Overcoming Impostor Syndrome and Investing in Stocks -Feat. Shandai Person

In this episode of "I Should Have Learned Sooner" podcast, Tim Winfred interviews Shandai Person, a senior frontend engineer at Netflix and a mother to a beautiful five-year-old boy. Shandai talks about her journey in overcoming impostor syndrome and how she used vulnerability to lead her teams at Netflix. She also shares her personal finance journey with investing in the stock market and offers advice for those who are scared about investing. Tune in to this episode to learn more about Shandai's inspiring story of personal growth and her valuable insights about investing in stocks.

Transcript

00:00 I used to be afraid that people would look at me like, oh, you know, she's not that smart, or she doesn't know what she's talking about, or, we're going to need to ask for a manager. And what it actually ended up doing as I started to be myself more, was that people started to connect with me in a much more authentic way. 

00:16 People saw themselves in me. Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to the I should have learned the sooner podcast. I'm your host, Tim Winfred. Together, let's take a dive into amazing stories of personal growth as my guests share their answer to the question, what is something you know now that you wish you had learned sooner? 

00:46 From overcoming impostor syndrome, investing money lessons, and more. Join me and my guests as they share their stories of challenges they faced head on and how they came out on top. In today's episode, I sit down with Shanday Person, who is a senior frontend engineer at Netflix and a mother to a beautiful five year old boy. 

01:10 Shaundai shares her story about using vulnerability to lead her teams at Netflix and her personal finance journey with investing in the stock market. So if you've ever wanted to learn about investing in stocks and thought maybe it was just too complicated, this episode is for you. 

01:32 If you're scared about investing in the stock market, this episode is for you. So, without further ado, let's dive right did. Hi, Shaundai. Thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me here, Tim. 

01:44 Yeah, I've been following you on Twitter for a while now, and you always post such motivational content, and I'm so happy that you accepted my invitation. I was really excited when you asked me to be part of this. 

01:57 Really excited that we get to finally talk face to face after all this Twitter time together. Yeah. It's funny how many people I feel like I know, but I have never physically met in real life. I know. 

02:09 Isn't it funny? I feel like a lot of my closest friends are people that I've never not even just not met in person, but like, people I actually haven't spoken with face to face over a zoom at all. Yeah. 

02:21 Even before this, I was like, I'm going to go watch a bunch of talks that she's given and podcasts that she's been on just to make sure I get the gist. And you seem like a fun and happy person, so, yeah, I'm super excited to have you here. 

02:36 Oh, thank you. For people who are unfamiliar with who you are or just people who are listening to the episode who even know you, give us a little rundown of who you are. Yeah. So I'm Sean Day person. 

02:48 I am a senior software engineer at Netflix. My day job is I'm a front end engineer, which basically means I code all day, have meetings all day. The front end is everything that you as a user will see. 

03:00 And a web app is something that like a website, an app on your phone, on your TV as well. So that's my day job. Outside work, I am a parent to a five year old little boy who I tweet about a lot. And I'm also a conference speaker, podcast, guest, like, habitual speaker. 

03:22 Like, I just love to talk. And that's pretty much me. Content creator is what we call that nowadays. Yes. Awesome. Well, I know you are a busy person, and we're going to make this a little bit shorter, our typical episode, but if you want, I'm going to just jump right into the first question. 

03:42 And here we go. So what is something you know now that you wish you had learned sooner? So I had trouble narrowing this down to one thing, so I'm going to say two things, and the first thing is more of a worldly. 

03:56 Answer to this question, but it's played a huge part in my life in general. And what I learned is that vulnerability is a strength and not a weakness. And it really became more apparent, my last company, where the leadership represented this view from the top down, and they kind of built the culture in this way where they led with vulnerability. 

04:21 Now, before I started with this company and this is I'm a career switcher, so I'm a software engineer now, but I was in sales before this, and in sales, I was around a lot of men who had very strong alpha male type personalities. 

