there was one skill that allowed me to go from a software engineer making about $10,000 a month to a software engineer making $1.4 million in the past three months with my company and no it wasn't coding it wasn't learning any new Frameworks it wasn't any of that stuff in fact it was something that nobody ever talks about and in this video I'm going to show you how you as a software engineer can use the same exact skill to not only make more money but to create an entire life of Freedom such that you can do
whatever you want whenever you want it however you want it without further Ado let's get into it and before we do this isn't something that only worked for me it worked for countless other people especially for my students in cot to so you want know more to learn about that Link's in the description without further Ado let's get into it so today we're going to be talking about resourcefulness and this is the skill that actually took me from making $10,000 a month when I first started as a junior developer to now making over 1.4 million
every three months right averaging about $400 to $500,000 a month and we're going to be talking about what resourcefulness actually is why it matters the fundamentals of it and how you yourself can be more resourceful in your everyday life as a software engineer so whether you're a beginner whether you are an already an expert whether you already have your own business as a software engineer this video will be extremely important for you so pay careful attention so let's get started with understanding what resour actually is so by definition it's simply the ability to find quick
and clever ways to overcome difficulties so pretty simple to understand right nothing too complicated so let's see why it actually matters and why I'm making an entire video on why it matters so the first thing you need to understand that as software Engineers our Tech world moves way too fast right so let alone the regular people even we as software Engineers have a relatively hard time kind of keeping up with all the advancements especially AI alone right and you have so many other things in teag and no matter how skilled you are there will always
be a new framework a new technology a new tool or a new unexpected challenge that you simply are not aware of yet and you cannot out learn the speed of change as it happens there are 8 billion people on this planet and there's countless millions of people consistently working on creating new stuff so you as one person you cannot ever expect to keep up with all that information you might ask yourself oh but I'm a 10x programmer I can does not matter time is running out and your clock is ticking what most people don't understand
is that yes if you had infinite amount of time then maybe you could learn everything but we don't have infinite amount of time the average person actually only has 30,000 days to live and if you are 30 you've already spent 11,000 of those days meaning you have 19,000 left so how will you actually use the rest of these 19,000 days that you have or the rest of the days that you have well you need to be able to actually hold the ability to identify the resources available to you and the best way to use these
resources to get what you want out of life so if you're a software engineer be it starting a business making more money getting more freedom whatever the case whatever that what you want out of life actually is you need to focus on actually making that ability holding that ability to be able to identify the resources you have and how to best use them to get what you want to get now the reason I say that is because most software Engineers actually all fall into the same exact career trap they get stuck doing what they're told
instead of solving real world problems and thus they have a very fixed mindset of oh I'll wait for somebody to tell me what to do right this this type of mindset is adopted and I mean it makes sense right if you're going into 9 to-5 environment your 9-to-5 job is just going to be strictly what your manager tells you to do or what your tells you to do you do that exactly that no more no less you get paid for your time you go back and do whatever the hell you want to do the rest
of the day and this largely actually stems from our education so imagine that you're a puzzle piece okay and the education system especially in the United States as is traditionally set up is the puzzle board and each piece so in this Cas so each piece in this case each software engineer is expected to fit neatly into a predetermined shape and if your edges do not align the system tries to trim or reshape you until you do this is why you see that there's almost no creative freedom in the typical 9 to5 right especially as a
software engineer where your role is to create you don't do much of creating do you and in this puzzle the goal isn't to embrace each piece's unique design or find creative ways for them to connect is to match the existing pattern that's laid out for you so you need to kind of step out of this puzzle board because we need to begin adopting the I'll figure out how to create value on my own type of mentality such that we're not dependent on a boss or another person right or a 9 to-5 job because that's the
only way we can truly be resourceful right because staying comfortable is going to be the fastest way for you to become Obsolete and funly enough most of you watching this will probably begin doubting your own potential you'll begin to doubt and underestimate yourself and you'll think to yourself okay but can I ever really start a business and guess what we grossly overestimate what we can do in a day but we severely underestimate what we can do in a year and I've seen this time and time again John one of my students joined cot to CEO
and within the first month it hasn't even been the first month he already made $225,000 as a software engineer or take Dom who's already been with me for already a little over five months and he's already closing deals left and right getting people on retainers and charging onetime project fees so all these individuals Dom and John included they all overestimated what they can do in a day grossly underestimated what they could have done in a year and in some cases in a few months right so let's understand what the fundamentals of resourcefulness actually are such
