Special Guest: Mani Vaya.

Hey folks, I'm a super busy guy and you probably are too. You probably have a lot going on with kids going back to school, maybe some new projects at work. You've got open source stuff you're doing or a blog or a podcast or who knows what else, right? But you've got stuff going on and if you've got a lot of stuff going on, it's really hard to do the things that you need to do in order to stay healthy. And one of those things, at least for me, is eating healthy. So when I'm in the middle of a project or I just got off a call with a client or something like that, a lot of times I'm running downstairs, seeing what I can find that's easy to make in a minute or two, and then running back upstairs. And so sometimes that turns out to be popcorn or crackers or something little. Or if not that, then something that at least isn't all that healthy for me to eat. Uh, the other issue I have is that I've been eating keto for my diabetes and it really makes a major difference for me as far as my ability to feel good if I'm eating well versus eating stuff that I shouldn't eat. And so I was looking around to try and find something that would work out for me and I found these Factor meals. Now Factor is great because A, they're healthy. They actually had a keto line that I could get for my stuff and that made a major difference for me because all I had to do was pick it up, put it in the microwave for a couple of minutes and it was done. They're fresh and never frozen. They do send it to you in a cold pack. It's awesome. They also have a gourmet plus option that's cooked by chefs and it's got all the good stuff like broccolini, truffle butter, asparagus, so good. And, uh, you know, you can get lunch, you can get dinner. Uh, they have options that are high calorie, low calorie, um, protein plus meals with 30 grams or more of protein. Anyway, they've got all kinds of options. So you can round that out, you can get snacks like apple cinnamon pancakes or butter and cheddar egg bites, potato, bacon and egg, breakfast skillet. You know, obviously if I'm eating keto, I don't do all of that stuff. They have smoothies, they have shakes, they have juices. Anyway, they've got all kinds of stuff and it is all healthy and like I said, it's never frozen. So anyway, I ate them, I loved them, tasted great. And like I said, you can get them cooked. It says two minutes on the package. I found that it took it about three minutes for mine to cook, but three minutes is fast and easy and then I can get back to writing code. So if you want to go check out Factor, go check it out at factormeals. Head to factormeals.com slash JSJabber50 and use the code JSJabber50 to get 50% off. That's code JSJabber50 at factormeals.com slash JSJabber50 to get 50% off.

Hey folks, I'm a super busy guy and you probably are too. You probably have a lot going on with kids going back to school, maybe some new projects at work. You've got open source stuff you're doing or a blog or a podcast or who knows what else, right? But you've got stuff going on and if you've got a lot of stuff going on, it's really hard to do the things that you need to do in order to stay healthy. And one of those things, at least for me, is eating healthy. So when I'm in the middle of a project, or I just got off a call with a client or something like that. A lot of times I'm running downstairs, seeing what I can find that's easy to make in a minute or two, and then running back upstairs. And so sometimes that turns out to be popcorn or crackers or something little, or if not that, then something that at least isn't all that healthy for me to eat. Uh, the other issue I have is that I've been eating keto for my diabetes and it really makes a major difference for me as far as my ability to feel good if I'm eating well versus eating stuff that I shouldn't eat. And so, um, I was looking around to try and find something that would work out for me and I found these factor meals. Now factor is great because a, they're healthy. They actually had a keto, uh, line that I could get for my stuff. And that made a major difference for me because all I had to do is pick it up, put it in the microwave for a couple of minutes and it was done. Um, they're fresh and never frozen. They do send it to you in a cold pack, it's awesome. They also have a gourmet plus option that's cooked by chefs and it's got all the good stuff like broccolini, truffle butter, asparagus, so good. And you can get lunch, you can get dinner. They have options that are high calorie, low calorie, protein plus meals with 30 grams or more protein. Anyway, they've got all kinds of options. So you can round that out, you can get snacks like apple cinnamon pancakes or butter and cheddar egg bites, potato bacon and egg, breakfast skillet, you know obviously if I'm eating keto I don't do all of that stuff. They have smoothies, they have shakes, they have juices, anyway they've got all kinds of stuff and it is all healthy and like I said it's never frozen. So anyway I ate them, I loved them, tasted great and like I said you can get them cooked. It says two minutes on the package. I found that it took it about three minutes for mine to cook, but three minutes is fast and easy and then I can get back to writing code. So if you want to go check out Factor, go check it out at factormeals, head to factormeals.com slash JSJabber50 and use the code JSJabber50 to get 50% off. That's code JSJabber50 at factormeals.com slash JSJabber50 to get 50% off.

 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of JavaScript Jabber. This week on our panel we have Steve Edwards. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Hello from Portland. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I'm Charles Max Wood from devchat.tv. Quick shout-out about maxcoders.io. Go check it out if you want to upgrade your career. And this week we have a special guest and that's Manny Vaya. 

MANI_VAYA: Hello from San Diego, California where it's still 75 degrees. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Oh shut up. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: I am so jealous. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Like I said, shut up.

 

A few years ago at a JavaScript conference, I was approached by Nader Dabbitt. And you might know him for the React Native radio podcast. He's also a developer evangelist for Amazon. And when he came to me, we had a conversation about React Native. And the thing that I love about React Native is that it's approachable, it's web technology, and it's cross-platform and it makes a lot of things really easy for developers to jump in and do interesting things on mobile with JavaScript. So we've had this show now running for several years, React Native Radio, where we interview people about the React Native ecosystem, some of the things that are coming out in React and how they affect mobile, and other options that you have for mobile development. So if you're doing mobile development, you're doing it in JavaScript, you're looking for a good option, or maybe you're just trying to stay current with React Native, then go check out React Native Radio at reactnativeradio.com. 

 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: This is one of those episodes I've been thinking quite a bit, and I'm just going to do a little bit of a prologue monologue here for a second. I've been thinking a lot about what I want from devchat.tv, and it was funny because we kind of went from, hey, we want to make a difference in the programming community to having a podcast for every development community, which is still a big part of what I want to do, but I realized that. After thinking about things for a while and the whole Max Coders thing that I've been working on, I really want to drive people to the point where they're actually building the skills that are going to make them A, the kind of people that companies want to hire, B, the kind of people that people want to work with, and C, people who are just making a huge difference and building and maxing out their lives. And that's kind of where the idea of Max Coders and Maxing Out comes from with the idea here, I've been looking for people who can come in and teach people how to max out, right? And some of it's going to be here's how you max out, you know, in this area of JavaScript or that area of programming skills and things like that. But there's more to it than that. So yeah, I brought Manny in because I felt like this is a particular topic that is probably one of the most important skills that you can have to be successful as a software developer. And in particular, I'm just going to tell this now, I've mentioned it a few times before, but I have a brother and a cousin that are finishing up computer science programs. And, you know, they're taking all these classes and independently each of them asked me, so what do I need to know in order to kind of, you know, have the best career I can have? And without even blinking, you know, I knew the answer. And I kind of held them in suspense for a minute because that's what I like to do. And then I told them, you need to be able to work with people. Manny's been on the show before. He summarizes books usually there about leadership or business or a lot of the things we would consider soft skills. And he has a series of books about social skills. And I'm like, dang, that, you know, that kind of nails it. So Manny, do you kind of want to give us a little bit more of an opening to this and just give people an idea of what we're talking about as far as social skills and developers and teams and working together and all that stuff? 

