Speaker 0 00:00:00 Join us as we gather around the hedge, where we dig into technology, business, and culture with the finest minds in computer networking. Speaker 2 00:00:18 Hello, Tom. How are you today? Speaker 3 00:00:20 Hey, Russ. Doing well. How about Speaker 2 00:00:22 Yourself? Been many, many hours since we talked. We gotta get back on that lab. Figure that thing out, man. Speaker 3 00:00:27 Yeah, Speaker 2 00:00:28 For sure. Tom and I are working on an SR lab, um, which is exciting, trying to figure out how to get segment routing running in a lab. I mean, I, I told him the problem is, is I have people who do this now. I don't do configurations. Speaker 4 00:00:44 Rus has people we've always known. We've always known. He doesn't create that much content on his own. He's got people Speaker 2 00:00:50 and that was Yon. Neither or she shed with her frog. Yes. Lamp. Speaker 4 00:00:58 my frog lamp. That was a gift from a friend of mine. Speaker 2 00:01:02 Yeah. See now that's what we'll be talking about today. One of the things, one of the many things we'll be talking about today is taking care of yourself and joining us. Is Ethan Banks the one and only the most recognizable voice in the networking field? Speaker 5 00:01:17 Most recognizable voice you think? Speaker 3 00:01:19 I don't think so. Longest Speaker 5 00:01:20 Around. It could be. Speaker 3 00:01:21 I think that's pretty, Speaker 2 00:01:23 Pretty accurate. I think it's pretty accurate. Yeah. Speaker 5 00:01:26 , that's my, uh, my business business partner and co-host Greg would say, uh, we, we've been too stupid to quit. So it's keep going since 2010 and keep talking. So something Speaker 4 00:01:36 Yeah. Was even before we started that, I feel like I've known Ethan way longer than he's known me. It's, uh, yeah. Mm-Hmm. It's been an asynchronous thing, but yeah. , Speaker 5 00:01:44 Oh, we met, we met at a si, Cisco Live Universal Studios, right? Yeah. It was Speaker 4 00:01:49 2013. It was 20. Yeah, I remember. Yeah. It was, it was a, it was a monumental week for me. Speaker 2 00:01:57 , I remember it's Speaker 4 00:02:00 The first time I saw Russ speak. He spoke on, he spoke at an architecture session. You just released the book with Denise Donahue. You were talking about, you were talking about the OODA loop. I remember that. Yep. We hung out. I met Greg and Ethan, like it was a big week. Speaker 2 00:02:16 Wow. Wow. Oh, so OODA loops, that's what we should talk about is oodles of OODA loops. That's, that's, that's . Speaker 4 00:02:26 We'll have to save that for another day. . Speaker 2 00:02:30 So, so Ethan, you said you've come to a kind of, I don't know, how many years has it been since you started down this path of, of reforming your life and, and thinking about things along these lines of taking care of yourself? Speaker 5 00:02:43 Uh, it goes back to 2008, actually, 2008. I, a Speaker 2 00:02:47 Lot longer than it's been for me. Well, Speaker 5 00:02:49 Well, so to set the context, I'd finished my CCIE and my CCIE. I'd gained a lot of weight, um, during, during that time working a full-time job, um, which involved technical lead network engineering, a lot of core network stuff for a financial institution. Highly stressful. And I eat my stress. So I was doing that job. Plus I was, uh, working on the CCIE, which is in, in and of itself, could be a full-time job. And I've been working on that. That took me, I think, 16, 18 months to get through that program. Uh, so between all the studying and all the day job stuff, I, again, I had just picked up a lot of pounds. And in 2008, sometime after I finished the, IE got through the lab, I started a blog, which doesn't exist anymore. Don't go looking for it. But I called it losing 50. Speaker 5 00:03:40 The goal was document losing 50 pounds. And, uh, I didn't do so great at that, but it, but it began my journey. Uh, anyway, so I started, uh, I joined a gym. I joined a gym in town there that was, uh, pretty near the place I was working. And so I'd leave work and I'd head around to the gym and I'd start getting on the StairMaster. And I didn't know anything about anything really. I didn't know much about like, lifting weights or I didn't know much about diet, didn't know much other than I gotta lose some weight, so I should eat less and exercise more. I, and that's pretty common sense. So I started with that. And, uh, and the, the, the journey from there, it's 2023. Wow. I've been on this journey for 15 years, has really grown over time. You read a lot of books. Speaker 5 00:04:24 Um, I got into CrossFit at one point. Uh, I got into hiking and now trail running. And as you get deeper into these different sporting disciplines and read more and learn more and meet other people, and I even have a coach now, you just learn a lot more about how the body works and how all of those things affect, affect, have affected me beyond just the, the physicalness of it. Um, changing diet, getting better, sleep, uh, working out, doing all these, these exercise kind of things have improved thinking processes and my ability to handle stress and and so on. There's been a lot of benefits about it beyond just, uh, losing weight, which I have lost a bunch of weight over time, uh, to the point that recently some people have seen me like, are, are you, you ? Who are you? , which has been nice to be able to drop a few pounds and have some people notice that hadn't seen me since, uh, since the before times. Yeah. Speaker 2 00:05:22 That's really cool. Yeah. So I really do think that, um, there is a massive side of this, of being fit and thinking and, and eating and stuff like that, that really does impact your ability to think, especially as you get older. It's so easy when you're 20 years old or 24 years old to just say, whatever, I'll just eat pizza all the time. I don't care. But I don't know, I'm getting, I mean, it's started about 10, 15 years for me ago when I started realizing that I couldn't do that anymore. Like, that's just gotta stop. Like, that's, that's just gotta stop. I need a bedtime. Somebody needs to tuck me in at night, and , and I gotta get up at about the same time every day. You know? And these are grandfather things. These are things my grandfather told me, and I just never listened to him. Speaker 2 00:06:11 Right. I just was like, yeah, whatever grandfather, like, forget it. Whatever. You're old. I'm young. I can handle it. And you really can't, honestly. You really can't. So I have a, I have a kind of a similar, I mean, when I was in the Air Force, I swam a mile a day or more because I can't run. I just, you know, you're trail running thing. My knees are too freaked out for that. I could swim, so