this is the art of network engineering podcast in this podcast we'll explore keys technologies and talented people we aim to bring new information to expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers welcome to the art of network engineering i am aj murray at no blinky blinky and tonight we have dan howdy how's it going dan it is going good actually i have a uh i have a shout out for my boy tim howdy tim that's for tim bert nice nice did he tell you to do that is that no he just he tweeted me and he uh so i had to just give a special shout out to all right all right i love it andy how you doing hi aj hi dan i'm good dan's killing me over here oh come on i like when he gets close to the microphone andy i saw your recent youtube video where uh where are you doing some uh shredding man yeah wait i haven't seen this you haven't oh no he did a wonderful rendition of the star-spangled banner well thank you for saying that it wasn't that good but i stand behind my my effort and i i knew what it was i recognized it i thought it was recognizable yeah i'll have to check this out no because then you'll just tease me dan you don't need to check it out just pretend you didn't hear it i don't have a musical ear so you know if i tell you it's good that might not mean anything i thought well i enjoyed it i decided that i needed you know something fun and enjoyable instead of just working and husbanding and daddying so i had like three guitars sitting in my attic for years that just didn't seem right so i'm gonna hang them up on the wall here but yeah that was my was my effort in a little i don't call like self-care but something fun i can do just to unplug with all the madness nice but thank you are you guys on vacation this week i am nice do i see you more relaxed yes i feel so relaxed i think the key is to not go back to work i'm not sure how to do that but i'm so relaxed right now i need my job i love my job do you have a uh have you planted a money tree yet no what's that it's a tree that grows money oh mine's still not sprouting vermont might not be the best uh you know soil for for that kind of plant it's not working for me yeah yeah nashville isn't either so you're off to dan i was off yesterday and today i go in tomorrow you seem pretty relaxed dan i am relaxed i've had a pretty good time off it was nice everybody had a good holiday very nice yeah can't complain what about you yeah it's awesome it's very nice excellent excellent i got this this awesome threads i know you guys can see it but my wife got me this wonderful very comfy hooded sweatshirt it is sherpa lined so it's like i'm wearing a sheep i like the sherpa i have a sherpa blankets oh man that's why i was asking you about that i it looked very comfy i'm not sure i've taken it off since since christmas morning nice i wouldn't either so comfortable and it's gotten so cold up here in vermont so i am cozy af aj i'm not trying to steal i'm not trying to steal your gift under but because it's so cold up there i got my wife a heated hoodie oh i heated it i heated a hoodie that's a thing it's amazing it has a battery pack and it she wears she hasn't taken it off since christmas because she's always cold amazing yeah interesting we are going to share a link to the heated hoodies yeah if you're a cold person and you want a hoodie that generates its own heat check out the link is that a fire hazard are you like do they like really figure that out so you don't just spontaneously combust while you're wearing yourself well we'll see it has a lot of good reviews and none of them said i spontaneously combust themselves no one stars we'll see i fell asleep in it well uh speaking of successful winning things like a heated hoodie um we've had so many wins in the winning channel uh so so as we mentioned on a previous episode we we did this run where we were recording two episodes every week leading into the holidays and and we kind of stopped our run just before thanksgiving and the winning did not stop uh people just kept drop and win after winning after win after win lots of uh successes a few that come to mind some people won or not one passed their ccna they completed their new devnet associate exam um devnet dan if you guys know devnet dan he passed his ian auto exam and that secured for him also his ccmp enterprise so congratulations to him awesome so much winning going on uh we are going to find a way to try to keep that relevant uh and you know there's always going to be some sort of delay in in recording and releasing the podcast so um you know maybe we'll put a section on the webpage and make sure we highlight these wins and we'll try to keep up with them a little bit better going into 2021 uh and announcing them on the podcast because i think that's uh it's something exciting i love to share the wins i know people probably love to hear about their wins as well so apologies for not staying up on that and i promise to do better next year a personal win for the group uh our podcast is just about to hit and by the time this episode releases in fact probably by tomorrow morning we will have hit 30 000 downloads it's all because of y'all absolutely all y'all y'all y'all and as in the fans i i am i'm blown away i'm speechless i really don't know what to say other than thank you thank you thank you i mean this is this is what six six months old we started this at the end of july we released our first two episodes our job is to now not screw this up right this is ours to lose yeah i think i think if andy was on tonight he would uh not be surprised that we're at this level um i am on dad or not andy aaron sorry yes he wouldn't be surprised but i'm surprised i i never thought that this would even get to this level like it's insane yeah i guess like i had hoped that over time we would eventually hit you know 30 000 downloads i didn't think we were going to do it in the first six months though right i did not see it be finalists and like the cisco best podcast award and like this just kind of it's grown way faster than anybody could have anticipated yeah yeah and then if you if you look back on all the guests that we've had like keith barker like keith barker episode like 22 and 23 like i did not see that coming no yeah so how do we top it i mean we're kind of you know what i mean we're going we can't we can't do him too soon though because after after we interviewed chuck robbins i'm i'm retiring from he's got to shut down so that was like that was like one of the higher up goals when when i you know wanted to start this thing so if we do if we plateau too early i'm gonna have to retire earlier it's just wonder if he's listening you think chuck robbins listens chuck if you're listening call me i'm sure you can look me up in in the database i don't even have aj's number i don't know how chuck's gonna get hold of you so i thought i gave you guys my number i've done it i got your number i'm sure everybody does we will fix that not here on the on the episode though did you fix that after we stopped recording did you look in contacts in your flip phone or get out your jitterbug i'm sure i'm in there god dawg i was looking at my white pages and they didn't have vermont vermont's not in the philadelphia phone book so another thing we couldn't do without all the support that we get um you know hitting these milestones like the downloads and stuff like that are the giveaways uh we've done some giveaways now they've been very successful uh super excited to have given away a devnet associate kit we gave away the devnet associate um ocg and we bundled with that a raspberry pi 4 and we had close to a thousand people enter that contest wow that's just crazy yeah never would have thought yeah it was it was very crazy it was awesome we and so we gave that away um right now but by the time this episode is released well it'll be completed but uh for to start the new year off right we're giving away two copies of both the ccna ocg 2 volume set by wendell autumn and another book 31 days before your ccna and like i said we're doing two and why we're doing two is really cool because ethan jackson you might know him from the discord he came to me and he's just like i want to donate books i want to donate the ccna two volume set and 31 days before and i was like dude i've already got the ccna set i was going to give that away i'm going to match you and also get the 31 days book and we're going to give away two sets to somebody looking to get their ccna in 2021 and so uh that contest is going to be wrapping up here in a couple of days we'll give it away on friday and announce the winner and get that shipped out just after the new year so um we are able to do that because you guys are buying merch you're supporting us uh you're doing donations through the discord channel um and you're reaching out and saying hey i want to give stuff away i just had somebody else reach out to me actually after we announced this contest and said i want to donate some books to give away too so we'll have more exciting contests coming out shortly after the new year um i i love it like we're getting money we're getting people coming at us to to want to give stuff away to contribute to this i love seeing people give back to the community i love giving back to the community i know you guys do sure i you know again speechless blown away i love to see it though yeah when we started this whole thing you know it was all about like hey what can we provide you know a resource wise to the community and this is awesome that we have people in our community already coming forward and like hey i want to help out this effort yeah and then that just opens the doors right there you know um like when we were able to link up with like boson i mean that's just crazy the fact that i was a part of that it just blows my mind but yeah uh big shout out to uh i get that was uh that was aaron that talked to them right yep yeah aaron anderson they they did not hesitate to uh to jump on board with us and give us that promo code yeah that was awesome so actually i just got to thinking to something i actually have a copy of that 31 days before your ccna i will pitch it in as well nice so there you go you got three of those now all right i love it though i love it all right and