MANI_VAYA: Yeah. And before I even jump into If I were to summarize everything you said Chuck so far, we're talking about this one skill, like where you can literally dominate your career, your coding career by mastering this one non-coding skill. Here's the thing, a lot of people might be thinking, well, yeah, that sounds great. I will work on it at some point in the future. Right now I just want to develop my core coding skills. But here's the thing, I used to be a computer engineer. I literally spent almost 13 years, 12, 13 years. In that career, I worked at the likes of Texas Instruments, Nokia, Qualcomm. I was in the hardware side of things, firmware side of things, but still doing a lot of coding, lower layer coding, not lower layers like firmware and layer one kind of firmware, a modem style coding. But one of the things I noticed in my career as a computer engineer was that the people who advanced, the people who grew in their career weren't always the ones who had the best coding skills. They were the ones who actually were able to work with people. They were the ones who had the social skills. And if you want to dominate your coding career, you literally have to be able to develop your social skills. If you can work with people, you will dominate your career. If you cannot work with people, you will struggle throughout your career. You will always have challenges because you will believe that it's all about you. It's all about my skills. And if I am good enough, then nothing matters. But the key is. If you can work with people, if you can lead people, if you can work with teams, if you can communicate, if you can make people do what you want them to do, you will succeed far more than if you just rely on your own skillset to get stuff done. And there's something I had to learn the hard way. I literally started with, um, believe that it was all about my skills only to struggle in my career early on until I learned this really powerful lesson. And that happened because a friend of mine actually exposed me to a book. So that's kind of how my journey started and where I started to like look at this as one of the most important skills I had to develop. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, and I kind of want to back this up a little bit. If you've been in software long enough, then you have worked with somebody who is one of those quote-unquote stereotypical genius coders, right? And they are just the worst people to have on your team, right? If you've been around long enough, the other thing that you're going to see is that a lot of times the team gets way more productive when that person leaves. Just to kind of put a point on this, it's kind of a critical skill in the sense that if you're super productive or super, you know, awesome coder guy and you can't work with other people, the company's better off getting rid of you even though you're great at coding. 

MANI_VAYA: Yeah, it's one of those challenging things to wrap your head around because you think the company just hired you for your coding skills. But the truth is the company wants to get stuff done. That's the bigger picture. And if you are getting in the way of the overall company's projects being done, you're not really that useful to the company. You will be stuck in the lower ranks of your career while others who are probably not as good at coding as you are, will rise up the ranks because they can involve other people, because they can work with other people and they're pleasant to work with. Think about the coders you have worked with in your life who were actually really fun to work with, who had those great skills. How fun was it to actually create a team with them? Compare that to the guy you were talking about Chuck, the guy who is the lone coder, the maverick who doesn't really care about you, who will hurt your emotions every time, who will tell you you don't understand shit, who will really be very abrasive. How often do you want to work with that person? How much do you really care to be around that person, to do any kind of project with that person. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: You know, it's interesting, Chuck, I'm hearing some of your 10x engineer rant and some of what he's talking about, talking about how this guy's such a great coder, but he really couldn't work with anyone around him. And that's just running through my mind. I think back to my first IT job that I started, gosh, 25 years ago. Oh, Lord. We had a guy like that. He was a developer who was sort of our libraries guy. He programmed the base libraries that we based all of our products on. And he was getting put on probation and just not the guy that people like to be around because he was a, you know, you idiot, you don't understand this. Why don't you understand it? That type of thing. And it just made people uncomfortable. He'd come into meetings and somebody would have a proposal and he would just squash them, Oh, we can't do that. You know, that kind of stuff. And it just made life so much miserable. And to expand on this a little more. You know, I see this in the sports world. I'm a, you know, I'm a big sports fan and I follow professional sports. You know, I'm not like a nut, but to a certain degree. And I know with interest, there are times that you see athletes that are incredible athletes, really good at what they do. And this is NFL, NBA, major league baseball, and teams will dump them, eat large amounts of salary simply because as a guy is a cancer in the locker room. And can't get along with anybody. There's a couple of NBA players. I think I've read off the top of my head that are like that. You watch them bounce around from team to team because they can't get along. They can't work with their team and make the team better. They're just more about themselves and that's it. So this definitely applies to more than just coding jobs. 

MANI_VAYA: Yeah, it applies across the board. I mean, if you think about it, those base communication skills, those abilities to make friends, to be charismatic around people, to initiate conversations, to carry on conversations, to resolve conflicts with people. Literally, you have to do all of those things. You have to become likeable. You have to have that confidence in a meeting to be able to carry on, to be able to carry the load of that presentation or whatever you're working on, to be able to build meaningful connections, to be able to build deep connections with people so that you can get stuff done. These are building blocks of success in any environment, whether you are coder, whether you are a leader, especially if you are a leader, especially if you are thinking of climbing the ranks. If all you want to do is stay a low-level coder where people just give you, this is what you need to do and just code it up. Maybe not developing social skills is okay. But if you really want to become a leader, if you want to be able to dictate, if you want to be able to lead projects, that's not going to fly anymore. People are not going to work for you. If you don't have the basic skills, if you don't have the fundamental social skills, communication skills, team building skills, friendship skills, all of those, you have to have all of those to really get people to work with you or for you. Otherwise, they will not work with you. They will work against you. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I think the communication and leadership skills, yeah, they're important for people who want to move up the ranks. But anymore, organizations are hiring for that team player. They're not hiring anymore for the guy who can go off in a room and come out with, you know, stone tablets that have 10,000 lines of code on it that are going to make everything run. It doesn't happen anymore. Look at some of these bigger companies like Facebook or Google or, you know, where people are saying, that's a place I really want to work. Well, guess what? If you don't have the social skills, if you can't work with other folks, they're just going to plain not hire you. And they have plenty of other people that they can go to in order to bring it in. So you're saying if you want to be a leader. If you want to move up in the ranks of your career, then you need to have these skills. And what I'm saying is, is if you want to have a career, you've got to have these skills because people will take a chance on you once. But after that, if you turn out to be impossible to work with, you're going to find it really hard after a while to find a job because nobody's going to want you anymore. 

MANI_VAYA: I learned it the hard way. I literally got laid off from three different jobs in a period, very quick period. And I was thinking, what the hell? Why am I getting laid off? I got laid off from Cirrus Logic. I got laid off from Texas Instruments. I got laid off from Nokia. And for me, that was a big struggle because I thought I was so smart. I was such a good, you know, I was such a good developer in my brain. I don't know how really good I was, but still I believed I was good. And the struggle kind of went on for a while until one of my friends gave me a book that changed my life. And literally after reading the book and it wasn't just, I had to read the whole book. I just read the first chapter of the book, the first chapter. And as soon as I read it, I'm like, Oh my God, I've been doing it all wrong. I've been doing it all wrong. That one lesson was worth $30,000 to me. One lesson, because within six months I got promoted by applying just that one lesson. And I think that is one lesson that most of us who are in this intellectual career of coding, get it wrong all the freaking time. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: So I kind of want to dive in a little bit because I think we've kind of sold the idea. Hey, look, you at least need to be thinking about this and paying attention to it and getting better at it. But I'll tell you, I'm really bad at looking at myself and saying, yeah, I screw that up. Like sometimes it's obvious to me, right? I'll read a book or I'll be talking to somebody and it'll come into my own head. Oh, I screw that up all the time or I'm not really good at that and I need to build that skill. But otherwise, I mean, a lot of times I don't realize there's a problem until I find out that I've been driving this poor other person crazy for months. Right. So how do you evaluate these things to say, okay, I'm doing okay on the interpersonal stuff, I'm doing okay on the social skills stuff. How do you evaluate yourself? And then how do you figure out what things you need to work on? 