I swam. And then when I lived over in one house, I cut about a quarter and a half of wood, two cords of wood a year. I cut it and splice, uh, you know, split it and stacked it and burned it over the winter. But I still, I mean, not until maybe 10 year, maybe even eight years ago did I start being, okay, no, I've gotta be more organized about this. I've really got to like dig in and do something. So I started lifting weights and I started doing a lot more walking and stuff like that. And I'm, I'm with you. I mean, I've lost a few pounds, probably not as many as you, but I've lost a few pounds. Speaker 3 00:07:07 So, Ethan, I was wondering, what do you think, what is it about our, our chosen profession that makes us vulnerable to some of these issues? I mean, there's lots of lines of work that are stressful and that, um, this kind of thing, but I don't know, do you feel like there's some particular things about our work that make us vulnerable here? Speaker 5 00:07:27 I I think it work in general, technology work is, is stressful. Not just because it's stressful inherently, but it attracts a certain personality type. And I think if you were to profile those of us that tend to get, you know, deep into the practitioner side of networking and it more broadly, whether that's DevOps or cloud engineering or, you know, fill in the blank with any of these operational things that we do, um, there's a certain personality that's there that I, I think is the, is the crux of it, is, is the common point. We react to these jobs that we love, where we're technical people and we love to build things, and we're fascinated by the nuances and the details of what we do. And we get really into how we should build it and what the right way to go about it is. And whether we care about Cisco versus Juniper operating systems and, and what the topology should be given a given budget constraint and why. Speaker 5 00:08:25 So-and-so is wrong. And we have, we just, we get into it. We're so into it. We love this stuff. We're wired for it. We are just built for it within our personalities to, to, to think this way and feel strongly about all this stuff and to care. Uh, and so when we care about our jobs and our, our career, not just because it brings a paycheck home for the family, but because we love what we do, we're so into it, it, it manifests itself, I think, in, in stress in an unusual way because we're personally vested. It's not like we don't care if the change control doesn't go well. We care deeply. It's a big, big thing to us. Um, and I don't see that in every job and in every profession and, and in different people that I work with. And, and certainly it isn't everybody in our profession. Speaker 5 00:09:07 It is, it is certain people that I, I just noticed commonality. It's like, I know you, I just met you, but I know you because you're me. You know, you can just kind of, you get that feeling, you know, very quickly as you, as you meet some folks. And, and there seems to be a common thread then among this personality type, however you wanna describe us, uh, uh, of being stressed out and that stress, uh, being handled sometimes badly in a lot of ways. You know, for me it's, it's always been food, always been, you know, again, I eat my stress. One, one of the jobs I had, we'd go out for lunch and it was, I, I would get mildly made fun of because like, how could you eat all of that at lunch, dude? What is really, you gonna finish all that? Oh yeah. Speaker 5 00:09:50 They'd serve some, we, there was a place we'd go called Rosie's, and Rosie's served, uh, middle Eastern food. She was Lebanese and served, oh, just fantastic lunches, my word. And I would eat every bite, but she served massive portions. I mean, I was housing probably 1500 calories no worries. At lunch alone, you know, and then I'd eaten breakfast and then I'd go home and I'd eat dinner and maybe I'd have something a little later on. Uh, you know, so you, you're putting down 2,500, 3000 plus calories in a sedentary life. Um, you know, I dunno, I'm getting a little far from the question, Tom, but I, but I do think it's, it's, it's not just the job, it's the, the, it's the personality types that are attracted to the kind of job that we do as it engineers. I feel that also lends itself to this somewhat self-abusive behavior where we're, where it's food or maybe it's alcohol. You know, we, we certainly know of people in our line of work that they drink too much. They just do. Sometimes they can handle it. Sometimes it doesn't affect 'em too badly. Sometimes it does. We've seen that that's a thing that can happen as well. I wouldn't say it's obsessive behavior. Exactly. But there's something about it where the intensity, uh, of us as people goes too far in these other regards as well. Speaker 4 00:11:09 Yeah. Well, and just from a very practical standpoint, you have to be okay sitting or standing in front of a screen for hours on end to do this job. Right? I mean, 'cause that, that is the job. You have to be comfortable sitting at a desk or standing at a computer and doing that. And, and, um, you know, there, there are plenty of people who are most happy and most comfortable working outside doing things with their hands. Like it is just by nature, sedentary work. Um, and I think you, you, you hit a point when you realize, oh, if I don't make some changes, like it's going to have a long term impact on my overall quality of life. And so either you can be miserable in the long term because you've not taken care of your health, or you can make some changes that are maybe uncomfortable in the short term. Um, small incremental things that are gonna have an outsized impact on your long-term quality of life. And I think, you know, when you're in your twenties, you don't feel as imminently the impact of that. 