When life punches you in the nose

Machine-generated from the episode audio and not hand-corrected, so names and technical terms may be imperfect. The audio is authoritative.

Hey, welcome to episode 97, Mark, of the CTO Advisor. Didn't you say we were at 100 last time? You know what, I'm sandbagging it because our good friend Chad Sackett said he'll be on the 100th podcast. So we can't have a 100th episode until we get Chad on again as a guest. I see, 100 part 1, 100 part 2. We need a big lineup for 100. I think you need like 10 shows. Yeah, like 10 shows for 100.

We've been doing this for a few years. So the other voice that you hear in this hodgepodge of conversations and voices is Matt Broberg. Matt, welcome back from the dead, man. Well, we haven't heard from you in the V community in quite some time. Keith, it is my pleasure to rise from the dead and come hang out with some good friends. It's been way too long. And I think you really hit that on the noggin. So we'll talk more about that.

It's great to be back. I'm excited to reconnect. So of course, we're recording the video. We're recording this, the audio track. And we're watching each other on video. And Matt and myself are in northern cities. So I'm in Chicago. I have a fire going on. Matt has on a wool hat, fleece. And Mark is sitting in his living room in a t-shirt. I have the heat on. It's like 55 outside, maybe. OK. OK, I hear you.

Yeah, and I'm new to Minneapolis. I'm definitely acclimating. Everyone else is outside in t-shirts. And I'm like, I'm clearly not from here yet. All right, so you know what? This is a bit of a serious CTO Advisor episode. com. It is a career-focused. And I want to say it's more than just career. It's life. As many of you know, I lost my sister-in-law to cancer just this past week. And I tweeted that mysterious tweet, life will punch you in the nose again and again and again.

And the community has been super-embracive. Everyone has sent me great thoughts and prayers. I appreciate all of that. And then later on in the week or the next week, Mark, you have the unfortunate news that now you're looking for a job. Yep, I was let go from my job kind of unexpectedly. And that's just a punch in the nose. On top of, like you said, life keeps on punching you in the nose. My father-in-law, as some of you guys know, is battling small-cell lung cancer.

He just kind of started treatment. It's going really well, so I'm excited about that. But that's how life is. It just has a funny way of just punching you in the nose sometimes. And then, Matt, you recently had changes in your life. Yeah. So my wife had a bit of a health scare for a while. And we were focusing on that. I was kind of splitting my time between taking care of her and the house and the pets and the startup life that I was living, which was pretty fast.

And we figured out that the right move is actually a move back towards family and towards home in Minneapolis. So selling a house, working as a VP of a startup, trying to keep going that, keeping that going at the same time. And the two did not line up well enough for me to stay there. I was let go unexpectedly. And I think it's been for the best, but that doesn't make it any easier. Yeah. Yeah. You know, something that I want to just kind of lead off with is something that you guys both said, is that when you get punched in the nose, remembering that you have people to lean on, whether it's the V community, whether it's family, whether it's friends, you know, that there are people to lean on regardless of the circumstances that you have.

We all have them. Hey, you can lean on strangers. I'm going to speak for everyone else here and say, we're open to talk to strangers if you need help too and need somebody to talk to. Yeah, absolutely. All those strangers have become really good friends. Thanks to this weird, wonderful place that we call the virtualization community and the DevOps community, the programming community, open source. We're all in those concentric circles that are moving forward together. The dead end.

Yeah. So I find that interesting, Mark. Some people who listen to this podcast, not most, might find it odd. Like most of the community found out right away when you lost your job. Yep. Some people who probably don't understand the community may not fully grasp that. I'm sure even before some family found out, the V community found out, what drove your decision? Or is that even something you thought about when you shared that on social media when you lost your job?

Well, it's twofold, right? I wanted to share it with some of my really good friends. Like Keith, a few years ago, we didn't know each other. Right now, when my mom died last year, you came to the funeral, right? You're an extremely big part of my life. We just hung out last week in Nashville. So part of it is that. I wanted to share it with everyone. Strangers a lot. And I also know the value of my professional network is twofold, right?

