it because it's like the last opportunity they'll have to learn psychiatry those are actually my favorite students to teach you don't have to like what i like in order for me to like care about teaching you all you have to do is like genuinely be interested in the material so even the the mindset that you have will alter your communication right you have this linguistic cortex you have all these empathic circuits in the brain and so all of those things will essentially act in concert depending on what's on the inside and if you show up with a study group and your attitude is hey like if we all study together we're going to do better together right we can all rise together by working together versus joining a study group out of a competitive mindset and i'm gunning for number one and i'm going to use you guys to help me get to the top those two mindsets are going to translate into different kinds of communication and will result in like different things because especially like med school is a good example of you know half of the people are gunners like when i went to med school at the beginning i was a gunner too and i hated it like it was like not who i was and i was like screw this like you know because what happens is there's like a medical school honor society right and only the top 10 of students get into the honor society so i was like i'm gonna get in the honors society i'm gonna get in the honors society and then like it turned me into like a bad person so i stepped away from it and then the second year i was like screw that i'm just gonna like learn medicine like i'm gonna try to learn medicine forget about being at the top of my class and then you know i get an award for academic achievement at the end of four years once i change like my mindset so even mindset can change like all of the other dimensions we talked about adaptation and how mindset changes that we talked about preparation we talked about communication um so the next thing that we're going to do is run through all four of these as a programmer so the first thing is like preparation right so depending on how you learn programming and like what are your you know avenues of like preparing to be a programmer that can obviously adjust how successful you are so for example if i'm gonna program um so you know depending on where you train or like whether you do different kinds of certification courses or things like that some programmers will learn like ancillary stuff so they'll learn stuff that's a little bit about uh different from their own field which i think makes them far more effective programmers so for example like even if my job isn't ui ux but i like spend some time learning about ui ux it'll probably help me like in my programming because i understand a little bit about ui ux and will help me like talk to people who are doing the ui ux for the back end stuff that i'm i'm building other examples are you know a lot of times like people are like they're almost like bots when it comes to like being a programmer like a lot of people like the difference that i see between the really good programmers and like the mediocre programmers who are still like pretty successful is like some of them behave like bots so like i'll work with two people let's say like just random company google right and one of the people at google is like very proactive about programming they'll like try to learn different things they'll take like certification courses things like that and then another person is sort of like a bot and what they'll do is they'll like go to work and they'll nine to five it and then they'll like kind of do their job they're smart they're talented they you know studied cs at stanford so they're good at it and then they kind of like leave and it's not that the other person like works more hours right so this isn't like a capitalist like i'm going to take advantage of of people and try to get them to work more oftentimes actually what i find is that the people who are who don't behave like bots and are actually thoughtful and spend time like thinking about the job that they're doing spend time trying to talk to different people in the company trying to talk to like product developers and things like that um doing different kinds of certification courses they're actually the ones who become more efficient at programming and can work fewer hours so preparation can be like kind of you know twofold either you can prep like a bot or you can actually be like thoughtful and stop and think a little bit about oh like you know how can i become a better programmer like what are the different things that i can do to prepare the good news is that your bosses will tend to love it because you will do better but you're not necessarily doing it for the sake of your bosses you're doing it so that you can become a better programmer that's like a piece of mindset there right so the second thing is to adapt so this is a good example of actually something that i think that programmers are very good at so this is something where um we'll still talk about adaptation but i think that programming is one of the few industries that iteration is like a part of what you formally learn right and and this is going to be it's kind of weird because if you're a programmer like i encourage you to talk to other people in in industries and you'll discover that you're a lot better at iterating than they are so as a programmer you know that when you write code they're going to be bugs right like you know that from the get-go so programming is one of the few industries where you write code there are bugs you're gonna have to rewrite it you're gonna have to rewrite it and you're gonna have to rewrite it and this is where for example if you compare it to like budding authors budding authors will