Technology
**Profitable Python**

Profitable Python is a podcast hosted by Ben McNeill. The show is devoted to the Python developers who want to meet amazing humans and take their skills to the next level. The community built around this show proudly represents integrity, unity, and leadership through self mastery.

Latest Episodes:

🥊 Mentorship Minute: Hong Kong Coder Nov 18, 2019

Show notes

✅ Join Us In The Virtual Python Community ➡️➡️ https://virtualpythonmeetup.com

I want to talk to you about consistency. My mind is on this topic today because of a story I heard about a python coder in Hong Kong.

Meet Tony. This guy tweets at me every day with his 100 days of code challenge progress. He does this consistently even though his city is burning. Wow.

First of all, how thankful are we in the states that Hong Kong is not our reality. I sure reflected on this story and fell very humbled. The other thing that comes to mind is how amazing is this guy's commitment to self-improvement in the face of disaster. If you get this message, Tony, all I have to say is it's going to pay off in a big way to learn software development skills.

The big lesson I am getting from this story is gratitude and inspiration. I can't think of a good excuse to stop being consistent with my progress towards my goals.

As a sidebar, the 100days of code challenge is an excellent way to invest in yourself. The best type of investment is in yourself, and the 100 day code challenge is precisely that. If you want accountability with the challenge tweet @pypodcast your progress, we are routing for you.

My last message to the readers is to make sure you reach out to Tony with encouragement. Ask yourself, and please comment if you have ideas on how we can help as a community with the scenario in Hong Kong. If I was a young person trying to cut my teeth in software development and having the challenge of political unrest, it makes me think gratitude and a bigger purpose.

I am embarrassed to say this, but I sincerely wish I had more ability to help! Please comment or share this if you have ideas on how to help people in Tony's situation.

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🥊 Mentorship Minute: Getting Un Stuck Nov 17, 2019

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I have been working on a code project for the past three weeks using flutter and dart to make an android app that leverages machine learning. The experience has been a challenge!

The issue I was having for the last 40 hours was integrating firebase with the flutter. I spent hours watching videos, reading documentation, starting and restarting projects probably 50 times. I couldn't get the damn to thing to work! There was a handful of times I felt like giving up, but I didn't give up.

Today I finally broke through. I began to reflect on how persistence played a massive role in my ability to get what I want in life.

At the moment, things may seem like there is not anything good going on, but persistence pays. Often when we want to quit, we are so close to winning. I wonder how I would mentally be if I had accepted defeat when the solution was just a few hard pushes away.

I wanted to share this story with you because I am sure you have had moments like this, too, or you may find one on the horizon.

The lesson here is to stick it out. As Marie Forleo states, "Everything is figure outable." Often we need to be creative with our problem-solving techniques. The rewards at the end of the persistence tunnel are waiting for us. The funny part is as soon as we get stuck and then unstuck, we look back and see it was just a speed bump preparing us for the next barrier we face at a later date. Tis is the life of a programmer.

Have you experienced something like this? Did sticking it out eventually pay off or not?

Ben McNeill 💚https://profitablepython.fm👽

#pypodcast #profitablepython

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🥊 Mentorship Minute: Your Book Reading Goals for 2020 Nov 16, 2019

Show notes

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How much do you like to read each day? Statistica shows that the average American's daily reading is about 15 minutes per day. They also show that 75% of Americans finish the book.

I am not trying to lecture here. I enjoy reading because of how it has helped me grow, so I wanted to share this info with you.

I highly recommend reading books on a subject that will help you grow your strengths. If you want to get a deeper understanding of the content, consider creating content around the learning nuggets that you collect. The last step in the internalization equation would be to teach the material then. If you need some ideas for how to do this, consider making a podcast or blog. If you have ever wanted to be a content creator but felt it would be hard to be prolific, consider integrating reading as a core daily habit.

Not all books are created equal. I would recommend to orient the books you read towards the areas in your life you want to get a more in-depth learning experience. Seek out books that have reviews that show the content has practical and actionable content.

Audiobooks are another cool way to download the content into your brain. Be careful with audiobooks, though, because it can be easy to veg out a possibly becoming a waste of your precious time. Also, I would personally advise against listening to the books at 3X speed. If you want to practice patience, consider slowing it down lower than 1X. You don't need to consume a book a day to get the impact you seek from the material.