They are friends. There are a lot of legitimate friends who I enjoy, but they also have connections and can help take you to the next level and where you wanna go. So that network is twofold. And then on social media, strangers. Strangers have literally reached out and said, hey, what do you think about this? Have you, about this opportunity? So I wanted to share that. I wanna share my experience with everybody. That's the value of social media.

So Matt, you took not quite the same approach. So I don't want to send out this impression that, hey, if you have some disruptive life event, in my case, it's the loss of my sister-in-law. You know, on one social media channel, I was quick to hit. And then another one, I just didn't say anything about it at all. There's a balance here that, I'm not saying run out and share your entire life on social media. Matt, you took a completely different approach.

Yeah, yeah. I took a little time to myself. There were bigger things going on in my life. And quite frankly, I was in the convenient situation where like, yeah, not having a salary is a big deal. Figuring out what you're doing for insurance is a big deal. It's not cheap, especially in America where we just screw that up consistently. But taking a few weeks to really focus on my family at that time and get us ready for moving and think about what do I care to do next?

Because, you know, being at the ground floor of an early startup was a dream. Like that was one of those things I had on my bucket list. So what do you do next when, like, do you want to do, did I want to do that again? Did I want to do something a little bit different? I needed a little time. So I was quieter. I reached out to what I call, and probably my first piece of advice for people, my Voltron.

Like the different people that connect together to be the badass that is Voltron. And started getting them to help me reflect on myself. Because I'm pretty self-aware. I really value that as an effort. But when you're in the depths of something that's kind of disappointing and sad, it's better to let other people reflect their idea of you onto you. Because it's going to be more positive than you can be for yourself sometimes. So talking to other people was huge.

And just to echo that, all the, when this first happened, rightfully, I was emotional and distraught. And even though the previous job wasn't the best job I've ever had, it wasn't somewhere I was planning on staying, I'd actively, passively, actively, passively looked. Anyway, I didn't look hard, but you know, there were opportunities and I'd shared that with some people. So, but still you feel like, I felt like a failure, right? I felt like I had failed. So hearing everybody reflect, you'll be fine.

Oh my God, you know, hire Mark now. All the outpouring of support from friends, strangers, vendors, you know, the fact that the day it happened, I got a call from three HR people and one hiring manager just means, man, maybe I don't suck. So I think that's an important thing to expand upon. I'm not going to say double click. I heard that in the meeting though. You can do better, yeah. You want to lean in on that? Yeah, I don't want to lean in.

I don't want to do a deep dive on this. But one key thing I heard from all three of us is that we had traumatic events of varying degrees and we had life issues already going on. And the first thing we did was just reach out. It doesn't matter that, you know, at the scale, you know, Mark, me and you had taken the approach, reach out to everyone. Matt, you reached out to your Voltron members and you get taken care of.

One of the things that someone tweeted to me the other day was, you know, obviously it's my sister-in-law, not my wife. And, you know, I'm super concerned about my brother and his emotional state. It's the same brother that lost his son, my nephew to gun violence last year. So he's had these two really traumatic events in the past year and a half that, you know, by themselves is horrible. But I'm focused on him and someone gave me really great advice. They say, you know what, Keith, put your oxygen mask on first, take care of yourself, make sure you're okay, and then help others.

And I think the reality is that, as you know, we, you know, Matt, you have a family that you need to take care of. Mark, you have a family that you need to take care of. When we get, when we reach, you know, Matt, when you reach that VP level of your career, whether it's with a startup or if it's with a large company, you have a network of people that trust and depend on you. So, you know, you have this pressure to continue to provide, continue to be that central rock, but first you have to take care of yourself.

Now, what I hear from everyone is that, you know, initially step one was, you know what, make sure, make sure self is good. Yeah, yeah, and I wanna also acknowledge that like, yeah, I started privately, but like both of you, I took the route of, you know, connecting into that community of people that we built over the years and we've grown to love and trust. And I tweeted a thread that was really hard, really hard to verbalize and to, you know, acknowledge publicly that things have been tough.