write a first draft or they'll write three chapters and they'll say this thing that i'm writing does not fit the vision of the epic story that i have in my head so screw it and they walk away from writing right they go back to their like programming job and they're like oh screw this it's the programmers who understand iteration and even the authors who understand iteration that are the successful authors there's no such thing as writing a good book the only thing that you can do is write a crappy book and then it's through the process of adding editing and iteration that you write a good book and so programming has iteration already built in but this is where when i work with programmers what i'll have them do is iterate on things besides code right so this is where like you can still iterate on things like work life balance so you know how can you maintain work-life balance um you know google is another good example of you know they provide meals and things like that and like some people that i've worked with at google have like d gen sleep schedules and circadian rhythm problems and like google sort of doesn't care right let's just like you have to write the code by the time that the deadline is there and what i really found is that you know working with with um some programmers who like are able to iterate on a good schedule and healthy work-life balance and the fact that like they're not famished at two in the morning because they started work at 10 p.m and then they're like ordering uber eats and then they feel like sluggish or whatever and they're eating crap and then they're like exhausted and it's like this cycle of like just like unproductive stuff and then they end up drinking tons of red bull and like hammering it out towards the end and since they're brilliant the code is pretty good and like they end up sticking at google but on the flip side they're the people who are who are like really really good at iterating even like personal life stuff or even iterating communication so i've worked uh with some uh you know clients that are at some of these companies where you don't even have a job description right so these are some like the open work kind of companies like valve is an example of this kind of company where like you can kind of work on what you want to work on and you know your performance review is essentially like some kind of like peer review and so when you're at i actually don't know if that's precisely what valve does i don't know their internal processes but i've worked at i've had clients who work at spaces like that and a lot of programming is turning into that kind of stuff and so if you kind of think about you know how you get promoted how you get raises it's not just based on the quality of your work what you actually have to adapt is like your interpersonal skills and social skills because part of your raises and benefits and uh and i could tell stories and stories and stories about the internal workings of these companies i've also worked with executives who are at these kinds of companies and have this kind of philosophy so unfortunately like getting a raise at some of these kinds of companies is like half work product and a half popularity contest and so this is where if you want to adapt right there's two kinds of people that i work with one is like oh it's unfair because this person is charismatic so they got more of a raise than i did like sucks like i like it's unfair and then there are the people who are like oh this is a place where i need to learn social skills so let me adapt and like learn how to play this game a little bit let me learn how to be a little bit more political and then they're the ones whose performance improves it's unfortunate that this is the way the world is i wish it was different but unfortunately it's the way it is right so now we can i kind of already segued to communication um but the truth is that if you want to perform in a programming team or you know anything else you need to learn how to be a good communicator so this is also where like if you think about sprints right so like a lot of these agile models for like programming involve sprints where people are get in a room and they sort of like sit down and they'll like maybe whiteboard things out or things like that but one of the biggest yields i've seen working with programmers is actually training them in communication skills because then what happens is like at the end of like the first sprint meeting or whatever like everyone understands like what they're supposed to be doing and when everyone is kind of on the same page the programming goes much more smoothly and not being on the same page involves things like like you know not laying out your argument clear enough not asking questions not asking other people if they understand so communication is a huge part of this so i really do think that like communication is like very important for programmers and what you'll find is that like you know who ends up being the cto the cto like if we take let's say take five programmers who winds up being cto it's not the person who's the best programmer it's the person who can communicate with the ceo the coo and the cfo right so like this is really really important if you want to be a successful cto you need to practice communication skills because this is what's going to happen your ceo is going to come to you and they're going to say hey we want this feature i want to add a button right because they've got this idea and then like because they don't understand anything about programming you as a cto are going to be like okay it'll take us six months because you've already learned to say we can't do that or you've learned that it's wrong to say we can't do that well the truth is you can't do that it's requires