MANI_VAYA: Interesting. For me, it was as simple as not getting promoted after a long period of time and wondering why the hell is that happening? Until one of my friends from the outside world, he said, you might want to look into this book. It'll change your life. But I think for a lot of people, it's not, there's one thing to be complacent and think that you know all the social skills you need to know. There's another thing to say, I want to improve and I will consistently improve. And it's a lifelong project. I think we need to start thinking of this as a lifelong project that rather than like, okay, once, okay, I have the best social skills and that's all I need to go as far as I need to go in my career. I think it's a lifelong project. You're constantly gonna learn, you're constantly gonna improve, you're gonna constantly try to become better. So you're never done improving is what I'm trying to say, Chuck, rather than making the assumption that, okay, well, I don't really need to improve these skills. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: So what was this book that you read that changed you around? 

MANI_VAYA: I'm glad you asked. Okay, so this book, and I'm gonna give the first chapter, and then I'm gonna tell you about the book. The first chapter. Let me tell the story. I spent four years and I still wasn't promoted. I was really frustrated and I was getting abrasive in the meetings and I was trying to tell people, no, you're wrong. This is not the way it works. I know what you're doing and I would make fun of, like I would literally think in my head like this guy is such an idiot. He doesn't understand this and that would show up in my communication. So the chapter, the first chapter in the book is never outshine the master. Never outshine the master. And what's And the name of the book is 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. And one of the greatest books on leadership, power, social skills, all the different skills you need to grow in your life. What Never Outshine the Master really taught me was that when you are in these kinds of situations, let's say I'm a developer and I'm working with a team where there's someone higher than me, my manager or my director or whoever it is, you don't try to constantly show them, you don't constantly try to prove in the meetings how good you are. You don't try to tell them they're wrong. You don't try to force the idea that, hey, you didn't understand it. I know this better than you do. I am better than you. The more you try to prove to them that you're better than them, the less your chances of becoming a team player in that situation, the less your chances of being promoted. So what I realized, as soon as I read that lesson, I was like, oh, I've been doing this all of my career. I've always been trying to outshine the master. I've always been trying to show up and say, you are wrong. That's not right. I know the right answer to this. I think you got it wrong. I think this doesn't make sense. And no matter what kind of people were there in the meeting, I would still be OK with telling my director or my VP that that doesn't make any sense. That is one of the biggest mistakes I was making. And as soon as I realized that, as soon as I realized all I had to do was not outshine the master, I changed my ways. Instead of telling the director that, oh my god, this is wrong. I think you were wrong in the meeting. I would come back later, I would not call it out, and I would come back later and say, hey man, I think this might be another way to look at this. What do you think? And that would get him to actually work on, that would actually get him to listen to me. And he started to take a liking for me. But until that point, until that point I made the switch, he literally did not like me because I was constantly trying to show how smart I was. I was stuck in this paradigm that if I showed them enough how smart I was, I will ultimately get promoted. But the key was for me to realize I just have to play with them. I don't have to try to put it in their face that I'm smart. I just have to go along and try to persuade them in a different way rather than try to tell them in their face that they're wrong, they're not good enough, they're not as smart as I am. That changed my life within six months of applying that one lesson, I got promoted. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Yeah. One adage that I've heard frequently and I've seen this in other places too is, One of the best things I can do is to make my job, my boss's job easier or better. And, you know, there's a number of ways you can do that. My preference, both as a supervisor and as someone who works for people above me is to be the kind of person that they know they can turn something over to me and I'm can run a fit and take care of it. And they don't have to sit there and micromanage me or supervise me. So if I'm taking that off his plate then he's a lot more relaxed, has less to stress about, knows he can trust you, and then he's going to want to give you more responsibility as you prove yourself. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I want to talk through this a little bit. I've been reading a book by John C. Maxwell. He wrote the 21 laws, Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, but the one I'm reading is the 360 degree leader. And he talks about how you have to manage up, you have to manage laterally, and you have to manage down. In other words, you're managing towards your boss and to your boss's peers, you're managing to your own peers and you're managing to the people who work under you and under your peers. So you have to have these different skills to work with things. And, you know, to Steve's point, he says, you know, making your boss's life easier. I mean, that's one of the big points that he brings out in this book. He talks about how to be transparent to the people who work for you and all of these other things. But that's one of the big things he brings up. And what's interesting is, is if you really think through what's likely to happen is, let's say you have a boss that gets promoted. Well, then his position's open or her position is open. And so if you're the one that's making their life easier, where do they want you? They want you right under them so that you can continue to pull for them. If they move on to another place that's better, they're going to want to bring you along. I mean, all of these things, right? They're going to want you with them wherever they wind up. And so if they wind up moving to a better spot at that company or another company, then your prospects get better. The other thing is, is even if they don't move up. You're the person that they want to keep around. You're the person that they want to keep happy and they trust you. And so I've seen a lot of people that they're like, you know, I've talked to people about the same boss and one person's like, well, my boss is such a tyrant and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and just talk to them. And then you talk to the boss and you find out that the boss feels like he's got to keep his thumb on them all the time. Right. Because they've got such a bad attitude that they're not going to pull through as a team player. And then you talk to the other guy on the team about the boss and they're like, my boss is great. And he's given me all this leeway and he lets me kind of do what I want. And the reason is, is because that guy is going in and taking the initiative to make life better for their boss and for their team. And so when, when that guy shows up and says, I need some time, or I want to go work on this other thing that's kind of outside of the realm of normal for here. Because I think it might pay off in this way or that way, or maybe it won't. They give them the rope. They give them the leeway because they can trust them and they can, they, you know, they know they're going to pull through for the team. And so that's the difference. And it's interesting just how much your attitude and your outlook is really going to affect how great your job is. And the way you interact with people is a big part of that. 

MANI_VAYA: Yeah. And this is like, let's reverse the tables. Let's think of what happens if you are the boss, you are the boss and you have under you, a person like you who's constantly trying to tell you, that you're not good enough, that you don't understand the shit, that he is smarter than you, that he knows it better than you. How likely are you to want that guy around in your team? 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Well, exactly. And if you have any say, you know, eventually you're going to either push them off to another team and make them somebody else's problem, or you're going to push them off to another company by letting them go. 

MANI_VAYA: Yeah. And you are thinking in your head by proving to the whole world, how awesome you are and how much better you are than your boss you're going to get promoted or you're going to rise up your career, but it's the other way around by the more you try to prove that the lower you will be pushed in the whole organization. So that's one of the most difficult lessons to understand as someone who is all about, like we've all been taught. It's all about your intellectual skills. It's all about your skills, about how smart you are, how much better than you are than others. That's how they do the competition of college and the competition of, oh, getting a job. All of that is about how smart you are. So we've been taught to believe that that's the only metric, you know, to rise up the ranks in some ways. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Well, the problem there is that a lot of people get rewarded for that, right? I mean, the people who go out and speak at the conferences, they don't get counted so much for how good a speaker they are or, you know, how well they speak to other people or anything like that. No, it's, it's essentially, Oh, I learned these things from them. And so my technical knowledge went up and so they must be super smart because they know all these technical things. And it's the same thing when we look at some of these problems is we solve them with technology. And so the more problems you can solve with more technology, the smarter you feel like you look and what, what more and more companies I'm finding or realizing is that, yeah, but if you've got the guy that's in there, that's helping everybody else get their work done and getting his own work done. That's the guy. Yeah. He's the one that you're going to miss the most when he realizes he's not getting recognized or she's not getting recognized, right? She's going to be like, I'm out of here. And so if you're not getting recognized, you know, think about it, look at it, have a conversation with your boss, but somebody will recognize you for it somewhere. And, you know, I'm not necessarily encouraging people to just up and quit their jobs, but at the same time, I mean, there are places where that kind of thing is recognized and appreciated. But yeah, we do, we put too much recognition on, Oh, you know, web pack better than the other guy. And it turns out that we need web pack to work, but once it's working, then I just run the dang command and it runs off of the config file. 