'cause I mean, your body's young, you know, your , your joints recovers still work well, Speaker 2 00:12:18 You recover quickly. Yeah. And you recover well, yeah, Speaker 4 00:12:20 You can, you can pull an all-nighter and not feel it as intensely the next day. And over time you just become, come to realize, hey, like if, if I continue, and, and eventually you begin to measure the length of your life and it's, you've lived that long already, right? You get to this middle aged place. And, and I like to joke that I'm quickly getting to the point where I can no longer honestly refer to myself as middle aged. Um, and you're like, wait, I have 20, 30, you know, 35 years, and do I want those to be good productive years, or do I want to continue on a decline? And you just have to make some choices, right? Um, I think, and that's, I know that's, that's where I, the place where I find myself. Um, so yeah, it's important. Speaker 2 00:13:07 Yeah. So two things. First, I think the realization really came from me, and this, this plays off of what Yvonne and and Ethan are saying, was I was listening to a, a preacher, a teacher, and he said, how many weekends do you have left in your life? Hmm. Given your average age that at which people you know, die? How many weekends do you have left? And what are you doing with them? And that really, like sank in. I was like, oh no. Like when you get to a thousand weekends left in your life, they're countable. And do you want those to be good weekends , or do you want those to be nasty weekends? Right. And that sounds very traumatic, but I just think, you know, that's what really struck me. I think there's another thing to answer Tom's question a little bit more, is that alright? Speaker 2 00:13:58 I, I watch a lot of British, British mystery for anybody who doesn't know me very well, I, I watch a lot of British mystery and there's one that I particularly love, um, called Morse. And then there's one before that's a prequel to Morse, um, called Endeavor. And in endeavor they're talking about stuff and uh, or Morse is a young, yeah. When he's a younger Morse and somebody says to him, oh man, I wish I were smart as you are. And he says, you really don't. Because the reality is the more mental you are, the more isolated you are from the rest of humanity. It's much harder to have community. When you're in the group of people who are always learning and always striving to learn, you separate yourself further and further from that quote unquote mass. And I don't want that to sound bad, I'm just saying that's just, this is something I've observed over my life. Speaker 2 00:14:50 So another part of our health problem that we come into in our, in our culture as it people is we learn all the time. We are constantly like run, run, run, run, run, go learn, go learn, go learn. If you're not doing better mentally you're not doing well. You know, we don't sit back, um, like many career fields do and say, okay, I, I know everything I need to know. I'm gonna sit here and I'm gonna do my job, then I'm going home and I'm watching TV and I'm hanging out with my friends. We don't do that ever. And because of that, we don't build the social networks that support us in things like being healthier in things like releasing stress and stuff like that. So I think there's also a social element, Tom, to why this career field is this way. It is, I don't know, maybe that's, Speaker 4 00:15:34 I also, I'm, I'm fresh off a trip to Europe and uh, and I think some of this is also an American problem, right? I mean, oh yeah. The folks that I, uh, had the opportunity to meet and get to know in Europe, uh, they, they have stronger social networks. They, they and, and one who had moved to Los Angeles shared like the hardest thing about their move is they had a really hard time making friends with Americans. And I'm like, I don't, I don't think that's you. I think Americans don't do friends as well. Yeah. Um, and also they build activity into their day. You know, they walk, the food is fresher. Don't get me started on how we've corrupted our, our, uh, our food supply chain and how it really takes a lot of effort to eat healthy food and it takes a lot more money to eat healthy food. Yes. And the rhythms of our lives don't support sitting down and having wonderfully delightful healthy meals with people. Um, and I think those are things you can work on, but they take, they, they don't happen organically in the normal American life, especially among people that are, have careers and kids and busy, busy, busy. And so I think those are things we have to intentionally cultivate, um, in ways that maybe, um, are just built into the fabric of culture and society and other parts of the world. Speaker 2 00:17:04 Yeah. There's a rhythm to making bread every Sunday or whatever it is. Mm-Hmm. , there's a rhythm to living in a space where you're like, I'm okay to spend two or three hours letting bread rise so that I can bake it and have a fresh loaf of bread at dinner that I didn't buy from the grocery store and just throw in the oven to heat it up. Speaker 5 00:17:24 Which is easier as, as an empty nester Yeah. Than it was when I was in my thirties and I had two kids and a long commute and Mm-hmm. , all of the rest of that that just made, made exercise eating well, those things were, were an afterthought. And even if I thought about them actively, I was like, what am I gonna fit that into the schedule? You know, in between my hour plus long commute where I'm stuck in traffic and, you know, trying to get back and forth to the office. It's like, you know, fitting that stuff in was, was hard. Now that I work from home and my kids are out of the house, you know, after I get off this podcast, I'm gonna go for a run because I can, I don't have to fight that. But it wasn't that way or, or earlier I had to really be intentional and make the time and fit it into my schedule. It was a thing on my calendar that I had to have in there. I am going to the gym tonight or it didn't happen. Food's a different matter. Yeah. I always seem to find time to eat somehow. We all, we all, we all do that. We all do that. Well, but Speaker 2 00:18:20 What do you eat? But exercising, I guess what Yvonne's saying there is like, do you eat quality or do you eat fast and, and in America, and that's a choice we eat fast. That's a Speaker 5 00:18:29 Because because Yvonne, I think you made a great point that it is a lot more expensive to eat all fresh food. So in the town I live in now, there is a food co-op, and that is, and most of the food that's in there is populated by local farms and very selected. If they're not local, they're very carefully selected what is populated on the shelves. And so if we wanna go in there and eat the food tends to be, uh, very fresh and good selection. But about 30% more than if I went to the major supermarket that's across town about three, four miles away. Um, but that's a choice. You know, we can go in there and we can patronize that place and get the best quality food that's available to us made by or grown on a farm that's, you know, very close by. Speaker 5 00:19:11 And it, it does tend to be better stuff. You know, Yvonne, I said don't you, you said something along the lines of don't get me started about how we've corrupted our, our food supply chain. Well, yeah, that's exactly what's happened. And I, and I think a lot of that, the food that's heavily processed, that's very, it's cheap. It's comforting to eat a lot of times what it is. And it's mostly pre-prepared. It isn't the the healthiest thing for