You're working on planning and executing your professional and technical journeys, but what about your psychological journey? The reality is that without taking better care of yourself, you are potentially setting yourself up for failure, and potentially also putting your health and wellbeing at risk. We are joined by Wei-Ming Lam, a coach and Yoga Instructor who provides practical advice for constructing and tuning your psychological stack.

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AJ_O’NEAL: Well, hello, hello and welcome back our wonderful JavaScript Jabbered listeners. Today on our show we have, oh my gosh, I didn't ask you how to pronounce your name. 

WEI-MING_LAM: Oh yeah, that's a good question. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Wei Ming Lam. Sweet. And also on the show today, we have Dan Shapir. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Hey from Tel Aviv. 

AJ_O’NEAL: And Steve Edwards. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Yo, yo, yo, coming at you live from Portland, Oregon. That's my AJ impression. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Oh, and Steve stole my thunder. So I guess I won't produce any thunder today. Just a couple of whispers in the wind. 

 

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AJ_O’NEAL: All right. With that out of the way, let's go ahead and dive into it. Our topic here is fine tuning your psychological stack. So DevOps for the brain. Why don't you go ahead and tell us, and sorry if I butcher this, because it's the first time I'm saying it, Weiming. 

WEI-MING_LAM: Yep. You nailed it. Okay. And I was thinking, you know, you may not be able to bring the thunder, but you can bring the lightning. 

AJ_O’NEAL: But I, ding. Oh, yeah, that was, that was a spot for you, Steve. That was a spot for you. He's all in on the puns and dad jokes and that sort of thing. 

WEI-MING_LAM: Oh, heck yeah. 

AJ_O’NEAL: So anyway, go ahead and give us an introduction to this. We're JavaScript developers. Why do we need to DevOps our psych stack?

WEI-MING_LAM: Yeah. So the taking a developer approach, essentially, it seems to me is, is always about iterating and fine tuning and figuring out the ways that different pieces of a very complex puzzle fit together and not only fit together, but how do we have them fit together in an optimal way? And that's kind of where you can take the same engineering mindset of problem solving and going from both a huge meta view and all the way down into a very narrow micro view and apply it to how your brain is operating. Because in a similar way to a software stack, I like to think about the brain as different layers of potentially softwares like our old kind of evolutionary brain software related to emotion and then tying it into our more evolved prefrontal cortex, higher kind of functioning brain. How do those two interrelate? And not only interrelate there, but then interrelate with those around us, our jobs, our relationships, and even our hobbies and our health. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I think this is a super important topic for people who are operating in our field. Not necessarily because of the stuff that we do, but more so because of the environment that we often work in that involve a lot of, let's call it uncertainties. You know, I like to joke that very often when I start, when I start the work day, I'm not a hundred percent sure what I'll work on. But at the end of the day, it's usually find out that everything that I thought I'll be working on is actually the stuff that I didn't work on. So, and, and of course there are uncertainties associated with not just the things that we do and how we solve various problems and whether we are able to solve them or not, but also about working with our colleagues and advancing our careers, especially at a time like this. So I definitely think that having a proper mindset outlook and maybe even a methodology is really important. So if that's something that you can, you know, guide us through, I think that would be really helpful for our listeners. 

WEI-MING_LAM: Yeah, absolutely, Dan. What I love that you were saying there is actually that component of uncertainty. And if we really look at life, the only thing that's really certain is that we have the opportunity to live and then we'll die. Those are the things that are certain. And 

DAN_SHAPPIR: taxes. 

WEI-MING_LAM: Taxes, of course, if you're living in society. I appreciate that. Yeah. And with all that uncertainty, what we can figure out, though, is the either perhaps principles or creating a North Star essentially for each of us. And it's going to be unique to the individual. And that's kind of where coaching kind of plays is the discovery, rather the self discovery of what's truly important to Dan, to AJ, to Steve, to you listener. And once you identify what's truly important, not just my next raise or this project, or my relationship with my wife or partner or pet. But what's really important at the highest, highest level that then can inform every single micro decision that you have to make. If you can identify and be really clear on that big picture, ah, that's who I want to be. That's what I want my life to be about. Then all of those little micro decisions and the uncertainty of COVID the uncertainty of stepping into a day at your engineering job, those uncertainties they become a little bit less daunting because at the end of the day and at the very beginning of the day, both of those times, you've got your why. You've got your guiding principles that make those decisions about what to work on or what to eat or where to go, much less much less CPU intensive if we wanted to tie it back to the processing analogy in the brain. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I know that a lot of times when people try to, let's say, start their own startup or something like that or create their own company or whatever, they're told that they need to come up with a vision statement, with a mission statement. Is that the sort of thing that you're talking about? 

WEI-MING_LAM: Yeah. In a way, yes. I would say like...Those with a business though, it's still kind of tied back to, you know, making money at the end of the day or creating a product at the end of the day. What this is, what I'd like to kind of talk about more is your reason for just being. And I can even share with you my own. The one that I've kind of that I've found is it's really informed by my own name. My grandfather and my parents named me Wei Ming. And a lot of times, well, not a lot of times, but every once in a while, somebody gets a little curious or like, hmm, what does Wei Ming stand for? You know, it's gotta mean something. And I- 

AJ_O’NEAL: Wait, you presented the opportunity. So as the host, what does Wei Ming stand for? 

WEI-MING_LAM: Great question, AJ. So Wei Ming stands for great light way me, way me meaning great and being being light. And it's kind of a bold namesake to live up to. And even sometimes I get a little bit of a catch in my throat saying that because it's such a big thing for me to think about living up to. And as I started to own my own identity as a person, I've essentially come up with the mission statement to increase the net amount of light in the world and to create more balance, both in myself and in the world. And the reason why it starts with me is that if I can increase the amount of light and balance in myself, then when I'm interacting with other people through my work or just through an interaction at the grocery store, then I can spread that same feeling to every single interaction that I have. So that's the kind of flavor if you will, of what we, of what's finding a personal why is versus potentially one of a more business focused way. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Before we move on, because this was the start of this particular segment of the conversation, I have to ask, what does AJ stand for? 

AJ_O’NEAL: So it stands for Alvin Jr. Alvin means noble friend and Jr. means son of my father with the same name or something like that, I think. So now I finally know But I getting back to the main topic though to an extent. It seems a little bit grandiose I mean this concept of like sort of stopping whatever you're doing and sitting down with yourself to try to figure out, you know, what's your mission in life? And suppose that I can't come up with a really good answer for that. Am I like stuck? What am I supposed to do now? Do I have to have this like ultimate goal that I have to work towards. Isn't it just enough for me, I don't know, to care for my family and then make a nice living and, I don't know, live my life? 

AJ_O’NEAL: Well, that's a North Star. I mean, the purpose of the North Star, and, you know, Wei Ming, you can give further detail on this, but the purpose of the North Star is to define what it is that's important to you and pursue it. And it doesn't have to be grandiose. It can be simple things like, I want to live in peace without conflict with my fellow man.