then wait hold on hold on oh one of our own members one of our own members uh andy how's your your giveaway going yes mr generosity himself yeah yes yes i am i'm very jealous thank you thank you i wasn't gonna mention yeah no no it's definitely worth mentioning absolutely i'm sorry yeah no it's it's it's it's great um so how do i i mean i so i picked a winner and i well hold on for people who don't know what it would yeah okay yeah so i have i had a stack of um routers and switches um pissing my wife off in my garage for but but if i remember right it's not just any kind of like router it's not like a 28 whatever it's like 1941 or something like that or 19 yeah there's four 1920 ones 1921's yeah uh which are really sweet because they're quiet and they're low power draws yeah i used to have loud you know home gear but they're they're very quiet they run all the stuff that you need and then i have a 3750 switch and aj actually mr generosity is uh donating to from his personal stash because i wanted to get four routers and three switches and i thought i had switches and i only had one so i was going to buy them off ebay and ship them down and they just said hey man i i got a couple so yeah i think tomorrow the next day i got them in a box they're ready to go i just got to get over to the um but yeah we got a winner um he's a guy who's been out of work since march because of covid he's got a really great story which i'll share eventually publicly but um you know he was in audio production travel in the world with bands everything shut down lost his job he got his a-plus he's sitting for his network plus uh in january and he wants to go for the ccna but it's a little out of reach for him so yeah we're able to help him out there which is which is really cool and as a result of that somebody else reached out to me and said hey i have a bunch of network gear that i can just give you to give away so i would like to keep this going i'd like to oh yeah i i'd like the awesome few home labs in 2021 yeah that would be absolutely awesome oh my gosh are you gonna are you gonna like are you gonna like sign the routers like my name is the host name in each one of them yeah like put a config on there well what i am doing which is probably going under the router change the host name and put in your aclu like a message of the day and well you can you can go take your logo and like get it put into the special character generator thing yeah you know how i go on and on about home labs but one of the things that's really helpful is like doing a password break for instance and i'm specifically leaving passwords on a couple of them and whoever receives them is going to try to get in can't and then they're going to say hey buddy what's up i'm going to say password look at that give him equipment and a lesson right out the gate yeah yeah so he's he's got some ocgs going i shipped them out yesterday okay for the ccna and then does he have a console cable uh i have i'm including a console cable and most of the power cables i did not include the usb to serial or whatever that thing's called there's a converter you need for the yeah yeah usb you do i actually have one but the brake sequence doesn't work i don't know why something is broke but anyway yeah it's it's i'm really excited it's great um i'm gonna put something together and you know officially release it but it feels really good and people are reaching out because of this podcast like hey i love what you guys are doing this is awesome you know i have books i want to give away i have gear i want to give away like just the fact that this is feeding on itself and we're able to help more and more people as we progresses so gratifying that's awesome dude you know i i guess i would even go so far as to add like if you're somebody listening to this podcast and you are sitting on gear that you're not using that you are able to give away as in it's yours or you know you know the owners and can get you know consent to give it away uh then then contact us because i would love to uh take that gear and get it into the hands of people that need it could use it could learn from it i don't want you to ship it to me i don't have the the space for that my wife would get very upset if a pallet of gear showed up on my doorstep as much as i would love that um but you know get in touch and we'll figure out the details um and try to get gear into the hands of people that need it so they can study and uh get their asserts and yeah the next generation get good engineers get another job after after you know losing their job to covet or or you know move up in their career whatever the case may be we want to help we want to help people so i worked for a company that closed the data center and they threw away millions of dollars of gear because of certain policies they had to routers switches servers so there's i mean it's happening all the time i believe and you know it's a shame to just scrap it and then it could go to the next generation of you know engineers trying to learn and there's usually a cost associated with that right like if you're oh scrap electronics you pay to have that stuff hauled away and you usually get charged by the pound and that stuff's not light it's going to be much more helpful in the hands of somebody studying say the ccna than in the trash yeah so if we can be a conduit for that that would be awesome absolutely absolutely thanks for watching that yeah good stuff well i look forward to to uh you know you telling the whole story on on this you know more information about the individual you gave away to and uh i want to see this person get their ccna and so when they do i hope that you guys like collaborate do a video or something like that you know yeah i mean he's gonna get it he's got his a plus he'll have his net plus in a month and he's gonna have a ccna and he's that's part of why i i picked him because he's he's driven he's like dude i need this he's he's going after it nice that's awesome she get him on the show too because i you know love to have him tell a story that'd be great yeah all right so some uh some recent events also very life changing events worth noting uh we're definitely worth talking about uh christmas morning it'll be close to a month ago now at this point by the time we aired this episode but christmas morning an rv loaded with some homemade bombs and a very troubled individual exploded in downtown nashville and uh took out a large portion of att's network and uh dan certainly felt the effects of that and uh dan i was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit more on the impact that that had uh where you are yeah so um yeah that was i think that happened around 6 30 a.m on christmas morning and i think services started going out around 11 it might have been about 10 30. i'm not sure but so like where i work our phone systems went down and we have we have three different isps and att is one of them but uh so we were still good on internet and all that stuff but yeah the phone systems definitely took a hit and it hit from what i'm hearing it has hit all the way down into alabama all the way up into kentucky head over all the way down into atlanta georgia so it definitely affected a lot of people you're talking about a major outage um i i'm not 100 sure if it was a uh a um what's it called a uh uh central office but i i think that's what the building was that the bomber hit um yeah it was crazy it affected a lot of people and you know kudos to t they they had uh pretty much everything back up by monday morning uh i i think like 90 of their services were back online and and working i know our stuff was so uh yeah it just talk about a dr plan right there uh i don't think you think about bombs going off and at one of your offices um so i mean kudos to them that's all i got to say just something that devastating and surprising happening and them able to you know bounce back i know there was probably plenty of engineers out there that are you know trying to figure out whatever was going on fell that traffic over to some other location i think they said something about they had like remote pods or something like that i might be saying that wrong but uh they mentioned something like that so i'm sure you know there's plenty of engineers and technicians out there trying to get all that straightened out uh all i gotta say is good job to those people yeah yeah absolutely i mean i i heard early on in the incident that um you know att wanted to respond and get people into the building and you know start making network changes or whatever to divert the traffic away from the area but it's it's a crime scene and you know rightfully slow law enforcement couldn't let those people in to do their job yeah i think fbi and tbi they uh they weren't allowing them back in if i and i'm getting everything i've heard from the news and on the internet so i'm not a i'm not saying this is in stone how it happened but yeah it definitely sounded like uh the fbi wouldn't let them back in so they had to kind of like let the services go uh i i think the reason why at you know uh we didn't start losing services until like 10 30 or 11 was because something about like they had to turn the gas off and turn the power off and stuff like that so that they could like i guess get firefighters and stuff like that in the building to you know i guess map it out or make sure it was safe to for entry um so i think that's why they technically started losing services it might not have been from the bomb itself uh so now i could be wrong i'm not i'm not saying that like i said it's not set in stone what i'm saying here but that's what i've heard and yeah but any any way you look at it i mean when you have something that catastrophic happen uh just to me that's amazing that they had everything back up and running in like two or three days like that's crazy yeah yeah that's that's a huge shoot big shout out to atnt yeah kudos to all those you know it goes without saying like the first responders so you know they're all heroes but like it i knew a guy i worked with at the knock he was in manhattan or 911 and he worked for one of the big financials which basically disappeared and i know like they just all went directly like they had to