MANI_VAYA: Yeah. And there's so much more that goes than just your basic coding skills to make it work. Another one, like I have so many different stories and examples from my life that I've seen this work again and again. It's all it's like simple little tweaks can change things massively. And this is, so there's another scale, like Chuck, you were talking about, hi, when do you know that you have learned enough or do you know? And I was saying, well, you never learn enough of these skills. So there's another thing that happened to me where someone actually applied a pretty powerful skill and I didn't really understand it until it had happened. And then I was like impressed as I was thinking about it, because as I was reading the book called, uh, the like switch by Jack Schaeffer, who's an ex FBI agent, as he described the idea, I was like, Oh my God, that's exactly what happened. So here's what happened. A friend of mine was trying to get me to invest in his business. He wanted me to invest in his business. And he came to me and he's like, oh, we'll give you this kind of return and this kind of equity and blah, blah, blah. And every time I would talk to him and I'd go back and think about it, I'd be like, nah, probably not. I don't feel secure. I'm not safe. I don't think I'm gonna do it. So then again, a few weeks later, we would have some conversation or a few weeks later he would come back and say, oh, by the way, we've added this or we're thinking of doing this. I think you should comment on the deal. And then, nah, man, not really. Right. He was, he's building an electronics hardware business, which is, you know, something I know very well because I've been in that industry for a long time. Then over time, what I saw him do was he stopped asking me for an investment. Instead, he started asking me questions about his business. He started asking me, Hey, how do you think we should do that? How do you think we should approach this product? What do you think we should do in this product in order to make sure that we can get it to that channel? Do you think we should have this kind of stuff or that kind of like, he would just ask me questions, just ask me basic questions, or advanced questions and deep questions and then he would actually take action on whatever I was telling him and he would come back and say, Oh man, yeah, that was interesting that worked, but that didn't work. And then a few weeks later in a non casual conversation, in a very casual conversation, he was like, Oh, by the way, if we have this investment opportunity if you're interested, and I ended up spending, I ended up investing six figures in his business. Why did this happen? Well, for all the time, he was trying to persuade me and influence me by using quote unquote, like trying to persuade me and trying to influence me by logic. I just wasn't persuaded. But what he did instead was he started asking me questions. And the questions led him to be influenced by my answers. And that created trust from my point of view to him. Like I started to trust the guy because I could see him asking me questions, listening to me, listening to my answers, going and deploying those answers. And I was like, huh, that actually allowed him to now influence me. So here is the paradox of influence in life. If you want to influence someone, you have to be influenced by them. As soon as he became influenced by me, he was able to influence me. And now this is a really simple, really powerful idea. It was six figures. You get an investment if you just understood this one concept. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: I see where you're going with that. I tend to think maybe it's something a little different. And I'll give you an example. I heard a talk from a guy a long time ago. He was very old at the time and had retired. He'd been a salesman. I think it was like for Pepsi or something like that. And the way he told his story was that when he would come into the different, you know, places of business that he was assigned to sell to, he wasn't convinced in, hey, will you buy Pepsi from me? What it was, was he would just ask him about them. What's going on in your life? You know, is there anything you need help with? Just take an interest in them as compared to, hey, will you buy stuff from me? And so sort of listening to your story and this story, I see it more as not so much wanting to be influenced but more as treating somebody as a person and someone who's interest as compared to a means to an end. So, you know, not as a tool to be used to gain something for me. So when I'm listening to your story, yeah, I can see the influence, how you could see that he allowed you to influence him because he was using your answers for his business. But it's more that he took an interest in you and your opinion mattered to him. And that's what made the difference to you. Not that so much that you were allowed to influence him, but that you matter to him. You weren't just a means to an end. He valued you in your opinion, not so much that you were a means to an end to invest in his business. Now in the end, that's what he got, but it was because of what he did where he wasn't treating your investment as his end goal. 

MANI_VAYA: Right. And that these are so tightly correlated right here. What you just said, Steve, until you can develop that ability to treat people like that, you will not be influenced by them, right? You will not be influenced by someone if you don't treat them as human, as someone you really care for. So in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey, he talked about the idea, which exactly what I said, in order to influence, you have to be influenced. And in order to be influenced, you have to make them feel, you have to make sure the other person, you're treating them as someone who is truly important. If you don't treat them as someone who's important, you cannot influence them, and they will not be influenced, or you will not be influenced by them. So they are tightly correlated. The way you are explaining the story from the McDonald or the Coke sales representative and this story, they're very correlated because this is a very important skill to understand, or important thing to understand in life, is you make people feel important. You make people feel appreciated. And that leads to a lot of different roads opening up for you. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. I mean, it's cliche, but it, you know, the saying's true that nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care. I mean, it, you know, I hate cliches and I, you know, I hate trite sayings like that, but I mean, it's the truth until I know that Manny is telling me to do something or, you know, trying to get me involved in something because he likes me, because he cares about me. It makes it a whole lot harder for me to actually buy into what he's actually telling me. And we see this in a lot of the other somewhat political or some of these other movements is that, you know, people smell an ulterior motive or they, you know, they, they feel like they're being yelled at or shamed or whatever into doing what people want them to instead of realizing that it's like, Hey, you know, I care about you. I care about these people. And so I'm going to go out of my way to try and make things better. And until I see that in you and recognize that that's the case, it makes it really hard for me to buy into some of the things that people are putting out there, even if they're right. 

MANI_VAYA: Yeah. One of the most fundamental social skills, like I literally created a course called 2X Social Skills, which is all about where I summarize all of the greatest books on social skills. And one of the most fundamental skills I learned, like as I was reading all of these books, I realized that the fundamental in all of this is you must like the other person. Unless you can develop the ability to like people, you cannot really develop any kind of, like they will not like you in return. They will not really, you don't have any social skills. If you don't like people, then you are just a manipulator. You're conniving. You are probably, you're not really the kind of person that people will anyways want to hang out with. So liking is like the fundamental social skill in many ways. You must like people in order for them to first like you. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: It's interesting because we're kind of talking our way around. You have to care in order to make this work. But at the same time, we're also talking about what you get out of it. And, you know, and so in one sense it feels altruistic and in the other sense, it feels kind of selfish. And in the end, what it really boils down to is, and I think this is kind of the missing piece and the missing link for a lot of companies that I've wound up talking to. Cause they talk about this stuff and they're like, well, yeah, we care about our employees, but we also want this from them. Right? And the reality is, is that you have to have that common thing, you know, whatever it is. So for a lot of companies or a lot of teams or a lot of groups of people, I mean, we see this with political parties, we see it with churches, we see it with, you know, clubs is that they have some overarching mission. They have some shared values. They have all of these things. And if you have that kind of thing, that's going to pull you together, then once you start talking about, okay, now how do I take care of you and take care of me? It's a lot easier because we're both working toward the same thing. And so taking care of you is taking care of me. Right? And so a lot of times, I see these companies and they just kind of miss the boat there. It's like, well, we just need another technical genius. And I'm like, no, you need another technical genius that's going to work well with the other technical geniuses you already have and who are going to work together toward whatever goal you're working toward. And if you don't know those things, then a lot of this stuff gets really hard because the social skills that I have that work for me and work for teams that are going to work well with me are going to be different from the social skills that somebody needs in another team or at another company. And it doesn't mean that they're a bad company and these other companies are good companies or vice versa. What it means is, is that it's, it's hard for me to unite my effort with theirs because I don't even know what it is. And if I did, then I may or may not actually be able to contribute. 

