Ep 56 Goal Setting
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[00:00:00] If you are a professional, a busy professional, especially. And you have been trying to learn to code for maybe six months, three, one year, however long it is, but you feel that you are quite confused and stuck and you're not making progress and you're definitely not getting interviews, then you're probably trying to understand, Hey, why is this happening?
And that's a bit of a struggle to understand why this is happening to you. Right? Why do I have. These set of problems. Now, most people unfortunately listen to the wrong online advice because it's convenient, it's easy to get the wrong advice, just like it's easy to get sugary food. Um, and often this wrong advice comes in the form of blogs or influencers or coding, cost creators, for example, because they have something to sell.
And this easy access to the wrong information ends up making you ignore pretty much the only data or information that matters, which is what the market wants. Now, the reason that it's so easy to do is because you don't have. A clear set of goals when it comes to [00:01:00] what it means to succeed at learning to code or becoming a professional developer.
And that's probably why you've spent hundreds of hours learning programming concepts and languages and frameworks and tools and all that. And you know, building. Portfolio projects and all that, and, and you're not actually any closer to your goal as you thought you would be. It's usually because of per goal setting right now, it's entirely possible that you've been spending all your time effectively.
And I hate to break this to you training for a marathon, when actually what you should have been doing is playing chess. Right. And the reason I use that metaphor is there's so much effort required to playing, uh, to training for a marathon. But when you're playing chess, it's somewhat less effort. It's more strategic, right?
The right moves at the right time. And I genuinely think that career changes like that, when I had to make the change from a 37, 30 8-year-old lawyer to learn to code and then, you know, eventually go to being a Google engineer, it wasn't. Brute force or sure effort that was [00:02:00] absolutely necessary, like efforts necessary.
But you also have to be strategic, right? The old thing about you can't just work hard or smart. You've gotta work smartly and hard at the same time. You've gotta work hard at the smart things. Now, this is the problem that anyone, everyone. Calcium. Calcium. Now, this is the problem that every one of my mentees in, in the Inner Circle program, no exception has faced, right?
And so I'm about to reveal to you something from the Inner Circle Program. It's what I call the career GPS framework. This strategy, which I teach my students and my mentees completely. Eliminates, eliminates the problem of tutorial overwhelm for my students, and ends up getting them hired three to four times faster than the usual ways because they have clear goals they're not meandering about and honestly, they may not even need to learn some of that dreaded data structures and algorithm DSA stuff, right?
Often we don't need to do that. So we'll dive into that in a moment.[00:03:00]
Now, the reason why I say goal setting is so important is because often the solution isn't learning more code. It's actually learning the right types of things that de-risks you in the eyes of the hiring manager. And that's what setting right goals is all about. Unfortunately, most careers changes skip through the most critical skip, um.
Calcium critical step, which is getting ultra clear on exactly what kind of coding career you want. 'cause without specific goals, every tutorial feels important. But then nothing feels like progress when you've burnt hundreds of hours in it, right? If, however, you nail your goal setting, then everything changes because now you know exactly what to learn, and more importantly, what to ignore, and so you can measure your progress against what you know to be important.
Now, I'm gonna show you now here on the screen are the seven stages of career change that I walk my students and mentees through in [00:04:00] the inner circle. Program. Right? You'll notice that most people get stuck on stage three, which is the learning to code stuff, but they haven't done stage one. Right? Why is it important to do stage one, which is goal setting?
Why is it so important? Right? What do you get when you do that stage, right? Well. Very simply, what happens is coding becomes fun, energizing, and addictive. It doesn't become like this draining, busy work that you're struggling and battling with, right? And then the net result of this is that every hour of study, and you're a busy professional, you don't have a ton of free time.
Your competitors or the other software engineers or computer science grads may be doing this five, 10 hours a day. You may have two hours a day, so every hour of study has to move you measurably. Closer to that feeling of, okay, I'm starting to get this. I'm getting how this works, right? You start to get that wind beneath your wings because without that confidence.
