Top 10 Motivational Tips During Covid Times - Growth Mindset Ep. 16

Thank you

20 years ago, a seed was planted and cared for. We painstakingly nurtured it and weathered it against adversity

until one day it blossomed and the fruits of our labor began to show

Today, millions have learned, shared, and been inspired by what our community has produced

We proudly serve 21 million users from 204 countries in 2019. For our 85,000 technical articles, code samples, and videos

our 450,000 forum questions, and our highly anticipated conferences and events featuring

keynote panels, live streams, and industry experts and influencers. We recognize and reward members

for their dedication to the community. Through content contributions and mentorships, we ranked

number 2,620 in the world with a reach of millions across our social media channels. Thanks to you

our global community of software and data developers grow stronger each day. For more

information visit us at csharpcorner.com. Good morning and welcome to the growth mindset show

My name is Mahesh Chand. I'm my host. I'm your host today. If you are joining us first time

welcome to the show. If you are our frequent visitor, welcome back to the show. As you may know

some of you may already know this show is every Friday 10 a.m. Eastern. I'm here in Philadelphia

It's a nice sunny day today, even a little bit cold, but it's very nice, bright, sunny

Things are getting better a little bit in the U.S. now. Hopefully, you know, COVID cases are still there

We still have, you know, tons of deaths. I believe almost 4,000 people are still dying every day

But, you know, the cases is kind of start going slow, slowing down

Hopefully, the vaccinations start and we'll get better. I hope all of you guys who are watching guys and girls, everybody who's watching the show

hopefully everybody's safe, you're staying safe and you know we're hoping things will get better

from there, you know here like it's been a while, it's been a while, we've been stuck in this

and this pandemic for a while now. So today we have exciting show, we are going to talk about

some of the things about how to stay productive and also motivated during COVID times. And

you know, after COVID, if you're still working from home, I know a lot of companies here in the

US, they are telling their employees they can work, you know, from home for a long time now

I think companies like Google, Microsoft and all big companies, Facebook, they have already told their employees, I think during this 2021, I think almost everybody can

work from home. So this work from home culture is kind of new thing and you know when working from

home sometimes it's important you know keep yourself motivated keep yourself you know

how do you you know get to the work how do you get ready so there are some of the tips

I will share today in this show in first 10 minutes. In the second half we have very special

guest Todd and we're going to talk about you know I talk about more what what is his background and

and then you know you can ask your questions as we know in the second half of the show

we take all of your questions questions can be about jobs career growth anything unless you know

community social work or anything you have your question anything about feel free to ask

questions uh no technical questions though we're not going to answer here how to write code okay

all about growth mindset all about learning all about growing in life in professional as well as

personal um so welcome to the show guys and girls i see a lot of people joining us i see familiar

faces welcome the show feel free to post all your comments in the comments box you know if you're

watching from you know facebook youtube wherever you're watching from post comments let your

friends know about the show anybody who can benefit from the show share on your social media

i really appreciate when you know people who are commenting and asking questions and sharing with

their friends end of the day this show is all about you this is not a this show is not a marketing we

don't promote things here we don't sell things here it's all about you and how you know based on

my experience of these 25 years in the industry working with the community working with the

companies and learning from you know background coming from where you know humble village and

learning through the you know all this time and now running my own companies and then growing

through this path all the things I learned anything so I can share and hopefully I can

help you that's the goal goal is to get you better get help you on any questions so any kind of

questions you have just ask you know there's no question no question is bad question so let's start

with the quick tips there are some of the tips i'm going to talk about in this show and obviously

these are my this is my personal experience some may work for you some may not work for you

and then in the second you know after 10 minutes we're going to ask our guest to join us

and then we're going to introduce guests and then you know you got just go ahead and ask your

questions start posting your questions so i have been working from home for a long time

like almost my whole life um and then these are some of the tips i want to share and when you're

working from home biggest thing you need to do is the tip number one is you have to have your

mindset ready you have to train your mind and it takes some time to train your mind but you have to

train your mind that I'm here to work okay I'm ready to work when you wake up you have to tell

okay it's work time now I'm also think like you are now in office okay you've got to forget that

there's a tv there's a kitchen you know and some of you know some people have big houses some have

small some have one apartment some have one room depends on your situation is you have to kind of

train your mind and tell your mind that listen this is work time now um and um then by the way

I have written a detailed article on this on c-sharp corner as well so you can go back after

this and then you know read the article with more details so in next four minutes five minutes I'm

going to run these tips and then you can go there but then I want you to ask your questions I want

to share what's working for you. What do you do to get you productive and motivated at work

What do you do I would like to learn from you as well So please share your tips like what do you do that makes you get going on at your home while you working during this COVID times So tip number two is you have to prepare and get

ready to work. You cannot say oh I'm home. You have to like just go like do the regular routine

what you would do. Try to get a shower, put clothes on. That's important is clothes on. You know

a lot of us are working in pajamas now you know I see a lot of pictures and funny things and we

are just working and wake up and working in pajamas that's great nothing wrong with it if

you can work it but if you are having hard time to concentrate or focus on work try to go take a

shower put clothes on so you like you mentally you're telling your body and your mind is getting

ready to work okay that's the tip number two. Tip number three is assign a fixed area if you have

enough room then always try to work in one area at least in certain in the morning so now your

brain is ready then when you're sitting in that area it knows you are here to work this is not

messing around it cannot be in the room where tv is there where other distractions are there okay

You have to find a quiet area, which most of us do anyway. And then tip number four is you got to have a fixed schedule

Try to schedule because the way our body works is once you have a schedule

then body start learning the behavior and habits. And then it's just getting ready

For example, you know, many of you wake up early in the morning. Now body knows you wake up early in the morning

