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The "Grit Q&A" Lesson is part of the full, Career Guidance course featured in this preview video. Here's what you'd learn in this lesson's course:

Paul fields a question about how to talk about personal career achievements and succeed in getting your first job.

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Transcript from the "Grit Q&A" Lesson

[00:00:00]
>> Speaker 1: In your experience, what did successful candidates do from unsuccessful ones when you break into the market
>> Paul DeBettignies: Successful ones versus unsuccessful ones. You have to be a little aggressive. You have to be motivated. You have to have an intestinal fortitude and be cool being told. No a lot.

[00:00:19]
Until you get the first job. By the way that sucks. By the way that's game in any role, in any industry anyway. So I would dare say that this is tough love that I get over. But the idea is this if you want to do this and you know you want to do this Then and we were going to talk about attending meetups in a little bit how to find email addresses for people how to network.

[00:00:44]
We're going to talk about that in a little bit. But then you will take the things that we're talking about now and you will do them even faster than instead of taking this bit by bit over the next six months. So the way I tried to do this deck was if I were you, I would do these things.

[00:00:57]
If I were you and I was really motivated, I would do all these things really fast. Instead of waiting around. Yes, ma'am, you had a question?
>> Speaker 1: No, you're good.
>> Speaker 3: [LAUGH] So how would I say that I was attending this bootcamp? Would that go under education? Would this just go in my bio?

[00:01:15]
>> Paul DeBettignies: I would do it under your education, and I might put it in the summary, too, like this one right here. It can be a little it could sound a little bit like this. Right? recently completed the front end masters two week beginner boot camp. With my goal, it could be literally just this, just swap out the one and putting this The idea is this.

[00:01:39]
Just tell your story. It doesn't need to be perfect. Like we get stuck by the way. I'm so like, do you ever do that when you give somebody advice, little hair in the back, your neck stands up. You get that little chill. Like hypocrite just went off in the back of my head while I was giving you this advice, like just tell your story, get comfortable with it and just it doesn't have to be perfect the first time.

[00:01:56]
All I hear is in my own head that 21 years in I'm a hypocrite. Why didn't I write that one blog post? Why, if you go to my hire me page is it still a draft from like four months ago? I suffer from some of this too by the way, right?

[00:02:11]
Be okay with where you are. This says you are not going to sit here forever. You are going to learn more things. You are going to become fantastic coders. Many of you are going to send me an email six months or three years from now, saying, hey, do you remember that one day in Minneapolis when he came and he spoke at that thing?

[00:02:29]
Here's what I'm doing now and I'm going to be like, fuck, yeah. It's going to happen. It's just that right now it might seem a little scary or a little bit overwhelming. I'm not a great cheerleader by the way, this is good as it gets. But what you all have done here in the last is a side note for those of you online and for those of you for what you've done the last two weeks is fucking amazing.

[00:02:49]
And I told mark, I wasn't gonna use the F word. Now I'm going to twice in a minute. But seriously, you've just been here for two weeks and if you think about where you were when I saw you last Tuesday or Wednesday, where you are today. Besides being a little fatigue, probably besides feel like your head's going to explode.

[00:03:06]
Which I would say is a good thing. You are a much different person now than 12 days ago when I first met you. Just ponder that, though, for a minute, okay? That's my, Mark.
>> Speaker 1: Yeah, and also like. I just feel like tagging on to your thing of like, I'm not an entry level developer.

[00:03:27]
I'm a junior developer, like having that portfolio or even like doing something for a local company, or whatever like, or a nonprofit that you immediately, sorry. [COUGH] You immediately qualify yourself as a junior developer at that moment, like if you've done one project if you've done one, you've shipped one thing to the internet.

[00:03:53]
You know, I feel like that these are building countries a junior.
>> Paul DeBettignies: These are building blocks, right? And you're building and you're at the first level and you're laying a foundation. This is a great place to be doing it. I'm hoping that you will watch all of the rest, not all of the rest, cuz it's probably that's a lifetime worth of video that Mark has at Frontend Masters now.

[00:04:12]
You can't watch all of it, but just keep going. And by the way, Google or whatever search engine will become your best friend as you learned to ask questions, right? So I was at my startup the other day, not my startup, the one that I'm advising right now.

[00:04:27]
And to really talented senior developers both googling a topic because they didn't know the answer. Not knowing is okay. Learning how to find it out fast needed and you'll learn this stuff.