Avoid The Drama

John:               Hey everyone, John Sonmez from simpleprogrammer.com and today I wanted to talk about a topic that a lot of developers, I mean people in general really get caught up on and it wastes so much of your time and so much of your energy.

The topic I’m talking about here is feeding into drama and we have a lot of this in the developer community.  I mean there’s always drama happening on Twitter and Facebook.  People are posting their political agendas and other developers are attacking them or they’re posting what’s happened at some conference or some kind of article that someone wrote or they made some kind of sexist comment or they did this thing.  We tend to get sucked right into this and to feed this.  We tend to comment on it and fuel the flame and make things worse.

This is something that’s hard to resist.  Sometimes I’ll look at my Twitter feed or my Facebook feed and I just want to type something, would actually think about some subject and then I realize that I shouldn’t even be reading this news article.  I shouldn’t even be paying attention to this drama because it’s such a distraction and it’s such an emotional drain.

I know that after, sometimes, when I look through my Facebook feed and I see all this drama in there it drains me after I’m done and then it makes it harder to work.  I lose my motivation.  It really gives me a sense of negativity.  It’s really important to stay positive if you want to have positive results because those emotions and those feelings around you will affect you and they will bring you down and they will cause you to become negative.  They’ll totally have the ability to change your mood.  Plus, when you get involved in these things it never turns out right for you.

The reason why there is drama is because it’s something that polarizes people.  What I mean by polarizes it divides them.  Some people are very strong on one side and other people are very strong on the other side.  There’s almost no thing that you can say that is going to make everyone happy with you.

In fact, when you type some comment to a post and you think you’ve got the right answer there and then maybe you’ve got a great answer you’re going to get some supporters but you’re also going to get a lot of negative backlash and over what?  Is it something that’s really important to your life?

I mean yeah, when you’re at work and you’re making an architectural decision and it’s really important because you know that this is the right way to proceed, yeah, fight that, have some drama there.  Do it in a respectful way.  Do it in a way that’s going to benefit everyone.  But when you’re looking at some news article on Facebook or Twitter or whatever social media or Reddit or whatever it is and people are commenting and they’re making harsh comments, adding to that is not going to help in any way.  It’s just wasting your time.  It’s distracting you.  It’s draining your emotional energy and ultimately it could hurt you at some point in the future when the wrong person reads your comment, takes it out of context and then forms a negative opinion of you.

That’s my advice.  Stay out of the drama.  Don’t worry about what other people are thinking, what they’re doing.  Just focus on your goals.  Focus on what you need to do and try to stay positive.  You’re going to have a lot better career, you’re going to have a lot better life if you can accomplish that.  We all get sucked in from time to time, but just keep that in mind.

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed this video.  Don’t forget to subscribe to my channel.  If you liked these videos then check out my blog at simpleprogrammer.com, until next week talk to you later.