You are not gonna convince a hiring manager that you're worth the hire because confidence is really important in the in to [00:05:00] get a job offer. And how can you feel confident when your time and effort is being dispersed too widely? Right? The other benefit of getting goal setting right, is you are able to show hiring managers and the recruiters that you are the person for that specific role, right?
So you stop competing with the general mark market of general coders and you become in the eyes of the hiring manager or the hire. The obvious choice for that role overall. When you get all these pieces right, what happens is day to day, the process becomes less struggle and much more enjoyable, right?
There's less overwhelm, which means you naturally make more progress. 'cause when you do the right things at the right time in the right order, progress is inevitable. More progress then builds more confidence because daily you're starting to see results and you're starting to see the effect of doing the right thing at the right time.
You, it's like going to the gym and seeing the, seeing the change in your body. And you see this on a day to day or week to week basis. And once you see concrete progress, how can you not have momentum that's gonna inspire [00:06:00] you to momentum, right? Um, calcium. That's going to inspire you to momentum, and you don't need to rely on motivation, which can come and go.
You just have the momentum, right? Momentum is so much better than mo, than motivation. And then after all that, what happens is it becomes, it's like physics. It becomes a question of, well, when are you gonna succeed? Not if you're going to succeed, then it becomes a question of time, not if huge unlock right, but unfortunately, unfortunately.
People focus on the wrong things and they solve what is the most obvious problem in front of them that the whole world tells them is the problem to solve. But just because it's the most obvious problem. It's not the most important problem or worse, they solve the wrong problem right now, the wrong and the obvious problem, which is wrong, is to think that your problem is learning to code.
And so when you think that's the problem, what do you try to do to solve it? Well, you try and learn more and more types of coding things, right? You feel that's the solution to feelings, [00:07:00] overwhelmed or stuck, left out, or you know you have fomo or you're feeling not good enough and you think if I just do more of this, it'll be better.
Big mistake. And obviously when you think about it, it's not true. So if you are struggling to get jobs. But you've known, you know how to code. The problem is not learning more code. That's like saying if nobody comes to my shop, the, the solution is to get more stock and use up cash to buy more stock and put more things on the shelf.
No, that's the wrong solution. The, the, the problem is people don't even know your shop exists. Okay. Now there are other reasons why people fail, right? So vague goals, we've talked about that and, and an example of a vague goal is I want a coding job. Well, what kind. You know, any coding job is not an answer because that's equivalent to Korea suicide.
That's like saying, I want to migrate to Canada. Well. Maybe, or I wanna migrate to the us Well, maybe, but chances are you wanna migrate to a specific city or a specific area in these countries, or pick any country, right? It [00:08:00] doesn't matter which country you go to, you're not actually migrating to a country.
You need to migrate down to the city level. And then when you get there, you need to figure out which street you wanna live on. That's kind of the level of detail you need when you un, when you decide you wanna change career. 'cause it's a risky move, changing careers, right? So vague goals. Major reason why people fail.
'cause they'll end up, they'll end up in the US or Canada or Russia or wherever they want to go, but they'll end up in the wrong city and then they're stuck there, right? So that's not how you want to think about this. The number two reason people feel, uh, people fail is that they get stuck on that, you know, the classic tutorial treadmill tutorial hell, but.
What that does is it gives you these dopamine hits. It makes you feel productive, but not making progress, right? So you are busy but not making progress and you feel validated because it releases dopamine, but the market doesn't care because you're not good enough of the market yet. The other reason people fail, um, is the shiny object syndrome, which also happens when you have weak goals, right?
Because you will chase new frameworks. Because you're always thinking, [00:09:00] Hey, maybe this one will click, because you're guessing you've not set goals, you're guessing your way to success. And fourth, you always have the problem of zero market research. So if you're building skills in a vacuum, you're then hoping that someone will want them.
