I did grow up very poor.We had no electricity or running water in my house.That's an actual truth here in America.It was not an easy childhood from a lot of regards.And I had to put myself through college thing after thing, right?
Bottom line is, I've learned to adapt and overcome.
Welcome to How to Thrive in IT.This is episode two, An Overcoming Mindset.If you work in information technology or want to understand those that do, you are in the right place.Helping people in IT thrive instead of just survive is our mission.
And now here's your host.He's got the biggest brain in his office, but there's only one person in that office.Here's DJ.
It's good to be with you once again.My name is DJ Eshelman, and I talk about thriving in this world of information technology. We're going to talk through a lot about our overall core tenants at Thrive IT.So we have four things.
They all begin with the letter M because I guess I like alliteration just that much.So the first thing we're going to talk about today is mindset.
But just for the record, the other things we're going to be talking about throughout the conversations we're going to have is also about our methodology.We're going to talk about our mentoring and mastery.
Beginning at the end of mine, I guess you could say, we need to talk through some mindset stuff.I just wanted to respond to a couple of things I've been seeing out there in the marketplace and, and hopefully we can get somewhere with this.
get to a place of not only just understanding, but also in being better people.Ultimately, that's one of my goals as a person, as a professional, and just generally as a person who is hopefully inspiring people in some way, shape or fashion.
So I want to see people better.In other words, I want to see. People like myself and others leave the world better than we found it.
So when it comes to that, the thing that I want to talk about as far as this goes is a core tenant of mindset is thinking about others without any kind of thought of reward for yourself.
This is always kind of tough because I don't believe that there is such a thing as true selflessness.I think everyone needs to have a level of selfishness in order to be even remotely successful.But actually, this is controversial, I know.
But I believe that you have to be a level of selfish in order to achieve things that will help others in life.
And as far as that goes with leaving the world better than we found it, being better people, it really does come down to the fact that we're not really always taught that, we're not always able to adapt things.
Hey, my friends, thank you once again for being here.I'm excited to launch this new podcast, but, you know, with any podcasts these days, you always have a sponsor, right? Well, we don't have sponsors yet.
So I am going to be my own sponsor, I guess you could say.I have a new offering for you.And the good news is it's free.So what you need to do to take advantage of this is ask yourself a question.
And that question is, where do I want to be in my IT journey? As far as your IT career, where would you like to be?
And especially if you are somebody who has been put into a leadership position, you've been at this a little while, and you are looking to figure out how this all works because you haven't been equipped to do so.
I'd like to have a conversation with you on that.But regardless, if you are wanting to go deeper and invest a little in yourself, I am willing to give you a roadmap of things you should be looking at to do that properly.
And so what we're doing for a limited time is I am giving you a half hour of my time to meet with you, to discuss this and give you a roadmap for how to continue on your career journey.
I know it's risky, but the reality is that I enjoy talking with people.It's something that I do enjoy.So. I wanted to give this gift to you.So in order to take advantage, all you need to do is go to thrive-it.com slash meetdj430.
That's thrive-it.com slash meetdj430. I'll give you access to a scheduling page where you can schedule a half hour meeting with me.
All I ask is that you fill out the form and make sure that you're putting in enough information that we can have a good quality meeting together and that you, of course, show up because I'm giving this gift to you.Let's get back to the show.
Here we go. Today, what I want to talk about is that angle of mindset that really is just saying, okay, how do I let things roll off?You know, how do I, when things are going right or going wrong, do I take credit for them?
There's things like this we need to address.
And a big one I think for me is in response to what I've been seeing out in the industry, a certain software vendor has recently denied some people membership in a program that I think everyone was assuming that they were going to be part of.
And seeing some of the responses to this, some were legit as far as their reactions and some were a little overreactive in my opinion.So I wanted to address that from a mindset perspective and see how we can address that.
So I want to be very clear about something along with this.I'm not trying to address overall sensitivity or a concept called anti-fragile.
Probably want to do that in another episode, but that is something that I believe as people in IT, we do need to address because we're people, right?We're not just automatons and things like that.