you. Um, but it is convenient and in inexpensive. And so we tend to just go for it Speaker 4 00:19:40 When I think sometimes it can feel overwhelming when we have a show like this. We talk about all these things you should be doing. Like you, you should be exercising and you should be getting enough sleep, which we haven't really talked about yet, and you should be eating better food. Um, but I think, um, what, what I found, so I am in a family of people with food sensitivities me, my kids like, and so for us, eating has always required an additional level of planning and preparation to be, because you know, when you, when you have food sensitivities, that adds another layer of complexity. But I think part of what I've learned is that I've developed kind of systems for making sure that we can all eat. And I think like, and over time, once you develop a personal system that you turn into a habit, then that one thing becomes easier. Speaker 4 00:20:31 And so you can't tackle it all at once. But, but I, you know, I had a doctor's appoint a visit once where I found out one of my kids couldn't have gluten, one of them couldn't have dairy and, and a couple other things right. That were new on top of like the peanuts and everything else. And it took six months of real serious planning and label reading and recipe finding and experimenting in the kitchen to figure out how to feed everybody in a way that was sustainable. But we eventually did it. Now we eat the same five things during the week every week. And that's, but it was manageable. But I think what you have to do is figure out, okay, what do, where do I wanna get to and what are the small incremental things I can do to build systems in my life that support the way that I want to live? It's, it's no different than building, you know, a system at work to make sure a thing gets done, but but you have to sometimes approach your life with the same level of care and observation and discipline. And then you, you, you attack a thing and then you attack another thing. Yeah. You know, you pick the, you know, the mo the, the, the thing you want where you wanna start. Yeah. And you just start. Speaker 2 00:21:36 And that's actually a good segue. I mean, what can we do practically? Right? What can we do practically? And Yvonne, I think your point about food is, is spot on. So, you know, for instance, only having five dishes a week, is that really so horrible. I mean, people make out, like, if I have to eat the same, if I have to eat that same chicken dish once a week every week for the rest of my life, I'm gonna die. Like it's so we are, so it's just like we do with our wardrobes. Like right, I used to have this thing about, oh, I'm gonna have a really cool wardrobe and all this other stuff. I'm gonna have lots of different color shirts and pants and whatever, and blah, blah, blah. And then this guy, Donny Savage one time was only wearing black and gray and white to work. Speaker 2 00:22:16 And I was like, why Donny, do you do that? And he said, because he said, you know, first of all you're like, oh, well you're just trying to be cool or Steve Jobs or whatever. And he's like, no, it's because I get up in the morning, I'm bleary-eyed, I don't wanna pick what I'm gonna work for. We where, where to work. I'm gra walking in my closet, picking out a pair of pants, a shirt, and I wear them and it really doesn't matter because they all match everything in my closet matches. I pay no attention to what I take outta my closet in the morning. And really there's some freedom in that kind of consistency that you can build into your life over time, around food and around other stuff that you can be like, I just don't need 14 different ways to make chicken, honestly. Like, you know, it's enough. Speaker 4 00:23:03 And if you're a foodie and that's your thing and you get joy from that, knock yourself out. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Um, like it's, it's not that it has to be one way or another, but you kind of have to figure out where you wanna be and then figure out what's the next incremental step to get me there. Yeah. Um, and, and that can be true with your fitness or your eating. Um, yeah, I, I'm battling sleep right now. I'm going through a phase of life where things sleep is different for me than it's ever been. And so I'm trying to figure that out. Right. And it, it just, and it doesn't stay the same, right? You, your family changes, your body changes, your life changes. And so you constantly have to tweak it a bit, but it's worth it, I think is what I would say. Speaker 2 00:23:41 Yeah. I think sleep is a, is a pretty important topic Speaker 3 00:23:44 Too, too. I, um, I remember, uh, in, in my life there was a time when I, um, you know, troubleshooting at 2:00 AM was actually kind of cool. It was like, yeah, the adrenaline, the like this is like, and and there's nobody else. And, and, and then, then you solve it and it feels really good. Um, and I was, I remember I was troubleshooting something once it happened to be in the middle of the day and a coworker was with me and he's like, he's looking at my face while I'm doing this. And he's like, you love this, don't you with this, with this kind of disgusted look on his face, . I was like, yeah, Speaker 6 00:24:22 I do. I know I'm a weirdo . Speaker 3 00:24:26 But but you, I mean, you can get caught up in that. Um, and you can get, and often, you know, you get caught up in it in the middle of the night that can throw you off for weeks or months. Um, it can be really hard to recover from stuff like that. Speaker 2 00:24:35 Yeah. I think sleep is really important. And again, the same thing, like for me, food has come down to, you know, we make things and freeze them in the house instead of buy buying stuff out of the grocery store frozen. Right. Like, because you can, like bread in particular, and sleep is, to me is largely all about schedule. Man, I've gotta go bed at the same time. I gotta get up at the same time. I just got to, I have to, otherwise in a week I'm gonna be an absolute mess. It's just that you just can't deal with it. Sleep. Speaker 5 00:25:07 Sleep is probably the single biggest factor in how I do in a given week. If I've had some off days where I haven't gotten enough sleep, I've fallen behind on my sleep. Yeah. Then it catches up to me in feelings of just general tiredness and fatigue. But it also affects my personality. I'm much less pleasant of an Ethan to be around if I haven't been sleeping much. , I'm really a little bit short tempered and I'm kind of grumpy and I iri and anything can irritate me. You know, the the, the cat could irritate me. Uh, email. Speaker 2 00:25:36 Well I don't