04:38 And I was usually one of the only women and always the only black person at my company. And so I felt like I had to try and be the type of person that these other people were generally white men, and I had to sell in the same ways that they sold. 

05:01 And it made sales very challenging for me because I was pretty inauthentic in my conversations. And it wasn't until I started to do more of just like bringing my own personality, which is a fun and bubbly personality, as you kind of talked about the person that you see on Twitter, that's pretty much me. 

05:19 And I bring a lot of that into my conference talks, into the content that I create as well now. But yeah, so it wasn't until I started to do that to allow myself to be who I naturally am, very silly. 

05:32 I don't always feel like I have to show everybody that know all the right words, and I have this super strong, perfect persona all the time. I call out all of my mistakes, and that has acted as such a strength for me. 

05:48 I used to be afraid that people would look at me like, oh. She's not that smart, or she doesn't know what she's talking about, or, we're going to need to ask for a manager. And what it actually ended up doing as I started to be myself more was that people started to connect with me in a much more authentic way. 

06:05 People saw themselves in me. And it wasn't just other black women who would see themselves in me. It was other parents who would see like, oh, I had forgotten what I was going to say because I was thinking of something else at the same time. 

06:19 Or we'd have these conversations about our kids, or I would have deep conversations with somebody else who maybe they just had a bad day, and my smile brightens up their day. But me making these mistakes in public. 

06:33 Was what other people saw in themselves. Everybody knows that they're not perfect, and everybody has this lens on themselves, like, oh, I'm not good enough. I'm not this, I'm not that, or, I'm working hard, and nobody understands my struggles. 

06:45 When you are that human person, that's what makes people connect with you. That's what makes people drawn to you. And the example that I use is like, if you think of a superhero, right, like a superhero story, if the superhero just had like, this perfect life from the beginning, from day one, they were born with a silver spoon in their mouth, and they went on their life, and everything was picture perfect. 

07:08 And they found the perfect girl, and they married her. They never had a fight. They never had a conflict with anybody at school. Their parents were picture perfect, and they were so super supportive. 

07:18 And then they went off to college, and they bought a house with a picket fence. Then they became a superhero, but there were no bad guys. And so they just had the perfect life, right? That would be the perfect life. 

07:30 Perfect. Yes. That would be the most boring story. And so what draws us to superheroes. Is those. Stories about like, oh, Batman was an orphan, or Thor, he became an alcoholic after he lost his bad fight. 

07:44 So that's what draws us to people. Iron man is like, he has a super bravado persona, but Pepper Pots is something like that. I forget. Yeah, he's got the issue with his heart, so we know that. But yeah, that's what makes them interesting, is that they have all these character struggles. 

08:02 So, yes, vulnerability. Bring it to the workplace, bring it to your conference talks, bring it to your Twitter, and that's what's going to draw people to you. Yeah, it's removing I read this article or a short story I want to say in college, and it's called behind the Formaldehyde Curtain. 

08:20 I know this is a little like morbid, literally, but it talks about people want to see this person in an open casket, and they don't see all the work that's going on behind the curtain to make them look like that and what they looked like before it was presented. 

08:37 So it's like especially in the end, in that scenario, people don't want to know all the little details all the time. But in a more realistic situation, whenever you actually do know what goes into it, it's more relatable. 

08:53 Then it's easier to relate and understand that no matter where you are in your career, where you are in your business, where you are with your finances, where you are with your family struggles, your mental health, everybody's on a journey, and nobody is ever 100% perfect. 

09:14 And the people who put up that facade on social media, you're just not seeing all the work that's going in behind that fermaldehyde curtain. Wow. Yes, exactly. Super powerful. Yeah. So you said you had a second thing as well. 

09:29 I do have a second one. Yeah. And this one is more related to finance. So one thing that I've been learning a lot, so I've been super interested in personal finance over the past, let's say I've been super interested in personal finance, let's say, over the past year or two. 

