10 Qualities of Successful People Growth Mindset Ep. 10

Thank you

Thank you

Thank you

Good morning and welcome to the Growth Mindset Show

my name is Mahesh Chan if you are joining us first time welcome to the show if you are joining us if

you are a regular listener welcome back to the show my name is Mahesh Chan and today we are going

to talk about successful people success traits and if you are in software development if you want to

get to the next stage in your professional career that's what we are going to talk about. We also

have a special guest today we are going to listen to the story success story of one of our own

in coming in the show. So if you are joining us first time just let me explain a little bit what

growth mindset is all about growth mindset is a is a person who thinks they can do it they can

achieve anything in their life and if you are first time joining us you probably want to go

back to our first previous shows where I talk about growth mindset versus fixed mindset there

are two kinds you know two kinds of mindset one is fixed mindset growth mindset and fixed mindset

you know a mind thinks like they have certain abilities and they cannot do more than that

In growth mindset person is thinking about even though he has certain abilities to do things but

they can still achieve more and if they can learn a lot of things and that's what really we are all

about here on even on C-sharp corner is all about learning, growing either it's in your programming

or in career, getting jobs, finding a new company and so on and so forth

This show is all about you. This show is about you. Even though it's growth mindset, you can ask us any questions

Questions can be about your job, your salary, your project, community, anything you can

ask any questions. Goal is by the time you are done watching the show, you should learn something today

so we break down this show into a couple of parts first today we are going to talk about

top 10 qualities of successful people so if you think you are successful or you want to be

successful or you are you are going to be successful look out these are the 10 you know

common features qualities these success most successful people have had and then in the second

part of the show we are going to bring our guest today and you can ask any questions again to me

to guest this show is every friday 10 a.m so if you think your friends your co-workers they can

benefit from it also let them know we also love you to talk about this show share on your social

media let people know you're watching it if you have you know benefited from the show you

thought you learned something from it you want to share with us definitely share with us i see a lot

of people have joined us already i see deepak welcome deepak and ato you guys are regular

welcome to the show welcome back to the show um yeah so let's start the show today let's let me

start with uh you know what are those top 10 qualities of most successful people right these

these are common quality doesn't mean that all success people have these but we will start with

some of the common ones first is goal oriented so if you look at any success people successful

person in life they have they're very specific to the goal they have their goals they have their

short-term goals they have their long-term goals they have their you know they know what they want

to be in life and you may say oh I don't know what my goals are that's fine it may take you time to

figure out your goals but you definitely should have goals you should have goals what you want to

do today you should have goals what you want to do this week you should have goal what you want

to achieve in this month or even this year and goals can be you know not just for work it can be

about your personal goals can be your health goal right you say you know what I want to run by the

end of the month I want to run three miles or you say I want to lose weight or gain muscle or you

may even say you know I want to learn some new programming or new skills or c sharp nine so it

can be whatever you have to have a goal goal can be personal goal can be learning professionally

goal can be even at the job right one goal can be that you want to teach somebody something

so that's important is if you look at any success people successful people they are

goal oriented they just don't do things and keep doing it without setting up some goals

welcome back to the show sunny welcome to the growth mindset show

we are here talking about top qualities top traits for of successful people today

Number one is goal oriented. They are goal oriented. Number two, they are highly motivated and also energetic

That's important. If you look at any successful people, they don't just sit around, relax

They are very motivated, whatever they do. Okay. So you don have to they don have to push themselves They already motivated If you think you not motivated either you are doing the wrong work you supposed to do or you just are not in the right place or right company

If you are those three things, you have the right, you know, you're doing the right thing you like to do

you are passionate about, you are in right company and you are at the right place

chances are you will be highly motivated. You don't have to, nobody has to come and motivate you

So think about that. third trait is driven they are very much driven so they exactly know their goals are right

they say okay my goal in my life is say I want to become a you know I want to run my own company

or I want to become a you know in next two years I want to become a software architect

they have the goal set and they are definitely motivated because that's they want to do that

now they are driven so they are highly driven they're non-stop even though there are some you

know they may face some problems they just continue going doing the same thing again and again

until they go to the place or the the goal they achieve their goal

number fourth is focused focus is very important right and i you know we all going through this

whole pandemic right now especially we are working from home we don't you know go to work anymore

or sometimes at home you are with family, kids, your dogs, pets, and so on and so forth

They still, successful people are still very focused. When they know their goal is this, even though they do other things

but they still know their goal is and they end up making sure that they are not

you know, distracted from their goal. They're very focused on that. And they don't do a million things

sometimes you know i remember you know i get sometimes we all get into these multiple things

like okay i'll do this i'll do this i'll do this but still you need to be focused on

some certain at least certain goals so that's how you will achieve those you know in your timeline

um fifth one is uh they never give up there'll be chances and you know i remember working with

a lot of entrepreneurs i remember working with a lot of senior guys people who are running their

own companies they they you know they fail they never give up they continue doing that whatever

their goal is and eventually you look at the history i'll give you an example right uh recently

i know in u.s everybody knows that joe biden is going to be the next president of you you know in

united states of america if you look at the history right he if you look at his his life

he first time he ran for the senate he was broke he has no money so literally they figure it out

and they raise money from the community that's how he became senator before that when he was born

his father has no money they were living in grandparents in some other homes

then several times he ran for the president several times in past and he failed and he is