WEI-MING_LAM: Bingo, AJ. I think you really hit it on the head there. It doesn't have to be necessarily, yeah, what he said, this broad strokes kind of vision for the future. If you're, when you're in touch with what's important to you, then that's the resonance that we're kind of looking for. It doesn't have to be something bigger. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Yeah, and the world's a small place. There's only room for so many big people, you know. Not everybody can have their North Star to be put a dent in the universe. And Steve Jobs wasn't necessarily the type of person you want to emulate anyway. 

WEI-MING_LAM: Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's finding really, I think it's just finding what's, what kind of lights you up, right? Like, are you, are you living day to day and feeling like a sense of fulfillment, a sense of feeling, feeling like your needs are being met, not just from a, not just from a material standpoint, like I have a roof over my head or I have enough water to drink but that your emotional needs are being met. And if you, that you feel like you're walking through life and feeling at, at the end of the day that, that you can rest knowing, ah, you know, I really did what I, what I wanted to do today. 

AJ_O’NEAL: So that's a bunch of touchy feely. 

WEI-MING_LAM: Absolutely. Yeah. 

AJ_O’NEAL: But we're JavaScript developers. How do we engineer this busy? 

WEI-MING_LAM: Yeah, absolutely. The, what I would do is typically with a client would be to look at, kind of go through potentially like a guided visualization of looking at, um, looking at potentially the end of life. I know that memento mori has been gaining popularity in recent times. Memento mori, for those that may not be familiar with that term, is simply a reminder of death and looking at your life, not from a morbid standpoint that, you know, we're all going to die. Like that, that's a little bit dark, but embracing the truth that at the end of life, we will have one and we will have had our life. I like to encourage people to maybe go into that future state of where you're sitting maybe on a hill someplace in a bucolic area and there are people coming up to you and talking to you, expressing, hey, thank you for X. Being a what kind of person in my life or thank you for the impact that you had through your work doing fill in the blank. And going through an exercise like that, just journaling free form, no notifications, maybe turn off notifications for a half hour and maybe do pen to paper so that we don't have all these tabs and music and other options kind of pulling at our attention. But yeah, maybe sitting down for half an hour and just kind of thinking about what is the impact that I wanted to have on the world or what are the kinds of relationships that I wanted to cultivate? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: The thing that slightly concerns me about this type of an exercise is, is the fact that, you know, you may not necessarily be able to figure it out. Certainly not necessarily within half an hour. And I'm, I'm kind of concerned about the situation where you end up feeling that, you know, you're lacking something that maybe because you're unable to formulate or specify your North Star right now, that something is wrong in your life and that you have to, I don't know, stop whatever you're doing and find what this North Star is, or alternatively you might get slightly depressed because you're unable to figure it out. So there is this concern on my part that somebody who's, you know, might have an unspecified goal, but they're living with it. When they try to specify it, might accidentally lose it. 

AJ_O’NEAL: I don't think that meets the definition of a goal. I'd actually say, if you don't know what your North Star is, maybe it's worth taking a step back and figuring what that is, because it's better to move forward slowly in the right direction than to move forward quickly in the wrong direction. And I mean, that said both ways too, but, you know. Like if you don't know what's important to you, why wouldn't you want to figure out what's important to you? And if that makes you depressed and think maybe your life is not in order, well, maybe you're depressed and maybe your life is not in order. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, but that's not what I was aiming at. Look, I'll put it this way. If you're in a situation where you're unhappy to begin with or feel unfulfilled to begin with, then certainly you need to reevaluate the situation. But I'm concerned with a different type of a scenario where you're actually, okay, you might not have articulated your goal, but you more or less know what it is. But then somebody, you know, you get into this position where you feel that you're expected to clearly define what your goal is. And since you're finding it difficult, you start to convince yourself that maybe you're actually lacking one and that can kind of throw your life into disarray. 

WEI-MING_LAM: Yeah. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Well, if you're that kind of listener, just turn off the show right now. No pressure. You do not have to listen to the rest of the show. 

WEI-MING_LAM: Well, I would also encourage those that may, you know, may feel like they might go down that road that Dan is talking about. Because I think that that's, that's very possible. Because I can share some about myself and my own past way back when I believe it's it's like 12 years ago now personally, I was dealing with a lot of mental health issues personally and at the time it was a very dark period for me And I didn't think that I was going to live past the age of 25 and I just turned 32 yesterday. So i've been seven years. I've celebrated seven years past 25 and i'm pretty excited about that And if mental health is kind of a concern definitely, you know if it's if it's a primary concern, seek professional help. Absolutely. If it's something that could pop up, if you wanted to go into an exercise like this, remember there's also always a softness. If you think about a yin and a yang symbol, the yang side is the energy of action and doing and accomplishing. The yin side is the softening, the nurturing, the Okay, the ah so kind of energy Um, and it may be even a good question I really appreciate that you bring this up Dan is to take before even going into an exercise like that Would be thinking hey what part of life am I in right now? Is it a part of life where I'm pretty okay and I need to just kind of soften and go with or is it a time when I can really? Turn on that opposite energy and being aware of that is even an important thing to do, is to know, like, hey, maybe today I can put out more at work, or today I need to maybe like dial the intensity down a bit. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I also feel that when you go into an exercise like that, it's probably something that you want to do with somebody who's qualified to assist you with it, I think. I mean, sure, you can sit just in front of a blank page and try to write down your goals. And I guess that some people are able to do that, but I do think that if you're in a point in your life, when you think that you really need to find a direction, I think it's probably a good idea to, to get assistance for that. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Then you have to find unbiased assistance. Like there's. I, so I've, I've been through counseling before, uh, for various issues in my life that were difficult for me to deal with. And there are the types of people that tell you, and also, you know, I have friends and whatnot, but you know, they're the types of people that tell you, well, everything that's wrong in your life is the result of someone else doing something wrong to you or like bad circumstances or bad luck. And then there's other people that are, tell you things like, you know, everything that you're doing in life that's wrong or everything that's wrong in your life is a result of like, actions that you're taking consciously or unconsciously and you're empowered to, you know, change that. So I personally believe that the people that tell you that you're in control of your destiny are the ones that are going to lead you to greater success. But just sitting down with someone who's a trained yogi or whatever, that's probably I don't mean that in an offensive way if that I don't know what that means actually. But anyway, like doesn't mean that they're going to have the right solution for you or even that their motives are going to be properly alive.

DAN_SHAPPIR: Oh yeah, for sure. That's definitely going to be a potential problem. I mean, you know, somebody who can assist you, you know, could definitely also cause you harm. It's the same with the sports coach. If you put your trust in a coach for sports and they don't know what they're doing and they're giving you bad exercises, they could cause much more harm than good. And it's the same in this case. And I don't have any ideas tips or how to pick the right type of a coach for you. I just think that doing it with somebody who has experience not in telling you where you need to go, but in helping guide you along your way could be really beneficial. And I know that you're a coach, Wei Ming, so what do you think about that? 

AJ_O’NEAL: Yeah. 