And that's actually more what I wanted to address today is sometimes we get into a place where we naturally address as we're expected to be addressed.Sometimes, even when we don't want to respond a certain way, we feel compelled to do so.
And not that is in and of itself a bad thing.Sometimes, actually, that's a good thing.
But in the technology world, sometimes we tend to respond overly scientifically, I guess you would say, or not with as much either compassion or the emotion that we actually are feeling. And so believe it or not, that comes across.
And so when it comes to being a situation that is outside of your expectations, where you feel you've worked hard for something and you don't get it, let me just tell you, I'm actually going through a season of this.
right now as I'm recording this, which is why this is actually getting a little hard for me to get through because it's been a very emotional few months for me.
But I felt like I should put it out there for you all and have this for you as a resource or just even just for me to get it out.And that is that sometimes I put a lot of effort towards something and I have an expectation of a result.
That doesn't mean that others have an expectation of giving any praise or even in my case, being part of that result.And I tell you what, I'll go ahead and just lay this out and whether I decide to keep it or delete it later, I'm just going to do it.
So actually before I started Thrive IT and doing all this kind of stuff, I in 2016 was kind of convinced that I should start a blog. and start talking about my experiences with Citrix and see if maybe I could start training people in that.
And yeah, so what I did was I started learning from people outside of the technology world, people that were into digital marketing and entrepreneurship from a digital side of things, like people that were creating blogs and selling courses and for the most part doing quite well, at least the ones I was following were.
So the expectation there was that if you just follow their formula, they don't get their results, right?That's a pretty natural thing to expect.And in the world of IT, we do that every day.We're not inventing new things here.
We're typically using software that other people have written and finding a way to make it work and adapt.And usually based on reading blogs and other collaborative kind of things.
Rarely is it something you just invent on your own with no input whatsoever.We are a community, especially in my specialization of end-user computing.It's a very collaborative kind of community-driven industry.
So all that to say, what ended up happening with me was that I struggled for a little bit.I mean, I tried to do the blog thing and that really wasn't anything that was growing all that great, but it was good to have.
Started doing presentations, participating in more community and industry events, that sort of thing.That was all good.
Then I decided it was time to go ahead and start teaching people based on both survey responses and all these kinds of data that I had that indicated that this was really going to be something that was going to be successful, I guess you'd say.
So what ended up happening in that regards was that I. launched a membership called the Citrix Heroes membership.The idea was to train some people in the better practices in Citrix that I've been seeing as a consultant for many years.
And so I got kind of paying that forward and then people would just be part of this and get content from me every month.And we'd have discussions, yada, yada, yada.It was a good concept that I did.Honestly, I still think it's a good concept.
In fact, I. was approached not too long ago, suggesting the very thing that I had launched years ago, which I find very amusing.
But nonetheless, what I did find during this process was that I had certain expectations about the way things would go and hopefully the number of people that I needed to enroll at the price that I was offering it.And you know what? didn't happen.
In fact, I didn't get anywhere near that.I had a good core group of people that were very generous with a lot of things, including their finances, to help support me during this.
But ultimately, it was not something that was even close to self-sustaining and certainly not to my expectations.I got depressed. After a couple of months, it was just clear that it wasn't going to go anywhere.
It wasn't really succeeding like I thought it was going to or should have.And I ended up just closing it down.Now, the good news out of this is that I was able to emotionally recover and say, let's try something else.
I pivoted, and that was to launch the Citrix Hero book, which, spoiler alert, is actually the material from that membership, all the videos that I'd recorded that I transcribed, edited, and made into that book.
And so if you're digital entrepreneurs out there, it's called repurposing at its finest.Now, interestingly enough, books, it's a book, right?So making thousands and thousands of dollars off a book is very difficult.
And so I kind of knew that I was not going to be, you know, retiring off of this or anything like that, but it was nice to be able to put this forward in a way that was working for the community.
But then all of a sudden I started seeing expectations that I was putting on myself as far as like the amount of sales and ethics of that nature.And I, again, had an emotional response to this.So faced with yet another result of
disappointment of my expectations versus reality.Trying to sell a book is tough enough as it is.When you're a self-published author and trying to do things on your own, that sort of thing, it is dramatically more difficult.