09:45 And I've taken a particular interest in investing. And so what I wish I had learned sooner was that investing instead stocks is not as complicated as I used to think. And that was probably the reason that I avoided it for so long, was because I was like, I don't know what stocks to invest in. 

10:06 I don't know how I'm not a risk taker in general. I'm very risk averse, and I'm not a gambler or anything like that. And so I was like, if I put in this money, how much money do I need to put in, and what combination of things do I need to put in to get the optimal results or the highest expectation of things to put back? 

10:27 So I was like, I'm looking at all of these different companies, different options and things like that, and I'm like, how do I know? This is very overwhelming. And I had a conversation with a financial advisor. 

10:37 This was like, probably the end of 2021. And he just kind of enlightened me and was just like, if it sounds complicated, it's probably not something that you even want to do. Like, stocks really don't have to be that complicated. 

10:49 Just start with, say you're going to put aside a set amount of money a month, and it can be whatever amount that you feel comfortable with, but just put it out of your head, play the long game and say, okay, just use like a round number. 

11:03 Let's say like $500 a month, and then put it in index funds. And I'm very detail oriented person, so of course I made myself a little spreadsheet and I was like, okay, at the end of the year, this is the amount of money that I'm going to have invested in total if I put in a certain amount a month. 

11:20 He was like, you can take that amount and allocate a certain percentage. To different types of index funds. And he explained to me how index funds are just like an aggregation of a number of stocks. You take the small cap, mid cap, large cap, and then he gave me certain percentages to put for each. 

11:37 I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was like maybe 20% in large cap, 15% in mid cap, 15% in small cap, and then also do a certain percentage for mutual funds and international only. And so those are the five buckets. 

11:53 And that's it. Just take it as those percentages. And he was like, it's as simple as literally just Google searching best Mid Cap Index Funds 2021, and whatever you feel like is the top one, just go for it and put it in there. 

12:09 Set the money aside. And so that's really all it took. And I'm just sitting there watching it grow. And not to say that everything has been perfect, like there have been no downs, but because I'm not sitting there watching it every day, I'm not stressed out about it. 

12:23 I've put it out of my mind as, okay, this is money that I'm not going to get back until 30 years from now. And it's so much easier than I thought. And I'm like, man, if I had done this ten years ago or however long ago, I wish. 

12:38 But I say all that to say to anybody listening, the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago. The second best time is today. Start your investment portfolio today and you can start with any amount. 

12:50 Like most stocks, most index funds don't require a minimum. So literally, just say you're going to set a certain amount aside for stocks and go ahead and start doing it every month. Yeah, it's all about about taking the sooner You Take Action episode three of my podcast with Danielle Daley, she talks about this. 

13:11 Take action today. Don't wait, because as soon as you set down that road, there's going to be doors and you open one and you say, yes, that one's for me. I'm going to head down into that room for a bit. 

13:22 Check out what's in there. You'll open another door, be like, it no, that's not for me. That looks a little too wild and crazy. But you have to first open the door and check it out for a while, see what's going on and see if it's for you. 

13:36 So, yeah, it's true. I do want to put in real quick for anybody listening, the contents of this episode are not financial advice. Please talk to your financial advisor if you are interested in making any financial decisions. 

13:49 We are here giving our stories and talking from an entertainment purpose. So I didn't invest myself until, I want to say, like, 2018, something like that, 2019. And I bought one share of Disney, and I watched it just drop, drop, drop for a while, and then I sold it and bought other things. 

14:09 And then it went up immediately after that because I was paying attention too much. Right. So a lot of the advice that I've heard over the years is the money you put into the stock market should be for five to ten years minimum. 

14:22 Put it in and think of it like, I don't need this money for that period of time. I'm not going to think about it. If it goes down 10%, I'm not going to think about it. Some people do annual adjustments and recalculate, and some people do more or less often just to make sure they're still meeting their risk profile. 