get back up for like the global markets so they went and i think spent i don't know how long it took them but they just they went into another building and they built a new data center and you know worked on getting that connectivity back up not so much you know for the bottom line of their company but like hey we're i forget which of the big brokerage houses it was like we have to get this up for the markets you know so yeah those guys down there and you know who knows if it was even a safe area they were working in like i don't know if i personally wouldn't want to walk into an area that you know just had an explosion like that so just kudos to all those people who walked in and did what had to be done you know like you had mentioned 9-1-1 dan like earlier when we were talking i mean you got to get 9-1-1 back up i mean that's a critical infrastructure i forgot to mention that 9-1-1 was wiped out in our area like we had to use an alternative number you know and so people were trying to share by social media what that number was because and and also they were uh texting and calling our our cell phones saying hey you can't use 911 you need to use this number basically uh so it was just a but but then you think about like my parents they have att they weren't getting calls or texts and the only reason they had uh internet on their phones was because they were at their house and they were on their wireless right so it was just it was a major it was a major thing and uh it's it's definitely scary crazy um you know i i'll put this out there if if anybody familiar with the situation you know network engineer involved in the response can come forward and discuss certain details uh it would be cool to to have that conversation um but again yeah that's obviously we don't want to violate any sort of uh communications ndas whatever uh so only with explicit permission from from those that you need it from it would be cool to to hear some inside experience uh on on the response to that yeah like how it affected your family i mean you had to you know stop what you were doing for christmas there and respond to this situation and that's kind of how the i.t world goes right right i mean that's that's the field we work in yeah jeez you know i didn't think about that i mean on on top of the incident itself here it is christmas morning uh you know mid morning or actually the bot it went off like early in the morning right so you're probably just getting out of bed with the kids doing the presents thing and imagine sitting there opening presents with your kids and the phone rings like yep you got to go to work wow yeah well but they did a huge huge thank you to yeah thank everybody involved in that yeah is that that it's pretty close to home you know obviously you know network engineers that's what we do that's what we got to do that's our job incredible sure well so um moving on last week in our episode last week we talked about goals for the coming year and we set some goals uh and some of them uh are pretty ambitious uh we we put out a tweet recently on you know what are your goals for next year and we've had just a ton of people chiming in and some people have some extremely ambitious uh goals for the coming year uh so what i'd like to do is for the three of us recap what we're doing or what we would like to accomplish this coming year in 2021 briefly and then uh how do we stay on task how do we track our progress on these goals how do we make sure we're picking away at all these things that we want to get done throughout the course of the year so uh any do you mind if i kick it over to you first and have us refresh our memories on what you're doing for this coming year right so my goals for 2021 um finish my ccmp uh so i have to pay us encore as a first step um the way i'm doing that to to to speak to what you're asking is you know how do you do that how do you stay organized how do you stay on task is pretty much what came from the keith barker episode um is you know from his accountability and a trick that you gave me aj was just i'm committing to 20 minutes a night five nights a week so at night time when everybody goes to bed you know i give it 20 minutes which usually turns into an hour an hour and a half so that's how i'm tackling encore um i used to take a ton of notes and i don't really feel that they serve me if if there's any indication by the amount of failures that i had um so some of the things i've learned with the podcast i'm really relying more heavily on flash cards now um space repetition interleaving just as i'm going through the material if i don't know something i make a flash card on it because i've spent a ton of time writing encyclopedias of onenotes and i probably only glanced at them before an exam because there's so much like i'm just reading the book again so that's that's a tactical thing i've done um to change it um today i actually tackled um i started my aws journey my cloud journey i'm getting pushed heavily in the cloud at work and i got to get up to speed so um i started an aws course today that was recommended by my buddy who's um an aws employee who creates content and he said this guy stuff is the best out there this is what you want so i started that today and i'm gonna do that during the days um that's kind of how i'm you know previous to all this conversation and podcast and everything i've learned i used to operate that i need to do one thing at a time and i need to finish my ccmp before i do anything else because if i don't i'll never finish it um but now there's all this science that's being pointed out to me that you know interleaving and it's actually helpful to remember stuff if you do jump around to different topics so i i could be doing myself a disservice by just doing my ccmp um you know if i understand what's been you know told to me but it seems like jumping between cloud and ccmp may actually help me remember both so time will tell but um i'm gonna do aws during the day my plan is to watch the videos while i'm working out on my elliptical because i'm gonna do that five days a week um so aws during the day when i work out ccmp at night um and i got a bunch of other stuff too after aws i have to do azure um and then i gotta do junos and then i'm supposed to do automation i think that's way too much to bite off in a year um that's what work you know is not in an aj year yeah yeah but but that but that's the funny thing dan i see how much aj has accomplished and i even spoke to my manager aj about something you mentioned before about how you do have dedicated time at work to study and that's a part of the conversation i'm having with my managers and i come to find out he's already having those discussions prior to talking to me about how can we carve some time for our team because yeah because we're inundated by all these new technologies all at once and yeah part of the job is doing it on your own and your spare time but when there's so much at one time how much can i do in an hour a night like you know what i mean i can get much more accomplished if i can carve out some time during the day so you know that may be my juno automation efforts because really with ccmp and cloud i think that pretty much fills up any spare time i have in my personal life it would have to be carved out time during my work day i think to jump into my other things which would be you know junos and automation but i don't know if that made any sense but that's kind of where i'm at and how i'm trying to tackle it flash cards over onenote and ccmp at night aws during the day um it's kind of where i'm at with it so you brought it up and i i just want to go back and talk about it so the things that you're talking about you know spaced repetition interleaving you know using the flashcards and stuff like that um we we've talked about that before in the podcast it came out of this book that aaron recommended to the team called make it stick and i've recently finished reading that book and if you don't have that book i cannot recommend enough that you go get it and read it aaron has alluded to a lot of the great things that come out of it he's espoused very often you know the benefits and you know make it stick is about how do we learn and you know aaron's aaron's mentioned it before you know everybody has a you know feels like they have a preference well you know guess what we're all humans uh and there's just certain ways that our neural pathways work and uh basically you know you learn something and the more you try to recall that thing that you learned on your own without assistance uh it's like a path it's like it's literally like like a footpath through the dirt right like the more that you walk on that path the more the path shows up and is there and then it's easier to find the path the next time around so the more that you can recall on your own without any assistance what it was that you just learned the the stronger that neural pathway becomes and so uh that's what things like spaced repetition does you learn something and you you don't look at it for a few days and then you try to go back and and try to remember it use the flashcards but use the flashcards properly right like you have a flashcard don't flip it over just don't flip it over until you can recall what it was that you learned or what that information was in that flash card and that seems like a harder effort right of trying to pull it from memory is what helps absolutely the harder you're working to recall it from memory the stronger and the firmer that that neural pathway is going to be and the trick is it's counterintuitive to how we naturally behave right totally yeah i mean we want it to be easy like oh yeah like aaron said like you click it oh yeah i knew that well no you didn't that's why you clicked it before answering it but yeah that's just that that's what you're fighting against is you know not you don't want it to be hard right at least i don't but the harder you make those questions and the more effort you put into trying to pull that out of your brain before flipping that card is so yeah that's a hack i'm trying i mean we'll see you know if all this stuff works i'm going to be winning in 2021 and you're going to be announcing my name every other you know it