Or if you're building skills based entirely in your interest or some random blogs or social media trend that you're seeing, then you're going to build the skills that the market may not actually wanna absorb. A classic example of this was the. Massive surge in 23, 20 24 in cybersecurity. Do you see it much anymore?
It's died out. Because what happens is social media builds this bubble, this echo chamber where you see everybody getting interested in, in, in, uh, cybersecurity. And you think this is a massive movement. It was always there. It'll always be very important, but that bubble is very exaggerated. And so people built all these skills that.
The market didn't end up needing 'cause it had most of the skills it needed, and it'll just, the market gets efficient after a while, so if you don't research the market, you're gonna get stuck in that. And finally, the reason why people fail so much, again related to not having good goals, is [00:10:00] they have no progress metrics.
You cannot tell if you're 90% ready for your first interview or 10% ready for your first interview. You don't even know what the finish line should be. Right, because you have no progress metrics, because you have no clear goals. Now, this is incredibly demoralizing, right? It's incredibly demoralizing because all through this, you're constantly feeling like you're not good enough, and what's that gonna do?
That's gonna make you feel like that there's something missing, right? When people feel not good enough at anything, forget code. Anything in life. They think that there's some secret, they're so desperate for a solution that they think that there's some secret sauce, secret resource, or trick or magic bullet, just something for the pain relief.
And of course, you'll have hundreds of marketers very happy to sell you some snake oil that will soothe your pain, right? But that's not how the real marketplace works, because there is no magic bullet. There is no secret resource whether you're doing Python or Java. It's the same for everybody. English is the same for everybody.
It doesn't matter which textbook you learn it from, guys, it's the same language, [00:11:00] right? So there is no secret bullet. The only reason you feel that way is because without clear goals, you're not making progress. And so you think that the lack of progress is a symptom of you missing something important and.
Maybe, but it's not the code. It's, you're missing pre clear goals. That's the only thing you're missing and a plan to achieve those specific goals, right? So the solution that I teach in, in, in the Inner Circle program to the students is what I call the career GPS framework. Now, there are only three parts to it, right?
And I'm gonna break down each of the paths over the next few minutes, right? Step one is. By the way, I will say this when I break it down, you'll think, gosh, obviously this is so obvious 'cause it's kind of obvious and intuitive in common sense, but we just don't think about it. So step one is destination mapping, right?
You need to get. Stupidly uncomfortably, unbelievably specific about your target role and saying, I don't know enough about it, is not an excuse. Okay? So you can't just say, I wanna be a front end developer, or I want to be, you know, a, a, a developer. You need to say, I want to be a developer using these technologies [00:12:00] in a mid-sized.
This kind of company. It could be a, a manufacturing company, it could be an accounting company, it could be an agency, it could be a software as a service company, it could be a software tech company, right? I wanna be doing, like, for example, I want to be a React developer or a, uh, an Angular developer at a mid-sized, you know, 500 or less people, SaaS company, building, customer dashboards.
You need to get that specific because each of those aspects in that goal statement requires sub goals to be achieved. Okay? This also forces you to do research. On actual job postings. We spend a lot of time in this, in the, in the, uh, inner circle program is what I call market research. It's a multi-week skill program, right?
So you need to not follow generic roadmaps and you'll get, you'll see why. When I tell you about reason number or step number three, um, generic roadmaps don't work. Okay? Now, many of you're gonna say, but I don't know enough to be specific, right? That is also true of people who today are getting hired.
There was a time when they weren't specific enough. Right, [00:13:00] and they will get more specific and then they will get the role. So yes, right now you may not know enough, but that's the starting point for everybody. So those who've got the success had to go through that phase as well. So absolutely. You may not know enough yet.
Right. That's why market research gets you to a stage where you know enough and in a few months you'll be very clear. Then you build a plan. There's no point buying all the ingredients and filling up your cupboard when you not very clear what dish you want to cook, right? 'cause everything else is waste and it's a perishable skill.