14:46 There's a lot you can do for anybody who's listening if you're interested in investing in stocks to figure out what is your risk profile, as you mentioned, don't be so risk adverse. How did you get over that initial hump? 

14:58 Then you were kind of risk averse, and now I'm also curious as well, what was the first thing you invested in? Yeah, so I would still say that I'm very risk averse. And so it's just one of those things, I think, in life where and I do this with a lot of things in my life is like, I'll do it scared. 

15:15 And that's the best approach, I think, to a lot of things. Switching careers, becoming a parent. There are so many things that a lot of people will hold back from because they feel like they're not ready. 

15:27 Investing was one of those things. So I was like, all right, well, I think in my conversations, not only with my financial advisor, but I have a couple of friends who I just talk about finance with, they were telling me that my money, because of inflation just sitting there in my savings account, it's actually becoming negative money. 

15:48 Like the amount that I'm accumulating in interest in the savings account versus how fast inflation is rising, that money is worth less and less every day. So they were like, you need to invest in that is the safer thing, that's less risky. 

16:03 So that was how I became less risk averse and made the leap. The first thing that I invested in was an index fund. I think it was the large cap, because when I looked at the details of the large cap, so I did the same thing that my advisor told me to do, which was just like best us large cap. 

16:24 And it came with my Google search, returned me a list of like ten or five or something large caps to look at. So I went through, looked at them and I recognized the names of the companies in a bunch of the large caps. 

16:38 So it just felt more comfortable to me. So that was the first one that I did, but I still had in my head that, okay, I'm going to meet this certain quota, these percentages of all these other buckets over certain amount of time. 

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17:27 That's Fiverr Learnsoner.com and take your projects to the next level. It's simple. It's simple and it's complicated. It's all like if you want to buy a cake mix from the store, right, and it's premade, and you just pour in the three ingredients and pop it in your oven. 

17:47 That's one level of making a cake. The other thing is to just go to the store and buy a fully premade cake. That makes it even easier. And then you can go and you can make the frosting from scratch. You can decorate it, you can grow the wheat that goes in. 

18:02 You can make it as complicated. I just thought of this analogy on the spot, and I'm very proud. I love analogies. This is my language. So being able to with stocks and stuff, there's all sorts of things. 

18:16 You can go and you can get a Robo Advisor and have that robo advisor invest money that gets automatically pulled out of your account every month, and you never even have to look at it. You can go for ten years and not ever go in and look at that account. 

18:32 Once you get it set up, you have to take that initial step to go to the store and buy your cake. But once you do that, then you have the cake and you just eat it later on. Wow, this analogy just keeps getting better. 

18:46 Yeah. So then there's the people who do this daily. There's the day traders, and they trade it every day. And most of them only talk about their six successes, to be fair. But I do follow several on Twitter that also talk about the losses, because that's super risky. 

19:05 If you've never made a cake. I'm just going to keep going. If you've never made a cake I've made. Frosting from scratch. The first time I made frosting from scratch, I was so disappointed because it said, like, you're supposed to use powder sugar. 

19:18 And I was like, oh, granulated sugar is fine. And it just came out so crunchy, and it wasn't right. So once you do things enough, the more complicated way, eventually you get to this beautiful portfolio of cakes that so it's true. 

19:39 And especially what you said about I do it scared if I want to move back. Something that I really wanted to ask you about, because a lot of people that are in the financial communities work for themselves, and they decide to not go corporate. 

19:57 So I was really excited to talk to you because there's sort of a stigma nowadays, right, about working for someone else. But there's so much opportunity within companies, and oftentimes that financial incentive of working for those companies makes it that it would take a lot longer if you started your own business or your own side hustle or whatever to get to that income level. 

20:24 So I'm curious a little bit about your story and the way that this transitioned is whenever you take a job, right? A lot of it is you haven't done those things before. So internally, at a company, can you talk a little bit about your story of growth and how you got to your senior engineer position at Netflix? 