WEI-MING_LAM: Definitely the thing about finding the right coach is important. And a lot of times coaches will offer, you know, just time to chat and get to know each other and really listen to where you want to go, what you want to create. And that, yeah, what you were saying is exactly right. The unbiased opinion is something that's kind of can be a little bit rare. A lot of times if we're talking to our parents, you know, we, our parents love us to death and hopefully we love our parents to death as well. But at the same time, parents generally are, could be a little bit, we've listened to them a lot through our lives. And maybe we need a more objective viewpoint. Same thing with our friends. They may be our biggest cheerleaders, but they may not be the most unbiased because they might kind of like, quote unquote, already know what you should be, should, or shouldn't be doing if they've been friends with you long enough. But that's where a coach would come in is to ask lots of really good questions. That's essentially the, the modus operandi, uh, so to speak of a coach is to really continue to ask and understand exactly what's going on and then provide that mirror. Let's one of, one of the ways that I like to think about being a coach is I try to eliminate myself as much as possible from the conversation in a way such that I can reflect my coachee or my client in a very unbiased and clear way. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: So suppose I came to you as a coach and told you something like, I'm unhappy with my current situation, with the way that my career is progressing. How, you know, I need assistance. I need help to find my way. How would you go about it? 

WEI-MING_LAM: Yeah, the thing is that with a coach would be, like I mentioned, really asking questions to get underneath what's going on. If you think about the, AJ was mentioning earlier therapy and I really appreciate you being so vulnerable and sharing about your journey with therapy because it's one of those things that is widely being more and more destigmatized. So appreciate you AJ. But if you think about a therapist might come in, if you were talking about a bicycle, right? And someone were to be wanting to learn how to ride a bicycle and you would ask a therapist for help with the bicycle, learning how to ride. A therapist might say, well, what does the color remind you of? Did you have trouble riding a bicycle as a child? A consultant might just take the bike away from you and then ride around the block, write a report and then give it to you about how to ride the bike. But a coach would pop you on the bicycle and kind of walk with you along the way as you are uncovering and unpacking the topic at hand until the point where you can just kind of go on your own. So that would be where we would start, is really just lots of questions, really understanding, not necessarily like the history and the details around what's going on, but what's really important to you, Dan, about coming and finding a coach to begin with. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: So I have a question. I've been sitting back and listening. It's usually what you have to do when AJ's on the line. But I'm curious, one thing that hasn't been mentioned. And it's always curious to me when it's not as the role of religion within this paradigm, you know, the coaching and the mindfulness and so on. So as a Christian myself, I know AJ is a member of the LDS church. So he and I, this is obviously going to be our North Star. This is going to be our important thing. And if we find a coach, we're going to want to find somebody that has a similar direction, shall we say. I know myself similar to AJ, I've been in counseling at various points over my life, whether, you know, with my wife, just to improve our marriage or to address things in our marriage and myself, you know, when I was still single, not because I was fighting depression or, you know, I was going to commit suicide or anything very drastic, just because, you know, there were things that I couldn't figure out myself and I wanted somebody's help to figure that out. And so I'd go to a trained counselor. And I know we're going to talk about meditation here in a little bit down the road. I'm just curious to see in your experience and in your practice, how you see religion integrating into the topic. 

WEI-MING_LAM: Yeah. The religion I feel like pairs really well. And personally my, you know, I follow the yoga path towards spirituality myself. And, you know, welcoming religion into the coaching is I think one of the most important things, if it's something, if it's a practice that is existing in in the client because as Steve and AJ, you can probably chime in. Those are inextricable things. Our spirituality and our religion defines a lot of our actions, how we wake up in the morning, how we, how we do simple things of even just saying hello to a stranger. And so I find that for those, for those people that I work with that do have a spiritual practice, uh, to, to integrate it to welcome it into the work. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: So if you get somebody, if you get a client that, you know, you mentioned you're the yogic, is that the correct way to say that? 

WEI-MING_LAM: Sure, yeah, you can say it that way, yeah. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: And you get somebody say that's, you know, evangelical Christian, you get somebody that's maybe Hindu or a Buddhist or a Muslim. Is that, how are you able to work with that if you're not as intimately involved in the religion of the person? I know you mentioned that you're just trying to reflect them and not so much guide them. Is that an accurate way to put it? 

WEI-MING_LAM: It's kind of well, it's guiding and Reflecting at the same time, right? definitely stepping along the path with them, but still trying to reflect back the things that I'm hearing in an accurate and unbiased way and for me, it's really getting curious again kind of going back to questions. If someone from a different faith were to work with me, likely that would come up in our intake call, and then I might ask questions about their faith and see what they're willing to share with me, and I would go and even do my own due diligence of researching what I can find about the faith. Because at least for me, I really believe, I think it's kind of like a Buddhist thought, that there's many paths to heaven. That's kind of my perspective. And I've, there was a time in my past, I grew up in, I went to a non-denominational Christian school actually. And through that experience, I was familiar with the Bible and familiar with concepts around Christian God. But it wasn't something that was a faith that was, I was brought up in, in my own household. And so for that reason, I never really was, you know, truly integrated into that religion. But over time in my own reading and searching through spirituality in my 20s and being exposed to Buddhist philosophy and yoga, I see the goodness in essentially all faiths. 

AJ_O’NEAL: And some people might say that's a cop-out, but I personally think that that is an excellent way to be. I think that there is some, I believe that there's divinity and I believe that that divinity touches all humans not all humans perceive it the same way and that there's truth to be found in following that light within. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: And which exactly brings, which brings myself to me, I'm religiously unreligious or religiously non, how would I say it, non-spiritual. How would you work with somebody like me then? 

WEI-MING_LAM: Welcoming that perspective as well, you know, like it doesn't, I'm not didactic at all in my approach. I'm really just wanting to hear what's important to the person in front of me. And for AJ, that may be honoring, you know, honoring his God. And for Dan, that might be figuring out a operating system to travel through life that, you know, issues the concept of a higher power. 

AJ_O’NEAL: So I feel really weird talking about this on a JavaScript podcast. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Why? JavaScript is a religion, isn't it? I mean, you know, we've got the...the JavaScript, the TypeScript believers, you know, for developers programming languages and frameworks are religion. Are they not? 

