005: The Great Vision: How to Always See It

Unbeatable Developer Academy

Have you ever felt lost with what you're doing? It doesn't mean it doesn't have purpose. What if you just didn't see the higher vision above it? In this lesson, we will cover: How I Agonized For 3 Months On A Single Task The Reason You Feel Uninspired How To Make People Inspired Master Action How I Agonized For 3 Months On A Single Task I don't like working on deep technical tasks for extended periods of time. But one time I agreed to build a flexible pricing functionality for a custom ecommerce system. The system was already complicated, since it was powering a high revenue business. Expanding the system wasn't enough - I had to change its core philosophy, which was set in stone a few years ago by other developers. I had to fully immerse myself into deep levels of code, because there was no room for mistakes. Over the course of two weeks, I literally put every single piece of code into my brain's working memory (RAM) and refactored the system in my head. I became exhausted and obsessed. I was living in my head. Some days I was working 12 hours. I didn't see much of life. Questions started to pop up in my head: Why the hell I agreed to do this in the first place? Did I really need to go that deep? That's not what I really love doing after all... The launch was horrible. Deployment was so large that it couldn't be split into parts, so I did it at night. Because of its size, I let some nasty bugs slip into production. What do you think I was doing the next day from early morning, without much sleep? Fixing all those nasty bugs! They were appearing one after another (like the real bugs in the nature) - I didn't even have time to prioritize them. Customers were angry. I was sitting in front of my computer for 9 hours straight until all the critical bugs were fixed. And of course, I didn't have lunch that day. I finally went back home and sighed: "Shit... Why did I start with this..." And then it clicked to me: Why am I seeing myself as a craftsman who just came to fix a pipe? Why don't I see the thousands of people whom I actually helped? My flexible pricing functionality will allow people buy gift cards. They will give those gift cards for their loved ones. It will bring so much joy for them... Wow. That's when I became inspired about what I did. That's when I finally started to see the BIG VISION above my work. The Reason You Feel Uninspired Being blind to the higher vision is one of the main reasons so many people feel uninspired nowadays. What's even worse, sometimes it's not having the vision at all. How do you start your morning when you meet your colleagues? Do you talk about... how good was the movie last night what's for lunch "oh look at Brad's new watch!" If you do - STOP RIGHT NOW. Because big people talk about ideas, while small people discuss things. As an Unbeatable Developer, you should start your day by discussing about the big vision. Talk with people about: how are we going to help the world with the current project we're working on how can we ship it faster why does it matter for us I guarantee that you will feel inspired from the very morning. How To Make People Inspired When I meet people, I always love to ask: What's your vision for your life and the world around you after 5 years? Usually this continues in 2 ways: People who have the big vision in their head: they immediately become enlightened and start telling their story with a big smile. People who don't have it: they usually become uncomfortable and make up an insincere answer on the spot. Once we worked with a really exceptional payment processing company. They helped us so much that we moved our entire transactional business to them. I thought they were destined to become worldwide leaders, because their service was far better than that of their competitors. But when we met in person, do you know what I asked?