20:41 Yeah, it's a story. So I started out my career in sales, and I feel like engineering kind of found me. And looking back, you know, hindsight is 2020. Looking back, there were so many signs that, okay, I would make a great engineer, and I would love what I did. 

20:59 But I steered away from it because I was just like I had the stigma in my head of what developer does. And I was like, I'm too social for that. I'm too social to just sit in a dark room and stare at a computer all day. 

21:11 And so I ended up actually, my undergrad degree is in entrepreneurship, which most people didn't realize as a major, but there are some business schools that have it. So I've always had this passion for starting businesses and things like that. 

21:27 It led me my entrepreneurship degree led me to sales because I had a professor who told me that the best way to understand what it's like to own a business is to have a commission only sales job. It's a lot of risk, and you're learning what it's like to have to hustle and fend for yourself. 

21:46 And through my sales experience, I got a lot of those skills. Again, I've never gotten completely risky. I'm still very much risk averse. But I've gotten a lot of skills that have made it just in general in life that have made a lot of things easier. 

22:04 They've come in handy in a lot of ways. So anyway, fast forward to around 2015. Leave the workforce to start my own business. And so I did go down that route. I went to start my own business, and I ended up I did very well. 

22:20 So I used my sales skills to start this organic and anything that you would see in Whole Foods, it was like I was selling anything organic and natural. It could be pet care, baby care, or whatever. And so I did really well. 

22:34 But then I got pregnant and I needed health insurance. So I was like, all right, I'll go back to the workforce. But it sparked the bug in engineering in a weird way, because my website, which was the main part of my company, was powered by Shopify, and I really wanted to customize my site. 

22:49 But I had to learn Liquid, which is Shopify's Ruby based language, to customize it or to get the little widgets to interact with my site in the ways that I wanted it to do. There was just a lot of stuff that I wanted to be able to do. 

23:02 So I started to kind of pick up a little bit of that. Still wasn't really interested in engineering until like a couple years later when I started at my last company sales loft, and I decided to kind of pick it up as a hobby. 

23:15 And I gave myself a half an hour every day to learn to code. And I just loved it so much that I would be up until like four in the morning, every morning, just doing it. So I looked up. What's? Because I had a kid, and so I couldn't afford to just leave this job that I was good at with the sales and everything, I couldn't afford to just leave and I couldn't afford to start from the bottom. 

23:45 But I looked up what an engineer makes and I was like, oh, this can be kind of comparable to what I make in sales. So I decided as I was doing the sales job, as I was parenting, to learn to code and then switch over to engineering. 

24:00 Anyway, I used a lot of my sales skills to get myself in the door with these engineering interviews. But the main reason, I guess, to answer your question about why not just venture out on my own? Why come to a large company? 

24:15 Is that one, I like the security, having the backing a company, and there are certain things that I look for in a company, like, and Netflix provides me a lot of those things. I look for great culture, great pay, loving the people that I work with, and working on exciting projects and meaningful projects, and I get all of that at Netflix. 

24:36 Also, I really love what I do. So I've been in a position for twelve years in sales. I've been in a position where I was really good at what I did and made a lot of money, money doing what I did, but I wasn't passionate about it, and I never saw that as my future. 

24:50 When I moved to engineering, my thought was that I want every single aspect of my life to be something that I look forward to. I want to look forward to Monday, I want to look forward to Friday, I want to look forward to Saturday night. 

25:01 And that's what I have now is like. Literally, and this sounds so corny, but I can prove to you that I mean it when I say that I switched careers because I love to code. I have that where I am doing what the things that I'm passionate about. 

25:15 And then I'm also making money and then I'm also like I have the security of I have the health benefits and my son can like I can afford really great schools for my son and all the little extracurricular things come home and then my hobby would be investing or just spending time with my kid. 