AJ_O’NEAL: Well, I think there is some aspect to, I mean, like being serious, not just being flippant, but I think there is some aspect to people have an innate desire to search for truth and there are some attractive paradigms in programming because you essentially establish that logic is truth and whatever can be logically derived is therefore true and all things that are true are good. Therefore, if I logically derive things, I'm a good person. And so I think that in some cases, the engineering can take the place of a religion because it has this basis and a system of truth and it's, uh, you know, and it's an attractive system of truth. But what I meant was like. What I was thinking before is we would start this as we talk about like more, I mean, literally more engineering your psychology, like here's things that you do, if you want this outcome, you take these inputs, if you want to do this, you do that. Like here's five things that if you put these in order, you'll structure yourself. And we're, we're having a much more touchy feely conversation from my perspective. And so it's like, it's so far off the path of what I was expecting. But with that said, because we're on the topic, that one thing I wanted to to share about one of my experiences was. So I was working with therapists and I'm a religious person. He was a religious person. We're both of the same religion. And I was really struggling with, so basically in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, marriage is the penultimate goal. That's the North Star is to have a loving marriage and a loving family. Like that's, like it's love God so that in loving God, you learn how to love your family is kind of the thing. Like the family is the thing. And things were not going well in my marriage. And it was really distressing to me because it was like, I wanna quit this. And I mean, like even forming those words took, you know, probably like two or three sessions to say that out loud. Like, I want to quit this. That's like hard to admit to myself. And like he being a religious person and having many of the same beliefs as me, it was very odd to me that he basically said, well, like, what if you do, you know, like, what if you, what if you quit? Like, do you think God wants you to be miserable? Do you think that just because you made a decision when you were 20 X years old, that God wants you to be miserable for the rest of your life because whatever. And it was really strange to have someone of my, you know, presenting an unbiased opinion. He wasn't coming at it from like a, well, you and I both know that marriage is you know, and family is the most important thing in life. So you got to work through it no matter what, but having that unbiased opinion of like, okay, well, you know, maybe that's the general rule, but maybe, and maybe you are the exception. Maybe, maybe like this is really not your thing or whatever. But that right there being that unbiased person helped me so much because a lot of what I needed to do to get better was to say the things that were unspeakable to say, I hate my marriage. I want to quit this. I don't want to be in this anymore. I don't really love this person, you know, to say all these terrible things and get them out so that then they were open for inspection, because as long as that stuff is bundled inside, it's not open for interpretation. It's not open for looking at. And if you can't look at, I don't love this person, then how can you possibly fix it? Because you have to, you have to say, well, this is a hypothesis. My hypothesis is I don't love this person. And then you have to be able to examine that hypothesis in order to determine what to do about it. But if you can't get to the point of being able to put out, you know, and I say hypothesis because that's maybe a friendlier term because it's what you say is not necessarily true. When you act on a feeling in a moment, it's not necessarily truth. It's just it's what you're feeling and it's true that you're feeling it. But it may not be the truth. But anyway, like having that therapist to to help in an unbiased way to pull out these things and to help me examine my own beliefs. Like, do I believe that God wants that everybody must do this? And if anyone doesn't do this, then their life is worthless in some way. And that was, in a way, it was a very logical approach. And he knew I was a programmer and he did, you know, tell me that he tried to work with me from where I came from as a programmer, knowing that, you know, I needed to be able to logic my way around things, not just to motion my way around things. But anyway, I hope that even though so far off the path I thought we're going to go. And I hope that that's helpful to someone and maybe leads our conversation in a continuing good direction as well. 

WEI-MING_LAM: Yeah, that's a profound share, AJ. Thanks for sharing, man. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I would like to say something about related to that. I think without getting into the belief and religions, because like I said, I'm not religious. So, you know, I don't have any experiences to share about this, but I would say this. I would say that if somebody is content, with their current situation, then they're probably not looking to make changes such as changing the definitions of their goals or maybe even trying to specify their goals. I mean, if things are going well, well, then let's just continue. I do think that a lot of our listeners, either at present or in the past, have felt situations where have been in situations where they were not content. I know that a lot of people, for example, in front development are people that went through boot camps. People who go through boot camps are often people who were in a situation that they were not happy with in terms of their career and consequently where their life was going and felt like making a dressing change. And going to boot camp and starting a whole new profession often, let's say, relatively late in life or after they've already have a different profession is a pretty scary and significant undertaking. And I think it directly goes to this feeling of whether or not I'm content in my current situation and whether or not I feel like it's time for a change and what kind of risks am I willing to take on myself in order to affect this change. And another, and it might be also people on the other side of this equation, you know, people who've been doing software development for a while and are thinking about their career going forward. You know, do I want to just continue writing code, be a programmer, is that enough for me? Maybe I want to advance my career in some way, but then which way do I want to become a manager? Do I want to become a software architect or something else? You know, what can I do with my career? Do I just keep on doing the same thing for the next, I don't know, 30, 40 years? So yeah, and I think it's kind of related to what you were talking about, AJ. So like we made various decisions at various points in our lives. If we are not content with them, how much longer do we need to abide with them? 

AJ_O’NEAL: So in the context of the, what you were just saying, are you saying like, so somebody goes through a bootcamp, they land a software job, they're not satisfied. And then they, you know, like they're trying to figure out, do I continue on say this front end pathway or do I switch to a backend pathway or do I just say, you know what programming is not for me? It's great money, but it's not what brings me joy. And a peaceful life. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yes. And even before that, I mean, like I said before, I mean, we spoke with several people who were in boot camps. And you know, in all cases, it seemed to me like a huge step to take, because you usually already have a certain profession, your life is organized in a certain way, and then you kind of make a break. And it's you have to often quit your current job. It's very difficult to actually go through a boot camp while continue working. It's a significant expenditure in terms of, you know, money and effort, resources and time. And it's often just a leap of faith because you don't know exactly what will happen when you come out on the other side. So so, yeah. And I think that's a prime example of people who are making significant changes in their lives and need to be asking themselves, you know, where they want to go. And then, like you just said, it might be that coming out on the other end, you might feel a little bit lost or maybe not feel as content as you expected to feel after all this effort. So what do you do with that? 

WEI-MING_LAM: First off, I want to say super kudos to all those engineers that have done that jump. I know handful myself as friends from my old job that really took the leap to, and literally a huge leap of regearing their entire life. That grit is something that I think could those people, if they're having that question at some point in the future or right after, is coming back to that grittiness and either but also not just simply pushing through for pushing through sake, because if we're just only relying on that discipline and the grit, you may just continue to do something that is, like Dan was saying, may not be feeling as resonant for the future. Recently, I was listening to a podcast with the recently departed Ram Dass, who's a spiritual leader. Not to bring us back into the quagmire of religion, but just very briefly. But he made a reference to a quotation attributed to Gandhi that Gandhi said, my commitment is to truth, not to consistency. And when I thought about that, I took it down into my little quotes note because it kind of rang, had a little bit of utility to me to think about what's really true, right? Just like AJ was talking about earlier what was true, he may have been feeling those things, right? But the ultimate truth that was potentially something bigger, right, was that commitment to a partnership and was commitment. And that might be the question to ask is how, what is really true? Like not just, I'm feeling frustrated, but what's true about where I wanna go? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: You, I think that in the document that you shared with us, there was prior to this show, to this episode recording, there was a section about the importance of grit on the one hand, but also the importance of acceptance and reflection and cutting yourself some slack. I think it kind of relates to what you were saying right now. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? 

WEI-MING_LAM: Yeah, absolutely. It's something that I actually work with kind of constantly because there's a, without going too far into yogic medicine, there's a, there's a element, natural element in nature is kind of natural elements in nature is kind of how we would kind of identify. It would be like the Myers-Briggs test of yoga. But if you were to go through that, there is an intensity to me. There's a lot of the fire element. And so that fire element and the intensity oftentimes for me leads me to learn lots of things or learn lots of things kind of at a surface level, which is something I enjoy. And then I learn a few things at a very, very deep level in a very investigative way. Now what that ends up on the shadow side of that intensity is kind of the term of imposter syndrome or you know, not being enough is kind of comes up for me, right, is no matter what I learn and no matter what I do, I'm not enough. And that's something that's one of my own things that I'm working with is, is knowing when to turn it down, and to rest and recover, versus pushing and pushing and pushing. And so, for me, the way that I like to think about the the paradox between grit, right, putting your nose to the grindstone and just pushing through, and then having that self-compassion is just thinking about the simple analogy of a cup, right? If you have a cup of water, and then maybe that cup of water is yourself, if you're constantly pouring water out of the cup, and you're not pausing to refill, right? Whatever the needs are to keep yourself healthy and well, whether that's more sleep, or whether that's leaning on a friend to talk about the stress in your life, leaning on your family. If you're not pausing to make sure that there's still water in the cup, then eventually you just burn out. And so that's the thing, that's where that bullet point was coming from, was in our Western society, we're so geared towards building and achieving, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that...And we oftentimes we wear a kind of like a badge of honor of like, oh, this is how little sleep I had last night, or this is what I, this is what I'm building or this is what I did. But to remember that there's a flip side to all of that expenditure, that if we only put out and we don't put back in, then how sustainable are we going to be over the longterm? 