MANI_VAYA: Yeah. And what you said there, Chuck, initially, which was like, it sounds like you're being selfish or you are being altruistic, but in the end, you're actually being selfish. What I learned in summarizing all of these great books was that a lot of social skills are very paradoxical. They're the opposite of what you think would work in any given situation. We think the charismatic people are the ones who are the ones who make people laugh, who are the life of the party, who are beaming and who are always like, you know, they are the ones that people are gravitating to because they have the best jokes, the best lines, the best stories and all of those things. But the truth is, 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I do, but I didn't want to say anything. 

MANI_VAYA: But the truth is the charismatic ones are the one, the charismatic people are the ones who make you feel special. And that is the biggest difference. They are not trying to make themselves feel special. They are making you feel special. Or if you think about the key to get people to like you is to you liking them. The key to influencing people is to be influenced by them. These are like very fundamental laws of social skills, but these are all paradoxical. These are the opposite of what we think the truth is, of the truth of interacting with people is in some ways. If you want to feel important, you actually have to make others feel important because that's the only way they will think you are important in their lives. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yep. 

MANI_VAYA: So all of these are very paradoxical, very, you know, kind of interestingly paradoxical skills, but they really help you put it, put the whole puzzle together of how to work with people and get the most out of yourself and off your team, off your community in some ways. You guys have read how to win friends and influence people? Probably most of you guys have read. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: I've heard of it, but I haven't actually ever read it.

MANI_VAYA: Yeah, it's one of the greatest books ever written on this topic of building friends, friendship, like winning friends and influencing people. And there's so many great ideas in this book. And one of the underlying principle, which really is the underlying current of the whole book is, Hey, all you need to do is like people and you will figure out a way to solve a problem. You'll figure out a way to solve the challenge. In the book, there's the story of Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln, the president, who was at times very abrasive early on in his career. He was always trying to pick up fights with people, always trying to prove them wrong, always trying to berate them. We know him as one of the greatest leaders ever, but that's not his story initially. So one time what he did was he wrote an article about one of his political opponents and called him out for all the stupidity or all the bullsh-t. And the opponent got really mad at him and said, Hey, I want to challenge you to a duet. And it's, uh, back in the days, if you get challenged to a duel or duet, whatever they call it, a duel, I guess, you fight till death. And Abraham Lincoln was scared out of his mind. He's like, I've got myself in trouble. I'm going to have to fight this guy with a sword and I might just die. And that was when he found a way to get someone else involved to call up the duel and they never fought. But that taught him one of the biggest lessons in life, which was don't criticize, don't condemn, don't try to make people feel bad about them. Instead, always appreciate them. From that point on, Abraham Lincoln, he swore, he literally swore off saying, never going to criticize, never going to condemn, never going to complain. And he did the same, like even during the heights of civil war, when he felt like his general was wrong, he literally wrote a letter criticizing and condemning him. And then he kept the letter away and never sent it. He never sent that letter because he realized he was being abrasive in that letter. And instead, he sent a much more pleasant letter appreciating whatever he had done and then suggesting ways in which it could have been better, he could have improved. All of these great people in the past, they had to learn these social skills in some way, shape or form. Nobody was born with these skills. That's one of the biggest things I'm constantly challenged by with people will say, oh, I don't need to read books because either I'm born with these skills or I don't have these skills, so I don't care. And I think we can all learn these skills. We can all go out and learn these skills from these amazing books and deploy them in our lives to see tremendous results. 

 

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STEVE_EDWARDS: So, you know, what we've been talking about so far sounds pretty good in theory, but what about the case? And I'm curious to see if you've run into this, the case where you've got to work with somebody and you want to be complimentary toward them, work with them, but they're. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Steve that never happens 

MANI_VAYA: that never happens. I know and never ever happens. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: I don't know what I'm thinking Right, but okay. Let's just say theoretically if you did run into a case like this. What's I don't know if this has been discussed in your books or you have real-world examples. How do you how do you work with someone like that who really just? 

MANI_VAYA: And don't want to they don't want to work with other people. They just care about getting there, you know doing their coding and everybody Adjust to their standards. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Sure. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I'm really sorry. We only work together for an hour or so a week and we've only been doing it for a few weeks, but you know, if you need man to mediate here, 

STEVE_EDWARDS: you figured me out. Chuck. 

MANI_VAYA: I'm sorry to get this all unearthed on a live podcast guys, but here we are. So I'm going to give you a story from the life of Changas Khan, Genghis Khan. We know him as one of the most aggressive warriors ever, right? One of the most aggressive guys who literally pillaged and plundered and killed and took whatever he wanted. He was one of the most difficult people to persuade to do anything in some ways because he did whatever the hell he was wanting to do. And this is coming from the book, The 48 Laws of Power, by the way, which I summarize in this social skills course. And anyone who wants to check it out, you can go to JavaScript, jabber.com slash social. So here's what happened. Genghis Khan was about to take a Chinese city by, I don't remember the exact name of the city, it's very difficult Chinese word there, but the city was a haven to artists and engineers and mathematicians and scientists and all those like really smart people. One of the guys in Genghis Khan's army, who one of the one of his leaders, one of his generals, who really took a liking to the city, and he didn't want that city to be just plundered and massacred because the way Genghis Khan would always operate is that wherever he went, he would just go and take the city and he would literally kill everyone, take all their money and just go to the next place. He would take their women, kill them in and then take all the money and then go to the next place. That was his thing. But one of Genghis Khan's leader did not want him to plunder this city. I don't remember the name of the city. The name of the general was Yeluchitzai. So this guy, Yelu, he was really troubled with the idea that in a few days, the city would just be massacred and there would be nothing remaining. So he goes up to Genghis Khan. He says, Hey, I think there's a way to make a lot of money from the city. And Genghis Khan is like, what do you mean? Well, we're just going to go and plunder and take all the money. He's like, no, no, no, we can make a lot of money from this city for a very long time, rather than just make this money right now. And Genghis Khan is like, well, what do you mean? Tell me. So he's like, well, here's what we do. We go to the city. We put our ruler or local leader in place. And we tax the city. We tax and we take all the money over the years rather than just taking it all away right away. And Genghis Khan was like, Hmm, okay, let's do that. Because Genghis Khan is just this really greedy guy who only cares about himself. He doesn't really care about anything else. Yeluch Chutai was able to figure out how to actually structure his plea for help in a way that would actually help Ganges Khan, but in many ways it was helping his cause. So the fundamental way or one of the laws of power is that if you want to get help from someone, the way to get help always is to find a way how you, that help will actually help them. That thing that you're trying to do, that thing that you're trying to get them to do will actually help them. And that's one of the best ways to work with those difficult people. Because if you can show them how that thing helps them, they'll be much more likely to listen to you, take action compared to when you say, this is what I need and you need to deliver on this. So that story was very powerful for me to kind of work with people like that. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I just love the internet meme. You're doing it wrong, right? And yeah, instead of the, hey, maybe we can do it this way and have it work out for more people or everyone. 