25:33 So it's a great life. I'm very grateful for everything that I have around me. Yeah, it's amazing. First of all, that you taught yourself. Thank you. And you went from a totally different industry that had nothing to do with this to telling yourself, I'm going to study for 30 minutes a night and then basically putting yourself through that 10,000 hours on your own time, it sounds like, to become an expert. 

25:59 So that's amazing. First of all, I did a boot camp myself because learning on my own just the hurdles related to it. Yeah. But also something that really stood out to me as well and something that I think has sort of helped me get ahead a little bit in my career is also what you said about using your sales skills to get in the door with Interviewers. 

26:21 I've always told my friends, if I can get my resume to get me an in person, there's a good chance I'm getting that job. If tech changed it up a bit, though, I will say that because I was in marketing before and so going from marketing to tech marketing, it's a lot harder to ask a specific question. 

26:43 That where in tech you can get really granular and ask the most specific, tiny, detailed question and sort of to trick someone in a way. And they're not always expecting you to have the answer, but they're looking for you to creatively, if you don't know the answer, to work with them and talk through. 

27:03 Different ideas. So it's not just about having the answer a lot of the time, and it's definitely not about bullshitting, because, you know, I'm sure you've done interviews, conducted them. Whenever someone is spinning that question and trying to be a politician and be like, well, look at this straw man over here, and let's talk about that instead. 

27:26 For anybody who is interested in getting into tech, there are so many different ways in, and you don't even have to work for a company. A lot of students that I've gone to boot camps with, I'm like, there's fiverr there's, upwork there's all these freelance sites. 

27:42 You can walk into a local mom and pop shop and be like, hey, for $200, can I redesign your site with Shopify or WordPress or whatever it might be that you're looking to learn? Right? Yeah, and that's a great point. 

27:56 And you don't even have to be a coder. People ask me how long I was in tech. I feel like my answer is kind of nuanced because I was a software salesperson before then. So I was always saying that I was in tech before I became an engineer. 

28:10 And for me, that kind of made it an easier transition where I was able to sell myself in the interview. So I was a salesperson at Sales Loft. We built software for salespeople, and I sold to salespeople. 

28:23 When I went to do my interview, I interviewed for the engineering team at that company. Part of what made me my strength was that I understood our product from our customer side. So that's a way in, too, is if you start from, like, a sales position or a marketing position at a software company and you want to move into coding or you want to just stay there. 

28:43 You are in tech. Like you said, Ken, there's a number of ways to get in. Yeah. So my personal journey that I relate to your story is I feel like if you go with your strengths, if you lean into what. You're just organically good at to go back to your company, you sold organic products, including yourself, your organic skills. 

29:10 So if you lean into what you're organically good at, like, I went to school in college and did graphic design work in addition to my advertising degree. And fast forward, whenever I went to boot camp, I was like, yeah, I'm not sure if I want to do front end design or front end web development or backend development. 

29:27 And whenever I leaned into my front end into the front end world because of my graphic design skills, that's where it was like, the response became a lot greater. And I tried to go into the back end because I heard back end engineers got paid more, and I was like, Give me more money. 

29:44 But whenever you try to resist what you're good at, if you try to force something that you shouldn't be doing I'm not telling everybody to go out and become a web developer because it's a difficult, the most difficult and rewarding thing I've ever done. 

30:01 Even more so than all of my investing and house hacking stuff and all of that. So, yeah, go with your strengths. Go with what you're good at, and you'll thrive. Love that. Yes, we've got the same story. 

30:14 We're a little short on time, but I do have two questions, so I want to dig into those real quick remaining that are the main theme questions of the show. So the second question I know I've asked a bunch, but this is technically the second question. 

30:28 Is there something, whether it's a book, a song, a job, a city, anything that's really impacted your life? Yeah, of course. The first thing is my son and I talk about him all the time, but yeah, inspiration and the reason why I wanted to structure my life to be so happy. 