Coding gets outdated. That's one of the fun things about engineering, is you need to learn a lot all the time because it moves so fast. So if you are learning the wrong thing. That knowledge is going to get stale very quickly and not help you. It's gonna be a total waste of time. Okay, number two, the number two step in the GPS framework that I talk about.
Um, you know, the career GPS framework, calcium, calcium. Now, step number two in the career GPS framework [00:14:00] is route planning or route planning, depending on how you pronounce it. So what you need to do is you need to reverse engineer based on the destination. Remember, the first step was destination mapping, right?
So the second step is route planning. You need to plan your route to the destination, but you need to work backwards. You need to reverse engineer the exact skills those types of roles require. And then here's the trick. Right. We call this the minimum effective dose in the program. We focus only on the minimum viable skills, not the most.
Don't acquire as many skills as you can. Acquire the minimum necessary, not nice to have necessary for that specific destination goal, which means you have to train yourself to ignore 90% of what coding bootcamps, computer science schools, YouTube gurus, all of that teach you. Now, for those of you who've been through college, you'll see that this is true.
Every profession. It's not specific to coding. For example, when I went to law school, what I used in the real world was about 15, maybe 20% of what I learned in, in, in law school. And it's not like that [00:15:00] 20% was enough. In the real world, I had to learn a bunch of new skills too. No matter what you're doing, if you've been a college of school, you've probably seen this yourself.
The real world requires you to learn new things. And what you did learn as part of your formal, as part of your formal qualification was somewhat useful, but no way enough. So clearly there's more to be learned. So you wanna learn the minimum so that you can get into the industry, learn on the job, which means you're getting paid to learn the rest that you need.
Okay, so focus on the minimum skills. That's what route planning looks like now. Very, very important point. You're gonna say, well, there's too much to research. Where do I start? Right? Honestly, 30 minutes of researching will give you more clarity, and I'm not saying 30 minutes is enough. I'm just using this as an illustration.
30 minutes. Let's say you do 30 minutes for five days. Okay, that's 150 minutes. It's two and a half hours of research. I can guarantee that two and a half hours of research will save you about 50 hours of random tutorials and jumping around, guaranteed. Okay? So the [00:16:00] fact that there's too much research is not an excuse because you're actually trying to save time.
And as a busy professional, 'cause remember, I keep addressing you guys, busy professionals trying to change career and become coders. Every hour you save is a huge advantage. 'cause your competition doesn't have the same busy schedule you do. 'cause most of your competition are established software developers, not career changes like you.
You're competing in a market. You are the new entrant. Everybody else there has been doing this for a while. Okay, now the most important step for rule two on route planning. Understanding your starting point. Now, when you think about it, it's so obvious when you put in, I don't know, a destination on Google Maps, have you ever tried to turn off your GPS?
It won't work. It'll say, we don't know where you're starting from, so I can't tell you how to get to your destination. It's so obvious, right? This is why generic advice online doesn't work. They don't know where you're starting from. 'cause here's the truth, guys. London may be north for some people in Europe, but it's south for other people in the north of Europe.
London is not the same way for everybody, [00:17:00] okay? If you're in the US you have to head east. If you're like me in in AsiaPac, you need to head west. If you're in nowhere, you need to head south. I mean, it's so obvious when you think about it. So the most important step is to know your starting point. In the Inner Circle program, we call this the baselining exercise.
Every student has to go through it, and sometimes students have to go through two or three iterations of the baselining exercise. I.
The reason they need to do two or three times sometimes is because we need to actually be very careful and calibrate, okay, roughly what level is this person at? Because that's their starting point. How do we calculate the route to the destination if we don't know their starting point? Right? So that's step two.