And it goes back a couple of years that the move out to Portland and the job I got out there was quickly end of life. And I was floating through a large organization for a little bit, trying to find my way until I left. And things started getting hard. And I found that I think there's a great balance that I wanna acknowledge that some people do this really well naturally, but I think for me, I had to like, really see a few examples.

And it's, there's a vulnerability and an openness that really resonates with people. Cause we normally just show each other our highlight reels. Like the best of ourselves is on social media and the rest is kind of, we live with it on our own. But there's been this resurgence of openness and vulnerability in our community. And I think it helps us all kind of feel a little bit more whole, a little bit more centered. And there's a balance to it, right?

No one wants to be like stuck in a conversation at a party with the person that starts divulging like very personal things without knowing anybody else. That's an awkward situation for all parties. But if you've earned the trust, if you have a relationship with many and you let people in, it has that beautiful opportunity of letting them see themselves in it and see that they're okay too. And that was, I just wanna acknowledge that that was part of it for me. It's like, I want everyone who's having a tough time to also be okay with that tough time and know that they're not the only one.

Yeah, I agree. Knowing that everybody goes through that problems. We tend, I tell my wife this when you look at Instagram or Facebook, that that's not life. It's the work. That's the, this is my posed shot. This is, and we're all guilty of that in various ways throughout the years. And I think we're all learning to be a little better at that now because of that. But being honest with the people you need to be honest with and sharing the good times and the bad times is just as important as sharing the best times.

Much more important actually. And there's no harm for people that are having a great time and send a big smiling picture of them goofing around. Like that's, I wanna make that clear that we're both on the same page, that that is, that's okay. We wanna see that. That brings us all joy. And both of you guys can relate to this because you both have struggled with family members that are sick and going through recovery. One of my struggles was, I'm having these life changing once in a lifetime events.

Me and my wife are having these, we're in the lakes at Copenhagen and it's the middle of the day and this is work. Like this is amazing. Like people don't live like this. This is incredible. And you know what, we're taking the picture and I'm about to post it to Facebook. And then I think about my sister-in-law and I'm like, oh wow, that's not her experience today. But to your point, Matt, I went on and posted the picture and she loved it.

And the idea that it brought her joy to see it, the others watch our lives and all three of us influence a spirit people, I think we don't necessarily realize. And I wanna talk to the kind of the inverse of that, not necessarily the Instagram life of, oh, you're living this amazing travel life, this amazing business travel life because most of it isn't amazing. I think it can be dangerous. Sometimes we can paint this perception. I think both of you guys have said it.

I've lost a job that I've gotten fired from. I wrote a blog post about it. Both of you guys have lost jobs that unexpectedly. And there's this perception that, oh, you just bounce back. Oh, we're some type of superheroes and we can just, oh, we took this punch to the nose and we just bounce back. Let us in, let the audience in into kind of the emotional state that puts you in. And I think to the second layer, what happens, and I can share if you guys can, what happens when there aren't HR people knocking at the door once that happens?

Well, since I'm kind of fresh off that, I'll start with the, I'm two days into that now. I think, yeah, two days. For me, it was remembering to get out of bed. Remembering that my day still has to go on. I still need to shave this morning because my wife said, don't forget to shave this morning. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have shaved this morning. I would have gotten up eventually and done nothing. But remembering that you still have to shower.

That's step one to me, remembering that life has to go on. It just does. Life simply goes on. Whether you want it to or not, life continues. That's really powerful. Yeah, I mean, I'm still in it. I'm not gonna lie at all. I'm like ebb and flow and it's not, it's a nonlinear progression out of feeling like shit. I don't know if I can say that on the podcast, but I just did. Yeah, feel free. It's a punch in the nose podcast.

It's a punch in the nose podcast. Yeah, and, but I will say that on days that I didn't have the confidence that I kind of, there's always that little part in the back of your head that's like, knows that you're awesome. And like, you gotta really give that as much space as possible. Especially when just the overwhelming part is just like, oh, I'm so ashamed of how that happened. I'm so sad that it changed. I had so much more I wanted to do before I left.