works it works like i i have not i i've been using bits and pieces of this all summer long you know that's how i got five juniper certifications that's why i passed my ccnp so i that's how i've done all the things that i've done because i've changed the way that i study you're using things that i've learned from from you guys from okay you know from what aaron has espoused like the flash cards have been a game changer for me doing the practice exams has been a game changer for me you know that's right that that's the big thing and then um space repetition you know like learning something learning something new going back to a previous topic i learned and reviewing it in in doing the practices again practice exam questions right like um if you if you learn something if you dedicate a whole bunch of time to just one topic and then you move on to the next and then you move on to the next but you never go back to that thing that you learned before you're not going to remember you have to revisit it every so often and make sure that you keep it fresh in your head and the flash cards make that easy right because when you're looking at it 800 page ocg how do you know what to go to yeah but the flash cards and isn't there like logic in it where it goes to things you don't know and it skips things that are easier and it yes right with the inky flash cards it you know based on how well you're doing like when you when you flip an anki flash card you you say like was this hard for me was it easy for me and if it's easy for you then it won't show it to you for you know a couple of days and then if the next time it shows it to you it was still easy then it won't show it to you for like a month but that's helpful because it keeps pushing the difficult stuff back in your face that's right it keeps making you work on it and you reminded me i never looked at the ditkas and i never used the end of chapter exams which is insane yeah but that's the first thing i'm doing now and i'm making flash cards using them if i don't know the dick girl i don't know the end of chapter exams in the ocg that's the first thing i do before i read the chapter which so far has been helpful i i don't want to get into it a whole lot because um i think we could dedicate an entire episode to to that book um i just bought it by the way so it's common january 3rd i'll have make it stick so here we go cool awesome see if you apply i look forward to it it's like the new assignment everybody here has got to read it and we're going to talk about it and if i read that book and do all this stuff and i keep failing exams you won't dude i'm fine in a different career path i'm telling you it won't it's something that works all right exact science so yeah science uh thank you andy uh dan what's uh what's on your to-do list this year all right i think the two things that i mentioned in last episode was i finally want to get this ccnp knocked out and just get it out of the way um so i think the path i'm going to do is encore and then the salad i kind of want to go down the design path that's kind of something i've always wanted to do yeah yeah i'm doing the same thing dan say one now doing the same thing oh you're gonna do the same thing yep there you go good deal so yeah i kinda wanna do the the encore and the salad and then i think for material stuff i'm going to use oh so finally we got cbt and ine at work now so i'm going to use those two and then how do you say it anki or anki okay anki okay i say i'm kai yeah exactly so uh definitely going to use that i have seen so much benefit in using that in the past just for other stuff too um it is they have a they have some kind of algorithm that i don't know it's the secret sauce of their of why that that system works so well for me but uh i'll also learn and this is just a tip for if there's any people that are out there like me and love lying to yourself uh you have to be honest with yourself with the anki uh system because if you if you if you don't be honest with yourself it's not going to work you have to be honest with yourself so if you if you couldn't define what you know what a vlan was don't sit there and say i know what it is you have to sit there and say no that was hard and let it let it do its thing because it's it's a tool that's going to help you in the end so be honest with yourself you don't have to prove anybody else wrong or anything like that you just go through it if you if you screwed it up just put it hit the little red the red one that said now that was hard and uh i promise you it'll it'll keep it'll keep flipping it in front of you and it will work its magic so i highly recommend that tool um but again don't don't just flip the card and read the answer really try to recall the answer from memory yeah if you're having a hard time then go go re-read this section in the book don't flip the card until you go find the answer but then the next time you encounter that card don't flip that card until you recall it from memory yeah i agreed 100 um and then and then the ocg so the th that's probably going to be my materials and then whenever i'm feel like i'm getting closer to being ready i will probably purchase boson and do a practice test on what do you get do you get three of those three practice tests out of that or in the bozo yeah and the boson is it three uh yeah there's three full exams worth of questions so over 300 questions and then you you can take exam a exam b exam c or you can just have it mix it up so you're not seeing the same questions every time you take it okay and what i like about the boson i used it for my encore is you can go into the settings and you can say only show me questions that i haven't gotten correct three times in a row four times in a row and then that that will force the boson exam engine to keep feeding you questions you either haven't seen yet or that you keep getting wrong i got you okay so i'll probably do that whenever i start feeling pretty good about it and then you know what dan i i would encourage you to do that throughout the course because you can you can set the bows on to say like you know just just show me this section or you can type in a keyword like hsrp or fhrp or something you can type in keywords and say only show me questions that have this keyword in it you know before you start studying take a full exam just sit down go through the whole exam see what you know see what you don't know and questioning yourself before you start your studies will set your brain up for it this is the stuff i'm about to learn and so when you're learning it you'll you'll capture it a little bit a little bit better so basically you're saying try to try to treat the the boson as a like the the dicta right oh yeah totally okay totally because i i i used to do that i used to wait until after i read the chapter and then i took the addictive and now i do the dicta before and i feel like when i'm in the middle of reading it i'm like oh that's what that answer to that question was right you know exactly and then exactly that's a huge part of the process for the make it stick book like question do the questions before you read anything before you learn create your own questions too you know like look at the questions that you know the dick is and stuff like that then come up with a few of your own like look at the topic and say okay you know what what i think i'm about to learn here what questions do i have uh and then answer answer your own questions answer the dikkas as you go along um and then just keep doing those questions over again you know like skip skip a week move on to another topic and then at the beginning of next week just spend a half hour and review the ditkas for the stuff you learned over a week ago and it's kind of like doing this like hopscotch thing like throughout the course like start off go to a topic the week after that review what you learned a few weeks ago and then start a new topic and then next week review what you learned you know so you just got to keep interleaving it in there and make sure that you review like what i do is is i will do practice exams you know i'll do a full practice exam before i start and then as i go i do a practice exam on what i just read or learned and then i will add on to that like i'll do a larger practice exam containing the topics that i've already learned and then for a week i'll remove one out so i don't see it for a little bit and then i'll add it back in after that okay all right you just hit me with something i haven't considered i have boson for encore and i haven't opened it oh god yeah and i'm like six chapters into the ocg because i was going to wait until the end yeah but i guess i can use that as well i didn't want to go in there and get this heart you know what i mean i know it's going to kick my butt but i didn't realize you could do it by sections like can i just do certain sections that would be helpful you can do you can't do like like if you look at the blueprint you can't do like individual like you can't do 1.1 1.2 1.3 you can do section one and you can do section two and then like i said you can do the keyword search so if you just wanna look at you know questions on lisp you can type in lisp and it will fire back and you know just hit you with that that's that's nice yeah incorporate that yeah i might i might reverse that then i might i might get that the boson and yeah take that test and fail it miserably and eat some well that's the thing like that's how you measure your progress right like you know you're gonna fail miserably so don't don't get all bent out of shape of it when you do because you haven't started learning yet right but see see what you know get a baseline and then as you're going through keep taking those practice exams over again and see your performance like oh hey i'm getting better in this topic or oh i'm not doing so well in this topic like then you know where you need to focus you know you need to study more like it's it's a tool and it's not just a tool to prepare you right before you go take the exam it's something that you should use throughout the entire course of it and then you add in stuff like flash cards like while you're while you're doing the practice exams you get a question that's got you