how we can learn how to better kind of become resourceful resourcefulness is really composed of three pillars so the first is asking the right questions at the very top and then we have leveraging other people so verging other people's knowledge finances and so on and so forth and last but not least creating Solutions with what we already have and this is incredbly important for you to understand is that resourcefulness is a system it is not a personality trait you're not born with it it's not like some people have it some people don't no it's a
system that everybody can learn and adopt okay so let's start with pillar number one asking the right questions so whether you're in a corporate environment or especially if you're in business you need to ask the right questions because the best Engineers don't just ask how do I fix this instead they ask what's the real problem here what's the real problem behind this that I can immediately Target so instead of saying why does this bug keep happening you need to ask how can we prevent this bug from ever happening again right so instead of treating the
symptom you want to treat the root cause or instead of asking how do I use this framework you should ask what problem was this framework designed designed to solve because that will give you the exact way for you to use a specific framework and kind of case in point is you need to slow down and asking what oriented questions and you need to start asking more why and how type of questions so why is this happening how can this be improved and even if you are going to ask what it should be about asking what
is the simplest solution so alam's razor in this case which means that for any specific problem the simplest solution is most likely the best one and in my personal experience this has always been the case so just to kind of recap what a bad question would look like and what a better question would look like so how do I use this framework what problems was this framework to tr to solve how do I fix this bug how can I prevent this entire class of bugs in the first place what tool should I learn next what
problem am I trying to solve okay if we can learn to ask these types of questions we'll naturally become more sourceful so the way I actually do this is I'm a big proponent of first principles thinking which means that instead of let's say asking how do I make a faster car I ask what actually makes a car fast because if I understand what actually makes a car fast then I can make a faster car so instead of asking how do I make my code run faster you ask what's actually slowing it down and the fundamental
point is that the better questions we ask the faster we will get get as the solution and the more impact we will have as a direct result so let's move on to pillar number two leveraging other people the best thing about this world is that you don't need to know everything you just need to know somebody who already does or you to somebody who can connect you to somebody who does right and according to the Six Degrees of Separation also known as a six handshake Theory all people on the planet are six or fewer social
connections away from one another so if you really need to even let's say meet Elon Musk or get in contact with him technically you are able to if you are resourceful enough with your current resources right in this case being your network so you can apply this to not only people's knowledge but also people's money be it for Investments be it for any type of pitch that you're going to do and this is how you actually leverage people and another thing as well with leveraging people is that understand that success actually leaves Clues so SpaceX
learned from NASA failures before designing the Falcon 9 stripe actually built its infrastructure by studying Amazon's scaling strategies so anytime that you see success it leaves Clues and especially if you pair it with leveraging other people be it leveraging other people's knowledge leveraging other people's finances leveraging other people's mistakes leveraging other people's success stories you are able to become a lot more resourceful and especially with nowadays you have ai on top of all the human knowledge and you'll essentially get what's called exponential learning so on top of everything we talked about on top of leveraging
other people you're now able to also leverage AI so it's just Cher on top and once again I want to kind of finalize this point you don't have to be the smartest you just need to learn from the smartest and you can do that by leveraging other people so pillar number three creating Solutions with what you already have so you need to understand that more tools don't necessarily make you better better thinking does because how you think is going to determine how you use your tools and a master Craftsman can still build something better with
worse tools than somebody who has no clue what he's doing and he has the best tools right and to even piggyback off this constraints actually Force Innovation so if you don't have all the tools in your hand that's not necessarily a bad thing because you don't need the perfect condition to do anything you just need a creative approach to what it is that you're going to be want to do right be starting a business whatever the case and another thing is that you also have a lot more resources than you think you do it's just
You' never taken the time to visualize it so after working with over 100 software engineers and helping them start a business I've noticed that every single one of them underestimated the resources that they had because they simply weren't aware of it so for them to fundamentally become more resourceful they first had to understand the resources they had and none of these people ever ask themselves who's in their Network right how many opportunities are in their local area be it through local business meetups be it through a local Chamber of Commerce what experiences are unique to
them and them only be it from a cultural side of things be it from a life experience side of things be it from a technical side of things everybody has a lot more resources than they think they do and once again it's always about resourcefulness problem as opposed to a resource problem at least for 99% of people now let's talk about how to actually become more resourceful because we discussed the fundamentals of resourcefulness let's talk about how we can actually become a lot more resourceful and everything really bows down to the parto principle right we