MANI_VAYA: You can appeal to people's selfish interests and still get what you want. That's the kind of the essence of the story. Like there are people who are selfish, who are hard to work with, but you can still find a way to show them what's in it for them and that's the way to get them to do what you want them to do. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. I just want to also, you know, throw out the caveat that this doesn't always work in all circumstances with all people. But if you can look at the problem this way. And I think this is the real kicker for me because I'm kind of a control freak for my own life is that it's a way for me to at least take some control over the situation and see if there's a way to make it work out the way that I think it ought to. And again, it's not because I'm the smartest or whatever, but there, there may be concerns that they're not seeing that I am and vice versa. And so if we can find a way to make it all work, if we can communicate well about it, then at least I may understand where they're coming from, even if I can't get it to work out the way I want.

MANI_VAYA: And you're right about the fact that this will not work with everyone. And that's why you need to learn a bunch of social skills. You just don't listen. You just don't have one skill in your armor that works across the board. There's a lot of different skills. There's a lot of different ways to implement. There's a lot of different ways to communicate, to persuade, to get people, to listen to you, to get people to talk to you, to build teams and things like that. And there's tons of those. And that's why all of these great books talk about all of these great ideas that we need to learn in order to be able to influence, in order to be able to get ahead in our career. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yep. So are there, because we're talking about social skills kind of like it's just kind of one thing or one, you know, class of things, I guess. And I'm wondering, you know, there are a lot of different skills. I mean, we talked about persuasion, we've talked about influence, and we've talked about, you know, just caring about people. And, you know, there are other social skills that come down to more ability to communicate and converse well with people and hash out problems and things like that. So is there kind of a comprehensive list of social skills that people can learn? 

MANI_VAYA: I would say, I mean, there is a lot of social skills you can learn. You would say communication skills, making friends. All of these are listed on that link I gave you or the link we have for listeners where I have the course where I've literally listed all the different skills you can learn. Communication skills, being able to make friends, becoming charismatic, initiating conversations, resolving conflicts, succeeding with people, overcoming shyness, becoming likable developing social confidence, making deep connections, building lifelong relationships. All of these are like different parts, the whole puzzle. We really need to develop all of these. It's not just as simple as, okay, I have one social skill will tide me through the rest of my life or the rest of my career. We got to learn all of these skills. And that's why I literally decided to create this course where I said, okay, I'll summarize the greatest books ever written on these topics. And the name of the course itself is like called 2X social skills. And I summarize 200 of the, like from these books, I found 200 of the greatest social skills that are out there and I created summaries of these books. So there's like over 200 great ideas or 200 great social skills in this course that people can get. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Gotcha. So there's more than we can just talk about in the next half hour or so. 

MANI_VAYA: I think we touched on three important ones or maybe four out of the 200 that you could literally that I have summarized. So there's, there's so much to learn in this realm.

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Great. I got our work cut out for us. So my approach to a lot of this is probably going to be moving forward anyway. You know, it's like, okay, well, I'm going to go check out the course and see what these social skills are. You know, maybe go through the course and go, okay, these are kind of the three or four that I need to focus on right now. And then maybe, you know, then I can go back and say, okay, I need to do better in these other areas. So you just go to JavaScript, Java.com slash social, and it'll just come up. 

MANI_VAYA: Yeah, you just go to javascript.com slash social and it'll take you to the course page. And, uh, I think for the first 200 people who sign up for this course using the coupon code jabber, they'll get 40% off for the course. So the key here, Chuck, is that as you identified, this is a lifelong process. This is not a process where you decide, okay, today I'm going to learn these three social skills and I'm done. What you will do is you'll go learn something, you'll apply it, you'll see results like I, for me, that one social skill, never outshine the master, that was worth $30,000 like that. You'd never know which one appeals to you, which one you apply and get the results you want. Maybe that applies, that applies in your team or it applies with your boss. It applies when you're managing a team. It applies when you're in an interview. All of those things are really dependent on you, but I think what happens is as you go and study these skills and apply, you develop this this base, this knowledge base of all of these different available skills to you, to become more of a social skills ninja. In many ways, you're able to do things much more smoothly now compared to the abrasive fashion that we sometimes are used to. So it's a lifelong process, in my opinion, it's not a one day or a one week or a one month. Let me just go and learn all the social skills and I'm done for the rest of my life. That's not going to happen. You're going to come back to these skills again and again. You're going to learn, you're going to improve, and you're going to come back and you're going to learn and improve and keep on improving. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Gotcha. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: So here's a question. We've been talking about this as, from the point of view is somebody's already hired. So you're here, you've got a job, you're working with people. You need to use these social skills to be able to get along and to be more productive. Having been on the other side of this at points in my life, what about from a hiring perspective? So, and I know it's incredibly tough during a hiring process to really get an idea of how somebody is going to be with other people. You could do things like they do from a public safety standpoint where you do background checks and talk to friends and references and stuff like that. But you can do the best you want and still get a person in there and find out that they really don't get along and they don't care about getting along. We hired a guy one time where I was at a company years ago. And he came in and it was pretty obvious. He was pretty self-confident. He knew his stuff and he wasn't going to learn from anybody. And he literally probably two weeks into the job just went away and lent us a sorry, I'm not coming back. I got a better job somewhere else. And that was it. And he was one of those people that it was better that he was gone. And the next person we brought in was really good. But I guess the question I'm asking is if you're talking to a hiring manager, can you think of questions or ways you can conduct an interview that is going to bring this out of people and maybe give you a clue as to whether or not they're going to be a good culture fit for your organization? 

MANI_VAYA: That's a great question. That's a really good question, Steve. I think the key is to ask for stories of when they accomplished something and see how much they emphasize themselves and how much they talk about people that were involved in that effort. If every story that they're talking about is how they did this and how they did that and how everything involved or ran around how they were so good at something compared to they're talking about how in that team or that situation, we had a team of five or 10 or we were trying to resolve this problem. Those stories will tell you a lot. Those stories will tell you a lot about how self-centered they might be compared to how team oriented they might be. So asking them point blank, are you a people person is not going to work. Right? Asking them point blank, are you a leader? It's just not going to work. But getting them to tell you stories of how they succeeded at a very difficult project that was taking like months and months. What was going on? How did they figure out a solution? All of those things. And asking multiple questions from multiple directions where they're forced to give you answers from stories, from their real stories, rather than like just Oh, this is how I deal with people. That's, that's really probably the, the way to go about it. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: One other thing I just want to throw out there is that I talk, I've talked to some companies and they're like, well, we need to hire a senior developer and we're having a devil of a time finding senior developers. How do we find senior developers? And I'm like, well, there are a lot of kinds of senior developers. What do you want? And I'll press them and I'll press them. You know, it's like, well, you know. What kind of skills do they have to have? What, you know, what kind of personality are you looking for? And eventually I get to the, well, I don't know. And that's a lot of the problem too, is that, you know, on some teams, the teamwork aspect, you know, what Manny's talking about is critically important. And sometimes they just need somebody who can come in and get some of the work done, take some of the load off, but kind of has the I'm going to be a team player, but they don't have to be in there and constantly pushing the team forward per se, right? That role is filled by somebody else and to have another one of those would be nice, but not necessary. And so I encourage managers to know, okay, what kind of skills are we looking for? What kind of a team fit do we want? What's really important to us? And that's back to that mission, vision, values kind of thing that we were talking about before. And so then you can ask the questions like Manny's saying, you know, where you're saying we need, you know, somebody with the encyclopedic knowledge that's willing to share. So tell me about how you, you know, how you learned this or how you know this. Tell me about a time where you helped somebody else learn this, if that's the role you're looking for. Whereas, you know, if it really is the, the team player and you're looking for that coordinator type person, then you can ask them about, okay, you know, what's a tough problem that you kind of took the lead on in your team. And, and have that work out. Right. And so then they can talk about, well, I knew so-and-so was good at this and I knew so-and-so was good at this. And so, you know, they jumped in on that and I filled in some of the holes. And then we had this other person on the team. Right. And so if, if you don't know what you're looking for, I promise you're going to screw it up, you might get lucky the first time and screw it up the second time, but you're probably, you're just going to screw it up. And so, you know, know what you're looking for and then use this advice, right. Then go in and say, okay, I'm looking for somebody with these, these kinds of skills with this kind of a personality that's going to fit in this way, but really believes in the mission of the company and then drive toward that. And that way you can evaluate those social skills. But if you don't know what you're looking for, you're not going to find it. 

