Traveling the world & becoming a software engineer (Ben Grynol & Stephanie Coates)

Goalposts and constraints can help provide guidelines for what you do and don’t do in your life and career. But what happens when you have unbounded opportunity to do whatever you want? Levels Head of Growth, Ben Grynol, sat down with Levels Software Engineer, Stephanie Coates, to chat about her journeys around the world as a digital nomad, what she learned about travel and life along the way, and how it all brought her to Levels.

04:11 – Becoming a Software Engineer

Stephanie shares her experiences on how she got into coding and became a Software Engineer at Levels.

My path to coding and to becoming a software engineer is extremely non-linear. I take a lot of pride in it. I remember are feeling pretty self-conscious at the beginning of joining the field and working amongst other software developers that had spent their entire childhoods and young adulthoods growing up around computers. And for me, I didn’t even know what a terminal was until I went to a bootcamp and really started immersing myself into this, which happened I think three years ago. But now, I think the experiences that I’ve had prior to joining software development have just really shaped me in a positive way to be able to approach problems from an interdisciplinary perspective, or just dip into this depth of knowledge, and like you said, curiosity that I think has been and built up from this variety of life experiences that I wouldn’t have gotten if I had just gone straight into the computer science field from the get-go.

10:22 – The hobby-career conundrum

Stephanie got a degree, moved abroad to teach English, and signed up to be a wilderness guide. She did that for six to eight months. It was, extremely fulfilling, but she realized her hobbies and career didn’t need to be one and the same.

I think both of those experiences of teaching abroad and working in wilderness therapy solidified that idea of, maybe I don’t have to make my hobbies my career, and maybe I can find something that I’m generally good at, but then also just provides this foundation to then do the things that I truly love and do the things that truly make me feel alive in the time outside of work. And so that was the full circle. That was the seed planted to then get interested in coding, in location-independent lifestyles, in careers that gave you a lot of flexibility and autonomy, but still at the same, it allowed you to work towards a fulfilling career and being able to save and invest money and being able to not just live in the moment, but also think about the future.

19:07 – An analogy about making up your mind

Sometimes you need to eliminate shiny-object syndrome and focus your attention.

I remember reading this analogy in a book where there’s a horse and then there’s hay on one side of the horse and then there’s a bucket of water on the other side of the horse, and the horse is both hungry and thirsty. And he takes one step towards the water, but then says, “Oh, I’m hungry as well,” so then he takes a step back and then takes a step towards the hay. And he continuously does this back and forth until he dies because he just can’t make up his mind and dedicate enough effort towards one thing to really reap the rewards of seeing if it will pan out as something that he or she wants to integrate into their lives. I’ve fallen into that before of just having so many curiosities and so many things that I want to dig into that I end up not making progress in any of them, and so I think that the way that I approach it now is being disciplined enough to say, “Yes, there’s all these things that I want to eventually tackle and careers that I’d like to explore and hobbies that I want to get good at,” but knowing that my time now best invested in fewer things so then I can go deeper into them.

30:33 – The nomad lifestyle

Stephanie learned a lot about what she wanted when she had an opportunity to test out a nomadic work existence.

This has been a huge evolution. And it goes back to that same point of, in my life, I was born and I grew up and there’s all these things I’m interested in. And I think throughout life, it’s just been a process of experimentation and a process of elimination of constantly narrowing that scope to figure out exactly how I work best, where I live best, what sort of lifestyle best suits me. You only figure those things out through experience. And so growing up and while I was in this mindset of, “I want flexibility and autonomy, and I love traveling and I love really feeling alive,” and so as I read articles about the digital nomad lifestyle and Tim Ferriss’ work, it really got pounded into my head of, “Oh, this is my dream. If I can pair coding or some location, independent job with being able off of the world full time, that is absolutely the lifestyle that I want to live for the rest of my life.”

32:35 – The value of consistency and routine

Routine has a time and a place. Lack of consistency was one thing that made Stephanie sign a lease and settle down for a bit.

And one thing, when we’ve talked about this before, the value of consistency and the value of routine, I’ve painted routine as this horrible thing, this enemy of time that if I was in a routine, then time would fly by and I’d be dead before I know it. And yes, that’s true where I don’t want to be working this boring menial job where my days fly by and I don’t find any fulfillment out of it, which isn’t at Levels at all, but I do think that routine has a time and a place. And so routines for going to the gym, or routines for eating habits, or routines for hanging out with certain friends. And so I’ve put more value onto routines ever since really losing them while doing the digital nomad thing because everything is so unpredictable and it does get drained after a while, or at least it did for me of having a total lack of stability. And so lack of consistency was one thing that I realized I did want more of that and that’s part of what prompted me to then decide to sign a lease and settle down for a bit. But also I think that the bigger thing was the context in which relationships and friendships take place while you’re always on the road. And I think we were talking about this in a separate context of breadth of relationships versus depth of relationships.

38:27 – Materialism in the context of Experientialism

Experientialism ****is the philosophy or approach to life that sees experience as the most valuable source of knowledge. Over time, Stephanie’s realized this doesn’t always mean seeking foreign experiences.

I guess you could call it, maybe experientialism, I don’t know, it’s on that same trap of just saying, “I need to accumulate the most experiences possible and I won’t be content until I check off every box and I’m here, but I want to be there or I’m going to be happier in this other place.” And it can be just as dangerous of a philosophy to follow in the sense of you’re never happy because you’re always just looking forward to the next itch to scratch, versus I think that something I’ve been forced to face over the past year or two has been, can I just sit in one place and be content and find joy in the little things and the simple pleasures and not always be seeking the new thing, which is very foreign to me because growing up with this just extreme sense of curiosity and love of novelty, that’s what comes naturally. But it’s been a fun challenge to really channel in and say, “I’m going to go deep in one place or one thing,” instead of just on a whim, jumping to every new thing once I get bored with a current task.