some weird back-end architect architecture stuff that you have to like do from scratch right because the ceo saw some of one of your competitors that has an app that added this feature and they're like oh that's a cool feature like we should just add just add the feature yo and you're like so the there's the worst ceo who says we can't do that then there's like this the second level like one level up from that is uh the the ct sorry cto who says um okay that'll cost us like six months and like five hundred thousand dollars and then the cfo gets pissed at you and they're like we can't afford that like you need to do it with 250 000 and then the ceo is like you need to do it in three months and so then they're kind of pissed at you and then one level above that is like the cto who can smooth over those things and kind of like massage them into like helping you understand okay you do need a bigger budget here's why things like that and then the highest level of cto is the one who when the ceo comes in and says i want to add this button is able to say we can't do that and the ceo actually respects your opinion and doesn't get pissed at you and listens to you so like at the bottom in the top you're saying the same damn thing it's just one of you in one situation you actually know how to say that right and these are like this is like when i work with ctos i'll teach them the skills that i learn as a psychiatrist talking to a suicidal patient right and like you can tell someone who's suicidal hey bro you can't do that it's that may not work it's about how you explain to them how to bring them to your point of view that's really really important so communication is vital in programming and is like so underdeveloped in the field that it's it's really sad and then so the last thing is mindset and this is where you know this is where things honestly fall apart a little bit for me because i want to say that like the best programmers that i've worked with actually are like have this weird kind of mindset of like cynicism and like a defeatist attitude but perseverance so there's something i'd say that the the best mindset to have as a programmer is like one where you know things are gonna be screwed but you're gonna yolo it right and if you're in programming like you know like it's hard like this is where i've made observations and i don't quite understand it to be honest chat but they're like some programmers who are like yeah let's just yolo it and something about that attitude is like it actually leads to like the best products i don't understand it i really don't and this is where you know i wish i could say like you could talk about action orientation or outcome orientation or things like that it may have something to do with that but i think that there's there's something about you know programmers who say this is hard and maybe it's just like it kind of goes back to like what we were saying about uh students but there's some programmers who are saying this is hard and then they and whine and like going into it they have something like the nocebo effect which is when you believe that a medication isn't gonna work it somehow doesn't work and so it's the opposite of a placebo and so there are some programmers who go in kind of thinking like hey this is going to fail it's never going to work and so like they're mauling on the inside and then maybe molding in real life and they're like grumps and people don't enjoy working with them and they're kind of annoying and then like it sort of doesn't work out and then there's another kind of programmer who's got a slightly different mindset which is like let's yolo it like this is doomed for failure but let's see what we can do let's try it anyway and not only does that attitude change to change the communication but it also like they just do better this is one of the areas where frankly i probably need to do like a little bit more research but you know i've done a lot of mindset work with programmers and i don't know how exactly i've done it but it seems to work so some of it is is also helping them understand that you know your success as a programmer has a lot more to do with like because some of them will be like hopeless right you're one of these cogs in the wheel the ceo doesn't understand what's going on the cto is like riding your ass the project manager is an and plays favorites they're all these kinds of attitudes that people have when they go to work and like if that's the attitude that you've got when you go to go to work it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if you think that the cto the the project manager is playing favorites like then what happens is like if as long as you hold that attitude in your head when you make a mistake like you're not going to think about the mistake you made you're not going to try to get better when you make a mistake and some product messes up you're going to blame the other guy and say that like oh they're just blaming you it's not because i did anything wrong it's because this the project manager is playing favorites and so you're never going to realize like what you're actually doing wrong and you're never going to actually improve and so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where then the project manager starts to dislike you because instead of taking constructive feedback and trying to fix things you just mauled on the inside and like go afk so mindset's very important for programmers questions you

Channel: HealthyGamerGG

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Keywords: doctor k, dr kanojia, dr.k, drk, healthy gamer gg, healthygamergg, mental health, night story for sleep, psychiatrist, twitch

Id: -YEoDAu1ET0

Length: 48min 41sec (2921 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 13 2021