 

I remember working my tail off to become a senior developer. I read every book I could get my hands on. I went to any conference I could and watch the videos about the things that I thought I needed to learn. And eventually, I got that senior developer job. And then I realized that the rest of my career looked just like where I was now. I mean, where was the rush I got from learning? What was I supposed to do to keep growing? And then I found it. I got the chance to mentor some developers. I started a podcast and helped many more developers. I did screencasts and helped even more developers. I kind of became a dev hero. And now I want to help you become one too. And if you're looking forward to something more than doing the same thing at a different job three years from now, then join the Dev Heroes Accelerator. I'll walk you through the process of building and growing a following and finding people that you can uniquely help as you build the next stage of your career. You can learn more at devheroesaccelerator.com. 

 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Kind of related to that this year because of the whole COVID situation. I've not actually taken any vacation because it felt kind of kind of, I don't know, stupid to take a vacation if I'm just going to stay at home anyway, where I am all the time anywhere. But I definitely feel now after, you know, my last vacation was in November of 2019, I definitely feel tight. I feel the ground and again, I'm not sure exactly what I want to do about it. Because like I said before, taking a vacation just to be at home where I am all the time anyway, feels kind of pointless. So so yeah, I can definitely relate to this situation of the day in day out kind of grind that can wear you down if you're not too careful. 

WEI-MING_LAM: Dan, your step number one, we got to get you on vacation, buddy.

STEVE_EDWARDS: Seriously. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to preempt one of my picks. So one of my picks was going to be that I received my first vaccine shot here in Israel. They started vaccinating big time. And until I get the second shot and a few weeks after that, I'm not going anywhere. I'm more scared than I am more down.

WEI-MING_LAM: Oh, yeah, well, you don't need to go anywhere, but just the vacation from the work, right? That's what that's what sounds like it needs to be there's a there's a it sounds like there's a thirst there. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Oh, yeah for sure It's just that usually i'm not one of those people who can just you know, let's say sit on a beach and and do nothing. Uh, our vacations are usually, you know touring places Seeing new stuff nature culture, whatever so again, just loafing around at home, that doesn't really feel like a vacation that I wanna go on. But again, I'm going too far down that particular rabbit hole. If I go back to our discussion, looking at the document again that you shared with us, I do see that you have some suggestions about ways for us to kind of hack ourselves. So can you maybe elaborate about that? 

WEI-MING_LAM: Totally, yeah. And...I still want to encourage you, Dan, one thing is to potentially think creatively. I'm going to just do a little bit of encouragement here. Maybe there's a way for you to adapt to the world situation, to still take some time off in a way that does refill you. Because when you were talking about not taking vacation since November 2019, my heart sank for you, buddy. But yeah, if we're staying in the work mode, there's really simple things that we can do to kind of stay fresh. One of the things that I heard recently is to look away from our computer monitor from time to time. And what that does is it helps to reset that prefrontal cortex, that most evolved problem-solving part of our brain, just to do it. I'm doing it right now because I've been staring at the screen even though we're not we don't have our videos on I'm just taking a glance to look outside the window and I'd encourage all the hosts on the show to just take a moment To look away from the screen reset your eyes and maybe take one nice conscious breath deeply in and deeply out and just see what that simple kind of like a reset can do. One of the things that I do constantly through the day is just a conscious breath. That's not necessarily tied to any religion or yoga practice or anything, but just taking a moment to just, Hey, Hey, ah, I can breathe. Then I find that it really brings a lot of, a lot of more peace into into my day to day life. One of the other things that I had on there that if folks aren't familiar with the pomodoro technique. I found the pomodoro technique a couple of years ago. For those that aren't familiar, it's basically interval. It's almost as if you were doing an interval workout for your work. And it's something that I use on the regular. When I'm spending potentially several hours at my computer or on a project is to every 25 minutes, this is the protocol, every 25 minutes to take a short five minute break. But during those 25 minutes where you're working, you turn off all notifications. You do as much as you can to single task so that you're really like going, going, going. And then for your short breaks, you kind of like take care of whatever needs to be done. Go have a cup of tea, text your friend, check your email, all those kind of like extraneous, um, distractive tasks. So that way you're kind of maximizing your throughput on the thing that you, you need to work on, but you're making sure that you're scheduling in the time to reset and to recharge, and they're small. And that way, I found that over several hours that I'm able to concentrate longer and have a better output if I'm doing that. Now the counter argument, I think, is, but what about my flow state? I feel like that could be a really potent thing. If I'm getting into my work and I want to just stay and stay and stay and stay and stay, I would encourage you just to look at the end of the day. How worn out do you feel if extra fatigue happens when you're not taking the time to kind of recharge? There's also some interesting research that's been done about movement and its impact on the brain. It doesn't even have to be super complex like, okay, I'm not saying we all have to go out and start running every day or working out every single day. But just small little movements where we're standing up from our desk and kind of shifting our weight from side to side, or just walk, maybe just going even for a short little walk in the middle of the day. Those small little things can actually help boost what's called brain-derived neurotropic factor. It's basically a chemical in the brain that helps us learn and have focus. So all those little things can really help prolong our ability to be the engineer or the boss or whatever the insert the role is in over the course of a day. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I really like the analogy of context switching to the way that we have to deal with interruptions in our day to day. It might be an analogy that's actually lost on many JavaScript developers because JavaScript is not a multi-threaded programming language. So maybe a lot of JavaScript developers don't actually know what the threaded context switching means and how much it actually costs in terms of, of, uh, computations. It's so, so maybe this analogy is less applicable to this particular podcast, but, but the concept of the, the concept is that for people and for computers, for software, switching between unrelated tasks and then be, and then switching back is very expensive, just the cost of the switch itself is really expensive. So unless there's a very significant need, then it's definitely best avoided. And I think that the suggestions you gave were very pertinent. And with regard to the concept of flow or being in the zone, I mean, sure, I mean, there are certain situations where we might be working under the gun. So we're kind of forced to kind of put ourselves in the zone because we have to finish something significant on a tight schedule. But if it's just that you're in the flow or in the zone because it's coming from within and not being forced on you from external reasons, I don't think it usually lasts more than a couple of hours. I don't think people are normally in the zone just in and of themselves for 10 hours straight. It might happen. 

AJ_O’NEAL: The theoretical, oh sorry, the theoretical maximum is four hours. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: So yeah, so definitely. So if you're in the zone, then you know, cut yourself the slack and keep on working while you're in the zone. But then be aware that after three or four hours, you're probably not in the zone anymore. It's probably time to take a short walk or something. 