It automatically wakes up in the morning, right? You like wide awake

so same thing with the work you have to make a schedule and stick to it you cannot do one day

okay one day i'm not working one day i'm working so it has to have a schedule so your body

is kind of have you know knows that um next important thing i like is tip number fifth

fifth is like make a to-do list and not just making your head make a list

on a paper, make a list on a board, whatever you have. And once you're done with the task

you got to check mark it. You have to feel like you just finished some work. Okay. And if the work

is one hour work or two hour work, try to take a little break after that. You have to kind of

pat on back, say, okay, good job. Me, myself, I did good job. Let's take a break. Okay. And then

go to the next task so you have to kind of check that more smaller tasks you check better you will

feel trust me don't make like a big one task like oh today i'm going to work on the website okay

that's just one task no make it look like today i'm going to create the layout of the page i'm

gonna do the css i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do that i'm gonna do that that that and then start

check marking those once you start check marking those items you're gonna feel like you have

achieve something today and that's a biggest big thing for your your brain to you know tell it like

yes I'm doing something good and then yeah take frequent breaks so don't just keep going sitting

on chair in one position every time you do certain tasks take a break what I do is I drink about you

know in the morning I wake up and get ready and all I drink about you know three tea and then every

time you know I work for an hour or so then I take a break I make a tea when I'm making tea

I'm probably trying to stretch. I'm doing certain things and I'm standing, obviously

And now I even got a standing desk here. It's not a desk pretty much. I just put stuff on the desk

It's like a workaround, right? So anyway, so now we are done with our 10 minutes

I have more tips. Those tips are on C Sharp Corner. And we will share more tips here in this

during the show as well. But have your questions keep coming. Let your questions keep coming and share

what tips working for you, what you do at home when you're working

That's like, yeah, that gets you going. That motivates you. That makes you more productive

Please share your tips. So with that said, let's bring our guest of the show today

Today's guest is Todd Fine. And I'll talk more in there. Let's start

Let's bring our guest in. Hey, Mahesh. Hey Todd, good morning. How are you? I am good. It's Friday. Yeah, it is Friday. Welcome to the show

I like your background. Looks awesome. What's there? You want a little bit? Tell us about

yourself and your background. How far do you want me to go back? Well, first I want to just

yeah, I want to actually, you know, obviously listen, when I start my programming

Win Intellect been there forever. Okay. It's like one of the oldest training companies

You know, I was working and I started my career as a programmer and I would read the books from Jeffrey Richer and your team and who started and founded the company

Even Jeff Prosaz, he came to India and all that. So maybe you want to talk a little bit about the company and then you're about your background and what you do

And I know you're also Microsoft Regional Director. That's how I met you first time

You're also president of Win Intellect. So maybe tell our viewers who you are and what your company is, what you do, and then I'll ask more questions from there

Yeah, let me start with the company. You're right. It is a really interesting company

WinSelect was founded in 2000 by three guys. If you're developers, you'll probably know them

Jeffrey Richter, John Robbins, and Jeff Proceis. and they all worked with Microsoft Teams specifically

Jeffrey Richter actually helped build the Microsoft CLR, you know, back in the day

He's actually working with Microsoft right now under like Scott Guthrie's and Jason Zander's teams

building some of the core infrastructure of it. John Robbins, if you know him

he was the Bugslayer columnist, one of the top, you know, system level debugging people literally in the world

And they were all friends and technologists and speakers and conference keynoters

and they were all independent. And one day in 1999, they got together and said

let's form a company around the brand that we already have. I mean, just between those three people, Mahesh

they have written, I think, 17 or 18 books, some of the top programming books out there like CLR via C Sharp

So they had this brand personally, and then they created a company around it

And you're right, they started out as a training company, this very hardcore training on the Microsoft technology platform

And from 2000 onward, from day one, they became, it sounds like I'm exaggerating

but they became Microsoft's number one trainer worldwide for Microsoft developer division

Meaning, you know, as you said, they were all over India and, you know

Hyderabad and Delhi and Bangalore and everything and Shanghai and Microsoft Paris and Microsoft Latvia

We were in that office once all doing training and multi-million dollar contracts every year

for Microsoft training Microsoft devs and testers around the world And the way I came into it was they were always asked because they like known as the people who wrote the book on the architecture of Microsoft

they were always asked to build stuff. But they were really much more trainers and content developers

So they brought me in at the end of 2005 to start up the consulting division

And within a couple of years, that was the bigger part of the company. And since then, consulting, which is application development, you know, AppDev stuff, and of course now Azure, is about three quarters of the company revenue-wise

So now we say we are a training and consulting company. And, you know, there's been lots of recognition

There's the books. There's, if you're in the Microsoft ecosystem, you'll know, like, we're a gold partner in everything, you know, DevOps and AppDev and Azure and this and that

And we have advanced specializations. And I think in 2018, we won the IMCP Worldwide Microsoft Channel Partner of the Year

The last year we won the Microsoft US Award for Intelligent Cloud

So, you know, we're a small company, but we're kind of small and very kind of high tech

And that's the brand. And then you and I, you know, both know each other as the Regional Director Program

We have lots of Microsoft MVPs and DevOps, ALM DevOps Rangers, and you and me, you know, Microsoft RDs and that kind of a thing

So that's the company. It's really fun to be a part of. You know, I don't like being part of large companies

I have once, and it has its perks, but I like kind of a small, more family-oriented company

So that's our brand. Yeah. Definitely, definitely. Yeah, I think, yeah, I've read more, you know, in the beginning, I've read a lot of books, right

Even recently until like five years back, I would, all these books, the top programming books on Windows came from Win Intellect and your group, right

Yeah. So I think. Yeah. And if they didn't, we were working with the people who wrote the other books, like Charles Petzold, if you, you know, for the older people who know him, I mean, they all worked with us or for us and they wrote their own books

So, you know, it was a, it's a pretty fun group to be a part of. Yeah

And I think some people joining us, welcome to the show. Looks like we have more people join us

I see people from U.S., I speak Canada. Yeah, welcome back. Deepak again, welcome to the show

We have people from India, Philippines. Jin, welcome to the show. Sonu, Deepak, Shashank, Carl, Atul, Sean

Sean is local, Philadelphia guys here. Hey, welcome to the show. I see a lot of familiar faces here

Today in Growth Mindset show, we are talking about how to stay motivated and productive while working from home

We have a guest today, Todd Fine. Todd is president of Win Intellect

He's also Michael Rossoff, regional director. We are just asking and he's going to share, I would say, 30 years of experience