He has also tragedies. When he was young, I think he was around 30 some years old

First time he ran for senator, his wife and daughter died in car accident

And his two sons, they had really bad injuries. And I think later in his life, he had some brain surgeries

And here we are. He's passionate. He found his passion. He found his drive

He found his purpose and goal in life. And here we are. He's going to be the next president

He's going to be the oldest president in the history of America. So point I'm making it just because certain goals are not achieved in certain time

it does not mean you give up on those. And most of successful people, you look at history, look at Bill Gates, look at even Steve Jobs

They failed several times. Apple was bankrupt. Even Tesla was recently bankrupt

A few years back, Tesla was bankrupt. up Tesla was almost closed the doors then they somehow got you know some loan about I think about

30 million loan and they end up becoming it today is the one of the most valuable companies and they

are you know the most innovative as well so they successful people never give up so with that

let me bring our guest Vidya to the show and we'll talk about five more traits of successful people

first we're going to introduce Vidya to the show and then after we that we'll take a break and

then we'll bring Vidya for the full show and then bring have your questions ready well Vidya

hey Vidya good morning how are you good morning I'm very well how about yourself

good good I'm here in Philadelphia today is actually very nice day it's going to be 62 degrees

nice and sunny. How about yourself? Yeah, I'm in Redmond, Washington. It's always cloudy here

especially in fall season. And it's not going to be the time. It's not that chilly as it's

in Philly. But yes, as you can see outside of the window. I see

It's nice sky outside. So how are you dealing with COVID, family

kids? How's everybody going through this and handling this? It's tough, I think, in this unprecedented times of COVID-19

Everybody is going through some challenges in their life. For me, my daughters are 10 and 15, so they are on their own

School is online using Microsoft Teams. Everything is online. But yes, sometimes it's hard on them to figure out things

Technology breaks. Recently, Azure Active Directory broke. and then that made to the national news and then of course everybody was impacted right

so kids have their own challenges and then i am working from my office room and then

sometimes kids have their own activities which they are doing online so it's going okay

all right all right so i know you like if life give you lemon you make lemonade right

yep yep see that's that's it that's how you know success people think you know they take

advantage of the situation right so Vidya I know you for a long time and most of people who are

watching this show or watching us live they are they come from a software background they are

programmers a lot of them are like Indian background as well some are joining us from

europe few people from some from us but mostly in software development um i want to go back and

if you can share your story like how you started from your career from your back in india and then

and then how where you are right now and then i know you are working with microsoft right now you

recently joined microsoft so congratulations on your new job so if you can run through you know

young guys who are watching the show that you know how do you start your journey and how you come to

us and you know and how and then i will ask you more questions during the show from there so let start with that sure first of all thank you for congratulating me on the new job with Microsoft But I will I will go I will give you a quick rundown for the benefit of our listeners

First thing I want to tell is that whoever is graduating in the recent time since this computer

revolution took over in India. When I started, there were no... computer science was not a thing

So I started back in 1995. I was doing my graduation. In those days, companies like

Apptech, NIIT, all these companies were coming. They were computer institutions. They were the

first one to launch computer training in India and then I also just dived into that. I was

interested in that. So I started unlearning computer with one computer sensor and then

I started slowly teaching there as well and then I did certification in Oracle from IIT

and I think that pretty much resonates with what you were talking earlier about, the growth mindset

What I think I was good at, or maybe fortunate enough, or I had that thinking, that I always knew what is next I want to do

So at a very early stage, I recognized that, okay, what are the new technologies coming

So in those days, back in 1998, 1999 timeframe, there was no .NET

It was still in inception phase. It got launched in early 2000, and that's where I joined with .NET Beta Stream

But then I did Oracle certification from IIT. Then I did some jobs here and there in metro cities

Then I got an opportunity to go to Indonesia. There I was leading the entire .NET platform for a company and then some education involved in that

And then I came back to India. I joined a company in Bangalore

then I moved to Mumbai. But I continued at that time I continued working with the technology as

it grew. So .NET was the one and I was always fascinated by Microsoft. So I picked .NET and

Microsoft as my base technology, which I really wanted to invest into and build my career upon

So I worked in Microsoft.net for quite some time. But here is a twist

After that, then I worked in Mumbai, I worked in the U.S., in Microsoft for four and a half years

Then again, I chose to go back to India, Mumbai, and then again, I came back in 2014

And in 2017, I was offered a position as a principal architect in T-Mobile

T-Mobile is one of the largest telecom organizations in the United States of America

And that company projects themselves as a software company, which is a very good thing