need to understand the parto principle the parto principle suggests that 80% of our outcomes actually come from 20% of our inputs So 20% of the effort that we put in leads us to 80% of the results so the first step in actually becoming more resourceful right you need to understand what 20% of your inputs lead to 80% of your outcomes so this is especially true in business what 20% of your inputs lead you to 80% of the results in your business business so let's say 80% of your revenue from what 20% is it coming from
right probably lead acquisition sales right and there's so much other stuff that you don't need to be doing and just apply this to your own specific life as a software engineer be it in a 95 environment or be it especially if you have a business and then you need to ask yourself based on the 20% that you kind of found right you need to ask yourself does this skill solve a recuring a problem so is this problem an evergreen problem is there going to be a time where this problem no longer exists or is this
the type of problem that will continually exist and will the skill that you were leveraging to get 80% of the results will it still be useless five years from now 10 years from now 15 years from now right is a future proof and can this same skill help you automate or scale your work or is it something that's completely determined on linear time or is it something that can be leveraged right because once you kind of ask these type of questions on top of figuring out which 20% of your inputs contribute to which 80% of
your outputs you'll be able to fundamentally understand what you need to focus on and what you need to completely just ignore okay now next when it comes to becoming actually more resourceful you need to adopt a Google first habit or as should say in this case nowadays a chat GPT first habit so chances are whenever you face a problem you are not the first human to face that exact problem the chances of you facing a problem and you being the first one is going to be extremely low so most often than now somebody else has
faced that exact same problem and what you need to be doing is actually trying to search for existing Solutions before you try to brute force or waste any more time on it now people will say that okay an argument can be made that one should figure out the answer themselves and not take a look at things instantly but to that I would say that time is simply too valuable for you to do that especially if let's say you're using chat GPT to emilly find an answer ask it how did it come to that answer such
that you yourself now understand how it came to that answer and you can go from there but do not waste more than 30 minutes on a specific problem and try to figure out on your own time is way too valuable you only have 30,000 Days to Live okay always keep that in the back of your mind next thing on becoming more resourceful is you need to continually test test test and test test and iterate test and iterate you learn more in one day of prototyping than in one month of theoretical planning so the more action
you can take the more you can do the better it's going to be because the more you can test the more angles you can test be it in marketing be in your sales whatever the case especially if you have a business the better everything is simply going to go because small improvements over time will create exponential growth and remember compound interest according to Albert Einstein is the eighth wonder of the world so to kind of recap everything for you to be able to become more resourceful you fundamentally have to understand that it's a resourcefulness problem
and not a resource problem you have a lot more resources than you think you do through your network through your physical location what it offers you and alongside your experiences life experiences and Technical experiences right you first need to understand the resources available to you for you to be able to become resourceful because just like budgeting you need to know how much money you make a month for you to be able to properly budget it accordingly after you understand the resources available to you you need to start asking the proper questions right you to start
asking the questions to kind of understand what 20% of your inputs are leading to which 80% of the outputs right especially if you have a business what 20% of the things do you do that contribute to 80% of the revenue being generated and after that after you find out which Essen of those skills are you going ask yourself are these skills future proof they are future proof and they do get you 80% of the results then you need to hone on those skills specifically you need to focus on those skills and trying to master those
skills and getting even better at those skills because that's essentially how you're going to Skyrocket and once you figured out the resources that you have once you figured out what leads to what type of result right which 20% leads to which 80% the result now is the time for you to continually test and iterate new things right continually test test and test because the more you test the more feedback you'll get and you can use that feedback to improve even further and that really is all resource lless is about it's understanding what resources you have
available to you right figuring out how to best use them based on the 20% of the inputs that get you 80% of the outputs and of course in the meantime being able to utilize other people's knowledge other people resources but all that fundamentally falls in the resources that you have in three categories physical location Network and your experiences right and last but not least it's about asking the right questions right it's about searching for a solution first and foremost and really valuing your time really having a high standard for your time because you only have
30,000 days to live right and once you do all that resourcefulness will become a system that's quite familiar and not as forign to you anymore so without further Ado I hope you enjoyed this video if you have any questions whatsoever leave them in the comments ments down below and as always thank you for watching