blame Speaker 5 00:25:37 You for that comes in, it's like, ah, you know, and you, the thoughts turn negative and, and, and it's, and sleep is the, is the thing. Man, if I'm getting, if I'm caught up on my sleep, sleep is going well for me. I'm a whole different guy. It's, uh, it's such a big deal. And, and what you were saying about schedule, Russ, that is true for me. I've got to go to bed and get up at the same time. That's what, whatever it is, I gotta pick the time and stick with it. My body gets used to it because if, and then if I go to bed late, I'm waking up at the same time. Doesn't matter when I go to bed, it could be an hour or two later. I'm not waking up an hour or two later. I'm waking up at pretty much every morning, 7 45 time to get up. But I went to bed late. That's tough. It's time to get up now. Okay. Body. Why do you like this though? ? Yeah. Sleep is huge. Speaker 4 00:26:22 The the mood thing is so real. You know, I, I had a couple weeks there of travel where I was on one side of the planet and I was on the other side of the planet. And, and those swings in time zones, it's impossible to not get your sleep disrupted. And, and I had a day when I was just incredibly down like blue and I have a tendency toward that direction anyway. And, and I've been around the block enough to know like, you know what, like I bet if you get a good night's sleep, the whole world is gonna look different, right? And so to not ruminate in that horrible, miserable state and just realize, oh wait, this is a function of my physiology. I need a nap. I need to like, I need my brain to go clean itself and I need . You know, and then the world's gonna look better. Speaker 4 00:27:12 And I think when we can fall into some pretty negative, like for me it's self-talk and things like that. Even when, when our sleep isn't, isn't okay. When we're not getting enough or when it's disrupted and even, and sometimes like life happens and you get disrupted. It's like, and, and that's, those things happen. But to be aware enough, like, wait, I'm not gonna make a big decision here. I'm not gonna go complain to my husband about this horrible thing that I think he just did when I'm running on two hours sleep because it's probably really not him and I'm gonna have to apologize later. Right? So like, but just to be aware of those rhythms and patterns and to just accept them and move with them as opposed to trying to ah, I'll be fine. Speaker 5 00:28:00 But the, the, the, the negative self-talk and that feeling of, um, just everything's down and you feel blue, it can affect you in the workplace as well. You, you get into, into work and if you're feeling negative and you're feeling down all the time and your coworkers are irritating you and you're pulled into another meeting that you don't wanna be in and you, you just, everything's just bothering you and grading on you 'cause you haven't been sleeping well, that can lead to, I should look for another job. I don't think I like working here anymore. I think I'm over this thing. I'm gonna go do something else. And you can actually make radical decisions that maybe you shouldn't be making. Uh, if you were caught upon your sleep and in the, in a right place and your brain was properly, uh, where it needed to be, to have the, the kind of energy that it needs to have to make decisions that are important. You should be making, you know, Yvonne, you were saying, you know, making decisions like shouldn't go harass my husband about that thing he did on two hours of sleep. 'cause I'm probably wrong. Yeah. The brain doesn't work. Right. But, but yet you, you, you feel strongly about things and wanna make decisions when you really shouldn't. Yeah. Speaker 2 00:29:05 Yeah. So first practical piece of advice made by listening. Set a schedule. Try setting a schedule to sleep. Apply the self-discipline that you do to your lab work, to your sleep work. Speaker 5 00:29:15 , you're in the Apple ecosystem. Probably works the same in Android too, I don't know. But yeah, you can plug in your sleep schedule and have your, if you wear an Apple watch, it'll once sleep mode kicks in, it goes dark, it goes black and you know, uh, yep. I'm supposed to be in bed now and then it doesn't come back on again unless you, it makes you hold the button to turn it back on to look at it so you feel really badly about it. I shouldn't be looking at my watch now. I should be sleeping now. That, that's a, that's a habit. That is, that has helped me. Yeah. Uh, it's a small thing, but it's like, yep, okay, bedtime, gotta go. Uh, Speaker 2 00:29:48 And the same thing with exercise. Right. Find a way to enjoy it and go do it. Even if you have to start, and this is something people don't get about exercise, right? They start out hating it. Everybody starts out, I don't know anybody who starts out loving exercise. I've never met him and I've never met that person. , maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you have Ethan. But no, I didn't start out loving exercise. Speaker 5 00:30:11 I hated it at first. Like yeah, like it was a thing I would say to my wife, I hate exercise and working out. Yeah. And she was a working out fanatic. She loved it. Yeah. And I was just like, Nope, I don't want any part of that. No, Speaker 2 00:30:21 Thank you. Yeah, exactly. And yet, once you get into it and you, you almost get to the point where you feel wrong that you didn't, you feel, you feel like, oh man, I missed three days. Oh, that's horrible. Now I feel like a dirty slob or something, you know? And it's it just really . Speaker 4 00:30:38 And there's a virtuous cycle there, right? Like if you exercise and work your body physically it will, it will help you regulate your sleep, right? Yeah. There is. And and it will also release like hormones and chemicals in your body that are designed to be there that help you with your mood and that Yeah. That, that make you just feel stronger and capable. And all of those things are gonna have a net positive impact on not just your job, but your, your how you show up in the world, your, your every single day. Yeah. And it's, um, it, it's, it's absolutely worth it. Um, and I completely get the whole like, not loving exercise, but uh, yeah, moving. You do feel better. You Speaker 2 00:31:26 Just feel better. Yeah. You do. Yeah. One of the, go ahead, Tom. Speaker 3 00:31:29 I was just one of, one of the great things about working from home, I feel like it makes that a whole lot easier for me. Um, you know, I, I run on the treadmill five days a week and, um, I'm not losing huge amounts of weight, but it feels great. And like I can, you know, I can shower and go to my, I can finish exercising at 10 