And I will tell you why I said that. But many of you will be surprised to hear T-Mobile does not use .NET technology

they are not using Microsoft at all. But when I joined them

my entire experience was in Microsoft technology. Now many of you might be surprised

that why would a person take such role and at a senior level position

which is principal architect, in a company which is well established and why did they even hire that person

who has no background in the technology they were using, right? So there is a catch

So like what you were saying earlier, Growth mindset is also coming out of your comfort zone

So when I started interviewing, and I want to give a few tips as well

that always you need to know where you are going and what is the job description

and then what that company is asking for. So I knew that in their job description, there was no Azure

It was all AWS. There was no C-sharp or .NET. It was Java Spring Boot, which is a microservices framework

It was completely angular. There was no MVC. However, MVC is a pattern, but it was not a .NET core MVC or .NET, ASP.NET MVC

Of course, HTML was there. TypeScript was there. But we were using things like Docker. There was no Azure DevOps

Or if you guys know, Visual Studio Online was the first name, then Visual Studio Team Services, and now we call it Azure DevOps

There was no such thing. It was Jenkins. Now, if I map to all these things, what I have always been focused on, that do not just go with the technology. DevOps will continue to remain DevOps. CI CD pipeline will continue to do the exact same thing what they are supposed to do. However, your technology of choice may change

right so you can use arm templates you can use terraform you can use something else to automate

your infrastructure or anything for that matter but concepts will stay the same so i always

strengthen on my concepts and how do we implement it so when i landed in t-mobile in my last round

of interview one of my leader asked one of my interviewer who was a tech leader there asked me

that oh your background is completely in dot net but I hope you know we are a

non-microsoft company I said yes this is fine because there is no difference

between Java and C sharp and not only I said that when I got an offer I got

selected I was grateful for that opportunity I thank God for that and

then when I joined believe it or not within first month I was able to start

doing code review find the gaps find the anti-patterns suggest some strategies become an

active code reviewer with our developers started working with them if there were any areas of

improvement started suggesting those means that did not stop me that java is the technology

i installed intellij webstorm got the repos from bitbucket all that stuff i did and recently after

working with T-Mobile for quite some time. I learned a lot. Recently, on September 21st

I joined Microsoft Azure team as a principal software engineering manager, where I run

a platform architecture team for our platform, which we offer to Azure customers. It's called

Services Hub, and that's where I am now. I will take a pause now. So that's great. No, that's

That's great. So we have, I think, learned a lot of things from this talk. And you definitely mentioned that the growth mindset is all about the mind that's willing to learn new things. Okay. I still talk to people. I talk to my teams. I work in different teams. And I say, did you do that? Like, oh, I don't know that. Like, that's fixed mindset. Always assume that I cannot learn that because I don't know that because I never nobody told me that

so if you are thinking that way that means your fixed mindset and you want to become a growth

mindset you need to change your habits and it not it not impossible to change that welcome to the show again guys i see some new people join our regulars Nancy Rakesh Megha Chaman Welcome to the show

I know you guys join us almost every week. So good to see you back again

Today we are talking to Vidya Vrat Agrawal here. Vidya is a senior architect manager

Sorry, I messed up your role. They are at Microsoft, engineering manager at Microsoft

with guys also a several times Microsoft MVP, probably 15 by now

How many times MVP? Seven times, Mahesh. Seven times Microsoft MVP. And I believe you have also written several programming books

mostly on .NET. And then you are also a frequent speaker at conferences, events

and you give back to a community a lot. So I want to go back to a little bit more, talk about some things you have

you know, I know you for several years now. I know you speak at the conferences. I know you

have written programming books. So let's start with that. How did you get, how did you get into

writing books and how the process worked? Okay. So just to clarify, my role is a principal

software engineering manager. I know it's pretty long, but that's my official title with Microsoft

as your team is. So a few things, I don't know, I mean, I would say don't write books because

somebody has written it or you think there is a lot of money. That's the first thing. You need

to find your motive first, okay? My situation was always different and I'm sure many of you have it

So it was like a natural instinct in me that always I knew that I want to write a book

Always. I have one old notebook where I have written some goals that what I want to do

And I am very grateful that many things which I thought and I continue work towards it and

I was able to achieve those. So and it's very easy. You can

I mean, recently I declined to do a technical review of a book

Actually two books. I declined technical review for two books. One was with Packet Pub, one was with A-Press, for some different reasons

So if you want to write a book, first of all, writing is not something that you can always copy-paste, because if you are writing for a big publishing house like Mahesh did, before I started writing, I was reading Mahesh's book on VB.net

You can see those books sitting behind his racks. And I didn't know Mahesh personally, to be honest

I got to know Mahesh in 2013. That's where, first time we met, then he invited me to his C Sharp Corner conference

That's where I spoke in Noida. And since then, we are friends. I live in Seattle

I met Mahesh in Philly as well, where he lives. So you learn, first of all, from some people who have done it

They sort of become your inspiration, right? So I knew that, okay, Mahesh is an Indian guy

He has proved himself. I started reading his book. But even before that, I was always interested in reading books, believe it or not