know five possible answers multiple choice question make flash cards out of the correct answer and all the other possible answers right because you're good because those are all the possible different technologies that you need to know for this exam and so if you just know all of them no matter how they ask you that question on the actual exam you're going to know the answer i see what you're saying that's pretty good thinking there you know what i do i'm telling you it's work you know what i love about donkey is i sat in the basement with my kids today and spent 20 minutes shuffling through um instagram pictures and after i thought dang i should have just been looking at my flashcards because i've you guys have talked about that on the podcast like just instead of scrolling through nonsense yeah just do your flashcards and i didn't but it was kind of a wake up call like oh yeah right i'm supposed to be doing that i i used to do that stuff all the time i used to be on instagram and facebook and it was just scrolling just scrolling nothing just mindless scrolling i post on twitter i you know and then i post on the arna network engineering account i post on my account you know because i like the community reaction you get on twitter there's definitely more of that going on there's none of that really going on on instagram or anywhere else um when i when i work when i travel and install gear i love taking like really cool pictures of gear but i haven't done that a whole lot this past year so right i haven't been posting a whole lot to my instagram account um but yeah i've definitely replaced a lot of that time spent um scrolling my phone on social media with flashcards yeah i don't know why it seems so obvious now using exim as just a supplement to the dikkas and the do i know you know and the and the chapter exams but in my head they were totally separate things and i can't touch xm until the end just nonsense yeah yeah i i thought they're on the same brain right brain uh wavelength as you were i used to have the same approach like i would start to do a practice exam and i would get really frustrated because i was getting questions wrong and then i would just close it right yeah um but now it like i've i've used the questions so much like when i was doing the juniper stuff this past summer like i was using the junos genius questions constantly and that was really helping drive this information and it wasn't memorizing it was like looking at the question and then reviewing all of the answers i know what that is i don't know what that is i'm gonna write that down and i'm gonna go learn what that is uh you know um it's it's not you know because you can definitely fall into a trap where you're doing practice exams over and over again uh and you're you're memorizing the answers right like because you've seen these same questions but if you can go through the exam and tell yourself this is the correct answer because of this and these are the wrong answers because that's the wrong technology that's not related or whatever the case may be right like if you can explain to yourself all of these things then you're going to be in really good shape for the exam how is it that i got through 12 years of private school and i got my bachelor's degree and i never knew about space repetition or interleaving like dude i am right there with you why isn't this there's a lot of stuff in school that they they dropped the ball on i mean i'm like and that's what it's wrong my whole life like it's crazy you're gonna read this book and they're going to tell you like here's here's what you normally want to do like you normally want to reread you normally want to highlight you normally want to do this that's how they call this that's what they told us what you need to do i didn't make it up like they told us to do that like write and highlight and you know yeah when i was when i was told highlight highlighting was a waste i'm like wait what that's all i got bro you know what i mean i'm right there with you yeah and you know what's nice too about i'm not you would think anki is a sponsor they're not but another reason i love it is like you said when you're taking that practice exam and you're getting your butt kicked there's a benefit to it because now i can put it in a flash card and i know that that's something i can work on and get better at where otherwise it's just like god i don't know this stuff i'm overwhelmed this is too much i'm gonna go you know have ice cream so anki makes me feel empowered because i know that that's going to help me get the stuff that i don't know into my brain yeah which is really helpful because highlighting and rereading and writing encyclopedia of notes wasn't working right right yeah no that's and you know for the android users out there anki's free um i think ios you have thanks for rubbing that in my face dan um you know it's 25 bucks but it's worth it on ios yeah so so the the yeah that's right andy so so the anki app for ios is twenty five dollars worth it 100 worth it i happily paid it but yeah android's free i'm sweet but uh chris from the discord our our favorite butcher network engineer um has found an alternate app and i will i will go to him and again ask what that is and i'll put it in the show notes because he found an app that is able to connect to anki and work it's not the official anki app but it works with anki uh and it's free so i will get that information stick it in the show notes so that way people have options for their anki access on their mobile device yeah and just a quick thing too for anybody who is new to this and they don't know what this is now we did talk about it on a on a previous episode but um just for anybody who hasn't heard that episode yet you can also get uh an key on key i i've screwed the name up and key on uh as a desktop version right yeah so you can you can create your your your decks they they use things called like a card deck um and so you can create the deck on your computer so i for for me that's huge because i hate typing on the phone and so if i can type it out all on the uh on the keyboard here that's a win in my book um but then you then you can um sync your decks between your devices your different devices and so that sync is really sweet and you know what else is nice then you can copy and paste so like if you're in the ditka wait what well you can you can copy and paste right from like the dick and material and the ebook right into anki which will sync which is pretty sweet because i don't like typing on the keyboard either yeah but that's that's really nice and then like i was away and i didn't have my computer with me but i could create cards you know it stunk and it was annoying but that sync 2 to my desktop so it's it's a great platform if you're listening anki creator come come talk to us yeah we're i feel like we're the anki shills here but it's it's it's amazing it's backed by science and it's working and now yeah i'm gonna catch you aj you're going down bro come on man yeah and so the other thing i was mentioning was my uh my weight i'm i've i've gained a few pounds this past year and i need to lose a few pounds this next year and i think so the way i'm going to do that is try to do meal prepping as much as i can so that way i have a set amount of food that i'm going to eat right rather than i don't know if anybody else is guilty of this but i'm i'm one of those where it's like oh okay there's six cookies i'm gonna go ahead and eat four and five and then i'll probably have that sixth one too you know i'm real bad about that so dan i ate the cookies and then i go into the fridge for the raw cookie dough yeah exactly that's how bad i got it so i think the way i'm going to help me uh like mentally is if i if i know that i can only eat what's in this container you know that's that's going to be my uh we'll see how it goes i i'm gonna play this by ear and see well portion control is huge right yeah if you just eat what's in there and you know you've prepared a healthy meal because like if you're what do they say like call if you're hungry angry lonely you're tired you're gonna make a poor food choice and just stuff your face i know i have and i'm always one of those i think so yeah i can tell you like 50 of the time we get off of this podcast it's late and i go and eat something i shouldn't at you know 11 30 12 o'clock at night it's just you know that that's not helping another hack i found damn which if i'm exercising i find that like if i'm exercising a couple days a week and then i go to make a poor food choice like why am i gonna do that why was i on the elliptical for 45 minutes today busting my butt if i'm just gonna totally counteract that so that's been another hack for me if i'm not exercising i make much worse choices with food then you know it's like aj mentioned it's like a lifestyle i guess like not so much a diet but i'm gonna exercise i'm gonna eat healthier and why would i eat like crap if i'm exercising why bother exercising if i'm just gonna eat like crap it doesn't you know it doesn't make sense yeah that that's so that's what worked for me right like i i was doing trying to change the whole lifestyle not just what i eat like it's it's if you really want to make an impact on on your weight get it you got to change the whole thing and so when i was going to the gym regularly i i had the same mindset that andy did like why would i want to go home and eat this junk food like i just did all that work and i'm just going to like completely demolish it if i have you know four slices of pizza right now yeah like why did you bother yeah how did you get up and bust your butt and sweat and yeah it really does create another thought process of you know why would i do that but if i'm not working out yeah it's the difference that's another one it's like i've gotta kind of come up with a plan on exercise so uh at the beginning of 2020 i was doing really well on walking like i mean i was probably walking about three miles a day i'd walk at lunch and then after i got off work and i i don't know i just kind of dropped the ball on that and i'm gonna have to get that going back again so i'm hoping between meal prepping and you know making obviously making better decisions on what to