Whatever you chose to do, make sure to allocate time to internalize the information by implementing it into your life.

What is your reading plan going into 2020? Tweet @pypodcast to report your reading adventures. I look forward to learning from your experience.

Ben McNeill 💚https://profitablepython.fm👽

#pypodcast #profitablepython

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🥊 Mentorship Minute: Your Future Network is Your Net Worth Nov 15, 2019

Show notes

You are not your past. You are the summation of your future potential. For the sake of this article and lets call that your future value.

You can determine your present value if you know your future value and assume a rate of compounding. Converting between the present and future value is something you can try in a spreadsheet program. Most people talk about time value analysis when making investment decisions. Everyone is in the business of deploying capital, and the same principles of optimizing that allocation applies to relationship building and skill-building.

In a previous episode, we discussed cost-benefit analysis within the context of opportunity cost. You experience cost-benefit analysis every day, but I want to break this down in a way that covers the nuances, so no misunderstanding occurs.

Let's say you have two options, option A and option B. You can only choose one option, so what do you pick? One of the best ways to do this is to select the option with the highest net present value (NPV).

To calculate the NPV, we need to compare options to see what the incremental difference between picking one over the other is.

Incremental value is just the difference between the two options. As a side note, this analysis works when choosing the least bad decision, but I digress.

The opportunity cost of choosing option A is the incremental difference forfeited from leaving option B on the table. Since option B also has an NPV, we can see how this simple decision between A and B has a massive impact on the future value of this one decision. We make 100 decisions like this in a day.

When it comes to your life and the decisions you made up to this point, your current value is your present value. You are where you find yourself in life because of the choices you have made up to this point in life, but that does not define your present value.

Let me ask you this. What is your future value? If you know your future profit and make some assumptions about the rate of compounding, you can determine your present value. The key here is knowing that your current value is a function of your future self and not your past.

If you still don't' believe me, let me ask you this. What is the present value of creating meaningful relationships with people in your niche over the next 50 years? Everyone says your net worth is the size of your network. I am arguing your net worth is the size of your future network.

You must convince yourself of the power of compounding and how converting the present value back and forth with future value works. If you want to play around with these equations, check out the present value and future value conversions with a spreadsheet program like Excel.

Why do I hammer on this topic so hard? I believe it contains a vast amount of empowerment. We are the only person that has control over how we respond to the stimulus in our life and is the fundamental principle of being proactive. The more we are aware of our ability to be proactive, the better decisions we can make. Ultimately we raise our future value by improving our decision making in the present.

If I were dead, the message I would want you to remember is that the only math that matters is knowing how to calculate present value. When you understand time value and the different parameters that impact time value conversion between future and present, you will be on a path towards abundance that few ever achieve. Your wealth of skills, relationships, and finance with be unrecognizable.

My homework I assign to you today is to challenge yourself to learn how the present value calculation works.

Ben McNeill 💚https://profitablepython.fm👽

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🥊 Mentorship Minute: Building Trust with Your Clients Nov 14, 2019

Show notes

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What are you doing to optimize your online presence?

I can help you answer by bringing you a great interview I made with a freelance python developer and tutorial maker for realpython.com named Vuyisile Ndlovu. Stay tuned with Vuyisile Ndlovu's podcast episode that will be released very soon.

Vuyisile Ndlovu talks about how getting clients is relatively easy when you have trust. Building your online presence helps establish this trust before you ever get in front of the customer by simply creating your online presence.

I ask you again! What are you doing to optimize your online presence?

I have some ideas for you if you would like to hear them. First of all, check out Gary Vaynerchuk. He is the OG King of online brand building.

Gary is famous for taking a keynote speech and slicing it into 30 pieces of content. We might not have the resources to do exactly that, but we can try something similar.

My formula is to record a video/audio podcast and then listen back to the audio and braindump that summary and ideas onto a notepad. Some times you will find gaps in the sound that you want to expand on. What you have here is a blog that accompanies the podcast. Steal this idea and start the upgrade of your online presence immediately.

Ben McNeill

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🥊 Mentorship Minute: The only math that matters Nov 13, 2019

Show notes

✅ Join Us In The Virtual Python Community ➡️➡️ https://virtualpythonmeetup.com

Einstein said the 8th wonder of the world is compounding interest.

What he is talking about is the consequences of time value.