Feel free to ask any questions. Todd is a great community guy. He's always ready to help us. That's what we are here, right

We're trying to help. So point here, this show is for you. Any kind of questions you have, we can help. Feel free to post your questions here

So, yeah, Todd, you were talking about. Yeah. Tell me a little more about Microsoft Regional Program, Regional Director Program and MVP Program, because many of our guys, they always ask, oh, how do I become Microsoft MVP

Oh, what does Microsoft Regional Director do? What are their roles? So if you want to, you know, help us on that a little bit

Well, I can talk more about, I'm one of those original directors who's not also an MVP

I think we are, but we have a large number of MVPs at the company

The MVPs, I'm sure a lot of your viewers know, are like, you know, advocates of Microsoft within the developer community and engineering community, right

They blog, they're doing user groups all the time, that kind of thing

And the way you get in with them is you find out you have to make contacts within the Microsoft local community

You know, find out who the MVP lead is, you know, in your city or your region

And then you have to be very active in the community and doing user groups and articles and all kinds of things like that

And it's it's not that hard to get into that. But you do have to do a lot of community work, just like you're doing here, Mahesh

Now, the RD program, people ask me about that, too. and to give you a sense of the scale for the mvp program hash i know there's thousands three

thousand or six thousand around the world yeah about about forty forty six hundred at one point

they were forty six hundred yeah yeah okay right so that's good i was right in the middle of the average so the rd program has about 120 or 140 people total worldwide so yeah that's only 120

130 about RDS in the world. So that's a kind of very, very special group

Yeah. And the way people describe it differently, but I'll just tell you how I describe it compared to the MVPs

The MVPs are people in the technical and developer community, evangelizing and supporting and advocating

speaking, writing user groups around Microsoft Plat. The RD is the way I describe it is like MVPs, but at an executive level, we certainly do stuff like you're doing here

We do user groups and things like that. But mostly we work on kind of one level up

So we're working. You'll see RDs, for instance, especially international RDs on government panels on data privacy and stuff, you know, in Sweden or talking to EU parliament groups and stuff like that

You'll see them, which is what I do, because I don't do any of that

I haven't been at the Capitol or anything, you know, doing anything like that. You'll see us working with Microsoft at a corporate level or like I'll work with marketing groups

Here's a couple of examples. I worked with Microsoft Research for some years, putting together programs to win the hearts and minds of data scientists

around universities and professors and things like that for Microsoft Azure platform

because obviously data and AI is a huge thing. So we put together a training program called Azure for Research

that we went on to universities in Europe and the US and gave workshops

We work with marketing groups. So we'll put together these initiatives at the corporate and marketing level or other things

rather than just say, hey, we're doing technical user groups around our local city

and then you'll do government programs and you'll do stuff like that. So, again, I call it MVPs at a CXO level

That's just my description. Yeah, and I believe there are also, you know, I was also, you know, RD

So one of the other things is criteria. I know some of, you know, older MVPs, they always ask

hey, I want to become an RD, right? So I think one of the requirement for or criteria for RD is also

that you have to kind of have experience working with multiple technologies

is not just Microsoft, right? If it's better, kind of. Yeah, there's like six criteria

You don't necessarily have to be small. One of them is experience in working with just as you said non technologies It could be AWS It could be something with big data It could be Google They want you kind of multi

So when you're going on and you're talking about things to customers or government groups or whoever

that you can talk with knowledge of the ecosystem, other ecosystems around you

So you're absolutely right. That's another criteria. Now about getting in, because that was your original question

every year there is a cycle of renewal for RDS and you can get nominated by a Microsoft person

or another RD. So the way to try to see if you can get in is to find out who the RDs that you

might know are, or just, you know, go online and look up lists or something like that

and then make contacts and show your stuff and see if you can get nominated. Then there's a

formal process for that but it's not just you apply online or call somebody on the phone you

you have to get nominated by a microsoft person or another rd yeah and you definitely you definitely

have to have a community presence big community presence you have to have leaders leadership

skills you have to have good writing and speaking skills because you are presenting in a part of a

group which is elite right these all these guys i see most of rd they run their own companies

a majority of them I think I would say run their own companies or work for a large corporation

so they have good experience so yeah if you are a young person either art is probably not good

for you it's very you know it's definitely for experienced people I would say so yeah yeah so

Todd let's go to move to our next topic I believe you are in Atlanta I'm in Atlanta yeah so how are

things they are doing this pandemic, Lena? And what are you, I know you, everybody's working from

home. What do you do personally to, you know, wake up every day, get yourself motivated and

like, you know what, I'm going to be productive today. Well, in Georgia, we've been, we've been

we've done pretty well compared to most of the U.S. until maybe very recently in the last few weeks

In the last few weeks, the hospitals have filled up just like you see

You can go online and you'll see almost every hospital is called like a diversion hospital

meaning don't come here unless, you know, they'll divert you to other hospitals outside the Atlanta area

It's certainly not even close to being one of the worst states, but it's ramping up a little

But we've gotten off fairly easy so far. I don't really know why

It seems almost randomly it hits different states or different population centers at one time

In terms of working from home, one of the great things about WinElect is our entire company has always been built on remote work

So we have a formal office. It's actually a pretty nice office at the perimeter

But, you know, I would go in there twice a week. That's all I would do

So the company was built from the start where everybody worked from home unless you had to go into a customer site, which some customers you had to

and everybody worked from home normally and all the work done for customers was 90%

Let's say 80% remote, which has gone, of course, now to 100% remote

The only change that's been even slightly noticeable in terms of how we operate is in training

because 95% of our training was what we call ILT, instructor-led training in person at customer sites

And luckily, in about a year and a half before the pandemic, we began to change and take advantage of all the virtual technology

and started delivering even our training more and more virtually. Not much, but we kind of used GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar

and all these tools and just started to experiment with it and started doing it

So when the pandemic hit and nobody was going to do training in person

We had luckily just by chance converted a lot of our gotten experience in training

So training instructor led training went virtual, but we already knew how to do it