MANI_VAYA: That's right. It's that definition that's crucial. And at the same time, you know what Steve was saying, like, how do you evaluate those people because you never know. You get yourself the wrong candidate even after you have done all the thorough wording because most of the thorough wording was done based on the technical skills wasn't really done based on their quote unquote, team skills or leadership skills or communication skills or social skills. We did not go into the details at all on that. Or we could have found out pretty quickly that this guy is not really about the team. He just focused on what's in it for me and how awesome I am and look how smart I am. Want me to tell you a story? 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. 

MANI_VAYA: All right, so so many freaking funny stories or amazing stories on how people like all these different social skills that people have figured out. There's one called the Ben Franklin effect. Now, Ben Franklin is one of my heroes. He is like, he is the person on the biggest American bill, right? He's the hundred dollar guy. And there's a reason for that. He's probably one of the most, one of the most accomplished guys. He has accomplishments in so many different fields. It's kind of mind boggling. So one time, Ben Franklin was trying to make friends with this guy who had just moved into town. But this guy who was very influential, he did not like Ben Franklin for some reason. And he just wanted to, like, he just kept on pushing him away, did not want to talk to him, did not want to have anything to do with Ben Franklin. So Ben Franklin came up with this idea of asking him for a book, because this guy was the only person in town who had this special book that Ben Franklin wanted. So Ben Franklin you know, went up to him and said, hey, I would really appreciate if I could have that book just for a few days so I can read it and learn from it. And, and the guy was like, okay, well, it's just a book. I'll give the book to him and don't have to deal with the guy. Now what happened was very interesting. Ben Franklin borrowed the book, returned the book, but after that, the person's behavior towards Ben Franklin changed. And that is called the Ben Franklin effect. So this is, this is very fascinating what Ben Franklin figured out. Most of us think if we want people to like us, we must do a favor for them. Instead, what Ben Franklin did was he figured out that he could get someone to like him by asking them to do a favor for him. And there's a deep psychological principle at play when you do that. And this is something I learned in the book, The Like Switch by Jack Schaeffer. Again, it's in the summary in the 2x social skills program. The thing that Ben Franklin figured out was that when we do a favor for someone, we are much more likely to continue to act in alignment with that behavior towards that person. So we stay consistent with our behavior. When we get people to do something good for us, they think there must be a reason why they did something good for us, and hence they will actually get around to doing more good things for us. So if you want to get someone to like you, get them to do a small favor for you crazy as it sounds, it actually works. Awesome. You know, there are simple stuff like that. Again, very paradoxical, you know, what we started off the discussion, the whole idea that all of these social skills are very, very, very paradoxical. What you think it looks like is not what the truth is. There is an opposite effect, the opposite thing you could do that would bring the effect that you want. So that's why I am fascinated by these social skills. That's why I put together a whole library of like 200 of the greatest social skills out there that your audience can find by using this coupon code jabber and they get 40% off. I think they have to go to javascriptjabber.com slash social for that. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. You know, you've mentioned a book summaries in this course. Do you want to just tell us a little bit about how it's organized and things? So people kind of get an idea if they're listening to this and going, Hey, this sounds pretty good, or this is something I could use or learn, right what will they get out of this course? Like what's in it and how was it organized and how did the book summaries work? 

MANI_VAYA: Yeah, so each of the summaries, it's like a book is broken down into probably, I'll find the five to 10 best ideas from the book and spend a total of maybe 15 minutes explaining those ideas. And that's all in video formats, in a mind map format. It's a very visual way to learn, where you can see all the ideas broken down and align, like broken down and placed visually so that you can see one idea after another, after another. And we have around 10 hours of video content and audio content if you wanted to go listen to it on the go and mind maps as well. You can click through those ideas, figure out which idea you like, which idea you don't like, which idea you should work on, which idea you don't work on. You have lifetime access to the course, 180 day money bank guarantee. So if you don't like them for any reason, just return it. I give such a long freaking guarantee because I want people to feel like they have all the time in the world to really apply these principles. Cause I know just one principle can literally change your life. One idea can change your life. And that's all like, that's really important to me. You go apply one principle and you'll see your life transform. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Awesome. Sounds good. All right, folks. Well, I'm just going to throw the link out one more time, just so that, you know, if you want it, you can go get it. It's javascriptjabber.com slash social. Anything else that we should talk about here, Manny, before we do picks?

MANI_VAYA: Whether people decide to improve their social skills or not improve their social skills, that's really up to them. But there are a lot of great books that I've listed on this, on this page. You should at least check out which are these books and which are these books that are, that you would want to read. And I've categorized them according to different categories. So if you just go to JavaScript, jabber.com slash social, and just check out the books that you may want to read, even if you pick up one of those books, I think your life will improve as a result of that.

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, I'll admit I'm a book junkie and I've no money for a long time. And half the time I go look at his courses and then I just go buy the books and read them. 

MANI_VAYA: The way you're using it Chuck is a great way to do it because most people will not read even a book a week or a book a month. So to read 30 books will probably take them years and years, sometimes a decade. Here I'm giving you all the summaries from these books in 10 hours. You can go consume them and then decide which book you want to actually read. Decide which book really appeals to you and go dig deeper into that. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Nice. All right, well, I'm assuming you're also on social media and stuff, and we like to get that information out there as well if people wanna reach out or follow what you're doing or things like that. 

MANI_VAYA: Sure, so I'm on YouTube as well. As you guys know, I used to be a former computer engineer, but I left that career to start 2,000 Books, which is my current business, where we summarize the world's greatest business in personal development books. I started that four years ago. We have a YouTube channel by the same name, 2,000 Books. We have around 40,000 subscribers there. And we have a podcast, really popular podcast as well, by the same name, 2000 Books. You can find it on iTunes and Android and the website 2000books.com, 2000books.com. Find a lot of stuff over there as well. So that's our online presence for you guys. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: All right, good deal. 