Step two is route planning. Step one, destination mapping, step two, route planning. Step step three is progress tracking. Very, very important. So this is, you know, your starting point. You know your ending point. You've got your roadmap right now. How do you stay consistent, especially when you're busy and [00:18:00] you have family and jobs and you know, how do you manage to learn on a busy schedule?
Well, you do what in the program we call lead indicators and lag indicators. Now, this is something I learned from the book, three Disciplines of Ex Execution, which I learned when I was an executive, right? I had to use that in my team. So what you wanna do is. These are my intended input hours or effort.
This is what I'm gonna do this week for this many hours to achieve this goal. And then at the end of the week, you reflect back and say, okay, this was the intended effort and the hours and the goals. How much did I actually achieve as a percentage of that, right? Some people will overshoot, okay? For my goal was to do 10 hours.
This week I did 12. Great. You overshot by 20%. You'll find most people undershoot, right? So they have an intention, but they never hit the actual, um, goal. And so what ends up happening is whatever your goal is, people will hit about 70 to 80% of it unless they're very driven. But that's data. If you are only able to eat, hit 80% of your goals, that means you're not doing something right.
Either your goal setting's wrong or your efforts not enough, or your ability to [00:19:00] actually stick to the plans, not enough, right? All of these are different clues for different problems. So that's why in the Inner Circle program, I spent about two months. Two months auditing each week for my student. Just how the time is going.
We analyze and analyze and analyze. 'cause one single week is not enough. 'cause weeks change, right? Different factors in different weeks. So over enough time we'll get a sense of, okay, what hap, what are the kinds of interruptions, the kind of problems people have? What is a plan? How do we anticipate, prevent, or manage those leaks of time?
Right now, the importance of this is. This is how you get to calculate when you're going to be job ready, right? So you've gotta stop guessing and you start measuring, right? It takes a lot of hours, not days. 'cause you could say, oh, can you learn to code in six months? Well, it depends. In six months, 180 days are you doing one hour a day?
That's 180 hours. That's not a lot over six months. But someone who's doing five hours. That's a lot of time, right? That's what, 900 hours? Um, five times 18. Yeah. So, you know, 900 hours. Completely different game, right? [00:20:00] So yeah, you can do it in six months, but it depends on the hours. Now a lot of people are gonna say, well, I don't have time for tracking.
Well, if you don't have time for tracking, then I'm, I've got some bad news for you. You are gonna waste time, you're gonna waste the time you don't have doing the wrong things. Quite simply because tracking saves you months of wasted effort. Months. I'm not exaggerating months, I'm talking hundreds of hours, right?
If you're a busy professional and you're serious about career change, you do not have a single time hour to waste tracking reduces time wastage. So actually, I would say. You don't have the time to not track. You cannot afford to not track. Okay? Now, the benefits of this three point framework, this career, GPS framework, is that it helps transform you from someone who knows some coding into someone who is employable and employs immediately recognize.
As a solution to their specific problem because you have research and understood their problem, and you have built yourself to be that solution. Okay? Which means you [00:21:00] stop competing with the general talent pool of the coding market, and you start competing in your chosen niche or niche, however you pronounce it, and.
That means there's gonna be dramatically less competition in the eyes of the hiring manager. It doesn't matter what you think, at the end of the day, the job comes from the hiring manager. They've gotta have an opinion of you. They've gotta think you're not risky. They've gotta think you're better than the competition.
Doesn't matter whether you're better code or not, they've just gotta think. You are better suited to the role. And believe me, coding is not the most important thing that you'll see. Plenty of advice on the on the, on the blog, right? So. Basically what that means is you end up being a tailor made solution for a certain niche, and then what ends up happening is that automatically there's going to increase demand for you, someone like you.
Right? Okay. So we've covered a number of things here. I want you to really think about goal setting as a very scientific. Process. Very sophisticated process. Um, businesses use it. Sports people use it, athletes use it. Um, finance people use it. The government use it. Don't do a great job, but they try to use [00:22:00] it.