All those kind of thoughts. You're like, you gotta take the time to appreciate that little part, that little spark that's still in that saying, you're awesome, it's gonna be great whatever you do next. And if you can't do it yourself, which I'm the first to admit, there are a lot of days I couldn't do it myself. You gotta have, you gotta be really okay with calling people that you care for. Especially ones in this industry. Like, I love that my family is there for me.

But they also don't get what I do. And yeah, this doesn't make sense. The fact that I'm recording a podcast right now with two people in two different cities that I've maybe spent a few hours with total in our lifetime but I feel like kin to you both. Like, that's weird and wonderful. So those people, those people that I call my Voltron, you can call them your Power Rangers, you can call them your Ninja Turtles, whatever sort of superpower, super group you need.

But you gotta have that list that you've earned because you've been there for them in their tough times. And let them help you remind you how good you are. You know, I really like that. It means that we have to remember to do that for other people as well. Oh, hell yeah. It is a mutual benefit of a good, healthy relationship with somebody. I was still in bed when you guys said time to podcast. I had already showered but I hadn't decided if I was actually gonna get out of bed until later.

So I did and I came downstairs a little early because of this and I wanted to get a drink and have some breakfast. And my wife had wrote me just a quick note, right? It didn't take much. Just, you know, I love you. Everything will be okay. You know, just do the dishes. You know, just a very simple, you know, note that she wrote. It probably took 30 seconds. It didn't take much of time. Just to remind me that I don't suck.

No matter if I was feeling like shit, she was there to step in and prop me up. Just like any relationship, you're not gonna be strong all the time. So I'm gonna pivot and go to a sensitive topic because, you know, we have a very skewed view of the world just working in an industry that we work in. I'm not telling any secrets when I look at the stats of the podcast. The average listener makes more than $100,000 a year. We are a niche part of America in which in the Western world in general, in the world where we have to make these ridiculous career decisions.

Like, do I take this 100,000 plus a year job or do I take that $100,000 a year plus job? You know, it's just like the average person can't relate to that problem. But there's also, I think, a problem that that creates. One, we're in a bubble. So we need to talk into our bubble and we need to talk outside of our bubble. But there's people who listen to this podcast in general that are kind of striding both sides of it.

Like literally one of the challenges that I have being from the culture that I'm in is that as I look around at my peers outside of my work peers, my family is struggling, my extended family struggles to get into the middle class. So there's a real possibility that a certain point in my career, I could fall out of this. Like I got one foot into IT, I got one foot into this world, this upper middle class world, but I could literally fall out of it.

There's a risk for a lot of folks in our community that get prompted into this situation where they've had this comfortable job, they had no intentions of ever leaving it, and change is thrust upon them. And they're not quite prepared for it. Like all three of us, we're gonna be okay. You're gonna find another $100,000 plus a year job. You may have to find some, you might have to make some adjustments to your living standards. Mark, same as you. And then I've been in that situation as well.

What about those people that, we're a little bit past that point. What about those other people? What should they be thinking? I think they need to think the same thing, that they don't suck, that they will find a way out and have to work hard to make that a reality. But at the same time, just like us, most people, no matter how much money you have, the vast majority of America still needs their paycheck. You still need to move that on.

And one lesson that I've shared in my life is, as I earn more money, I don't increase my lifestyle. Right, Keith, you've been to my house. You know I could afford a much nicer house than I have. But it's just a modest, it's an okay house. Didn't cost that much money. It meets my needs. So remembering, as you do grow, you don't have to, you know, hashtag live your best life. You know, I learned a valuable lesson from you, Mark.

I sold my second car, which was a luxury car. I sold my car based on that advice that you've given me in a practical sense. Yeah. That's really cool. All right, Mark, you and I are gonna have a side hustle conversation on that point. But, you know, I wanna address both points you made, Keith, right? It's the fear of falling out of something. I'll be honest and say I don't feel that. I've like, I've escaped what I was born into.

I was born very poor in rural upstate New York in a divorced family that wasn't great in a lot of ways. I got a lot of love along the way, but a lot of challenges as well. And I didn't know if I'd go to college or how to get out of that. But I, dumb luck, I happen to be good at school. And that helped me get an education for free at a good college. And that I've hit that with the CS degree, I seem to be more hireable than at times I feel like is relevant.