So the impact, interestingly enough to us and how we work was almost, I would say it's almost zero

We were built that way from 20 years ago. So it wasn't much of a transition for us in that sense

Yeah, I see a lot of IT companies, you know, whoever had at least some kind of, you know

remote work, they just, you know, expanded on that. And, you know, I see companies like, you know

local companies here in Philadelphia, Comcast and big company, IBX and IBC and banks and big

they're like, oh, everybody's saying now, they're shipping your laptop, they're giving you all the

stuff you need it is 700 for your supplies just work from home yeah we did do um a lot of prep for

it which i can talk about in a minute but it was really interesting i don't know if you were um if

you participated mahesh but we did a lot of community things when this first hit because i

do have friends that you know that own their companies that went out of business or that cut

I mean, one CEO I was talking to said, we've lost 50% of our customers and I'm laying off 50% of our staff next week because they didn't know how to work remotely

They just weren't set up to do that. And it's very much dependent on your customer list

So to give an example, one, 80% of their customers were airlines

And if you remember what happened when the pandemic hit, that just ended. another had 75 plus percent of their customer base was retail like macy's you know what happened

with them so um we thought the same thing was going to happen to us and i can talk about that

if you want of what we did to prepare for it but there's a randomness aspect to how it affected

people and there is how are you set up for this new remote world aspect which we again were like

that from the beginning so we had no transition but others had a really hard time because they

just weren't set up to remote to work remotely they just didn't know how to do it yeah yeah yeah

um so we have some questions coming up uh we'll take one question because it's related to what

we're talking right now but we'll take more questions in the second half uh i think deep

has a question uh simon you want to put up the question yeah say i think um he wants to you know

he's asking this question if you have to be mct to become a trainer uh i think he's more focusing

on trainer for software developers, you know, or join your team or, you know, become a trainer

for a company. Yeah, though, I can give you a really long, interesting answer, or I'm trying

to decide if I should give you a shorter answer, because... No, we have time, so feel free to

because, you know, maybe you want to be in the middle. Okay, so one interesting thing about us

is until two years ago, so first 18 years of our existence, we did not do any official

Microsoft curriculum training, which we used to call mock, Microsoft official curriculum. So if you had a

certification, you wanted to get a certification in something, we didn't do

any of that. All of our training was proprietary content. It's from the

guys who wrote those books, and it was It still is better than anything out there

So not one person in all those 18 years, maybe one or two that we didn't even know about, had their MCT

Didn't have to be an MCT if you're not teaching Microsoft's official curriculum courses

Every couple years, Microsoft, whatever the Microsoft Learning Group was called, because now it's called MS Learn, but it was called something else

It was called something else. It used to be called EEG, the Engineering Excellence Group. They would say, blah, blah, blah

Why aren't you a learning partner? Because you're everything else. and I'd be like, I'm happy to be a learning partner

but you're making everybody become MCTs and we're already the best instructors out there

which you acknowledge and we teach you guys and they're like, oh, you have to be an MCT

to get in the program. We'd be like, well, not really interested. But two years ago, we decided that we would finally join up

and we became like a Microsoft Silver or Gold learning partner and we started to have everybody

get MCTs. So that's, and we are a learning partner right now

managed Microsoft Learning Partner, and we are now finally doing Microsoft certs and things like

that. So that was a long answer. The much shorter answer is, if you're teaching just content that's

not Microsoft official, like Microsoft's official certification courses, you don't have to be an MCT

If you're teaching those courses, Microsoft requires you, in most cases, to be an MCT

which is not that hard to do, but they require it. So you kind of decide, what do you teach

What do you want? What do you want to do? And then you can decide you want to be an MCT

Yeah. So as long as you have your customers, you know, you can find work

That's fine. But I believe if you have MCT, I'm sure some companies would prefer that

It's kind of, you know, it becomes your credentials. Like, okay, so you did some work

If they know you already and they're your existing client, I guess you don't need MCT to be a

No, I totally agree. If you're going to be building up your business or you want to get into that field

the first thing I would do is get certified in that field

And if it's training, I would absolutely get an MCT. I was more talking about officially what do you have to have

Well, you have to have an MCT to teach those courses. But if that's what you want to be, which is a great career field

I mean we have dozens of them that work for me right now, I would absolutely get your MCT

Yeah, yeah. So welcome to the show. I see more people have joined us

we have some questions coming up in the show today in the growth mindset

we have guest Todd Pine he's the president of Winintellect is like a

training slash software consulting firm and I believe you also hire people

you hire software developers you hire senior leaders senior architects and other positions

we will talk that also in second half We will also take some of your questions and we're going to ask more questions

What thought can help us young guys, you know, in the growth side. So stay back and we'll be back and we're going to take like a two minute break and then 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. Thank you

All right, all right. Welcome back to the show. We have today's Tar here with us and we are taking

your questions. So, Tar, a little bit about this mindset. So, this show is more about, you know

not only just learning and asking questions from, you know, experts, but more about how do we as a

software developers change our mind and I've been in software development for my you know whatever

25 years and I remember when I start coding I'm writing code and you know we start building these

applications and our head start growing right we start thinking like whoa we are the guys we are

changing the world and we are doing this and I some of us become arrogant you know as in that's

where really you know you talk to this developer and he's in his own world and you so our focus

has been on the show is, you know, sure, you are a software developer. Sure, you're building a

product. Sure, you are helping on all that. You still can be, you know, a good, nice person. You

can have good education skills. You can have good speaking skills. You can present. You can write

And you can also grow in other parts of your professional life as well. Like you can lead

people. So, based on your, obviously, you are very experienced. You've been in a super while

do you mind sharing with us some of the things like you started you learn mistakes you made and

how did you overcome and some of the people watching they're young you know they're starting

their career have two years three years four years experience what would you advise them

so they can grow in their life wow that's a that's a large question um we need and we have we have 25

minutes so yeah we have hours for that if you want me to go over no just uh yeah um you know

there's there's so many i mean i'm somebody always likes to learn everything i mean um i actually

study every night just different courses and things just for fun but i'll try to pick and choose

there's a couple you know i was a developer like most of us were on you know on this channel

and love developing, but I always also wanted to expand and looked up to other people. So I looked

up like the people at Winolec. I didn't know they were Winolec. I just knew their names like Jeffrey