WEI-MING_LAM: Yeah. And even if you wanted to stay in the zone. I was thinking in my head as I was saying it earlier, I realized I was saying, okay, if you're taking a five-minute break, you have to be doing those extraneous tasks. You could even just make sure that you could continue the thought process, but just maybe step away from the computer or really take a deliberate look away from the monitor for a few minutes and then still be processing and thinking or problem-solving, but just not be zoned in completely hunched over at your computer and just kind of like, you know, sprinting with your fingers. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Just a quick comment. A lot of us are working from home now because of, again, of the current situation that have less experience with that. Prior to COVID, I was working from the office. And in the office, I was used to getting up and walking around and talking to people, you know, at the water cooler or just walking into their office and then, you know, seeing that they're not super busy, maybe talking with them about what they're doing, stuff like that. And it's stuff that when you're working from home, you know, doesn't necessarily exist, or it's more difficult, it needs to be more planned for something like that to happen. So it's something to watch out for. I mean, how you can create this sort of a rhythm that you give yourself breaks when you're working alone from your home. Anyway. That's a comment I wanted to make. 

WEI-MING_LAM: Yeah. Back in the earlier times of COVID, before I had left Tuft & Needle, I had a similar struggle for the first couple of weeks. I had never really worked from home. It wasn't something that my job

was particularly conducive to. I spent most of my time at the office. And it's, yeah, it's being really mindful of, hey, what are your energetic needs, basically, to continue your output? And I would also encourage those who are listening that if they are at a company that is open to communication and feedback is to figure out how to make some of those water cooler moments still happen virtually. Because we can oftentimes get sucked into the idea that meetings are meant for productivity and we jump into the meeting and then we're just going to town on work. But what if you were desiring to have some more of that informal chat, to have a chat with your manager and say, hey, like...Can we build in a few minutes at the beginning of the meeting? You can also think, as we transition to 100% digital, we used to have this time where we would come in and kind of shoot the breeze before we started diving into the real work if we were in person. But there's an opportunity there still when we're going into the digital world to still have that kind of a connection and create the informal bonds and nurture those, because those are really crucial to work as well. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: So I think we're getting about to an hour AJ, so probably need to wrap up soon. But before we do, I wanted to ask a question and it has to do with fear. In all of this coaching and meditating and stuff that you do, how much does the element of fear play into what you're working with or what people are dealing with? Speaking from personal experience and watching over the past year, I can see more and more how a lot of our actions and reactions are based on what we're afraid of. And in some cases, it's almost delusional. And so I'm just curious to see how much you see that issue in, in your practice. 

WEI-MING_LAM: Yeah. Without kind of like breaking confidentiality, I would say broad strokes. The, the thing is, is to invite it in. Right. Um, just like AJ was talking about earlier with being able to name things outside of our head, I oftentimes think of like the mind is like a, like a, a pressure tank, right? We have to let some pressure off at the release valve in order to maintain stable pressure inside. So when we can kind of like name it, right, name the fear, talk about it, and figure out kind of like give it a form, right, and know and really experience the fact that the fear is not me. A lot of times we say in English, I am scared or I am happy. And that simple saying of I am. It's not super helpful because we kind of become identified. We can over identify with our emotion to create our entire experience. And so instead of being... So once the fear is kind of out in the open and we can kind of say, hey, look, there's that fear, right? We can then figure out, okay, well, what's the thing that we want to move toward, right? What is the thought or the task that is pulling us as opposed to trying to push away. And it's one of, I'll share kind of, maybe a little vulnerable here is one of my greatest fears is becoming an old man filled with regret waiting to die alone. And if you've seen the movie Inception, you know that reference to the old Japanese man in the movie who's stuck in the dream world. And he's just waiting and waiting and waiting to die alone. And recently, I would say in the last few years, I've realized that instead of trying put run away from that fear, which honestly, it was a fear that I've had for a really long time, moving towards for myself towards creating love, creating connection, and creating an impact. That's a much more compelling kind of thing for me to be pulled forward to like almost like a magnet towards that thing, as opposed to running and pushing away from a fear. So if anybody's out there and kind of like dealing with that, that kind of a headspace, like definitely see if you can. Get the fears out, make them kind of concrete and outside of you, and then just figure out, what are the things that I really wanna move towards? 

STEVE_EDWARDS: It's interesting that you mentioned about being part of you versus having something and just sort of reminding me that I speak, I'm a Spanish speaker as well. And I'm assuming this is probably gonna be true in the other romance languages, or maybe just Latin languages. But when you talk about in Spanish, if you wanna say I'm. As we would say, I'm hungry or I'm afraid or something like that. You use the verb for to have. So if you were to do a little translation of I am hungry, it's I have hunger, or if I'm afraid, I have fear. So just an interesting little side note to tag onto what you were just saying. 

AJ_O’NEAL: It's interesting to me. There are some languages that don't have the same possession at all. Like they say it is to me rather than have Hungarian and Latvian are both that way. So that's like even worse than English. Cause there's not even an option to say, I have something you have to say. It exists. And to me. 

WEI-MING_LAM: Yeah, that's a whole nother can of worms. Is the impact of language, right? And how that, how that interrelates. I mean, I think that in a, in an engineering perspective too, right? When we're, when we're engineers are utilizing different languages to code, there's also that impact, right? Like how is the language that we're using impacting the final output? And it kind of brings a perfect little coda to the entire talk is, how are we able to take that engineering approach and then engineer ourselves? 

AJ_O’NEAL: And Ruby was created for that purpose, actually. So I forget what his actual name is, but I think how people would code differently, given different language tools. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: And they do. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Well, anyway, I guess it seems like we're at a good place to kind of wrap things up. Before we do, is there anything else that you, Wei Ming, would like to bring out from your initial discussion topics? 

WEI-MING_LAM: No, I think if we're running up on time, I just am super stoked to have been on here and share this time with all you guys on the line and then all the folks that are tuning in. For those that might want to find more about me, you can find me at themiddlewei.com. So V middle and then W E I, like the way from my first name, a little nod to Tibetan Buddhism of the middle way, Buddhist paths. And that's pretty much it. And I wish you guys a, this is being recorded on January 5th. So I wish you guys and gals, everybody out there, a amazing 2021. 

AJ_O’NEAL: All right. Thank you very much. And with that, let's move on into picks. Shall we? 

STEVE_EDWARDS: If you say so. 

 

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AJ_O’NEAL: I say so, Steve, would you like to go first? 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Certainly. I actually have three picks today, which is setting records for me. I usually just have one. The first was actually inspired by something that way just suggested. He was talking about the movie inception and I just saw another Christopher Nolan movie called tenant and it is, I'm still trying to comprehend it. I still haven't understood it. It's really mind-blowing. It has a lot to do with inverted reality and time travel and something called the Sator square S A T O R. It's funny how. The Sator Square basically is a square, a five by five square that has five different words in it. And the movie Tenet, which is one of the words from the square, uses all of the other words throughout the movie. So it's a real, real mind bender. And at some point I'm have to go back and see it again and try to understand it even more. My second pick is something a little fun. As AJ has mentioned, I'm a practitioner of the bad slash dad joke, depending on how you categorize the individual joke. I personally don't think I ever tell bad ones, but that's just a matter of opinion that I'm sure is disputed. Anyway, my daughter for Christmas, who is another practitioner of the bad joke, dad joke, excuse me, gave me a bad dad joke a day calendar. I'll find the link for it and put it in the show notes. But for me, it's great. For instance, as someone who is an avid workout person, exercising person, Today's was great. As my wife said, I should try to do lunges to stay in shape. That would be a big step forward for me. Anyway, and then I can't get any laughs. This is getting really sad. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: We're laughing on the inside, Steve. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Oh, either that or you're laughing on mute, right? 