minutes before my first meeting and I don't have to sacrifice my sleep to do it. And so not everyone can do that. I mean, not everybody's working from home, but, um, I dunno, I found that to be a really great way to use that flexible time to stick some exercise in there. Speaker 2 00:31:59 So that, that would be another piece of advice I would give people is target towards flexibility in your life on time. Most people maximize their earnings. That's just the way we are. We maximize our earnings. The reality is you need to balance your earnings against the rest of your life because you have a long life ahead of you and you need to have a phy, physically healthy body when you get to the end of it. Um, so that's another piece of practical advice I remember very well when I was in global escalation team at Cisco and I just said to my, my manager, I said, I find it really, really hard to do lab work in, in the office. I, it is just really hard people interrupting me. It's not that it's wrong that they interrupt me, they're asking me valid questions, but just like, this is hard and I need to go solve customer problems, so can I just work from home one day a week? Speaker 2 00:32:47 And he was like, sure, stay home, do lab work. And that quickly turned into two days a week and three days a week. And then by the time I was on, uh, deployment and architecture team, we were all agreeing on which day in the office we were gonna, which day of the week we were coming into the office, . And so we made it a point to all show up in the office one day. And by the way, we had another laptop rule on that day. You come to the office, you don't bring your laptop, you, you're there to sit in front of a whiteboard in a, in a conference room, go to lunch with people, figure out what they're doing, whatever. But you're not there to sit there and do email 'cause it's your one day a week in the office. So you go do office stuff that one day and then the other four days of the week, you, you have all the time you want on your computer. And so there are different ways and patterns and rhythms you can use to balance things better. We don't do very well with that. But it's, Speaker 5 00:33:41 It's funny what you said about maximizing earnings, Russ, because that is an easy decision to make and feels like the right decision, the obvious decision, right? Yeah. I have an opportunity to make some more money. I did that for many years where I, for most of my working career, I didn't work one job, I worked two, I had one primary job and a side hustle of some kind. It might've been, uh, writing for an IT magazine or, uh, doing some consulting on the side. I ran a , I did web email and DNS hosting outta the basement of my house for a while. I had a business line in from the ISP and I, I did that for a while before, uh, the GoDaddies of the world kind of made that a non-starter. You know, it didn't, didn't make any sense, but I would prioritize all of those things because I could make a few extra bucks over taking care of myself because taking care of myself wasn't that important. Uh, what I needed to do was just make every dollar that I possibly could however I could. And that was, in hindsight, that was wrong thinking. Speaker 2 00:34:36 Yeah. And Speaker 4 00:34:37 Well, and I think go well. I I think when you're, there's also an age differential there. Like when you're really young, when you're in your twenties, you've not established yourself in your career like that, that work that you do and that you did, Ethan and I know well, that all of us have done to a degree to really be a deep subject matter expert and to grow and to learn and to really have a skill that, that will serve you the rest of your life. And so I do want to acknowledge that folks in their, in their, especially in their twenties and their early thirties, like this is a sliding scale that may change over time. And at one point in your life when your income is relatively low, increasing your income by 20% is life changing. Absolutely. Life changing. But then you get to a point where increasing your income by 10 or 20% is not life changing. Speaker 4 00:35:31 It means like, we can take another family vacation this year, or I can put more of my 401k or, and, and those are things you also have to consider as well, right? Like, so there, there, there is a time when like that money is really going to change things depending on where you are in the econo economic scale. Mm-Hmm. . But I think the problem is we get in those patterns and we don't readjust our thinking based on how things have changed, right? And we say, oh, well there's a time in my life if I could make another five grand in a year, it would, it would absolutely change my life to get to a point where, you know, we always, it'd be great. We, is it worth the trade off that I'm making to have it? Yeah. And that's, that's how you have to think about it, I Speaker 2 00:36:16 Believe. And so another, go ahead, Ethan. Speaker 5 00:36:20 Some of those side hustle jobs I did were that kind of money, Yvonne, where it really did make a difference, right? But some of them weren't. Right. When I was doing the ISP thing in, in, in my basement, it's because I had experience with that and I knew a lot about it, and I knew those products really good. And so it was an easy thing for me to set up. And I had customers that wanted me to do that work for them. And I had fun, uh, adapting spam assassin in Pearl to do daily reports and whatever. So it wasn't just that I was doing it for the money, it was also amusing and entertaining and a fun, nerdy thing to get into. But it wasn't making any money. Uh, I should have, I I eventually I migrated everybody over to these other services that were, could do it so much cheaper than I was willing to do it for. Uh, and, and was done with that. It was something that I should have not, should have stopped doing much sooner. Yep. And respected my time, um, and made time for myself more in that specific case. But I, I do wanna acknowledge what you said, uh, Yvonne, that yeah, depending on what income brackets you're in right now, that side hustle could make a big difference. Yep. Uh, and, and, and maybe that is what you need to do for some people. That that's just, that's where you're at in life right now. Speaker 2 00:37:29 Well, let me, let me spin it a slightly different direction too, because this is like a, a, this is like a hobby horse of mine here, which is that often people will spend their early career learning a specific technology in a specific way because it maximizes their income when what they should be doing is building a mental map and building a set of mental tools that will serve them for