Richter, where I would see people speaking or doing something like you're doing now. And I'd be like

wow, I wish I could do that. I don't know how to write a book or I've never spoken in front of an

audience or I a developer but I like to project manage or lead I would look up to people like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates and they were very technically smart but they were business smart too So I really just wanted to do that as a passion type of thing

not just as like I want to make money type of thing. So I focused on it. I focused on the

development and being, I wanted to be the top five or 10% of developers and I got very good at it

And I got my MBA, my business master's degree in business years back because I thought if you have technical expertise and business expertise, that's just gold

I mean, that's the two completely different sides of the coin. And an MBA is it's like anything with college, right

It's kind of background learning. You don't get your degree and go, I'm smart at this

You just have background knowledge. But it's good background knowledge. You're learning about the whole business and people side and organizational side and leadership side

So I did that. And that was really fun. This is going way. This is 25 years ago, you know, Mahesh, 30 years ago

So I wanted to learn the business stuff and then I wanted to be able to speak in front of crowds

So I did, you know, a lot of what we're talking about here. I started speaking at user groups and I was terrified at the beginning, you know, just absolutely

it was horrible. But I got really good, took it to the point that I went with some other people

you might know. Three of us went to Malaysia for TechEd Southeast Asia in 2009. There was 120

speakers over the week. And I'm not making this up. The three of us got in the ratings that came

they posted it at the end of the speaker ratings. We got one, two, and three at 120. And, you know

you get very good at it. So I would say, you know, work to expand the areas that you don't do right

now, as long as you enjoy them, write articles, you'll learn a ton from that, you'll meet people

from that, speak just like you're doing now Mahesh, speak at user groups, look for other opportunities

that's a really hard and completely different skill than being a developer, explaining how

you're writing code or solving a problem in a way that people understand is completely different than

actually doing it in your room. And you will meet more people and you will have more experiences

If you're interested in the business side or the leadership side, get your, I don't know

get your Scrum Master certification, which I did just for fun. I've never done a Scrum Master work

but I have people working with me that are project managers. So I want to know what they're talking about. So I got my Scrum Master cert. Get maybe your PMO cert. Whatever areas you're interested in

get, you know, get experience in them. And I'm not saying that like to pass your test. I'm saying

you will have new experiences. You'll grow personally. You'll grow professionally. You'll

make a lot of contacts in the different groups of people you haven't. I mean, talk to Mahesh and say

I have, you know, stuff to share. Can I be on this, you know, show sometime? And then practice

your butt off. So, so you can come off, you know, well. So all of those things, you know, are things

that I did. The stories about mistakes are really much more fun. So stop me anytime. But

I'll tell you some of the, maybe a mistake or two. I'm picking up some things. I'm going to ask you

more because there's a lot of things coming in this topic. This is really gold. This right here

is the gold. Everybody who's watching the show, this is the gold you grow in life. This is what

changes your life is learning and uh really challenging yes yeah i remember i remember the

first time so this is not one of the fun learning stories but i'll just tell it anyway very short

but i thought i was pretty hot pretty good speaker um by the time i was at win elect i was an rd by

that time so i was going to find people and i can't remember where i was some company and i had

to give a talk i scheduled to give a talk and now i'm part of win elect and jeffrey richter

was also speaking because we were both at Winnipeg, but I went first. And so my boss

really, he was the owner of Winnipeg. I wasn't an owner at that point. He's in the audience and

Jeffrey Richter. He's one of the best speakers in the world. So I was a little nervous, but I'm like

I did pretty good. I gave my speech afterwards, just like I said to Jeff. So what do you think

He's like, yeah, look like you kind of winged it. I was like, so that was, that was a learning experience

That's a funny story, but I'll tell you a big learning experience. Before I came to Wynalak, the reason I got in at Wynalak was I had

I was a developer and a project manager at a company called RDA based out of

Maryland. And I, and I moved to Atlanta in 1998 to open the Southeast office

So, I mean, picked out the carpets, grew it to 40 people. So I was, I guess we called it managing director

And now that was, I mean, I had leadership a little bit being an enterprise project manager

So I was leading kind of technical teams. And I learned a lot from that. I won't go into that

But now I'm running an office and I'm the managing director and I'm hiring recruiters and salespeople and, you know, tons of technical people

And, you know, it's a real executive position for the first time. And I had my MBA

So I kind of, you know, try to take all those practices I had and I'm trying to model myself on what I saw my boss doing

He was the owner of that company. It was just a great guy. And that was a mistake for a couple of reasons

One is you should take lessons from people, take lessons from Mahesh, take lessons from me, take lessons from anybody you're working with

But you have to be yourself. If you're not yourself and you're trying to be like other people, it's not genuine and you'll screw up

so part of my problem which I didn't realize was I was trying to act like

somebody else acted yeah the other problem was I was trying to do what I

thought books had told me to do like here's how you have to be a leader you have to you know be you have to demand the most from people right you have to

you know push there's this little phrases I didn't it's not like I wrote

them down and tried to follow but it was in my head and it was quite successful

and every time anybody would quit, we had a very formalized process. We would do an exit interview

So I would do that interview because I was running the office. And I remember one year

probably my first year or second year, I had two exit interviews and they were fine, but people

weren't unhappy or disgruntled, right? But they left and I was kind of surprised, great first

place to work. And the second person at the end, he said something along the lines of

you know, hey, Todd, I just want to say, I really enjoyed working here. I like working, you know

here, you know, I like working, you know, with you. He said, you're a very fair person

but it's not enjoyable working for you. And I was like, I was just devastated

Yeah, and I was like, what do you mean? He's like you're fair. I trust you

You know, I like you personally, but it's just not an enjoyable place to work

And I talked to him about it and what I what I realized was I was trying to be my old boss It was a guy but very demanding you know boom boom boom boom which is not me at all I like to bring people along through positive positivism

which I get criticized for, by the way, sometimes. You're too nice. You're too this. There's not

enough of a wall between you, Todd, and your employees, which is what business courses will

teach you. You're the leader. You can't really be anybody's friend. You know, they'll say that

so I was trying to follow that but that's not me um and I changed in an instant and now there's so

many people that will say you're the best boss I ever worked for so this is great now this is

working out yeah no I'm not saying now just be clear I'm now not saying don't try to be like me

try to be yourself and take the lessons and everything you've learned and make it your own

which is what I did I still sometimes get criticized you know even now saying you you need

to have more of a wall up, you know, you're being too nice. You know, if you'd been more demanding

or more decisive, you know, this wouldn't have gone on for three or six more months. I'm like