So first thing is, if you want to write, you cannot be a good writer unless you are a great reader

You need to read a lot to write. It's not because you can copy paste, you can steal the ideas

You need to know how people think, how a writer thinks. you cannot just go on internet and say okay copy this from here paste from this

here and then put it there all these companies run plagiarism tools they can

even sue you if they want they can blacklist you and you will never be able

to to author anything with them they will blacklist you in the contract list

for any initiatives you take with that organization right so I authored five

books with a press I have done over a dozen technical reviews for different

authors in PacketPub, O'Reilly and A-Press as well. So it started back in 2005, six timeframe

I was in touch with A-Press, but even before writing book, I was writing articles

So you have to have presents like Mahesh has given a huge plate from C-sharp corner to all the aspiring people

today, even if you don't want to write book, but you want to start something on your own

you can write articles there on your blog, on C Sharp Corner, and that brings millions and millions

of views to your work. You will not get millions of views. What I mean is that it will be exposed

to millions of readers, and then they will filter what they want to see, right

Like for my work on C Sharp Corner today, it's approximately 8.5 million

I think I'm in top 50 now. I'm not very active, but yes, I'm still maintaining that position, right

So what happens is you start reading, you start writing, And then slowly you reach out to people

okay, can you help me to make some introductions? But I will only make introductions

once you have proven out yourself. If somebody is reaching out to me without their blog

without their original work sent to me in an email, I will be very hesitant to make an introduction

to any publishing house, right? So you need to prove yourself first

That's the first thing. But I think when Mahesh asked me, how did I do it

So I got in touch with A-Press. They asked me some of my sample work

And then I got connected with a person who was writing a book

And then I got engaged with that person. And then I took the book for my first book, C Sharp 2005

database, beginning with C Sharp 2005 databases. I did that book. I did a couple of conversions of the books

from C Sharp to BB.net, where I was not the main author

But I was the author of that book, which I translated completely from C sharp to BB.net

And then I did a couple of more books in the latest version of C sharp

And side by side, I also started asking for work for the technical review

If you go to any book, there is always a technical reviewer outside author

So I did that. Now, other advice I have for you, which I got from my first person in A Press

who gave me the first book. His name was Jim Huddleston. may his soul rest in peace. So that gentleman told me that, Vidya, if you want to write book

first of all, don't think that you are going to be a millionaire. The reason I'm saying that is

many people, many friends of mine at the early stage when somebody was meeting me, they will say

oh, this guy is a very rich guy. He has written five books. He must be having hell of the money

But this money thing is, what do you call riches? I was listening to Bob Murley, who is a

a very famous singer and composer and music writer and all that stuff

Somebody was asking him that, oh, are you rich? He said, how do you define riches

So everybody has different definitions. So if you ask me, am I a millionaire? In Indian currency, yes, maybe I am

It's only 10 lakh rupees, right? But I mean, just take your mind away from that millionaire concept, okay

Think about how many published authors do you know, right? who has written one, two, three, four, five books

consistently one after another. That means you did something right, then only that organization

continued giving you books. So my focus was not on money first of all, all right

But I will be honest, when time came, I negotiated, I said, okay, give me some more

if I can squeeze a little more. That's a human nature, which is fine, because you are being

professional, they will of course offer you a little less, a little more, but these days they

are very strict. So I got some money, which was the advanced royalty, means you write the book

you give them three chapters, they will give you, let's say, $1,000. Then you write another three

four five chapters they will give you another thousand dollars and that book has twelve dollars

you got let's say two thousand three thousand dollars right that is an advanced royalty that's

a reward that you did something now the book will be published and you sit quiet you get no money at

all now that book will start sailing at the rate of ten twelve dollars whatever their price is and

you will get fraction of that that is coming back towards the money which you got now you will not

get anything until those two thousand one thousand dollars has been recovered because it was your

advanced royalty so it was not a straight money given to you so i did not pay attention to money

first of all my focus was that okay i want to be there i want to write i want to feel good somebody

told me long ago maybe i read somewhere i forgot that there are two types of income one is your

monetary income the money the green money us dollars green right in india we have colorful

money like pink purple purple all that color right it's money has color right the other income which

i really believe in is your psychic income how you feel how you how that thing will uplift you

and bring more opportunities for you right so after that i got into technical reviewing with

a press said i said okay i have kids now uh i am not in mood to write more books because it's so

much time consuming and I can tell you it takes time like hell from you it it

sucks all the time out of your your life when you write books and I have written

five so I know how it works I can give you a rundown if somebody wants to know reach out to me hit me or maybe I can write a complete Mahesh has written

articles on T-Sharp Corner about it if you want reach out to me I can talk in

greater length about it as well so I did technical review that is started paying

me a little bit a few dollars here and there and then now I do even free nobody

pays me, but I still do technical review because I have mastered the art, I know what to look

for, and I'm very quick with that, but still it takes time. So connect with those people who have done it, ask them how to do it