30:46 I mean, I wanted to be happy for myself, but also I felt he deserved to come home to a happy atmosphere and see an example of somebody who just went after her dreams and his mom. I didn't never want him to feel like he was the reason why I held back from doing anything that I wanted to do. 

31:07 I wanted him to always feel like he was the inspiration for what I wanted to do. So he's one and then also, Brene Brown is completely different. Isn't that her? Yes. I love her book. So, yeah, I would recommend men to anyone to read Bernay Brown. 

31:27 I was recommending it to a friend that I have a football coach. That how much I've learned about vulnerability, going back to that topic of vulnerability, how much I've learned about vulnerability and how it can be a strength. 

31:40 And she uses real stories from her life that I resonate with. But yeah, I guarantee you. So Darren Greatly would be the book that I would say to start with. She also has a special on Netflix, and I think her Ted Talk is on YouTube, so definitely check her out. 

31:55 Yeah. Is it a podcast? She does have a podcast, too. I can't remember the name of it, though, but yes. Yeah, I used to listen to a lot of motivational speakers back pre pandemic. Whenever I was commuting to work in my 30 minutes time every morning, I'd either listen to an uplifting soundtrack of songs that included, like, Eye of the Tiger sort of thing I was going into the office with, like or I'd put on motivational speakers because it's like what you were saying is earlier about doing things. 

32:26 Scared doing it. Even though you're afraid that's like every day going into work, I'm like, there's going to be another task that I've never done, and I'm afraid to do that. So let me work myself up so I feel like the most badass person in the world going in. 

32:41 And Brene Brown was on that and the Quote of the Day show, that's what it was. It's a short ten to 15 minutes podcast every day. He does it Monday through Friday. And. It's just the most inspirational little tidbits. 

32:56 And she came up so often and I just remember yes, yes, from her. So if you're not familiar with Brene Brown, I also highly recommend checking her out. But I was also getting that emoji where it's like the watery googly eyes whenever you were talking about your son, I was like, that is so beautiful. 

33:13 Just to want to be the inspiration for him. I love that. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate that. All right, so in the last couple of minutes we do have we talked about what you have learned in the past, but forward thinking, what is something you are working on learning now? 

33:28 Yeah, so one for work, we did talk about like back end engineering and things like that. So I want to learn to be a better communicator with my back end teammates. And so I'm going to pick up a little bit their language, Kotlin Java, hoping that I will love it just as much as I love my front end languages, JavaScript react TypeScript, and then eventually become a full stack engineer. 

33:57 So for now, it's just, hey, I'm trying to make it a little hobby, same thing, and learn a little bit more so that I can be a better teammate, but hoping that that will flourish and grow. I'm also wanting to fine tune my speaking skills and so I'm just getting more practice by doing more conference talks and engagements and things like that. 

34:18 So I really want to learn to continue to fine tune and become a more effective speaker. So going to practice that, but also considering taking some speaking public speaking classes. It's so funny that I can't speak as I'm talking about speaking of it. 

34:34 Yeah, I know, it's so true. It's like I want to do this and then of course, right, whenever you're telling people you're like, I can't even say the word public speaking. But I love you were saying that our stories have similar stories. 

34:48 Hold on, let me grab this sticky note from behind me. What? I'm going to hold it up to the camera. Do you see what that says? Study our back end engineers at my company, right, in Kotlin as well. And something I've learned in my career that I think is probably part of the reason that you're doing this as well correct me if I'm wrong is whenever you learn to speak other people's languages on other teams, you're able to get more shit done faster and you're able to get them to respect you. 

35:19 Because coming from marketing and graphic design, like, the UI designers at my companies that I've been at since becoming a software engineer are like, Whoa, okay. And the marketing people are like, Whoa, this person actually knows what they're talking. 

35:33 And so it's the same thing with studying the back end, working on projects, or communicating or pairing with people who are not directly in your day to day and learning what they're doing and being able to pick up those skills. 

