Growth Mindset | Andrew Whelan

So thank you all very much. I know you just spent 3 hours working with Tim and listening and watching everybody else's, going through what they kind of want to do with their lives. This is my first time here. I want to thank Asra and everybody for having me here. I'm going to talk a little bit about moving into the next place you're going to be. Some of you, it's going to be entrepreneurship. Some of it's going to be getting some experience in the tech world. And then I'm going to give you some really cool tips and tricks and tools that you should have in place. Things that you might know, things that you don't know. Because I've never worked with you, I know where you're coming from and I know your backgrounds. If you feel like, we got this, Andy, move on to the next thing, I will. Just let me know. And I'm pretty interactive, so please ask questions, throw things out. I am not formal at all. I believe in non-traditional education. That's why I do what I do. So please just feel the way, you know, throw something out if you want to. Start with, because you just had 3 hours with Tim, everybody stand up. 'Cause we are tired! And everybody take a deep breath in, and then just go ahh! And do one more. Ahh! I assure you, when you own your own companies and you have your entire team do that in the morning, it's wonderful. 'Cause then you get a sense of the people who are like, I'm not here to work. People who are like, all right, I've done this long enough, or people who are like, yeah, let's get going. So everyone take a seat in your awesome little lounge chairs. We're going to talk a little bit. As Amy said, I'm a career coach. I currently work with data scientists, product managers, full-stack developers, user experience designers, and filmmakers. So those are the people I work with on a regular basis. I'm going to talk a little bit first about what I do and why I do it in the sense of preparing you. So we're gonna talk about networking. I know that part of what you're gonna have to do as you start to build your careers, whether it be for getting funding or building into positions, you're gonna need to start to learn how to talk to people and have people take you seriously, right? So for me, I'm gonna talk a little bit about that. Then we're gonna talk about LinkedIn as a tool for you to get started from wherever you are. I talked to a few people before the class started. You'll be going back to where you're coming from, going to school, doing whatever. So if you start to practice some of these things that I tell you today, you'll be a little bit ahead of the curve when you get close to graduation or when you actually are ready to get that company up and running, okay? And then what we'll do is we'll talk about some job strategies, and then towards the end I'll talk a little bit about some branding techniques. I spoke with— tell me your name again. Vivek. Vivek earlier about this idea of coming up with this sort of personal brand, getting set to move into the next phase of your lives. And I'm going to talk about branding, what I think it is, and then we're going to do some exercises on branding. I will tell you from the start, I don't have all the answers. My wife will argue that I believe I do, but I will tell you I don't have all the answers. So some of the things that you may ask me, I might say, I have no idea. Or I'll tell you sort of where I would go in order for you to get that information. What I work with as a coach is my experience and what I have to share with you. I work from a place of Inspiration and information, right? So I'm here to motivate people to get them ready to go into the next phase of their career, but also motivation and information in terms of this is what I know about the industry right now. I can tell you about this market here right now and certain other markets. I lived in New York for 10 years before I came here, so I can tell you what it's like to start a business or to find a job in those markets and a few others around, you know, smatterings around that I have worked with people who are in like Portland, Seattle, Singapore, and a couple others. So that's what we're going to do today, okay? Does anybody know what growth mindset is? What's growth mindset? Yes? It's another way of describing optimism. It's another way of describing optimism. Get more specific. Those are all excellent. Open-minded. Not one state of mind. Open-minded. I said thinking big. Thinking big. I love it. Okay. So, growth mindset for me is this idea that I am capable of anything, but I have to have something in place. And what I have to have in place is a willingness to do the work and work incredibly hard to get there. I have to have a solid plan in place. And then I have to be willing to take feedback and critique from others in order to grow. If you put those in place, we have this growth mindset where all of us have And you've known each other— how many days have you guys been in this course? 5. 