Many times people ask, can you get me a book? That's not the right question to ask

You also need to learn as a growth mindset person how to ask questions, right

So you need to say, okay, here is what I have done. I want to be a writer

Could you please review my work and suggest any changes? anything I need to improvise and if possibly could you please recommend me to a publishing house

and I have done it for a few people I have recommended them I don't know where they went

because after that I take out myself it's between the company and the person so Mahesh I will take

a pause now I don't know if I yeah so guys definitely with that definitely great great

great story how to get published a book again as Vidya said you when you're writing a book

don't write because you think book authors make a lot of money especially these days books don't

sell a lot printed book definitely printed books definitely don't sell a lot when i wrote my books

yeah we were selling a lot we did you know we make up i made a lot of money from those books

as in the beginning i wouldn't say a lot but at that time it was a lot

but again writing is a you have to kind of enjoy writing that's the only way you can come you have

to be natural at it but one thing not one thing few things I really learned from writing books was

which is which was really good for my career as well is like being a me from a you know non-english

medium background it helped me learn english number one it helped me write english better

it also gave gave me a concept of being disciplined because writing book is a lot of time

during that time it took me my year and a half to finish my first book and there's so many revisions

and you there's you know how it is the editorial process they will find so many errors and then

you have to redo again and when I was writing a book Microsoft wasn't sure what features will be

in version one and they keep changing every every two weeks and you have to recompile the code

it wasn't like today where automatically you get software updates so you know how it is it was a

hectic process but those that experience taught me how to be disciplined how to be focused actually

also writing actually helps you become focused as well because when you're writing you're in writing

mode you don't hear anything and i remember i had like a six year six months old son

he would be crying and i would not hear it when i'm writing so anyway guys we are today we are

with Vidya Varathagrawal. Vidya is an old friend. He's a published author, Microsoft MVP

has been architect for several, several years now. Bring your questions. Any questions you have

ask me or Vidya any questions. I see a few more people joined. Vinay, well, good morning and

welcome to the show. We are going to take a one minute pause and we'll be right back. When we come

back we are going to talk about five more traits of successful people and then we will continue

talking with vidya and listen to other stories he has to share with us again any questions you have

feel free to ask your questions about growth mindset about success about career about you

know, job, about salaries, you can ask any questions. We'll be right back

Here at Mindcracker, we create artificial, virtual, and mixed reality games and apps

voice-enabled skills and apps, and intelligent apps and integrate AI with IoT products

We offer advisory services for innovations and startups. We provide cloud and code security and performance services

We also offer AI-ML blockchain development, consulting, and training. Just visit www.mindcracker.us to make your dreams into a reality

COVID makes us feel like this. And work from home like this

But what if work looked like this? With a leader like this

and a payday that feels like this. Learn how to change your mind and your mindset

with the Growth Mindset Show every Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern. Welcome back to the Growth Mindset Show, guys

If you are joining us first time, this show is every Friday, 10 a.m. Eastern

we are today here with Vidya Bratagrawal I'm sure some of you already know Vidya from C sharp

corner some of you probably have read his books and he published author and we are also talking about top 10 traits of successful people we already covered five of our traits we covered goal they are highly motivated driven

focused and never give up the next which is a next trait for successful people is is risk takers

courage they are they are courageous right so if you look for any successful people you look at

history how they became what they are they take risk right i see a lot of people and even with

there you mentioned that a lot of people don't want to take the risk right they just want to

live in their own comfort zone so if you live in your comfort zone it's chances are that you're not

going to grow much you're not going to go to the next step this is how it is um if with these we

are going to talk about these if you want to add any more to these uh just feel free to jump in

but I agree that you cannot live in a comfort zone and also expect that success will come to you

success is there somewhere it's out there you have to just go and get it find it work hard for it

you know nobody's going to come and give it to you so you got to take risk sometimes it's fine

to take risk as Vidya mentioned that he's his whole background was .net and then he became this

architect at T-Mobile, he ended up learning AWS, learning Java, learning so many new technologies

So you got to, and that's the concept behind growth mindset is you are willing to learn

And once you say, you know, I'm going to learn that there's nothing you cannot learn, especially

in software development these days. There's so many resources out there. With that, you're mute, by the way

Yes. You want to add something to that? So, yes, many people always ask that, how do I become a software architect

So you touched on something, which I always believe in, is that if you really want to be a software architect, you learn to be courageous, like risk taker and courageous

Risk taker does not mean you break customers architecture by taking, you know, known risks

I remember when I was architecting a solution back in 2007, 16, 17, for a customer in the

US, that customer wanted the greatest and latest. All right? And hear me out

There is an anti-patron in architecture, which is called shiny toy. Means never architect a solution for a customer and the customer which is into the business

to serve customers, not for a proof of concept purposes, do not use shiny toys

In those days, .NET Core was evolving in 2017. It was like early 2017 sort of timeframe

And I was standing there in their leadership. I said, no, I will not suggest you guys to go with .NET Core