their entire career. And that can be leveraged at higher and higher levels later on to make more and more money. And so what we often get trapped in is, I am a speed demon demon on the Cisco CLI, I'm a speed demon on yamo files for juniper. Whatever it is. Doesn't matter what it is. I am the best cable wrapper in the entire world. I can make that rack look absolutely beautiful, fine. And somebody's gonna pay you a lot of money to do that, by the way. Speaker 2 00:38:23 And that's fine. But in 20 years, do you really still want to try to be a speed speed demon on the Cisco CLI or the Juniper YAML files or wrapping cables, right? You need to think young in your career to use the energy that you have to build something that you can build on later rather than just beating your head against a wall, trying to make as much money as you can right now because there's a need for this or that or the other. I don't know that, that seems to me to be another thing too. It's like I still have all those side hustles, Ethan, and I don't know, they don't bother me so much anymore because like writing is, I don't know, I just spent six months writing a a 500 page book. So like, whatever, . But Speaker 4 00:39:11 I think the important takeaway there is that it is a very individual, how you work that into the rhythm of your life is a very individual thing. It's that you need to do it with intention, right? Mm-Hmm. . And, and then be willing to sit back and go, uh, you know, this worked for a while, but maybe it's not working anymore and maybe I should try something new. Speaker 2 00:39:32 Design your, design your life the way you would design a fine network and be willing to get rid of what we call tech debt. Old stuff. It's not really tech debt, but whatever, what we call old stuff, legacy stuff, when it runs, when it's done, when it's end of life, there's a time and a place to get rid of end of life stuff in your life. , it just is nice. . I like it. Ethan's over there going, I don't know, why did I come on this podcast? , these crazy people. . Speaker 4 00:40:13 Oh Speaker 5 00:40:16 No, I, I I, you know, we were kicking around topics. Russ, you know, one of the reasons I brought this one up is I, I've seen too many people just burn themselves right to the ground in this career. And I, and I was, I was that person. Uh, I still am that person to, to some degree, uh, maybe a lesser degree. But, uh, when you go so hard for so long trying to accomplish things in your career, whether that's to hit the next salary bracket or get that next position that interests you or to climb the ladder within your company so you have a position of more authority and responsibility, you pay a price for that. And it's a price you pay over time. It's not immediately apparent to you. You can go for a decade really hard in your career doing all the things you need to do to advance, advance, advance, advance, and meet that goal and go to that next rung of the ladder. Speaker 5 00:41:10 And after a while, a decade or longer, you realize I'm exhausted all the time. And I don't know why. It's 'cause you spent 10 years burning yourself out. You, you, you ground yourself right into the, into the ground and made yourself into a nice fine dust by working so hard. And I don't think people can do that forever. And yet this, I guess maybe it's any career, but something about it particularly where there's always new things and changing things and, uh, new stuff to take on and new challenges to consider. And there's always another big project out there. And there's always another job where someone wants to hire you to do the next incredible thing. It's easy to just grind yourself out. And, uh, and again, that whole burnout thing hangs over your head for a lot of years. If you, if you don't take time for yourself and properly balance that work life and that career with the rest of what your body needs to function. Yeah. Speaker 2 00:42:07 And, and don't be plus onto Speaker 4 00:42:08 That. Speaker 2 00:42:09 Yeah. And don't wait too late for that, by the way. Don't wait too late. You can do permanent damage doing this and, and make it impossible to recover fully at some point. Um, yeah. And, and by the way, anybody else here really dislike it when you go into, uh, a career growth thing and they say, where do you want to be in five years? , alive somewhere, . Yeah. You know, I don't know. Like I, it's, I think the industry drives that too, to some degree. Look at this new certification. Look at this new thing. There's like always in our industry, this total push for new, new, new, new, better, better, better, better. And you know, we talked about this when we a little bit on another show, and we were talking about like, really does 5G you know, the wifi? We did a round table a couple days ago. We were talking about like we wifi seven. Like, okay, do you really need 96 gig to your couch? Like, you know, , what are we doing? Hmm. Speaker 4 00:43:12 I just wanna be careful though that we don't, um, I think you can, you can have ambition and still take care of yourself. Oh yes. Like, you don't have to trade one for the other, but you do have to accept that you are a finite human with a finite body, with finite time and finite abilities that are gonna be different depending on your health, your emotional health, your phase of life, and all those things. But it doesn't mean you have jettison your ambition in order to be healthy. But you, and, and frankly, the people who do it the best, the longest find a way to do both. Um, and I, and that is okay, but we, we don't need this false dichotomy, but we just need to be aware that, you know, you are making a trade and you should make the trade. You should not have something else. Make the trade for you. Speaker 2 00:44:08 Right. Exactly. I, I think that the, the key to that trade is what, what I would call virtue. It's what are you doing for other people, not for yourself. It's, you know, there's, there's an extent I can go to for other people that I can't go to for myself. However, I still have limits. Right. You know, too much pressure is still too much pressure. But, um, I can, and not, not just to please other people, but just, just to be like, you know, am I doing this to be richer or am I doing this to help people who are junior to me? Am I doing, you know, those types of questions you can ask yourself that can help you balance a little bit. Speaker 4 00:44:50 Well, and a good, a good way to think about that for me is if, if I want to contribute the maximum to the world over the course of my life, how do I best do that? Right? And I best do that by making sure I'm able to contribute for the longest amount of time. That's