5 days. So you're sort of getting to know each other. You're starting to collect status, right? Like someone's the funny one. Someone's the really serious one. Who's the really, really incredibly overachiever, right? And then someone's sort of like, we don't know why they're here yet, right? We all create this kind of, this is who we are in this course, right? And so we start to believe that. Who are you in this class? Oh, I don't know. You guys can say. All right. So we'll get to that later on when we talk about brand. So this is all part of it, right? You're going to get to this point. Well, we know— I know why you're here. So here's the thing. This is what we're talking about. So we have this growth mindset that I can do everything and I can do anything. Because if you didn't and you believed you wanted to start a business, most businesses— let's say you want to start an application. You need some sort of understanding of engineering if you don't have any background in it. It doesn't mean you're going to be a full-stack engineer, but you certainly want to talk to your developers. You're going to need to know something about marketing. You're going to need to know something about the legal aspects of running a business. All of this is important. So, this growth mindset says to me, I can do all of it, but I've got to have a plan. I'm going to do the work and I'm going to take feedback from people, specifically mentors as well. The opposite of that is a fixed mindset, which states, I'm only good at this. No one in my family has ever achieved this status, so I'm not going to. There are people in my class that I've witnessed in the last 5 days that might be further along than me, So they're going to get what they want, and I'm not going to get what I want. That's the fixed mindset, which prevents everybody from achieving. It prevents you from going after what you really want, because this belief system is as simple as that. The growth mindset says, I'm in it. I can do it all. I just have to start to get to do it. And that's the bottom line. So we're going to talk a little bit about that. Because where I coach from is this idea of there's a whole group of people out there that are saying, please pick me. Please pick me for this job. Please pick me for this funding. Please pick me for anything because this idea that deep down, kind of don't have the information, not really sure if I'm ready, but I'm really hungry and if you let me get my foot in the door, I'll show you, right? So, it's this mentality of please pick me, please pick me. When the truth is I just want someone who comes in and says, when do we start? I'm ready to go. I've done the work. Because you're all going to end up, if you want to find that success, You're gonna have to do the work. So, now I walk in the door and I say, when do we start? It's a completely different conversation you have when you ask for money from somebody, when you ask for mentorship, or when you ask for a job, right? Because now you're not saying, well, I know I'm a recent graduate, or I know I just haven't done this much yet, but you're saying, I filled all the gaps on my own, getting the information I need. Let's get started. What's the number— everyone here interviewed for a job before? All right. If you haven't had a job yet, I'd like to move in with you. There's nothing wrong with that, right? If you don't have to— I'm essentially fairly lazy, and I enjoy not working a lot. That's why I sold my company and I do this now. It's much more fun for me to put a schedule together and talk about that rather than it is to work 7 days a week. Because when I had my business, I was 7 days a week, 10 to 14 to 16 hours a day, right? That's what it takes to put in to build any kind of business. So be aware of that, and you all know that as you go through this process, right? So what am I asking you if I'm interviewing you and I say, why should I hire you? Or tell me about yourself, or walk me through your resume? What am I really asking you? What do you think of yourself? What do you think of yourself? What else? Why should I care to listen to you? Why should I care to listen to you? That might be the case, you know, especially you're gonna get into some interviews where people are gonna be like, I'm going to challenge you from the beginning. Why should I care about you? What else might I be asking you? What have you done? What have you done? What have you learned? Why are you here? We know how busy everyone is, so it might take— if I take an hour or 2 away from my schedule, that's an hour or 2 of productivity for my business that I can't utilize. What I'm asking when I ask you those questions is, why should I trust you with my wallet? Because that's essentially what I'm doing every time I hire somebody. It's what you're going to be doing every time you hire somebody or one of your managers that you trust hire someone else, because their job is to fill your wallet essentially, right? In order to keep this business going, I don't care if it's not-for-profit or you're out there for growth and getting as much as you can, you got to fill your wallet, right? And I got to trust you with that. So when you start to go through this process, When do we start is that person that says, today I can execute and you can, in fact, trust me with that business. I have a lot more to learn and I'm willing to learn that, but I'm ready to go today. So that's kind of the stuff that I coach. Does this sound reasonable? Yeah. Make sense?