I agree, but I'm okay with it. That's not me. Yeah. So those are the kind of things that you

learn over time. At least those are the lessons I took. There's many, many more mistakes I've made

over time. As I've gotten older, I'm sure you're the same. You just get more relaxed

You just kind of let things roll off your back a little more, which to me is a huge thing

When you're younger, especially, at least for me, if there's something to do, it's like

let's attack this and attack it now. And we've got to solve this. Or this person is not doing

the right thing. Let's talk with him right now. And now it's just much easier for me to not get

so upset and to just kind of take it as it comes. And we'll deal with it, but we'll deal with it

over time unless it's something that really has to be dealt with immediately. And that works for

me. And that's just changed the environment and the culture completely. Over years, it's taken me

to kind of come to this. But those are just kind of things that I would say that pop in my mind when

you ask me about mistakes you've made. There's many others, but I don't want to go on too long

or then your listeners will stop listening to me completely. No, definitely. No, this is good learning. So, you know, there are a few things I kind of

I definitely agree with that is that learning is key. Making mistakes is key. And I'm reading this

I'm almost finished this book called Growth Mindset. And this is the, she is a

Carol is the one who came up with the term growth mindset. And in growth mindset

that's how we started the show is growth mindset is all about growing your mind and mind grow mind

means that the you know neurons in your brain they only grow when you start challenging yourself

so if you are if anybody's listening they if you know you're you're growing as a child up to 17

years your brain is growing it grows you know by the time you're eight six or eight years old your

brain is almost complete as an adult but after a certain age let's say 30 stop growing and then 40

and 50 start slowing down neurons the way you grow them is by challenging yourself by learning new

things and by doing things you don't want to do and that's really this growth mindset is all about

if you want to grow in life you have to do things especially learning make mistakes um and then

other thing you said is you know Einstein said it right Einstein said it right that

call you go to college you go to college or get a degree not because of learning but you're kind

of training your mind to how to be disciplined so at a certain point you have to be disciplined

to get the you know get the things done and then you also had a you know definitely definitely

follow what you love to do rather than following others. And I just came up with a quote the other day, and it's my original, by the way

I'm proud of it. It says that if you follow others' path, you will never reach your own destination

Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you something because I just wrote an article a couple months ago

You might have seen it for Microsoft, a little blog post. It's on the Winnaleck site if you want to look at it

But this is kind of related, but the topic was what is the definition of a professional, right

Because what we're talking about is how to grow your career and what you want to be

And if you go to the Winnaleck.com website, go to blogs and search for me, you'll see it come right up

And I'm going to bring this up because it stuck with me another lesson, Mahesh, years ago

So I have to give you a little background. own. I have a lot of kind of adventure hobbies. And one of the things I do is I'm a pilot. So

I've got my license when I was 22 in college many years ago, and I'm actually a certified

flight instructor. And when you become a flight instructor, you actually have an entire course

on what it means to be a professional and how to teach, which is good for training

It's how to, because you're an instructor. How do you teach people? How do you deal with the different kinds of students you have

People learn differently. But I'm going to read this to you. It's right on my blog

Yeah. And I think Simon is finding the link too. Yep, he's going

Yep, go ahead. It says, and again, this is literally the definition of professional for a flight instructor

But it didn't say to be a flight instructor. It said, what's the definition of being a professional in your field

And I have a few bullets there, and I'm just going to read them. Use as good judgment

extended training in his or her field. We hire people all the time, Mahesh. And when they only

understand things at the surface, it's an automatic no hire. So they will say, I had so many people

so many people interview when we'll talk to them. And they say this as if it's a good thing. They're

meaning it's a good thing. They're like, I learned really fast. So we'll ask them things and they

won't know and will say well i learned enough to to do the job i have to do for that particular

project you know i i learned exactly enough to do that particular job they're not learning deep

they're just learning at the surface so if you're a professional do you want to go to a doctor who

just knows stuff at the surface but he didn't bother to learn all these other things he's going

to mess up he's going to make a wrong so three uses regional logic four has a code of ethics

Five, studies, researches, and keeps up to date with his or her field, which I just talked about

Six, provides a service. So there's a couple other quotes in there

Aviation instructors should be constantly alert for ways to improve the services they provide, their effectiveness, and their qualifications

So it's literally cut and pasted from my flight instructor book of what it means to be a professional

And I read that a long time ago, and it always made an impression for me because what does the word professional mean

There's lots of definitions, right? And we just kind of use it all the time

Yeah, I'm a professional. I'm a professional developer. Well, a lot of times all the people mean by that is I make money that way

Yeah, I work for a company. Yeah, that's what I mean. I work for a company Yeah that not what professional means in the context you and I are talking about So I would urge you guys you don have to read my blog article but just take a look at those bullets Because that how I started when I read that

That's how I started to think about myself is that's completely true. I need to be doing that to call myself professional

Because before that, I just thought it means not being flip about it

I just thought it means, oh, I make money at whatever I'm doing. And that's not what it's supposed to mean

yeah we definitely I think Simon we should also share this on our social media this looks like

definitely a good blog course I did see that um by the way so there's a few other things that's

great let's go on I think there's a few other things before we we have we have eight more

minutes you know obviously we respect the time here on the show let's take some questions Simon

you want to take some questions from our viewers I know we won't be able to cover most of them

but here's a question from Robbie. Can you read this, Todd? Yeah

Yeah. I still find publishing websites or apps, i.e. Xamarin, to Linux servers, go places are still not as easy as it could be