eat and then also i would like to start walking every day again and hopefully i don't know how successful this will be but maybe eventually start dabbling and getting into a gym uh i just don't know i'm i'm not a big gym guy so you look like the kind of guy that just wants to go out back and chop some wood then yeah exactly right i mean hey if anybody is in the area and you've got a bunch of trees down like let me know and here's a hack then i learned today because i was trying to figure out how in god's name i'm going to pursue another cert when the ccmp has been kicking my butt as long as it has some science called habit stacking so like you used to walk and you don't and i was going to ask you why do you think you stopped but it probably doesn't matter because with habit stacking what i what they were saying today was find something you do already like if it's drink a cup of coffee in the morning something that's already a habit after you drink that cup of coffee go for your walk like build on an existing habit and say okay well i do that every day anyway so let me go do this other thing and commit to five minutes like aj's hack like all right i'm gonna go walk for 10 minutes after this cup of coffee and maybe the morning isn't the right time for you but there's a thing about habit stacking and how to create new habits is to kind of latch them on to an existing one that's already there that's easier than so that's what i'm trying and that's why i'm like you know what i'm going to study when i'm exercising my elliptical for a cloud because otherwise i don't know when i'm going to do it so exercise was already there that was my existing habit let me attach you know cloud study and see if if that is a way i can stack it so i don't know time will tell if it works for me but more science stuff hit me with the science i wanted hey we like science it's proven it works so what are you doing aj do we hit you what about you uh i i waffled for quite a bit and uh i don't think i actually drew conclusions at the end of our episode last week so um i have at this point now settled on uh for this coming year i want to do uh professionally i want to do the ccnp data center okay and i want to do the devnet professional okay um and i can do two professional certs in a year yeah yeah and i can do it by just doing three exams so i can do the the data center core uh and the dc automation exam why data center automation makes sense to me for you why data center so um i love data center i do a fair amount with nexus for work okay there's obviously some other pieces to the to the data center exam that um i don't touch regularly i mean i i rack servers i work with ucs servers but not not to the degree that you need to know them for the data center core exam um so there's there's definitely going to be some challenge in there right like um i want to get another ccnp and and after looking at all of them and based on what i work on i think data center makes the most sense okay um and that's cool you know so i'll have you know the dc core the dc auto and then the devnet core and that will get me the three the the two professional level certs with those three exams so are you saying that because you get the dc auto does that count towards the devnet stuff yes okay all right yep because it's an automation exam it'll count both for the ccnp data center and how do you figure all this stuff out so it's like you come up with this because it's just that's amazing that's so smart well if you look at if you look at all the exams right like they have like enterprise security data center collab you know whatever um and each one of those has an automation exam there's ian auto there's sac auto there's dc auto there's collab auto all of those exams are also in the devnet track so if you look at the devnet professional there's en auto dc auto collab auto security auto and then there's actually like a couple different devops ones that don't appear anywhere else so you're going to get devnet professional and what exams do you need for that you need you need just like the other professional level exams you have a core exam that you need to take and then you have a specialization but this dc core account for devnet professional the the dc auto dcsr automation yeah and what's the second do you have to take two exams for yeah there's there's dc core or i'm sorry devnet core and then the dc auto exam will count as my specialization which will also account for the data center uh professional example he's taking one specialized exam in two chords counts for two okay so you're going to take three exams and you'll get two professional yeah starts with that that's nice that's a that's a cert hack right there i know you can do it because you've been killing it in 2020. so i mean resources wise when it comes to dc auto it's pretty scarce so that's going to be a lot of hunting which which i think will be a welcome challenge right because up to this point everything that i've tackled there's been tons of videos tons of this tons of that on it dc auto i have yet to find like a video course or anything like that i have found content for the dc core exam um i i know that cbt nuggets recently released the devnet core course so i'm looking forward to watching that but the way i plan to attack it is i'm going to hit c core early on in the first quarter then do the dc auto and then save the back half of the year for um the the devnet core i think that's that's going to take the most amount of time and i'm trying like i've already kind of looked ahead at like what's in that blueprint and i'm trying to make sure that i'm starting to focus on all of those things now so you know going back to the interleaving outside of like the certification stuff like i want to get better with python like i can do some stuff with python now but it's mostly scripting like easy stupid silly scripts i can do i can take something i found off of you know github or whatever and i can modify it ever so slightly to do my will but i want to get better with it i want to i want to do a lot more coding so i've been doing a lot of python practice watching some video courses i picked up some network automation stuff off udemy recently i've got a stack of books i want to get through and so in between studying for you know the data center core i'm also playing with python yeah so now like what what's kind of your goal like are you going to obviously focus on the like the data center professional level and the devnet professional level but how are you going to tackle like doing the python in between are you going to take like a certain section and just like work on that section over the span of however long uh between you know study nights and stuff or are you trying to like you know you'll do a certain couple sections of your professional level and then knock out a bunch of the python or like how like what's your plan on that i'm kind of curious because i i've always kind of been scared to uh i don't know if the word scared is really what i want to say but i i've always been uh not so a good feeling about trying to try something else while i'm in the middle of learning something over here so i just kind of i'm curious about like how you're going to do that because i might i might try to use this at some point i don't know so so after reading the book interleaving topics is definitely something that helps you remember stuff and i've noticed that just in the short time that i've started to implement it which is in the last two weeks so um okay i will when i have free time when i have time to myself well first of all what i've done is taken all this stuff and i've written it out i have a task app that i use uh on my smartphone and i've listed everything like all the books i want to read all the stuff i want to do that's in there because i used to suffer from like uh just too much too much to do and and nothing was like focus like oh i want to work on my blog i want to do this when i do that like and so now i have this this kind of prioritized list of things that i want to attack and so when i find myself with some free time and i sitting sitting down at my laptop i'm like holy crap what do i do and i i end up doing nothing because i just sit there and stress over like all these different things that i have to do this sounds very familiar yeah yeah and so what are you using what's happening what app are you using to organize your is it a song no it's okay uh it's just a task app okay a task driven app called todoist okay i've been using to do but i've heard of todoist yep todoist is really good yeah i like it you like it okay um you just described my life right there so but but it works right so um i wake up early in the morning and i've taken to reading you know um i i wake up sometimes between 5 and 5 30 sometimes between 5 30 and 6 i'm almost always up before the kids are so um i'm reading in bed i got myself a nice little nightlight in the nightstand and i wake up roll over turn on the light and and start reading you're reading an ocg like are you reading no um i've been reading um i i finished uh make it stick now i'm reading network automation and programmability because i started it and then i got pulled off to do some other stuff so now i'm going back to finish it and then when i sit down at my laptop you know i might write a blog article or i will do python coding um i've been doing a lot more python coding i i you know at your recommendation andy i signed up for the kirkbuyers free python course and so i've been working my way you know through that how's that so i i only pick like it's going really well i'm actually really really enjoying it okay um so i only have like three or four things you know i've got a book a couple of activities that i want to focus on and until i take one of those three things off my plate i don't start another one so i just interleave those those things and then after i finish one then i can start the next like i really wanted to read the network automation programmability book but i told myself i'm not going to crack that open until i finish make it stick okay one book at a time i'll so two books at a time like i'll do the network automation programmability and i'm going to crack the data center core book