WEI-MING_LAM: I've got a bad joke to share with you as well. I'm assuming that I can share a bad joke as my pick. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Well, like I said, I don't share bad jokes. I share dad jokes. Oh, right. Again, that could be disputed. And it is frequently. And then my third pick is a blog post. And, you know, towards the end there, I asked you about the implications of fear within your practice. And as I've gone and watched the 10 months with our various responses to the COVID virus, I have come more and more convinced that everything we do is based in fear. And from what I've seen from the...just the wreckage that we've caused in our response. A lot of it is based on, I want to say, unreal fear. And there's a blog post that's written about a practicing psychiatrist that's been around forever and a day. Out of California, he talks about what he calls mass delusional psychosis and our reaction to COVID-19. So like anything along these lines, I'm sure it's controversial. People agree or disagree, but I'll put the link to the blog post in the show notes. And that's it.

AJ_O’NEAL: All right. I will go ahead next. Thank you very much, Steve. I've got a million picks, but I'm going to condense it down to basically two. So one I'm going to pick, there's a, it's a 30 minute audio book. It's like a dollar and a quarter on audible. And if you don't subscribe to audible because of the restrictions of not being able to use it on the devices you want, there is a thing called open audible that can make that easy for you at a reasonable price, but as a man thinketh is it's just an amazing book about the power of where you place your thoughts is what will become around you. And I think it's presented in a way that's digestible and believable even if you're not necessarily a spiritual person. But it is kind of a, it's not a spiritual book at all, but the approach is not based on facts and solid, evident reason. It is based on perception and what's that word that we hate about experiences? Anecdotal, anecdotal experiences. But anyway, I think it's really good. It's super motivational. You know, you, you listen to it on one and a half speed or something. You get it done in less than half an hour. And then along with that, I'm going to pick the war of art, which is basically similar, but in a format that's more two hours and then deep work which is really relevant to what we were talking about earlier, especially with flow. And that's where I pulled the third theoretical four hours is that this guy basically says you develop through exercising flow, you develop your ability to be in it. And you can, most people can only be in it once they've honed the skill for about four hours at a time. And, and that book's just very interesting. It has a lot of stuff about, you know, not letting social media distract you, not letting things that people tell you are good such as, you know, make sure that you're consistent in posting on YouTube or, you know, things like that, not letting those kinds of things get in the way of actually getting the real work, you know, your North star work done. And then the mind and the brain, which is even longer, but explains complex processes that go on in the brain and how our neuroplasticity works over the ages, how it works in animals, how it works in humans, and kind of gives you a good mental model of how to map. What physically happens in your brain to the outcomes that you have from that and then kind of how to be more in control of yourself through cognitive. Basically by thinking on purpose, you can direct the way that your mind works because it optimizes for the pathways that you choose or not choose, but the pathways that get used the most are the ones neurons that fire together, wire together. That's the thing that. They say in pop psychology. Anyway, so that's all kind of one pick of just like that self-help motivational category. And then, um, my, my second thing is for anybody that currently has a Mac book, sell it as quickly as you can and get the M one because it is a game changer. If you haven't watched like Linus tech tips or max tech, or any of the videos on the comparisons between the M one versus like the $800 M one Mac money mini versus the $15,000 Mac Pro and stuff like that. The M1 is no longer a laptop. It is a different type of thing in the same way that a smartphone was different from a phone. It is, it is like a smart laptop. I don't know how to explain it other than that, but if you've got any Apple hardware, dump it as quickly as possible because it's become irrelevant in light of the M1. And I personally think you'd be better off ditching whatever you've got. And then, you know, if you need something that's more pro than the M1, which you probably won't other than screen size, since it's better than everything out there that exists other than high-end gaming laptops. Yeah, it's your resale value on anything else is gonna go down really fast, I think. Prediction. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Well, there are limitations. A buddy of mine bought an M1, and he's a hardcore computer user all day and running his business. And in terms of performance and battery life, he said, oh, it's off the charts. He said, right now it's only if I'm correct, it's only being offered in the 13 inch model. 

AJ_O’NEAL: That is correct, but I went ahead and got the error because I'm just gonna sell it. Like it's coming, it'll be here in like 30 minutes. So I'm kind of pre-picking something I haven't used yet, but from the reviews, I can tell this is a game changer. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Yeah, but the downside is as with any early, first iteration of a big change like this is that there's a number of applications and things that haven't been rewritten to work with the M1 chip yet. For Mac based developers, for instance, Homebrew was one last I checked that had issues with M1. And there's a number of different popular applications. So yeah, it's definitely gonna be from the performance and battery life standpoint, it's off the charts. Like my buddy can go like 12, 13 hours, he sat on one charge. But you might wanna wait a little bit if there are other applications that you're using that you're very dependent upon that don't yet work with the M1 chip.

AJ_O’NEAL: Yeah. And that, that would be mostly brew, but web installed.dev works just fine on M one for any of the tools that have been compiled for him one. And it's a very, very simple. So brew will work on the M one just fine. As long as you right click on your w what you basically do is do a copy paste. So, so you've got iterm to do a copy paste and rename your copy of iterm to, to like iterm to M one and that you leave the same in your normal everyday working one, you right click on it, go to properties and select run this with Rosetta. And then things should work just fine. I, I haven't tried that with brew myself, but that's what other people are saying will work because then it runs everything with the X 86, I mean the X 64 version inside that terminal. So you can have one terminal that's your M one terminal with programs that are compiled for M one and the other one with X 64. So, but I I'll give a better report next week. I probably shouldn't pick this before I've actually used it myself, but in that vein, because I had to, you know, I've got a 2012 with four terabyte SSD inside and I'm I'm downgrading to a MacBook Air with eight gigs of RAM and 512 gigs of storage So I had to pick up Plex and had to learn a little bit more about sync thing and I'm considering MB but you know for those of you that actually have media collections music movies, etc You know, you're not just a casual watcher. You're a collector You know who you are and you've been afraid of these types of things because you're like I don't want to pay an extra four to $800 for a reason. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Isn't a different name for a media collector these days like a criminal? Are you allowed to have your own media content? 

