Joël recently had a fascinating conversation with some friends about the power of celebrating and highlighting small wins in their lives. He talks about bringing this into his work life. May Stephanie interest you in a secret she learned regarding homemade pizza?
RubyConf is coming! Who's submitting talks?! It's hekkin scary. Don't fret! Joël and Stephannie are here to help. Today, they discussed submitting a conference talk proposal from start to finish.
Sheet pan pizza (https://anewsletter.alisoneroman.com/p/may-we-interest-you-in-a-party-of)
RubyConf CFP (https://sessionize.com/rubyconf-2023/)
Speakerline.io (https://speakerline.io/)
WNB.rb (https://www.wnb-rb.dev/)
Transcript:
STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn.
JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And together, we've come here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way.
STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world?
JOËL: I've been having a really interesting conversation with some of my friends recently about the power of celebrating and highlighting small wins in our lives, both in, like, kind of sharing it with each other, like, you know, if something small happens, it's good for me to share it with my friends. But also, where it becomes really cool is where the friend group kind of gets together and celebrates that small win for one person, and how that can be, like, a small step to take, but it's just really powerful and encouraging for a friend group. And I think that applies not just among friends but in a team or other grouping in the workplace.
STEPHANIE: That's so fun. How are you celebrating these small wins, like, over text? Is that the main way you're communicating something good that happened?
JOËL: It depends on the friend group. I think, like, different friend groups will have, like, a different kind of cadence for the kind of things they do. And do they all hang out together? Do they have a group text, things like that?
One of the friend groups I'm a part of, we meet weekly to go climbing at a rock-climbing gym, so that's kind of our hang-out. And [inaudible 01:34], we're there to do stuff at the gym, but it's also a social thing. And it's an opportunity to be like, "Oh, you know, did that thing workout, you know, at work?" "You know, good for you," Or "Did you get this project accepted?" And yeah, when small wins come up, it's a great time to celebrate.
STEPHANIE: That's awesome. I think having regular time that you see people and being able to ask them about something that they had mentioned previously is so special and really important to me, like, in bonding and building the relationship.
I also love the idea of celebrating milestones. So, this is, I guess, more of a bigger win, but milestones that aren't traditionally celebrated. You know, so, yeah, we'll have, like, a party when someone graduates or someone gets married. But I also have really enjoyed celebrating when someone gets a promotion at work. And, you know, maybe that's not, like, a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but it's still so worthy of going out for dinner or buying them a drink.
I also will maybe, like, send my friends a little treat if I know that they did something small but hard for them, right? And sometimes that's even, like, responding to a scary email that they had sitting in their inbox for a while. Yeah, I really love that idea of supporting people, even in the small things in life that they do.
JOËL: Yeah, and that's really validating, I think when you've done something hard and then a friend or a colleague reaches out to you. And it's kind of like, hey, I saw that. Good for you.
STEPHANIE: How have you been thinking about bringing this into your work life?
JOËL: I think it's about being on the lookout for things that other people do. And I think one thing I like to do is kind of publicly calling that out. It sounds like a negative thing, right? B