When people don't leave you reviews and you ask for them, do you ask for reviews and they don't leave you any, you start to wonder, am I doing something wrong?It's like, don't you, it's not just, do you like me?
I don't know if I am worried about that as much when it comes to, like, books and things like that.Other things, yeah, I'll admit I worry about that.But when it comes down to it, without the feedback,
I don't know if I'm doing the right things or not.I don't know if I'm helping.I don't know if I'm just doing something to be done.And so I decided that was a good practice, treated it like that.
I had written the second book, Just Do This, actually in 2017, and decided to finish it in 2020.And so I published it right after Be a Citrix Hero.And this one was the one where I did have some expectations.
I did want to say that this was a significant amount of work.I threw money at this.This is where it gets hard.I have thrown something to the order of $15,000 to $20,000 at writing and publishing this book.
To date, I think I have made about $5,000 in the almost four years since it's been published. That includes all versions, audio books, all that kind of stuff.That's hard.And again, there's lessons that I've learned in the process.
I've realized that, well, first off, nobody was asking me to write this book.Nobody was like, Hey, DJ, teach us everything, you know, about consulting and IT methodology.Nobody's really asking me for that.
So really when it comes down, it's not a fault there, but the discouragement comes in. And so in the process of launching courses associated with the book, there's been disappointments.
I've come to realize that I get frustrated and have been very frustrated with people of IT. that want to be successful, they tell me in surveys that they're really interested, but they don't step up and invest in themselves.
And I don't mean just with me, I mean just in general.A lot of people seem to have this attitude of, let's just let other people kind of dictate what our success will look like.
What bothers me, though, is when people claim victimhood, when they don't step up and they claim that they cannot succeed because they're being discriminated against. because the odds are stacked in their favor.I'm not trying to sound too harsh here.
There are some genuine obstacles that people have overcome or had to overcome to succeed in information technology.That is definitely true.But a lot of the people that I've been seeing lately are quite honestly, not as challenged as I'm seeing.
Another way to say this might be that sometimes we blow things out of proportion and we kind of end up marginalizing the people that actually are having some struggles in certain areas that are afraid to speak up.
They don't have a platform to speak up.And so there's that, whether that's stricken from the record or not, whether I'm canceled for saying that or not, who knows.But the bottom line is I, in my life, I have had to overcome a lot.
And I don't tend to say things too much about this because, you know, average white guy complaining about having to work hard.But I did grow up very poor.We had no electricity or running water in my house.That's an actual truth here in America.
It was not an easy childhood from a lot of regards.And I had to put myself through college thing after thing, right?Bottom line is I've learned to doubt and overcome, and that has
fortunately for me, translated well into the professional world, where when I'm faced with a challenge, I can have that mindset of, okay, I'm not to take this personally.
This is something where I can accept this for what it is, even without accepting that it will always be that way.I can look at something and say, this is a changeable situation.This is something that I can
work towards either inspiring a different result or in some cases, even creating a different result when it comes to a lot of working with teams and things like that as an insultant or whatever, there's a lot of times that's a possibility.
So I won't bore you with all the details, but in the midst of this not working, I had kind of given up.And now that is to say, I stayed busy.I was doing some consulting work, but not enough. I was doing the YouTube thing.
I was almost every week we had another episode of Thrivecast and interviewing people and it was good.And honestly, as far as results go, there were some things that actually were beneficial beyond just any kind of finances.
Some relationships that were able to be made better by all this.It's hard to put a price tag on some of that.And I don't think I ever would. But yeah, let's be honest, let's call it what it is.
In a good two to three years of effort, we yielded about 300 subscribers for the channel.It's not a good result.Again, it says maybe this isn't the right thing.
It says maybe this isn't the thing people are needing or wanting, or maybe they don't want it from me.I don't know.Maybe they don't like the way it is.There's no feedback is what I'm getting at.