here soon gotcha but i'm not going to open up any more books until i finish one of those so counter-intuitive to me that by studying multiple subjects it's going to help us like it's still exploding my brain and i still don't believe it i'm going to do it and i know it's going to work because it's science-based and all that and so one of the one of the big drivers in make it stick too is linking stuff you're learning to stuff you already know and so the more that you're you're looking at you can make those connections oh so you're saying like if you if you learn one little new topic about maybe a bigger subject that you already know pretty well you're it's just it's just a little thing that you're adding on to it rather than a mountain that you're trying to get over right okay you know i already understand how this works and now i'm learning this new thing and they work pretty similarly and so you can kind of make connections that way i got you okay and so because the dc automation exam is on my path like i want to make sure that i'm really working on my network automation so when i get to the dc automation i can make those connections like oh i already know this about network automation and this is how dc auto you know applies i would love to go for a data center because yeah manage data centers and oh yeah man that stuff would be really hard after looking at the blueprint and like hearing you talk about your job i'm like that's this sounds like it's right up andy's path yeah i i need i need to do that now if i get all this stuff done i'll do that at the end do you have any like cloud stuff in that data center one um other you know from the from the little bit that i've looked at the blueprint um i think that the only cloud uh that they really talk about is like some of the data center stuff that can you know connect to multiple data centers and monitor those like i don't think there's nothing like you know azure or anything like aci or something yeah yeah or just like the high level benefits of cloud versus on premises and how to connect the two i got to um and then numerous numerous personal goals you know i'll definitely echo what dan said i've definitely put on some weight this year after working so hard to take some weight off uh last year so i want to get back to a better better lifestyle being a little bit healthier um so i don't know about you guys but we've been home so much i have done some renovations at my home there you go and boy um my my downstairs basement i have like a shop area downstairs in my basement and that place is trashed because of all the projects that i've you know started here and there and everywhere uh and so i i gotta clean my basement there's there's some stuff i gotta uh you know i wanna sell there's some stuff i gotta get out of there because um last year some friends gifted me a heavy a heavy bag for boxing nice and i hung it up from a rafter in my basement and i started working it one day and my wife screamed at me she's like what are you doing you're shaking the whole kitchen so i i gotta make some room downstairs um i have a big workbench that i built um i want to get rid of it because i have like the house came with like another workbench in there okay um and so in its place i will put a stand that will hold the heavy bag rather than me hanging it you know from the ceiling okay um so i i got a lot of stuff going on it sounds like you guys got a lot of stuff going on and um we're very quickly coming up on the end of our episode but um are there methods that you guys use to like keep track of all these moving parts like how do you do that uh no no yeah they keep track of all the goals there are different ways what's that keep track of all the goals that we mean like all the stuff well keep track of all the goals but like how do you know you're making progress on this stuff yeah andy how do you know i haven't passed a certification test in so long i am not making progress i mean that that's the ultimate litmus test right i uh but but i i think that passing the certification is is the the long term goal right like so so how do you know you're working towards that increment to me it comes down to discipline and what that looks like for me is i'm doing what i say i'm gonna do yeah um so if i'm studying three to five days a week my cloud stuff and i'm studying three to five nights a week my ccmp for me that's my barometer now how long it's going to take me and when i pass the exam that's all you know for me just kind of out the window like as long as i keep doing that and i have that discipline and i'm doing it i know i'll achieve that goal don't know when but that's i don't really have a system or anything fancy or just i i have to do what i said i'm gonna do and you know like tonight would be a perfect example if i'm up till one in the morning after we get off and i just mess around and do some stuff tomorrow i'll be too tired to get up and work out i won't study for cloud so to me it always comes down to discipline am i gonna get to bed at a decent time am i gonna get up and and do what i said i'm gonna do that's where i struggle usually yeah i make i make promises i have plans and then i'm up late one night it screws me up for two days so like yeah and i don't know about you guys but when i get behind on like studying and and i don't feel like i'm getting accomplished like dude that's stress at another level right there for me um it just i go into like almost like a shutdown mode uh and just want to give up on it because it's kind of like what we were talking about before uh you get overwhelmed with how much you have to get that you have to do and like you were talking about you just said your laptop and you're just like uh like i don't know what to start on because it's just there's too much right and yeah and so i think yeah for me is if if i had like hey this week i want to nail down a certain concept and if i don't nail that down then i know i'm not i'm not making progress right and so i think i think for me is definitely if i if i put an objective on the board i'm like hey i want to you know learn whatever this is uh and then by the end of that week or into the next week i'm starting to really understand that subject then i feel good i feel like hey i'm actually accomplishing this you know yeah and so i don't know if that fully answers your question or not but um i i think it does it in it's along the same lines as how i've started to approach things you know i i used to have information overload um i used to get anxiety about studying because there was always this this part of or or starting any project for that matter because it was always like i need to dedicate hours to this and i don't have hours right now i got like maybe five or ten minutes and then i don't do anything i just you know screw around chat with people whatever and don't accomplish what i set out to accomplish how do you build a house one brick at a time how do you eat a gigantic meal one bite at a time um and so which bathroom one leg at a time that's right uh and and so that's the approach that i started taking like cleaning the basement i go down to the basement a number of times every day we have our washer and dryer down there um and so every time i take a trip down there put something away you know i go down to kick over the laundry i i put something away is that habit stacking right there maybe i don't think it's habit stacking in the way that andy talked about it though yeah i think it's just me like you know rather than going down there and looking at the basement going oh my god what a huge effing mess this is i don't have time to deal with it right now and then not dealing with it it's as i pass through i just put something away and i've done this the last couple of weeks and and the basement already looks like a different place than it was before i started this new habit nice it's almost like slow and steady wins the race right if you just chip away little by little one day you'll turn around and that basement will look great like when we get off of here i can spend 10 minutes in the ocg and if i get two or three flash cards created it's a win yeah because i'm just doing a little bit by little bit yeah and that's what it's been with like reading the books like i i used to want to like carve out a half hour 45 minutes an hour to like sit down and read the book you know what i i've realized i can't do that you know i have competing priorities you know wife kids whatever the case may be stuff i gotta do it's reality so when i wake up in the morning i read for 20 minutes if i have time throughout the day i'll pick up my book and read for a little bit and i've already crushed one book and i'm already halfway through another one you know i'm not sitting down and reading for hours on end it's 20 minutes here 20 minutes there sometimes it's five minutes sometimes it's 10 minutes sometimes it's less than one minute because you know exactly yeah there i literally i read my pair uh i read a paragraph earlier i was gonna sit down to read for a little bit more than that i got a paragraph in and i had to go do something else yeah um but we talked about it on another episode if you put 20 minutes a night in three nights a week that's an hour you wouldn't have done otherwise yeah it doesn't see yeah because i fall under that you know stupid thing of like well i gotta dedicate two and a half hours and get through these three ocg chapters like so i don't do anything it's ridiculous yeah put 20 minutes in well i think there's something to be said about that too uh in one of our episodes with zigg we were talking about how did he knock out like was it what was it like two ccies like within three or six months or something like that of each other and he said he made a good point about how it's their sacrifice right like if you if you take you know three months to get your ccie something's got to give right and so for him it was health sleep and family time basically and uh i i for me that's not an option i'm not doing that and and so the path of like what you're talking about aj and andy about you know you know take take 20 minutes a night and try to you know either create some more flash cards get a couple of you know paragraphs down maybe