35:49 It's just like, suddenly you are their favorite person. Yes, right. I love that so much. And the key is not going into it just with the idea that you're going to come out of whatever learning or studying you're doing with more knowledge than they have, and you're not going to come in and be like, okay, well, this is how you do your job, because now I know this. 

36:10 Or I can walk around like a Kotlin expert because I read a couple of pages in a Colt book. It's more of like, no, I did this so that we could be better. We can communicate better for each other. Aren't you proud of me? 

36:23 And here, I did this for you. And it makes people I don't even know the word for it, but it makes people feel like this type of closeness to you where you're just like, I was thinking about you, and I care about our work relationship, and so. 

36:38 I did respect it. Really? Is it's showing you anytime you try to learn about someone's culture, for example, like, whether it's work or not. Whatever it might be, people respect that. Because I went and I lived in Korea for a year, and now that I am back in the US. 

36:53 Anytime I go to a Korean restaurant and I pronounce something correctly, I've occasionally gotten free things because of it. Just because you're this non Korean person who can actually say something right. 

37:07 You care. Yeah. It's like, yes. Good sign of respect. So, yes, I love that so, so much. Know. All right, well, I know you're busy, as I said in the beginning, and you've got more meetings and prep to do. 

37:19 So before we wrap up here, for anybody who's interested in following you or continuing with you on this journey, web development and finance and all of the above, you're speaking, learning kotlin. Where can they check you out? 

37:34 Yeah, so I'm typically on Twitter, you can find me. My handle for everything is just at chandae, so I'll spell it for you. S-H-A-U-N-D-A-I just my first name. So that's one of the perks of having a unique first name and a very Googleable first name. 

37:50 So if you ever can't find me or from off of Twitter, for whatever reason, just Google my name, and the first result should be wherever I am. Awesome. Thank you so much. This has been so fun, and I'm so happy we finally got to meet in person. 

38:04 Quote in person. Yeah. I like that. Thanks, Tim. This was absolute pleasure. Great talking to you. Take care. You, too. I hope you enjoyed that episode. I know. I personally really loved hearing her say how being human draws people to you, how people enjoy the struggle and hearing about your story and realizing that you're an underdog, too. 

38:39 People start somewhere. Everybody starts somewhere. So we all have to overcome. Our obstacles. And as Chande said, you have to do things scared. You have to go in and realize that sometimes you just have to figure out how to do it as you go along and jump into the deep end. 

39:00 Shaundai had a beautiful story, and I really loved what she said about personal finance and how investing in the stock market just isn't as complicated it seems. If you're interested in investing in the stock market, just spend a little bit of time learning, maybe watching some YouTube videos, reading some articles on Investopedia. 

39:22 Either way, you can figure out how to invest in the stock market in a way that is to your risk profile. If you don't want to go out and invest in super risky assets like Bitcoin, for example, investing in the stock market and index fund in particular, small mid, large cap, as Chanday mentioned, are really safe ways to invest for the long term and manage your risk. 

39:51 You just have to make sure that you're not putting money in that you need tomorrow or next week or really in the next five to ten years to get the most out of investing in the stock market. You have to leave that money in for a long time and sort of set it and forget it. 

40:07 The longer you set it, the more likely it is that it'll have gains in the long term. So if you enjoyed this episode, tune in every week. This is season two. Season two is probably going to be about ten to 15 episodes long, so we're little under halfway at this point. 

40:27 So tune in every Monday for the next several weeks, and don't forget to check me out on Instagram at contemporary. That's like Contemporary, but more fun. And drop me a review for the I should have learned the sooner podcast. 

40:42 On Apple podcast. It'll really help me out. Until next time, my name is Tim Winfread, and I'll talk to you soon. Music for this podcast comes from film music IO Acid Trumpet by Kevin McLead, Incompatech.org. 

40:57 Licensed by creativecommons.org/Licenses/buy/4.0