So in the IT world, very often we don't get, and sometimes when we do get feedback, it's very negative.Users complain about performance.That's probably the most common thing actually.
And so there's, there's things like that, that don't always lend themselves well to knowing what to do, I guess, or how to do it well.There's, wow.
You see, I didn't realize that I would feel so emotional recording this, and I'm only scratching the surface, my friends, about how this has felt the last few years.Put all the effort in, get no result.
And a lot of times in our workplace, we do the same thing.We do a lot of work thinking that it'll yield something.We do a lot of late evenings.
We do a lot of things that are kind of counterintuitive in a lot of ways that don't really make a lot of sense.
As far as like no other job would, you know, require you to go log into a server at three in the morning or go physically to an office at three in the morning because someone can't access their email.
I'm being dramatic, but yeah, I mean, stranger things have happened to me.So I can say that with some authority as well.This is a hard reality.The feedback we get just always seems negative.And so sometimes situations come up.
And like anything, it's practice.Anybody who's been cheering me, the two or three of you that have heard me over and over, you know that I say this a lot, and that is, you will not rise to the occasion.
You will only rise to your level of preparedness.So what that means for mindset is that you have to practice being prepared to respond to situations.Otherwise you will go to your trained response to your practice.
And if your practice is only ever negative feedback and negative emotion, whether it's deserved or not, you will respond negatively and lash out.You're more likely to do things like that.
You'll be more likely to say things you regret, again, without calling out any names.I'm recording this because when you've seen 10 people do the same thing,
and several of them permanently damage their careers, it's really tough to just stand by silent and say, oh, you poor thing.There comes a point where I have to say, no, you need to take steps to correct this.
You can't just blame everyone else for your problems.The world doesn't work that way.And certainly professionally, and certainly in IT, it doesn't work that way.
You know, we sometimes get away with it a lot of blaming, you know, other teams for our problems that we're facing.You know, whether that's true or not, the practice of doing that, and that happens.
So if you're in the practice of shifting blame, I guess you'd say, hey, guess what?The rest of the professional world and dealing with other people, that's gonna be a challenge for you.
And so I guess I'm encouraging some mental toughness, but also some emotional fortitude. when it comes to this.And really, that is something that takes practice.And so let me conclude by telling you what's up in my life that addressed this story.
Facing all these challenges, faced very abysmal sales, even though I invest, continue to invest in the hopeful success one day of Justice List, I've come to realize a lot of things.Like, first of all,
There's gaps in the field as far as what I need to learn to be successful at these kind of things, whether it be marketing or sales, whatever.But the default response to getting mad at the very people I'm trying to serve is not appropriate.
It's kind of silly to think about it.So I am taking this. in a couple of different directions.
One is in the coming months, just so you're aware, I'm going to be working towards finding ways to just get my material out there so that I'm paid for it, but you're not the one paying for it, if that makes any sense.
I'm taking on the role of an artist and an artist will often have patrons. In other words, people that are basically sponsoring them.And so I've resisted that for years and it's time to stop.It's time to let other people be involved.
And so you will see things, if they continue in this fashion, not necessarily be something that's just out there as quote unquote free content. I'd be free to you, but I need to be paid for my work.I need to be compensated for this."
And the reality is if I'm not, then I'm not interested anymore.It really is one of those things where I can't...financially is one thing, but emotionally, I can't continue doing the things I'm doing and not being as supportive.
And the honest truth is that might be stepping back completely and just saying, let me just sunset all this content.Let me just make that available for people.And I just rewound to something else.It might look like that.I don't know.I don't know yet.
But what I'm going to tell you is that I'm not going to take it personally.I'm going to take it as an opportunity to grow. I'm going to take it as everything in life can be treated as a lesson, basically, and this is no different.
There's no reason this can't be a lesson learned.So yeah, this episode feels harsh.Anyway, good to practice, good to put things out there, good to talk things out.Bottom line is it's been a very hard journey for the last few years.
Life is not always a bunch of roses and sometimes there are consequences.
earlier this year, or sorry, earlier in the prior year, I took a gamble in a thought that I could figure out how to sustain my family finances, my business's finances through these ventures, mostly because some of the feedback that I've gotten was indicating that it would be successful.