There's a reason why metrics around goals matters so much. Why is it that every company like Google, we were completely obsessed with our KPIs and our OKRs and stuff like that, right? Like it's because. You have to measure progress against goals. So I want you to ask yourself now, just right now, if this has had any impact on you, ask yourself.
There's no right answer, but there's a right answer for you, right? Ask yourself, are you serious about your career change as a busy professional perhaps with family? Are you serious about your career change?
How do we measure the seriousness? Well, you wanna ask yourself on a scale of one to 10, one being, yeah, I'm kind of interested in this. 10 being, you know, apart from my friends, family, and health, this is the most important thing in my life. That's a 10. Okay. Apart from friends, family, and health, this is the most important thing in my life.
That's a 10. If you're not at least I'd say a seven or eight, you're gonna have a [00:23:00] tough time. Honest truth guys. Honest truth. I don't even let people into the Inner Circle program without going through this exercise with them, right? Because when you've already got a job and a family, it's hard. Okay? If you're already working full time and you know you're only done at five or 6:00 PM or even later, it's hard.
You don't have the same 10 hours that other people do. Now, I know people will always sell you things, all learn to code in 10 hours, learn to code in 12 hours or this weekend or whatever. It doesn't work that way in, in. Practice. You could consume the material in that time, but you're not gonna learn the skills in that time, right?
People will sell you things because they want to take advantage of your desire, your desperation. The more desperate and desirous you are or something, the more likely you're going to believe things. So that's the truth of human nature. It's not just about code, it's everything, right? So remember learning to.
Isn't enough. It doesn't make you a professional grade coder. Just learning to code won't do that, right? Just like learning to play basketball doesn't make you an NBA level or a professional athlete, right? There are so many other [00:24:00] things apart from learning how to play the sport or learning to code that contribute towards getting to the professional grade.
So these courses, let me be clear, they aren't scams. They a hundred percent deliver on their promise. Their promise is usually you learn this thing. If you do it, you will. That doesn't make them a scam just because you never got to your goals. 'cause that was just one brick in a large wall of bricks that will get to you, to your goals.
So they deliver on their promise. You think it's a scam 'cause it didn't get you to your goals when you're not even clear what your goals actually are, or you think that the goal is only this one thing, it's really not okay. You're not thinking about this clearly. If you think a single course or completing some online thing is enough to get you.
To your goals. That's why I keep saying there are seven stages. I showed you the screenshot at the beginning. There are seven stages to create change. Learning to code is one. Let assuming there's seven bricks in that wall. Learning to code is brick number three. Okay? Now if you want to check out a free preview of the seven stages, um, I've given most of them in this inner circle, uh, [00:25:00] preview that I'll link to, right?
So you can look for the free newsletter. Calcium calciums. So you can look for the free newsletter in the show notes. And in that newsletter, every installment of that newsletter includes a link of the free preview, right? And it shows you how we approach these seven steps and a lot more. 'cause it's a 12 month program, the seven steps address in the first two months.
But then we have to actually implement on the plan against that goal. Right now, the Inner Circle program is a long program. Like I said, it's 12 months because. Career change is hard, guys. I mean, it's gonna take time. I don't care what other people say. Learning to code is not gonna be enough, so therefore it's gonna take some time.
Especially if you're busy and you work full time, you, you know, you want to get professional grade skills. You don't want literacy. You need professional grade skills that's gonna take you longer than 10 weeks or 15 weeks. That's the truth, okay? It's gonna take you hundreds of hours. Hundreds of hours means a year.
Of time together. Okay? So if you got value from this, if you like the fact that I keep it real, then please like and subscribe. Um, because that also honestly keeps me motivated, right? I have momentum, but I also, every now and then, I'm a human being. [00:26:00] I like the validation from you guys because it feels like it's helping out more people.
So with that hope it helps. Check out the links in the description, like and subscribe overnight.