If you understand time value, which is simple elementary math, you know all the math you will ever need in life. The decisions we make today either payout long term in our favor or result in a massive loss to our future self.

In either case, we earn interest on those decisions, and the good news is we control a lot of the factors of the outcome. Leverage the 8th wonder of the world and build the life you want.

Ben McNeill 💚https://profitablepython.fm👽

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🥊 Mentorship Minute: Your Trillion Dollar Software Company Nov 12, 2019

Show notes

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You are a trillion-dollar software developer whether or not you like it. I am not talking about writing more Javascript or Python3. What I am talking about is the software that runs in your mind.

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🥊 Mentorship Minute: How to Find Beast Mode Nov 11, 2019

Show notes

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One of the biggest blessings in life is having the clarity to know what you want and how to work towards it.

Before we can start having impact with others, we need to build a foundation for our own habits. Stephen Covey talks about this in his 7 Habits book.

You must adopt the mindset of agreeing with this statement: I am in life right now as a direct result of the summation all decisions I have made up in life up to this point.

We are all team members, either in our family, our marriage, our the projects we collaborate on at work. Before we can have impact among our team we must have stability in our own independence.

Teams operate on a healthier level when everyone contributing has internalized their role as an independent thinker. We might not agree with what other people are saying but we get to choose how we respond. It's empowering to know that we all have that gap between action and reaction which is our choice of response.

this is why it is so important to prioritize yourself before you can be good to others. When you are practicing independence you are proactive, you are putting energy into planning and focusing on congruency with your daily actions in relation to your goals. This is called extreme ownership.

Effective, independent people begin with the end in mind by planning for the future. When you have a team (or a marriage) the planning really benefits from having a materialized form. This doesn't have to be fancy just get a piece of paper and write them down and review often.

The other piece of being independent is executing on first things first. It is hard to prioritize the week when there is no end in mind (a mission and vision for the future).

Being independent is going to help in work and in life. When you are more in tune with your vision it gives meaning to each weeks planning effort. Often when we feel less productive on a give week, it just mains we our not aligned with our mission. the good news realignment is something only you control and it starts by just putting in the work, effectively you can fix this as soon as you choose to.

Do you believe you are the only one to blame for your success and failure? Do your goals exists on paper? Are you re-visiting your goals often and organizing your calendar to execute on the most important activity that will push you closer to your goals? If you anything like me that answer changes from week to week but the good news is if we don't like the answer we know who to hunt down to get it fixed.

The homework for this post is to work on becoming more independent by doing the following activities. What is most important is to do each of these steps now. You are placing these foundational stones in place, you are not cementing them in yet so they can be adjusted.

Tell yourself how you own every decision you make
Write down your goals
Make a plan this week on a calendar that prioritizes your goals

Flip that beast mode switch on and lets get to work on the most important things.

Ben McNeill 💚https://profitablepython.fm👽

Ben McNeill is a personal brand coach for python software developers, practicing petroleum engineer, and podcast host of the Profitable Python show. His passion is solving problems with code 🐍, meeting amazing humans, and demonstrating leadership through self mastery.

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🥊 Mentorship Minute: Roles and Goals Nov 10, 2019

Show notes

Lets stop labeling ourselves and instead focus on what matters. We are not beginners or advanced practitioners at anything. That language is dangerous and is not helping us get what we want.

For example, if I immerse myself in some activity, who am I or you to judge what level I am performing at. When we have an obsession for something, our personal growth can be so rapid and our memory can be so terrible that often we do not give ourselves credit for how far we have progressed.

What I am suggesting here is that we be more careful with the language we use and the labels we place on ourselves.

For example, today when we woke up if I chose to integrate something into my life like becoming a mobile application developer and I put in the work to get those skills then today I am a mobile app developer. I am not a beginner or advanced, I am just growing. What would prevent me from being a mobile app developer? The day I put on my lazy pants and stop integrating that role into my regular routine is the day I stop being a mobile app developer. All the days in between is a choice to play the role of mobile application developer.

Does that make sense?

What is preventing you from taking on a role or being more effective in areas of your life?

Here is some homework, list the roles you choose to play in your life each week. Don't say that you "have to" play a role. You and only you can put your body in motion so take ownership over that and realize there are some things you choose to do that perhaps you don't like and some other roles that you enjoy.