That is kind of the emotionally hard thing about this is that Again, I felt like I was doing anything right.In fact, reality is I was doing pretty much everything right, up to a point.I mean, there's no way I can do everything right.
The coaches that I work with, the trainers of various entrepreneurial things, all looked at the numbers and everything else I had, and they all had the same conclusion as well.Like, this should be working.I don't know why it's not.
That was very validating to hear, by the way. And that made me relax a little bit.
But at the same time, if they can't figure it out, and they're supposedly experts in their field doing this kind of stuff, that really tells me that I need to not assume that I somehow can magically.That was a big thing for me.
So we'll see what the future holds, but sometimes you just have to embrace a little bit of humility, do what you have to do.And so, yeah, that's kind of when it comes to mindset, that really is kind of the thing.
So I know I won't be like this forever.And I know that certain things will likely change for the better at some point.Right.Now this has to. Well, hey, once again, thank you so much for tuning in to today's podcast.
I want to let you know this episode was recorded back in February of 2024, and I was actually delivering DoorDash while I was recording this.
So there's been some things since then that have turned around a bit and then some things that are coming into play now and finally releasing the podcast.I had intended to do it a lot sooner, but you know what?Things happen that way sometimes.
And so there's been a lot of shifting that's happened and a lot of humility that has occurred a lot of what I was describing in this podcast.So I almost deleted this whole thing, but I figured I'd keep it for you and let you
have that journey with me and I hope that there was something you got out of this.
If nothing else, just to see that we're not all perfect and we all have these things we need to adjust in our lives as far as expectations and really overcoming what challenges we have.So I hope that was helpful for you.
I did want to let you know that since this recording was made, I mentioned patrons and people that are supportive of the podcast, sort of like supporters, that sort of thing. Well, fortunately for you and for me, I found a patron.
As I said earlier, I was looking for patrons, treating this a lot like an artist would be.So I'm just creating content, getting it out there for you.
And other people are paying for that and helping spread the word and that sort of thing and serving you. for whatever motivations they have.
And this particular case, there was a motivation of someone that is a CEO of a company that I respect greatly and want to do more with that decided to buy 100 of my books.
And I've given most of them away or made them available in one fashion or another.And so what we've decided to do in partnering with this is to say, you know what, we want more of your feedback.We want more of
your input into what is going on in your life and how we can make better content to better equip you for thriving in IT.So here's the way this works.You're going to go to thrive-it.com slash EP2 survey.That's thrive-it.com slash EP2 survey.
What's going to happen is that that link will have a few survey questions for you that are going to help me determine what kind of things are going on in your life and those around you and your opinions on the industry.
And as a result of that, I'll be able to get more content going, like I said, but to give you something out of that and to give you some further investment in your career,
Through this sponsor of mine, I've been able to arrange for having several of my books available in hardcover at cost.
And so at the end of that survey, you'll be presented with a link that will show you how to get that deal where pretty much all you have to do is pay for the shipping and in some cases the printing cost of the book, depending on if you're in the US or not.
I'm not worried about profits with the book.I'm interested in your feedback above all else.And so profits on the book, like I said in this episode, not really a factor at this point.And so thank you to
You know who you are out there, and if you ever want me to reveal who you are, I am more than happy to do so, but I understand the desire to be anonymous in these kind of things and supporting this.So I do thank you for being here today.
I thank you for your support of this podcast.And hey, you know what?If this was enjoyable for you, or if this was convicting for you, or you think you know someone that would benefit from this, Please do share.
It is going to take quite some time to get this fully up to speed, obviously.And it's going to take even more than that to get this popular in the IT world.Advertising doesn't work for podcasts.
What does work is you sharing it and you giving positive reviews on the platforms that you're listening to those podcasts on.So I appreciate those in advance and I'll see you in next week's episode.
Now, maybe I should leave you with a fun little song generated by AI earlier this year for the Thrive IT channel.So enjoy this AI-generated theme song.See you next time.
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