Hmm. So we actually have a big Xamarin practice. We always have a couple of Xamarin things going on at one time

as we do now, and Xamarin is our preferred mobile development platform

because it's cross-platform. um hmm but i'm not the person to ask about that i do know that every time we have to publish

something it's an effort um yeah it's an effort you have to meet all these requirements it's

rejected then you have to meet them again um it's gotten i was going to say it's gotten much better

but what i think has happened is our guys have gotten much more experienced and you know overcoming

all the obstacles. But unfortunately, I'm not an expert on that. I did want to just bring up one

thing just in case you wanted to go there, Mahesh, which is we didn't really talk about

the COVID pandemic, you know, stuff. So I'm okay with just answering questions

but I just kind of realized we never hit that topic about like how we... No, go ahead. Let's spend a little couple of minutes on that. I have to take one more question

And if you have time, we can, you know, extend five extra minutes. That's not a problem. There's

one more question. Let's take that. So we try to, you know, mix things up. Yeah, there's another

question. I think this talk about work from home. Is it good for a company to have work from home

for, I guess, forever? Or what's the impact do you see? So I might not be the right person to ask

because we've always done work from home our entire history, even before I came here. And

it's one of the things that I loved about Winnelec before I took the job of like, all right, you know

get to work from home because in my previous job for quite a while, I had to go in every

single day to the office. And in the early days, we had to wear a suit, I had a little plaque on the

side of the door like you do, like, you know, in the old days, if you're a young guy, that's how

it used to be. When we had a customer at, oh gosh, it wasn't UPS, was it? Anyway, everybody had to

wear a sport coat. You can only take it off when you sat in your cube, that kind of a thing. So

So I think it's, I don't want to say that's the way it should be because different people are different

We have people at the company, one in particular, who doesn't like working at home

I heard you talking about at the beginning of the show. They just like to be around people. I'll give you a great example from my company, Jeffrey Richter, one of the founders

We all work from home. And increasingly, he started to say, I'm just lonely

I want to be around teams and people. and he went to work for a Microsoft team

where he goes into work, well, before the pandemic every day and has an office and he loves that

So there's no one right answer. So when you say, is it good? I would say it's awesome for me

and every single person except one at Wentelec loves the fact that they work from home

If they ever had to go in the office every day, they'd quit. So it's not a, is it good or not

I think, I don't think I know. It's a completely viable, wonderful way to work

As long as you have employees that, as you said, have a mindset that they like that

For me and everybody that works here, working from home means people working harder because there's nothing to stop you to make you go home at the end of the day

You'll stay up till 1 a.m. I do it every every night. But if you have the wrong person that doesn't like it, they might be hard to focus and they might not like it or you might have trouble getting to work

I can tell you we never, ever had that problem because we hire people that love development and love code

And if you sit them at home, they'll just keep on working forever. So I love it

Yeah, I think right. Hiring is important. And, you know, it's the mindset

Even I'm going to tell everybody who's watching this show, if you are working for a company and you are finding an excuse not to do the work and not to work hard

actually, you are harming yourself because you are building this habit. it's going to become your habit for life rather than that company because habits are not just for

one company or other so you gotta if you push yourself to work and do the work even though you

don't like you're telling your brain and training your mind that's what it is all about uh yeah let's

talk about the COVID thing um you know and then I have a few other questions I want to talk about

your winning intellect now what's going on there what you're doing there maybe our audience want

to check it out. And if you are hiring anybody, what kind of people you look for? Those are a

couple of topics I had. For the pandemic, so just to kind of, you know, start with the conclusion

It's been a, it's ended up being a great year for us. We've grown. We've actually hired six people

five or six people over the year. But when it hit, we literally thought we're going to go out of

business. I mean, because if you remember that March, April timeframe, I mean, we were making

money, but it wasn't those one of those great quarters at the time. It was just like, yeah

we're going to make a little money. And if things went bad, and we, I did talk to, as I said

multiple friends who were on the verge of going out of business at the time, and it was all panic

mode. So we, we went into, you know, a big effort to prepare. And we actually did have two customers

one paused the 600k SOW meaning we were about to sign and they said well we just got to wait

so it wasn't canceled it was just all of a sudden we had a bunch of people ready to work

and get started like a week later and that was on pause and at the same time one of our customers

who is retail their entire business is retail they were terrified and they caught up and they said we

are asking every vendor for a 20-25% rate cut. We don't know what's going to happen. Our customers

are canceling our contracts, one after the other using force majeure, which means force of nature

And that was their whole business. So those happened within two weeks of each other

And everybody was in panic mode. And we literally thought this is it. So what did we do to prepare

well, and I'm not sure how helpful this is. First is financial. That's number

one. So we put a whole bunch of financial plans in place

We got lines of credit. We already had lines of credits, but they were zero balance

We didn't use any of it. Always for all these years just in case. Well, we maxed

out to half a million dollars. We just took all the money out, put it in the bank in case we needed

it. We never spent a dollar, by the way. But the way banks work, if you want to get into business

is you have all these loans available to you until you need it. The minute you need it

they look at you and go, oh, you're in financial trouble. You need a loan and they won't give it to

you. So you get it out before you need it. So we did all that. That's a good learning. That's a

good learning. Yeah. Yeah. Those are banks for you. So we took all that money out, put it in the

bank. We already had the remote learning piece down, but we really accelerated the training part

As I said, to make that virtual, we'd just been experimenting and we just went all virtual with

that. We talked to all the people. This is kind of the people part of it and had some conference

calls, all hands meetings, and just let them know as leaders that, you know, here's what we're

facing, just dead honesty. We don't know, but this is what could happen. And we said, we're going to

do everything we can to support the people first. And that would have included it never happened

if me and Jeff had to literally just take no salary for a while. That's great

So we just kind of let them know we're on your side. We can't promise anything

but we're not going to be the unfeeling, you know, corporate management. And then we did

community nurture. I think you might've participated in some of these, like me and Adam

If you know Adam Kogan, another RD, RDs in pain, a community thing where we did two or three of those

There's another one coming up soon where we just shared just what you and I are doing