 

A couple of years ago, I put out a survey asking people what topics they wanted us to cover on devchat.tv. And I got two overwhelming responses. One was from the JavaScript community. They wanted a React show. And the other one was from the Ruby community and they wanted an Elixir show. So we started both. The React show though is React Roundup. And every week we bring in people from the React community and we have conversations with them about React, about the community, about open source, about what goes into React, how to build React apps and what's going on and changing in the React community. So if you're looking to keep current on the current React ecosystem and what's going on in React, you definitely need to be checking out React Roundup. You can find it at reactroundup.com.

 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Well, let's go ahead and do some picks. Steve, do you have some picks for us? 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Yeah, I've got one pick today. And it's actually a Twitter feed. Just to preface it a little bit, I have a pretty dry sense of humor, as Chuck, as I'm sure you've noticed. And one of the types of humor I get into a lot is just sort of basic slapstick stuff, you know, people colliding unknowingly. Just by example, if you look at the classic Robin Hood animated cartoon, there's one scene at the end where everybody's running around and a couple people collide and fall over and I'm on the floor laughing for five minutes. Don't ask me why. So anyway, there's this guy named Rex Chapman. He was a former college and NBA player played in the NBA for 13 years. And he's got this thing going on his Twitter feed that he calls blocker charge. It's a basketball term where, you know, if a offensive player, defensive player running together is a foul or a block on the defender or is it a charge on the offender? And the types of videos that he puts out there are two people, you know, something happening to somebody where it's, you know, they're running into something or something runs into them because they're doing something stupid and he'll put block or charge and the videos that sometimes themselves are really funny. But the best part is the responses that people give. Yes. As a block is, uh, his feet weren't set so on and so forth. But if you just Google Rex Chapman and block or charge, you'll find articles that explain how it started and how it got to be so famous. I just, it just about every day he's posting something and I'm on the floor laughing because it's just my weird twisted sense of humor. But that's my pick. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Oh, that reminds me of these freaking hilarious videos, Steve, it sounds like you'd really enjoy them. And I'll see if I can find one. In fact, I think I found one on YouTube. So I'll go ahead and link it over in the chat and that way you can have a good laugh afterward. But there are videos of people who they get like a really fine cable and they attach it to a bike and then they leave the bike leaning up against a fence or a tree or something. And it's tied to the tree. Right. And so, uh, these people get on and they start, you know, you see them give it a couple of good pumps and then it hits the end of that cable and then you see them just go flying. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Oh my God. I can see that. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Oh, that'd be too good. And you're sitting there and you're kind of going, that's really cruel. And then you're also sitting there going, yeah, but they freaking stole that bike, right? 

STEVE_EDWARDS: It totally makes sense.

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: And so you're kind of sitting there cringing on their behalf. And at the same time, part of you is going, they kind of asked for it. So anyway, I, I don't know, I can't completely condone it, but I can't completely condemn it either. They're really funny. And yeah, some of them, you know, you get a little bit of commentary before or after, you know, did you see that? And they, you know, they slow mow it as the guy like flips over. Freaking funny. So yeah, I put a link to one of those in the the chat but there are a whole bunch of them on YouTube. Yeah, there's a ton of good stuff on YouTube. I guess the other pick that I'm gonna throw out there is Bomb Bomb. I picked the marathon I ran on Sunday in the last JavaScript Java, so I'm not gonna pick that. But Bomb Bomb is a video message system. So essentially what you do is you hit the record button and you record a video for somebody. And then it just embeds it in your email, your Gmail and mails it to them. The only real issue I have with BombBomb at all is that I've moved away from Chrome and I'm trying to move off of Google stuff as much as I can, just because the more I read about Google and the way that they operate and some of the censorship and things like that, even if some of it is conspiracy theory, the fact that they can do it, and the more I think about it, the more I think they can do it. And so I don't see any reason why they wouldn't do it if they really wanted to. I'm trying to move away from their stuff. And so I had to move off of Chrome as part of that. And on Firefox, the bomb bomb plugin doesn't work. So anyway, that's the only run in, but yeah, I've been sending videos out to people that I meet at conferences. I've been sending videos out to people who are potential sponsors. They get like a two minute video for me. And I actually have a little whiteboard here that I write, hi, whatever your name is on it and you know, I wave it at them and it captures the first three seconds of the video and turns it into an animated GIF. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: And then just how much are you paying for it? 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I don't remember, but it's not that much, especially considering how much it's more than doubled my response rate for sponsorship. So it's paying for itself, but 

MANI_VAYA: I think I have a better tool than what you're telling me, given your Chrome issues. It's called Bonjoro and it's on your phone. So you literally can just hit record on your phone, press send, send the video to them in the email and it, uh, it ties in with your, uh, CRM, whatever CRM you're using, ConvertKit is what I use. So when my customers come in, I just send them a video saying, hey, welcome. And that really changes the overall game for us. So Manjaro is, I think, something you might want to try out. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I think Bombom has a phone app, so I might just do that. It's kind of nice to just use the webcam on my camera or on my computer though, and then just kind of sit back from it a little bit. I don't have to position my phone or anything, but it works and I'm pretty happy with it. So I looked at Bonjoro. There were like one or two features that bomb bomb had that I. 

MANI_VAYA: That's what I was trying to figure out. What was it about mom, mom that you liked? Cause I like Bonjoro unless you can convince me that bomb mom has something better than Bonjoro. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. I don't remember what it was, but, uh, I think it was either an integration with like HubSpot, which is what I'm using for my CRM or if it was something that I don't remember, but yeah, there, there was something there that made decide to go use BombBomb because you had mentioned Bonjoro to me before. 

MANI_VAYA: Yeah. Okay. All right. My pick. So my pick for podcasts that I absolutely love is how I built this by NPR. It's a startup podcast. Literally their interviews, some of the biggest names. I shouldn't call it startup podcasts because literally talking some of the biggest names in the world today in terms of guys who have built great businesses, Mark Cuban and Uber founders and the Airbnb founders like Brian Chesky and they literally go into the nuts and bolts of how they built all of these businesses. I'm the founder of Whole Foods, the founder of Patagonia, the founder of Lululemon, the founder of... Whichever founder they can find, the biggest billion-dollar founders, they go and interview them and they tell a great story. One of my favorite podcasts and one of my favorite books is I'm a book guy. I've read over 1500 of probably the greatest business and personal development books. I have one book that I read more than anything else. One of the greatest books ever written on that in the field of personal development. And that is As a Man Thinketh. And it was written in 1906. It's a classic and it's now available for free without any copyright laws because it was written so long ago. And you can download it for free from my website as well. Just go to 2000books.com slash think and you can download the PDF and read it for the rest of your life. One of the greatest books ever.

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Awesome. That's it. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Manny, have you ever heard of the, uh, along the lines of your NPR podcast? Have you ever heard of the indie hackers podcast? 

MANI_VAYA: No. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: So yeah, that's, um, I forget the guy's name. I've heard him before and I've listened to him and it's the same thing. It talks about people who have created startups and created businesses and, and everything that went into creating it and the whole process. 

MANI_VAYA: So do they bring those as guests? Like, do they bring those as interviews? 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Yes. They're all interviews with the original founders. Hindi hackers. Okay. Yeah, it's a really, really entertaining podcast. 

MANI_VAYA: And check it out. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, we'll have to list that in the picks too. All right, folks, well, we're gonna go ahead and wrap this up. Once again, that was javascriptjabber.com slash social, and we'll go ahead and wrap this up. And in the meantime, Max out. 

MANI_VAYA: Yeah, and the coupon code is Jabber. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Ah, coupon code is Jabber, Max out.

STEVE_EDWARDS: Adios! 

MANI_VAYA: See you guys!