AJ_O’NEAL: You know, I guess that depends on what country you're in. In the United States, we have laws that protect you. If you purchase something, then you are allowed to have a usable copy of it, which means that if you have to break some sort of DRM in order for the thing that you paid for to be able to meet your needs. We also have the Family Protection Act, which says that if you want to edit content, you can, which gives you the legal right to be able to decrypt something as well. So we have multiple laws that are in place that protect the consumer that if they purchase something, they are allowed to, you know, just like if you bought a painting, you're allowed to scribble on it with crayon if you want. No one can come in your home until you know, don't scribble on this painting. It's a priceless work of art. If you paid for it, it's yours. And so our laws, although they often in the media get exercised in favor of corporations and big tech, in the privacy of your home, you are protected by US law for a number of these things. But I do recognize that in some countries, they only favor big tech and they don't really have any consumer protection in their law. I think...I don't want to offend anyone, but I think Britain is that way. I've heard you're not even allowed to make MP3s from your CDs. I don't know if that's true, but that's something I heard. But yeah. So don't use open audible if it's not legal in your country. I am not a lawyer, blah, blah, blah. But anyway, yeah. So for those people, Plex may be something look into it's definitely not as user-friendly as I would like it to be, but it works and working at all and being able to have a large drive in the house and being able to stream things without having them on my laptop is going to be the new way that I have to work. So such it is. Sorry. And oh, wait, wait, I mean, yeah, 

DAN_SHAPPIR: before way you forgot me. 

WEI-MING_LAM: Yeah, I was gonna say Dan. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Oh, did I forget Dan? Sorry, Dan. Oh, gosh. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah. Terrible day today. I'll make it I'll make it short and sweet, I hope at least. So I kind of entered that during our conversation. So one of my picks is the fact that I myself received the first shot of the COVID vaccine. And I do have to give props to the healthcare system in Israel. For those of you who don't know, we've got universal health insurance here. Everybody, every citizen, every resident of the country has medical insurance through a somewhat complicated system, but effectively from the state. The outcome, which, you know, I know that there are a lot of debates about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing or whatnot, especially in the U.S., but I have to say that in times of a pandemic, it really worked out for the best. Israel, within a matter of a couple of weeks, has been able to vaccinate approximately 15 percent of the population. We're leading the world by far. There's going to be something of a slowdown until they get more vaccines, but... Everybody who's already got the shot or has the second shot lined up for them So it's not like the situation in the UK where they're apparently going to switch to just having giving one shot Because that's all they have for now where they also have universal health care Yeah, so sometimes it works better and sometimes not and 

STEVE_EDWARDS: which one did you get Dan? Which one did you get? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: In Israel so far. We're all getting the Pfizer one. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Oh the one super cold storage

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, exactly. We are, Israel is supposed to get a shipment from Moderna, which I think can be stored in minus 20 degrees Celsius instead of minus 70. So that certainly makes storage a lot easier. By the way, the one scary thing about this vaccine is because it's so delicate that you're, you know,

there's a risk that the vaccine that you received, because maybe it was mishandled along the way, is actually not effective, and there's no way for you to really know that that's the situation. So hopefully that's not what's gonna happen to me. But there is a possibility that Israel might be the first country in the world that would actually be able to achieve herd immunity thanks to vaccination. So that's one positive thing that I wanted to mention. The other thing, my other pick is actually a technical one. So Norm Rosenthal was actually a guest on our show a while back. I forgot to look up the episode number. I actually just wrote a blog post and I actually haven't read it yet, but because I really love the stuff that Noam puts out, I'm going to pick it anyway. It's the topic appears to be an interesting discussion, kind of, I don't know, somewhere between a discussion and argument that he has with Alex Russell, who was also a guest on our podcast a while back about exposing hardware capabilities from within the browser. So, you know, we had on episode 450, we had the discussion with Thomas Steiner about Project Fugu from Google, where they give you access to stuff like the USB from within JavaScript in the browser or the file system, local fonts, other stuff like that, various hardware and operating system capabilities, access from within the browser itself. Alex Russell, who's one of the leaders of this project, kind of posits that you...You have to provide these capabilities to the browsers because otherwise they will lose out, especially on mobile to native applications. And I think that Noam has somewhat more, let's say complex or complicated view of things and he wrote a blog post about it. So I will definitely link to that. And those are my two picks. 

WEI-MING_LAM: Right on. Well, congratulations on your vaccine, getting the vaccine and AJ, I just got a MacBook Pro not a couple months ago. So You're making me have severe FOMO. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Oh dude, just sell it. I'm telling you, sell it, sell it for like $100 less than you bought it, get the new one. And then, you know, if you want the one that the 16 inch or whatever, resell it later. Cause the thing that you bought is basically worthless. If you look at the specs, like it, you're, it's not going to last. The new software is not going to run on it. Like get rid of it. I'm serious. 

WEI-MING_LAM: All right. Okay. Okay. I'm putting it on my to-do list, but, so my three picks, one of them is going to be a book called Grit by Angela Duckworth. It's kind of in the vein of what we've been spending the previous hour kind of chatting about. And my second pick is going to be something very tangential, but something that I'm getting into is knife sharpening. And for those of us that are staying at home, we might be noticing we're using our kitchen knives a lot more than normal maybe. And so my second pick is a whetstone and then combined with a video about knife sharpening from a master bladesmith. And the link for that will be in the show notes. My third pick would be get a houseplant. If you don't have a houseplant, houseplants are great. They help purify your air. They make your environment a little bit nicer and softer. And if you are living, if you live alone like I do and you don't have a pet or a partner, your houseplant can be your new roommate. You can give them a name and there's a lot of There's a lot of research and science that talks about how house plans can actually respond to, you know, conversation and encouragement, and it could help improve your workspace. And then my last pick, I'll actually throw this in here. I'm going to need Steve's help for this one. It's a dad, my favorite dad joke. What is Beethoven's favorite fruit, Steve? 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Uh, I am drawing a blank. I'm not sure.

WEI-MING_LAM: Banana. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Oh, yes. That's so good. Oh, thank you. I used to go around doing that all the time. Anytime I said the word banana, I'd sing. They don't know. Banana banana banana banana. No. Okay, I'll stop. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Sorry. That was wonderful. 

WEI-MING_LAM: Just figured we could end it on that. Hopefully, you know, love to hear from any of you guys. If you, if you're interested in looking for a coach, you can find me again, the middle way.com the T H E M I D D L E W E I.com. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Hey, do you have any like freebies on YouTube, just like general talking head advice about this is how I deal with this situation or that situation or anything like that? 

WEI-MING_LAM: Just, I can't remember who was talking about it in the pick section, but talking about making sure you're following your North star before you start getting into the posting, posting, posting kind of space. That's where I kind of am with my business building right at this moment. My blog is live on my website and I post there, I've settled into a monthly cadence in there. So if you're looking to kind of like hear any or read anything about how I'm thinking about approaching problems that as I'm overcoming them, my blog is gonna be the best place to go for now. But I do have a YouTube channel that has a few guided meditations up right now that are. One of them is only a minute long, which I find is a perfect thing to throw into a short break. So if you're looking for guided meditation and you haven't established your own practice, I've got one of those and also five minute guided meditation on my YouTube channel, which is the middle way all spelled out. You can find that as well. 

AJ_O’NEAL: W E I. All right. Well, thank you very much. A very interesting show that we had today. Glad that we had you on and that we did get into some of the more technical aspects of the, the psychological mind tuning in there. But yeah, it's great to have you. Thanks for coming on. 

WEI-MING_LAM: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: And with that, I guess AJ, you're wrapping us up. Well, if AJ isn't, then I will. So thank you all for listening and bye bye. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Adios. 

WEI-MING_LAM: Cheers. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Oh, was I muted there? Yes. Adios. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Now that's a professional ending. 

 

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