The reason is it is still evolving. It has not proven it out

So my concept with architecture for a customer facing a platform, portal, tech, whatever you

are offering APIs, microservices is always stay and minus one. So if there is .NET 5, stay 4.6

or four for that matter, right? The reason is there is enough community support. So you need

to be courageous to say those things. You need to be courageous to say what is the right technology

You need to be courageous and risk taker to take your chances and suggest what is in favor of the

customer, right? Yeah, I agree. So these things I just wanted to bring from my professional

experience regarding what Mahesh was touching base on is risk taking and being courageous

Yeah and then welcome Amit, welcome to the show. We have two Amits here and I think we're going to

take a question here Vidya. Actually this is questions related to you. I think Amit is asking

what exactly about what actual work is done by principal software engineer which you are

i think your principal software engineering manager so first of all if you take a principle

out of it okay let me give you a little bit uh rundown about these titles so if you take principle

out of it the remaining part is two word software engineer right so everybody is actually a software

engineer i am still a software engineer that's what my breed is right but this senior associate

many companies have associates right and then principles and then some companies have a different

different labels after that all these are different titles different levels the stages but your

foundation is still software engineers right so so the thing is what they do i will come to that

first of all try to master your craft okay i always use the word craft all right uh you need

to be passionate about your craft like i am okay i'm passionate about my craft i know what i'm

doing i know what i want to do and i see i want to see the same in others as well which is very

hard at times and that is totally understandable uh no hard feelings but that's how i i want to go

with other people as well and i expect that but as i said it's not possible every human is different

So principle is just a label and principles reflect more leadership, more coaching, more mentoring, working with people, taking people together and leveraging on strength of others and letting others use your strengths

Right. So these sort of leadership traits come with the label what principle has in many organizations

So my title at Microsoft is a principal software engineering manager. It's a people manager role. It's a heavy on technology side

I lead a platform architecture team for Azure CXP, which is customer experience group

I hope I answered your question. But if you are really interested in this principal thing

if you go to LinkedIn or any job website, you will see these job titles. And if you put two

left and right you can compare both the job titles uh what traits they are looking for but you will

find something similar what i just sort of described yep all right so let's get back to our

you know traits for being successful people if you have any again questions again vidya is available

on twitter as well as linkedin feel free to follow him and connect with him on linkedin and twitter

um so number seven thing i want to finish these four more you know these four more traits of

successful people and then we will take break after that and we'll come back with more questions

and answers. The number seven is accept failure or they take accountability and which we see often

is that you look at the leaders and most successful people they are good leaders right. Good leaders

take accountability of their failure they are not like somebody in our you know some president where

he for you only take you know that take credit for good things and not for bad things right so

if something is wrong most successful people they take they accept failure and they even take

accountability for their team's failure as well and that's how that make them successful successful

people also are leaders they make people believe in them right that how you you want to add something to that no i think you you said it right uh it all about you know uh when i was with t we had a t

printed with something like uh we build it we own it so our t-shirt had some logo and then on the

back we had we build it we own it i mean so that failure thing uh that thing will never come in

any individual if you don't believe you own this right yeah so once that feeling of ownership comes

in you if you just think that you are an employee who is taking salary every month selby is crediting

into your account you are just fine chill out then that's not going to take you anywhere yeah

all right i'm sure many of us have that mindset but since we are talking about mindset uh i think

that word will keep coming here and there yeah everything starts from here uh every thousand

mind yeah whatever you have here it will come down so so just start to take ownership of things and

i can share some more stories later uh yeah yeah the last half we will do is all you know take more

questions and share more stories and i have some questions for you too so and then number eight

the number eight quality is they're adaptable adaptive always means just because one thing

doesn't work they pivot and they learn from things and they change they're not really stubborn

they're not really you know they learn and they're flexible right um and besides this there's two

other properties one is they're good listeners and they are good communicators without being a

good communicator it's hard for you to actually tell people what do you mean what are you trying

to say what you're trying to do and they listen to people they even look at your steve jobs he

always says that they hire smart people so they can understand and listen to them to build better

things they're trying to build. You want to add to that Vidya? No you finish the 10th one then I will

take some time to cover. All right so great so what we will do is now that's guy we're going to

take a two more minutes break and then we'll be right back and then what we will do is we will

take your questions uh i have some questions for vidya so if you have any questions about career

jobs um even you know community writing anything you have a microsoft mvp question we will take

some questions atul i see you uh welcome back to the show uh sean i see you welcome to the show

we will take your questions right after this break we'll be right back here at mindcracker

We create artificial, virtual, and mixed reality games and apps. Voice-enabled skills and apps

And intelligent apps and integrate AI with IoT products. We offer advisory services for innovations and startups

We provide cloud and code security. And performance services. We also offer AI-ML blockchain development, consulting, and training

Just visit www.mindcracker.us to make your dreams into a reality. Hey guys, can't believe we haven't seen each other since graduation in May

What's going on? Not much. With the pandemic, I can't really do anything right now

Me too. I mostly just stay at home, hang out with my dog, and watch the news. I feel you