But that's helped along the way a great deal. So I can't acknowledge that. But I can say that like, definitely there's a, there's something that I took from my childhood that I'll carry forever. And it's that like, I'm not waiting for anyone to save me ever. It's like, you have to save, you have to save yourself. You know, you can have whatever faith in this world that you want. But I think any faith where you expect something to come to you instead of you being drawn to what's gonna get you out of where you are is bad faith.

And that's dangerous to you. So mentally, we have to be in a place where we have to save ourselves. You know, I'm not gonna go preach anywhere about this. But since you opened up about it, I'll be personal about this too and be like, when I'm at my lowest, I'm always reminded like, no one's gonna show up and save the day for you. You gotta get your ass out of bed, figure out what you're good at, make the spreadsheet of what you're bad at, figure out what iterative steps you need to to get moving forward and fucking do it.

No one's gonna show up and do it for you. Yeah, my mom growing up, used to always raise her hands and scream, money cometh to me. And what she really meant was get off your ass and go find what you want, go find what you need. But that is how she expressed it. She'd raise her hands and just say it. Mark, I really wish I would have met your mom. Going to, meeting your family, going to the funeral, I'm like, this woman, that would have been, I would have loved to have had Mark mom stories.

She was a character. Oh, what a champion, I love it. So let's close out. We've had our wide ranging, I wouldn't say rambling conversation. I think we focused on just, there's a lot that happens when you have a major life event. And most of it is like unseen. People don't like, even on social media, people don't see the hours and hours and days of days of nothing, kind of like nothing spectacular. They see the highlights when we post the highlights around these changes.

But as people are going through these challenges or may go through these challenges, what's the one thing you want them to take away from this conversation? The thing that hits home for me is actually something you said to me, Keith, when I called you after losing my job. And you really blew me away when you said that it wasn't a surprise to you that things weren't going great, because you said, when I'm busy and I'm doing what I need to do, I pour myself further into the community.

I don't disappear from it. And then you said, everyone has that unique fingerprint of what they're doing when they're at their best. And to remind yourself that, where is your best? And remember that if you are leaning away from something that's good for you, maybe that's already the signal that you need to switch it up and put yourself into it. Yeah, that really hits home for me to this day, that you gotta stay true to what you have to do and where you're doing your best work.

And then just remember that you gotta do it yourself. Yeah, I'm gonna give a little bit of practical advice. When my wife and I first bought our home five years ago, they gave us this big binder of crap you have to do to make sure your home doesn't fall apart. Clean out your hot water tank, clean out your septic system, check for foundations, all those things. Keep your resume up to date, keep your list of skills and your list of contacts.

Life will punch every one of us in the nose repeatedly again and again and again to varying degrees. And do what you can to prepare. I mean, not just in a job search, right? We're all gonna face problems in our lives and we all basically know what they're going to be. We're going to lose loved ones. I mean, as harsh as that may seem, it's just a reality. It sucks and we don't like it. But you know what we do?

We make wills, we do what we can to prepare. So do what you can to prepare for aspects of your life that you can and you know will change. Wow, this has been a deep CTO Advisor episode. I don't know if you folks were expecting to hear this when you downloaded this, saw that, oh, the every so frequent, infrequent CTO Advisor episode is there. And you know, it's been a little heavy. But you know what, this is life. And as we deal with our professional lives, we have to deal with the way it touches our personal lives and other people.

This community is important to all three of us. So speaking of community, Matt, where can people find you on social media and the web? Yeah, I'm everywhere at MBBroberg. And that's on Twitter. fun is my website. Oh, that's a new one. I didn't know that. Yeah. You can find me as at Centsy Storage pretty much on everything. All right, you can find me as the CTO Advisor on the web and at CTO Advisor, I dropped the the on Twitter.

And then of course, you can find us on LinkedIn, your favorite pod catcher. This is one episode that you might be able to share with your mom and she might be able to actually relate to this one. So seriously, share us on your friends list, go into iTunes, rate the podcast, talk to you next CTO Advisor.