a couple pages uh out of a book or something like that get that knocked out i think that's small wins for me go a long way um i i know personally like whenever i do knock something out like that dude i feel so good i it oh yeah it's a it's like a dopamine hit almost it absolutely it feels good whenever like i bet whenever you walk down there in your basement and you've noticed that it's already changed i mean that has to feel good right like absolutely yeah and it creates momentum right like yeah my garage like my garage is like your basement my garage is a hot mess all right mine's like i could never freaking bomb went off in there i need a screwdriver and i'm out there cursing like where is my like i just can't find anything but my my my in-laws got me this i have a peg board that isn't in use and they got me this little hook system and oh yeah yeah you can't see this on our people cans you may not but and it's all out of focus but anyway i spent an hour out there putting these things up and i got some things hung up but now when i go out there instead of having that feeling like i can stay in this garage and i'm like okay i can see some of the progress it makes me want to go out there and work on it more i guess is what i'm trying to say so yeah making that little bit of progress that 20-minute win makes you like you get that dopamine hit and then you can chase the next one yeah you know so i got i want to clean my garage down like that's a big deal for me because i don't like going out there but because i made a little bit of progress is why i want to do more so there's something to that i think so i think yeah i think absolutely i think uh any advice for viewers or for me personally is like trying to make i i don't try to make like huge goals in like a mountain of a goal in like that be the the task i guess you want to say i like setting up a lot of little ones and as i yeah you have to right yeah getting the cert is the end goal but what do you got to do to get there right yes exactly and and i think andy said it perfectly it's the momentum right so once once i start knocking out one two or three goals right there i start feeling really good and it's like dude i want to knock out four five and six and uh it definitely the the snowball effect right um it it definitely is a thing for me so i and the longer you don't the worse it feels like what i wasn't studying at all just got worse and worse and the thought of studying made me sicker and sicker to my stomach yep so it the inverse is true too like oh yeah yeah i think that's interesting because the recently the you know when we talk you you talk more about oh i studied this i made some flash cards i'm doing this now has anything like changed home life like your kids are still home they're still remote learning you're you know you're working from home your wife's working from home isn't anything talking to change talking to keith yeah so what was that talking to keith barker something about that conversation we had with keith clicked something in me just kicked you out in the butt huh you know i've been listening i've been listening to that guy for so long in my studies and getting to talk to him he dropped so much wisdom and so much knowledge but when when he when keith barker held me accountable when he called us out and said all right i'm gonna call you guys out what are you going to do andy and i'm going to check on you next week i mean if i got keith barker following up on me i i i better i better do it like you know what i mean i can't let keith down like everybody knows keith you know so yeah who's that yeah right it was just something about talking to keith clicked something in me and and i because it is all excuses and it is obs and we're all busy and you can find 20 minutes and i think i think marrying aj's hack which he's been telling me forever with keith's calling me out saying what are you gonna do once i said keith i'm gonna study 20 minutes a day five days a week i've been doing it ever since i took a couple days off for christmas but i've been doing it ever since and it's been working so it's it's a good question aj it's a great question because for six months i've been complaining i don't have the time and now i'm doing it what changed i i don't know keith lit something in me but your approach changed you know i think just like everybody else you had that anxiety when it came to studying like i don't have an hour to study well my my ways never worked you know what i mean i put in all this time and all this effort and all this writing and i fail so it's like why in god's name you know there's where imposter syndrome comes for me like i i'm not good at this stuff i don't know why i can't pass exams but this podcast really in our community and all these tidbits of everything we've talked about and all the science of it and you know the interleaving and space repetition and the dikkas and the end of chapters and how to use boson which you said tonight like every time i talk to you guys there's something else i pick up and it's again more momentum i feel like i'm getting more and more tools that i can implement easily that i really think based on your guys experience is going to change my outcomes this year oh yeah yeah i know it will and that's just going to light a fire i'm just going to want to be you know the aj and our insert guy because you know you guys have had all these secrets we didn't know about that and they they've been holding out on i know right like i i mean until we were out here before you started they've been killing it they're like they've used a lot of the same things like you were saying like i used to highlight i used to fill notebooks and i realized like yeah i rarely went back to review my notes i rarely went back and reread the book so it was pointless to highlight so now i spend more time reading the content and making more progress because you'd read a little bit you'd stop and take some notes or you'd watch a little bit of video and you'd stop and take some notes you know that kind of thing i just don't do the notes anymore and i get through more content and then i spend more time questions you know answering questions like doing the flash cards or doing the boson or the ditkas or you know end of chapter questions and that's that's what's helping like reinforce this stuff for me and i'm feeling a lot better about what i'm learning i'm having more success as as you know we've seen this past year uh and it's it's been a game changer man i'm telling you that's awesome if you're doing this i know you're going to see some better results and it's the power of the community if we weren't having these conversations if we weren't talking to each other if we weren't vulnerable saying well this isn't working that's not working you know me making a fool of myself week in and week out how are you doing it you got kids like but it it's all really culminated to this point of of like okay i've exposed my weaknesses and i've been shown better ways to do it and now it's it's up to me to implement so it's really you know if i wasn't plugged into the community i'd still be doing what doesn't work thinking that you know i'm not smart enough to do this stuff so i'm pumped coming for you i love not really a good underdog story i just want to pass an exam to share maybe two awesome well guys i i think we have definitely hit our our time here we're gonna have to edit this uh episode up a little bit uh slice and dice but uh any any parting thoughts before we uh bid everyone i do here i just appreciate everybody listening and getting on the discord where are we past 800 now on discord it's got to be close if it's not past 800 i'm gonna check i have to look because uh that it's just awesome how much this community has grown oh seven ninety eight seven ninety eight seven ninety eight so very very close to hitting uh 800 discord members and it's crazy how active that community is i swear if i get there's three very active study groups right now yeah encore on course getting ready to fire up there's a devnet slash ian auto study group there's a ccna study group going on right now um those guys are very very active uh i i love it i really love it i mean this this is you know this was the vision when uh when we started this thing right like bring people together like at any given time there's tons of people studying for these things let's let's get them all together you know accountability sharing the knowledge that's what it's about yeah so if if you are not in our discord you should definitely join our discord what's the what's the name aj it's all about the journey i could put a link in the show notes to that there is a link at the bottom of every show note for every episode there's like four or five links i stick at the bottom of every uh show notes so just if you're on your mobile pull up the episode the show notes are right there scroll all the way to the bottom you will see links to our website our twitter account and uh definitely the link to join the discord is right there as well so yeah so no more excuses join the discord yeah my parting thought is go help somebody yeah i've got so much help here and even if you're you know if you don't think there's anybody you can help look around you know help somebody when i was a cable guy there was guys i could help that just got hired as a network engineer i can help people we're helping people here just fi find somebody to help that's that's that's what i would say because the community just keeps growing and improving and you know i go help somebody that's that's my uh it's my soapbox statement i love it all right guys thank you so much have a great week we'll catch you next week peace later hey everyone this is aj if you like what you heard today then make sure you subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcatcher smash that bell icon to get notified of all of our future episodes also follow us on twitter and instagram we are at art of net eng that's art of n-e-t-e-n-g you can also find us on the web at art of network engineering dot com where we post all of our show notes you can read blog articles from the co-hosts and guests and also a lot more news and info from the networking world thanks for listening you