Have you guys been able to get jobs yet? Funny that you ask. Gary and I actually have been working on something together

Yeah, we came up with an idea for a startup that's an app that will help us stay active

since we both have been sitting around so much during this quarantine. That's genius. I could definitely use something like that

When are you guys launching it? Well, that's the issue. We don't really know how to build it, so we're kind of stuck

I know of this company that does startup advising, if you guys are interested

Oh really? Yeah, they're called Mindcracker and they'll help you validate your idea and connect you with angel investors

and help you build everything from your product MVP to your technical team and even your go-to market planning and execution

Wow, that's awesome. Do you know how we can get in touch with them? Yeah, you can just visit their website, mindcracker.us

That's awesome, Mae. Thanks. I'm excited to get started on this. Of course. Good luck, guys. And let's talk soon. Thanks, May

Welcome back to the Growth Mindset Show. Today, I'm here with Vidya Vrathagrabal

My name is Mahesh Chand. I'm here from Philadelphia. Vidya is here. He's in Seattle, close to Seattle, Washington

I work for Microsoft. Today we are talking about growth mindset and what are the different

traits of successful people. So Vidya, let's take a couple of questions and I think they

are questions and then we'll continue asking more conversation. Sure. I see this question from Atul on the screen. Is that okay to take that one? It's

Sirma, does a technical architect need to be a technology agnostic? So this is a very good question, first of all

And I would say, if you are not a dev and you want to come out of it, you need to learn

to be technology agnostic. The reason is you cannot always talk in terms of one technology

At T-Mobile, I will give you an example. we were having hybrid architecture

Our UI was in Angular. We were using Google Cloud, which was Apigee Gateway for our proxy

And then everything was in AWS. Then we even had some microservices running

on on-prem data center that was in PCS, Pivotal Cloud Foundry. I already gave you three cloud environments named by now

And then we had some in Azure as well in some other teams not in my team particularly so if you see if somebody says oh i only master one

then how it is going to happen but at the same time this master may not be the right word don't

try to master it the reason is if many of you have asked that question in many forums

is that how to become a software architect or technical architect or whatever is the

title solution architect like my title was principal architect just keep it software

architects for that matter to keep it simple. And I gave a complete talk on it. You can search it on

my LinkedIn, how to become a software architect. So architects are always T-shaped. If you see how

T is drawn, T has that long bar at the top and then one line in the center. That means is

architects have the equal breadth and then they have some depth. So my depth is in server-side

technology, right? I am aspiring to clean code, best practices, guidelines, software architecture

microservices, all these sort of things. You can be having depth in, let's say, UI technology

You know a lot about React Angular JavaScript and whatnot right Somebody can be having depth in devops somebody can be having depth in networking and then your breath means you can talk cross cut across the

software layers and different technologies so yes you have to be technology agnostic for example you

are talking to a customer that customer's background is in aws you cannot keep telling them uh vm vm

virtual machine virtual machine they will understand it but if you say ec2 that is elastic

compute cloud that's what amazon awf call a virtual machine it will resonate better with them right

if you want to call let's say you say okay we will don't worry about your multi-reason we will put

a traffic manager in the middle traffic manager is part of a load balancer which routes traffic

coming from a customer to the nearest reason of that cloud provider amazon doesn't have that term

amazon calls it route 50. so if you know these basic things and you are technology agnostic and

you know a little bit about the other competitor provider or the technology used then you are

always having an edge on advantage when you are talking to a client or to a dev or to anybody for

that matter i hope i answered your question all right so let's take one more question from sean

sean is asking how can we take our career to the next level i believe sean is a developer

all right sean so that's a great question as well uh however i don't necessarily understand what do

you mean by next level next level could be you want to do more in your career or you want to go

to the next promotion level the only thing i have is i think growth mindset covers it all

ownership is one uh first of all and then uh once you start let's take an example let's say you want

to become from you know you are a developer and you want to become a tech lead yeah that's that's

perfect and sean please put your clarification in the chat window i apologize if i'm not getting

your question clearly because i see it's a little bit abstract but please put more information in

in the chat window and I will I'm watching your the comment section so it

has happened in many people okay I have worked with many organizations and many

people will go in a review when they say okay they did not promote me they

didn't make me an architect I'm still a tech lead or I'm still a dev they didn't

make me team lead yep I will tell you just one thing okay and remember it's a

very powerful thing I'm going to say always remember what got you here won't

get you there. I will repeat it one more time. What got you here won't get you there

If you became a developer in a company, you are never going to be a tech lead if you continue

doing the same thing. That's what this means. What got you here won't get you there. It means

you need to do something extra. Now that extra, many times people think that it will just happen

out of the blue. My philosophy of work has always been when I join an organization, I always try to

look up to the next leader. I'm not in rush to become that person, but I want to know what my

leaders are doing. How do they think? I sat 101 with them. At T-Mobile also, I had a couple of

mentors. I always look for mentors. I talk to them. I understand how they think. What is their

traits what are the other big things they are doing right so always if you want to be a tech lead

already learn what tech leads are doing i'm not saying many times you will find in many companies

that they are not doing anything different then find what that gap is how do they think how do

they talk what sort of responsibilities they take and then slowly put your foot into those areas as

well means you need to prove yourself right that you can do it and once you are already doing it