Identify those areas where you want to become more effective in that role and identify some other roles you want to cut out. Now that those roles are defined (on paper!) we can now determine what is the one most impactful activity we can focus on this week to enhance or eradicate that role's concentration in our life. See how easy that was to set a goal, purpose fit to our unique scenario.

For example if you drive to work every day and you don't want to be a driver of cars, there is a few things you could do. Talk with your employer about the mutual benefits of working at a home office part of the week, find carpool with someone, or even begin the hunt to find a job that is more amicable. Bottom line is if you drive to work and you don't like doing that you are actually choosing not to talk with your boss, not to find a carpool buddy or not to find a better employment situation. See how that works, either way you choose to be the captain of your ship.

Determine your roles and set your goals. I love the clarity in this process.

If you are looking for a framework to operate in consider one like the 100 days of code challenge. It has a set amount of time, there is accountability and best of all you experience immersion. Imaging how a daily activity like that would improve your role as a programmer. Don't worry if you don't code, there is a #100daysof anything you could imagine.

After the week is done review the roles you chose to play in your life and your results. Did you prioritize what are the most important things? Did you detect more roles that you want to improve or remove?

I hope to hear good news from you in the coming weeks.

Ben McNeill 💚https://profitablepython.fm👽

Ben McNeill is a personal brand coach for python software developers, practicing petroleum engineer, and podcast host of the Profitable Python show. His passion is solving problems with code 🐍, meeting amazing humans, and demonstrating leadership through self mastery.

--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/profitablepythonfm/message

🥊 Mentorship Minute: Living Large Nov 09, 2019

Show notes

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Everyone sees the world through a different lens. This is called the paradigm that you operate in. A paradigm is the sunglasses you chose to wear when you look out into the world. what do you choose to wear? I chose the abundance lenses.

I confidently believe we all can have what we want in life. That does not mean we will get it as fast as we want nor does it suggest our actions are aligned with what we are striving to achieve.

If your actions do not align with your vision for abundance you are actually sitting on the sidelines of life watching people.

It is not easy to maintain abundance mindset when things don’t go our way. We need to just remind ourselves when we start to see the bad in a situation remember how much we have to be thankful for. Some people go as far as maintaining a gratitude journal.

If you manage to maintain an abundance mindset there are some major benefits that I think you will find very helpful to your journey.

Lets say you are a entrepreneur looking for a place to start your McDonald's burger shop. If you had an abundance mindset you would probably look for another Burger shop to open your new location next to. Since you have the abundance mindset the competition would inspire you to get a piece of the pie. If your abundance mindset was lacking you would probably not place your shop there and potentially miss out on a lot of business.

Let me tell you a personal story. At one moment in my life after I graduated from college I found major abundance with a new fortune 500 job. 10 months later I got wrapped up in a 2,000 person layoff due to a crash in the oil price. I had a terrible mindset that couldn’t see any abundance. What a roller coaster!

I kicked and screamed about the situation and eventually decided to start a freelancing business from scratch. At one point I even accumulated over 100k revenue through the freelancing business and still I could not find abundance and that is because I chose to wear the crappy sunglasses. How insane is that? If I could have just seen how much abundance there was around me I would have had an even bigger business success and probably a lot faster. Even after choosing to not see abundance I was eventually forced to find it. My hard work paid off, I had a successful business and as a result I even got an amazing full time job offer.

I tell you this story not to brag but to offer you some genuine insight on the impact of your world view and how it carries you through life. Thankfulness was forced upon me and I could not be happier. Now I choose to see abundance.

Look at your niche. Is there a ton of competition? I see the competition as a good thing. That means there is money happening there and a growing opportunity. Our job is to maintain a perception of what is true and the truth is folks abundance is all around us.

In order to find the abundance, our actions need to align with our desires. That is the key to getting what you want.

Ask yourself, do you believe there is more abundance in the world than what you could consume in a lifetime? Do your actions align with your desires to go get that abundance? Answer those questions and if you don’t like the answer make the adjustments in your life to get back on track.

Ben McNeill 💚https://profitablepython.fm👽

Ben McNeill is a personal brand coach for python software developers, practicing petroleum engineer, and podcast host of the Profitable Python show. His passion is solving problems with code 🐍, meeting amazing humans, and demonstrating leadership through self mastery.

--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/profitablepythonfm/message