How are you handling? What are you doing? What steps are you taking so I can learn from you? So we nurtured the community. And then we also kept people busy

So if they weren't on a project, we doubled down on all their objectives and expanding their learning

because people that are busy and that are doing things in code and dev and getting objectives and bonuses

they're happy. If they're sitting around thinking, doing this, you'll have trouble

So those are the five things that we did. It turned out that we had a little bit of a lull

and then it really took off again because we could already do everything remote

So we actually had an advantage over the other vendors that couldn't deliver training virtually

or that had to be on site. If you're, I'm trying to think, if you're like Avanade

and you have 30, 50 people at Delta down in Atlanta, on which they did and all of a sudden you can be on you have a problem But you a Minelac and that how you work you don So all that kind of worked Yeah No that great It looks like that great that things work out

And I see more and more companies are adapting and I don't see much impact

It was, you said, for three months, six months, four months, there was a panic because all work was stopped

Like we had SOW that was ready to sign, as you said. They're like, no, they actually stopped the whole new projects for the year 2020

It's because there was this more in like wait and see more. You don't know what's going to happen

But it looks like things like business-wise, especially on the IT, didn't impact a lot

So we have one more question. So let's take this one more question. It's kind of good

I think everybody should learn from this. It's from Atul. Simon, you want to put up this question here

And this is kind of good for you already kind of covered this. But how do you keep up with new technology

Because there's so much coming every day, literally. and I also find myself sometimes like my head wants to blow up

because I'm learning so much and there's still not enough time. So how do you keep up with that

Yeah, I have a really bad answer that I don't think people will like. If you remember that definition of professional saying

always keep up with advances in your field, that's really difficult. It's probably more challenging in our field than any other

because the technology changes come so fast and furious. I don't care what it is

If you're Angular, it's going to be your next version of Angular. And then it's going to be React and it's going to be Vue

Then it's going to be the next slide. It's just whatever it is. So what we do for people is we give them objectives every year, paid objectives, $1,000, $3,000

Get your shirt in this. Whatever you're doing, learn. But the real question is, well, how do you do that

And our answer is not one you're going to like. Because the answer is you do it in your off hours

I mean, I stay up every night. I like to work. So on the weekends, if there's something cool, I'll, you know, I'm not saying I work eight hours a day on a Saturday, but I play around all the time and I have to do it off hours. Now we get complaints sometimes saying you want us to learn all this stuff, but you won't pay us to do it. And by that, they mean just have me on the bench and take a week or a month and let me learn this stuff. And I do have friends that are RDs that actually do that for people

And so I mean, I'm just telling you how we do it

And I'm impressed with that. And I'd be like, I'd like to work there

I think it's a great company, but there are profits are also much slimmer than ours So for us we hire people that love to learn They going to do it even if I don tell them to But they have to do it If they on the bench fine right

They can just learn at their leisure. But if they're working for a year on a project, which most are, yeah, you got to do it on your

off hours because you have to keep up. And when they say, I want to be paid for it, I'm like, I'm pretty sure you have a six-figure

base salary and I expect some things from you, just base things as part of that. And one of those

is keep up with the technology that you're supposed to be developing. So that's why I said

it's not necessarily the nicest answer, but it's always worked out for us. We hire people that are

going to do it anyway. But I think people don't understand if you're learning something, it's

really more for you than the company because, you know, you may leave tomorrow, right? There's no

The company is not going to say you're going to work with us 30 years, right? Learning is actually for themselves

That's what I see. That's the perfect answer because what I tell them in their offer letter

and when we have discussions in their interviewer each year is all these objectives

you know, if you're SQL Server, learn Cosmos DB, you know, if you're Angular, learn React, you know, whatever

It's expand whatever your area is because, and this is exactly what I say

It's what you just said. I said, this is really good for you at the company because you can be put on more and different projects

You're more available. But I say directly to them, it's also good for you in your career, because if you ever leave and I don't want you to ever leave

But if you do, you have more abilities. And I actually say that to them. So what you said is the perfect answer. If you think of it is I'm only going to do something by company

What makes me learn. Well, you're not going to survive at Winnelecht anyway, because that's just not, you know, who we hire

We hire people that if I, you know, I have to try to prevent them from learning because they're going to go off on the weekend and learn the newest, you know, JavaScript library on their own anyway

But, yeah, you gave a perfect answer. It's the same answer I give. Great. So, yeah, we are almost running out of time

I have two more questions for you. They are personal. So number one, what do you miss the most during this pandemic

And what is the first thing you will go do once everybody gets shot and you are allowed to go out there and do anything you want

I would guess I miss the travel. I like to travel. And that has all stopped

So you know we usually take a vacation a year somewhere You know we might go to the Caribbean or whatever so the travels really stopped I miss going out to dinner all the time I still very occasionally do my wife works for the

CDC in the United States okay okay she's busy she's been busy a lot yeah she will not she is

because it's all hands on deck but she will not she's hardcore she won't go out anywhere I can't

can't see my parents who live in Florida. They're in their 80s. So I miss all that. So the first

thing I will probably do is travel and go see my parents. Okay. Well, that's great. That's great

We all wish to go see our loved ones, you know, once start traveling. Well, that was a great show

Todd. I think we enjoy. I learned a lot from your, you know, your experience and hopefully our

audience learn a lot. Anything else you want to say anything to our user base here? In the end

that's you, and then we'll conclude this. Only that my background is not as a software guy

My background is in electroengineering and electrophysics and charged particle beams. And I'm not trying to do this as a pep talk, but we work in an incredible field

It's fun. It's always changing. There's opportunity. I've always said, if you're a developer

you will always have the opportunity for a job. So we're in a great field

Enjoy it. Take advantage of it. And grow as much as you can. And have a good time

All right. Thank you so much, Todd, for coming here. I know it was short notice

It was literally yesterday. Yesterday. Thank you so much. And we would love to have you again in the future

Anything else we can help you if you're launching a new program or hiring something, anything we can do, just let us know

All right. Thanks, Mahesh. And thank you all for watching us. And we will conclude the show

We'll see you next Friday, 10 a.m. again