When you go in your review or your leader see that, oh, you are already performing at that level, means you are good to go for that

Many times we think you give me that job designation first, then I will start behaving or performing at that level

But in many companies, it doesn't work that way. You already have to start performing, then they will give you that job designation or level

yeah and to yeah i think that's good and i can add some to that is it's basically you know as you

said with you watch what everybody's doing and learn from them and then also be available to do

more right uh companies wants to see or people wants to see that you are you know just not only

responsible but you can take on more than what you're already doing right I always tell guys

don't find a company that give you just enough job find a company or a bad boss that gives you

more job than you can handle it because that's what make you your mind it like your mindset again

back to the growth mindset if you already start working hard when you are young then eventually

it's going to become your habit and you are the you are the main person who's going to actually

benefit from that no matter where you go but if you are just doing as much as you are told or you

are just doing that you know you're supposed to do you're not gonna nothing is gonna change

so besides the what are you doing also go and learn new things right so in your company and

discussions there may be discussions about new technologies or new features or new products

and you may be the one who only knows that. For example, in a meeting, if your boss asks you about blockchain

and nobody knows and you are the only one who knows about even the little bit, guess what

He's going to next talk to you. So you have to kind of go out of your way

learn new things and be in the discussions and participate. All right

That's great. So let's take one more question from Megha. We only have one more minute left

So Mahit, I will take this question and then there is a question which Deepak has put long ago. Okay, at the beginning of the show

I would like to take that as well before we end the show. So, Megha is, sir, how can I improve my

coding skills? So coding is all about practice. First of all, I would say do not try to

to memorize the language. Try to focus on grammar, right? Like if you want to learn English

for example, what do you do? If we just only learn the phrases, then you know where we are

But if you learn the grammar, how things fit in, then it's a different ballgame altogether, right

So try to learn the grammar means the syntax, what new features are coming. You do not have to

necessarily install every new version of the technology. At times it's very hard. These days

there are tools available. If you are working on .NET, there is a .NET Fiddler website available

it's the online compiler which shows mvc model view controller you can put code there it shows

html and all that stuff and then you can run it then and there so try to focus on that stay in the

core of object-oriented programming how i was able to do it at t-mobile without having any

working background or like hands-on experience like i did in c-sharp.net in java because i focused

on the grammar of the language. When I landed there, I knew if this design is properly

following solid design principles about right solid states the same thing it's object oriented

design principles and then i focused on those things and found gaps so i hope i answered your

question at the higher level uh mahej do you mind if i take deepak's question real quick no no go

ahead go ahead so deepak has asked that he is watching the session along with his friends there

you go uh how we detect that we are at the right place or wrong so i will leave you one a book

title here uh it's a very small book hardly 39 pages it has immense value the book title is

who moved my cheese uh read that book if not already uh what is what is the book called i

will repeat it again who moved my cheese it's a very famous it's a very famous book so what he is

asking is how do you know if you are at the right place of all so what defines what is right place

right? So for me, right places where there is an opportunity to grow. For me, right places where

when I wake up and get out of my bed, I look forward to go to work. Right places where I enjoy

working with those people. I like my boss who gives me enough opportunity to grow, who gives me

enough playground to play and do things. That does not mean that I am in .NET, Azure, and he gives me

blockchain projects. Maybe I'm not interested in that, right? But different ideas, right? Don't take

it in the wrong direction. So read that book. I think that will answer your question to greater

length. But for the sake of time, I will leave it there. Well, that's well, I think we are kind of

out of time now. But this was a great session. And again, guys, thank you, everybody for joining us

I know I saw a lot of guys coming back every week. It is nice to see you again. And Vidya

Again I know it too early there It like almost you start at 7 a I can be up at 7 a So but you are like early riser you know So thank you so much again coming here and sharing

your experience with all of us and these guys. And I hope everybody enjoyed it. Any last word

you want to say to everybody? No, I think first of all, I want to thank Kisha Furner for hosting

these events these are very good i hope people who will listen later will be benefited uh in

c shop corner there is a career section where you can go and ask questions you can hit mahesh or me

on linkedin or whatever and we can either do some other sessions mahesh keep inviting other leaders

if you want to grow i would say listening to others is very important listen to other leaders

I'm still learning. I'm a constant learner. And just do good wherever you are. And always

remember that the harder you work, the luckier you get. I also recommended a couple of books

So go through those. Send me a note or messages if you need anything on Mahesh and we will

see how we can answer those questions. And thank you so much Mahesh for having me

And I hope... All right. And thank you all, guys. No worries. No worries. And thank you everybody behind

the scene guys and guys on social media. Everybody thank you so much and we will see you next week

Thank you