Speaker 2 00:45:06 Right. Speaker 4 00:45:07 Um, and that's, um, to me, that's, that's the framework that helps. But you may have to go find your own and that's Speaker 2 00:45:14 Okay. Yeah, you might. It's okay. So I don't have anything else to beat up on Ethan about . Well, that's not true on this topic. Speaker 4 00:45:21 Ethan's fabulous. I know you're not allowed to beat up on Ethan . Speaker 5 00:45:27 Uh, why not? You sure? You can go ahead, . I can take it Speaker 3 00:45:31 . Speaker 2 00:45:34 So Yvonne, anything else you want to throw out there before we wrap up and let Ethan go back to running? Speaker 4 00:45:41 No, I think this is, this is great. It's important. I'm glad we're talking about it. Um, and I, I welcome, uh, feedback from those in different phases of life and stages of their career to see what, what they think and how maybe they're managing differently because they're in a different place. I'd love to hear about it. Yeah. Speaker 2 00:45:57 Yeah. Hey, if you'd like to come on the hedge and talk about how you're managing it or failing to manage it, I mean, this is a perennial topic. . We've had people come on and talk about printout and say they didn't manage it. Well, it's, it's happened. So, uh, Tom, anything from your side? Speaker 3 00:46:15 No, no. It's been great. Speaker 2 00:46:17 Did you finish reading all those books yet? Speaker 3 00:46:19 No, not yet. Speaker 2 00:46:21 I see copies. I see duplicates. So this is, that's not fair. . Speaker 3 00:46:26 There are no duplicates. That would be silly. . Speaker 4 00:46:29 They just look the same. Speaker 2 00:46:31 . And Ethan, anything before you, anything else you wanna say about being wellness before you go running off into the sunset? Yeah. Speaker 5 00:46:41 Speaker 2 00:46:43 Into the mosquitoes and the trees. Speaker 5 00:46:44 There's, there's, there's one thing we got on onto before we, uh, uh, hit it off in other directions in the conversation. But yeah, the point was made. Don't feel like you gotta do all this stuff at once. Maybe you know, by instinct that you need to take care of better care of yourself and you know, you don't eat well and maybe you weigh more than you want to. And you know, exercise is a piece of the puzzle and you know, you should be sleeping better and all the rest of it, but you don't kind of know where to begin. Just take it one step at a time. Um, you know, food is the biggest thing to get control of. And then you can add exercise later on. And exercise doesn't mean you know, you, you follow David Goggins, do everything he does. 'cause the man's insane. Speaker 5 00:47:20 You can just go , go, go gently into it and pick, pick running. And that running doesn't start with running. It starts with walking. That's, that's how you begin. If you're gonna, uh, pick up a career of, uh, of hobby running, you start by walking and that moves into jogging. And then you start, uh, start running. And my thing is trail running. That's what it's evolved to over the years. It was basically walking on trails as a hiker that's turned into running on trails as a, as a trail runner, you can take it slow and it takes years and that's fine. But if you know inside that you'd wanna do better for yourself, you gotta take, take a minute and figure out what that thing is and pick a goal and then go after it and then build on it over time. Um, the habits that I have, which we didn't get into a lot of detail in this, about the different habits that are in my life, but it took many years from 2008 to 2023, it's been 15 years. Speaker 5 00:48:16 I'm still making changes and tweaking things in my exercise and in my diet and, and sleeping. It's an ongoing thing that has gotten me to a much happier place. I'm, I'm a lighter human. I don't weigh as much. Uh, my diet's improved. I sleep better. I'm more consistently happy. I'm less often depressed and angry and frustrated, you know, with my life because of the changes that I've made. Um, but it's not perfect yet. It's still, it's still ongoing. So don't, don't feel like you gotta do it all at once. Um, no. Pick something and it's worth it in the end. Speaker 2 00:48:49 Yeah. And don't set in reasonable goals. Go do it. To do it. Not because you saw somebody else trail run a 20 mile run, you know, or whatever it is. Right. Go pick, you know, go do it. Do it to do it. Okay, Yvonne. So where can people get in touch with you if they want to follow you? Yep. Hear, hear your many words of wisdom. Speaker 4 00:49:11 Uh, always on LinkedIn. You can find me at Yvonne Sharp or, um, on the platform, formerly known as Twitter as Sharp Network, Speaker 2 00:49:20 And Tom LinkedIn. Yeah, he's the one social media guy. He's down to one piece for of social media. Good for him. We went from giving him a hard time about not blogging to giving him a hard time about only having one social media account. . That's okay. Ethan Packet pushers. I know. Speaker 5 00:49:41 Yeah. Packet pushers.net, uh, is a number of podcasts that I'm involved with there. Uh, heavy networking, especially as well as day two Cloud. And then, uh, LinkedIn, if you'd like to follow me on social media. I, I write about, uh, briefings I've taken from different vendors or heard about it at Tech Field Day event, uh, uh, getting into LinkedIn live, starting to do some live streams and experiment with some of those things. And, uh, that's the place to find me because, uh, hey, Twitter is, I don't know what it is anymore and I'm not there. . So LinkedIn for me. Speaker 2 00:50:13 Cool. I must white. You can always find me here at the hedge on Rule 11 Tech on LinkedIn. I do log into Twitter about once a week or something formerly known as Twitter about once a week or something. But I'm easy to find. So just look me up and you'll find me. I'm might have to check into that live stream thing on LinkedIn, though I didn't even know that was out there. I'll spend some time looking at that. And, uh, I mean, you can also find my stuff on Safari Books online or whatever too. So just look around, you'll find my stuff. Uh, as usual. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Hedge. We know your time is important, however, I think this was a really important show. I think that you should take heat to this if you don't already. And, you know, think about balancing your life and think about your physical fitness and think about sleep well and get into rhythms of life, um, about food and about even holidays and taking time off and all that stuff to be a healthier person. 'cause I think over the long run you'll be a more effective engineer if you do. Um, and thanks for listening to this episode for the Hedge and we will catch you next time.