49:36 – Appreciating the finite

Stephanie used the evolution of the seasons to explain how looking forward to things and appreciating the other side of them is wonderful.

I just had this revelation recently, I was hopping around mostly within the US and I think it was October getting cold. And Helena and I had actually just wrapped up our month-long Airbnb stay in San Diego. And I said, “Oh, well, wouldn’t it be nice to live in warm weather for the winter?” And I moved to LA and Ben, I lasted a week because, one, I just don’t think that LA is really the place that I would thrive the best, but also I was faced with that idea of… especially growing up in the Midwest where you have this intense joy that comes from the change of seasons and the excitement of, I almost frame it in a way of, I don’t know the right words for it, but summer is this time of aliveness. And then fall is this time of reflection, and then winter is this time of closing in and almost a hibernation, and then spring is the reawakening. And then to not have that, I was surprised at how much it negatively impacted me, where November was coming around and there was no snow and it was still 70 degrees and I thought, “Gosh, I want to live somewhere that’s four seasons where I’m forced to contemplate and be grateful for these seasons that are finite.

55:38 – Settling in at Levels

At a startup, times sometimes it feels like it’s in slow motion or fast-forward.

It’s interesting that you mentioned the time warp. No one really knows how long we’ve all been there and I feel that exactly. There’s days where I feel like it’s still day one and there’s so much to learn and discover and I still absolutely feel like a total novice. And then there’s other times where I think, “Gosh, I feel so rooted here and I feel so connected with the people that I work with,” and it feels like I could have been here for years. I work really closely with Justin and another engineer on the team. And it’s funny to think that he only started, I think, three months or four months before I did. And so sometimes I look to him as this expert that’s been here since the origination of Levels, but we’re learning on the same trajectory. And so it is, the sense of time at startups is certainly very strange, but on the low level of Levels specific, not to Levels zone horn too much, but I love it. The culture and the mission and the work, I would say, especially the people, that has been the most differentiating factor. And I think the culture ties very closely with the people.

57:05 – Seeking opportunity for growth

Stephanie shared what it feels like working at Levels. When nothing is ever stagnant, you feel like you can truly grow.

It’s a dream environment to work in. And I remember when I was applying at the company, I was happy in my current job, but when I discovered Levels, I just thought, “I can’t stop thinking about this company, I want to be a part of it.” And everyone seems to emulate that same belief of just no matter where we were in our lives prior to joining this, it’s such an honor to be a part of it. And it’s so great to be a part of a company where there is so much gratitude and excitement for what we do. And I hope it stays that way going forward of just this really strong appreciation for what we do and for each other. And it makes the work environment so fulfilling to work in. And I like coding. It’s still extremely new, I have so much more to learn, and especially at a company that moves so fast at a startup. There’s days where I just feel like I’m completely drowning, but I would rather feel like I’m completely drowning and there’s more to learn and there’s opportunities for growth rather than feeling stagnant and rather than feeling like I’ve done everything that I could do, and now I’m just bored. And so I think that’s what keeps me at startups, which definitely applies to other parts of my life too of just this constant seeking of novelty and challenge and new experiences.

Stephanie Coates (00:00:06):

I remember reading this analogy in a book where there’s a horse and then there’s hay on one side of the horse and then there’s a bucket of water on the other side of the horse, and the horse is both hungry and thirsty. And he takes one step towards the water, but then says, “Oh, I’m hungry as well,” so then he takes a step back and then takes a step towards the hay. And he continuously does this back and forth until he dies because he just can’t make up his mind and dedicate enough effort towards one thing to really reap the rewards of seeing if it will pan out as something that he or she wants to integrate into their lives.

Stephanie Coates (00:00:40):

I’ve fallen into that before war of just having so many curiosities and so many things that I want to dig into that I end up not making progress in any of them, and so I think that the way that I approach it now is being disciplined enough to say, “Yes, there’s all these things that I want to eventually tackle and careers that I’d like to explore and hobbies that I want to get good at,” but knowing that my time now best invested in fewer things so then I can go deeper into them

Ben Grynol (00:01:11):

Here at Levels, we’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health, and this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is A Whole New Level.

Ben Grynol (00:01:34):

When thinking about goal posts, when thinking about constraints, sometimes it can give guidelines, can give some boundaries as far as what you do and what you don’t do. But when you don’t have goal posts, when you have unbounded opportunity to do whatever you want, that being from an autonomy perspective, maybe not work related but personal related. Well, what does this have to do with this episode? I sat down with Steph Coates, a software engineer on our team, who is very much a digital nomad, or who was a digital nomad, and who went from living a life full of all these different experiences. She was very much in the outdoors, she was a wilderness guide, taught English overseas, and she even ended up working in a number of different career paths.

Ben Grynol (00:02:18):

Eventually, she thought, “Hey, I should really dig into this thing called coding, called software development.” She had heard that there was a lot of opportunity to get jobs in coding. And so she started teaching herself to code when she was a wilderness guide, she was doing it on her own time. She thought, “Hey, what can I do that will allow me to work remotely, to be nomadic in my footprint, travel the world, and still contribute to solving problems, to doing things based on curiosity?” It’s very much the way that she grew up and something that she held innately close to her heart, being from the Midwest. And this curiosity led her down all these different paths.

Ben Grynol (00:02:58):

So we sat down and talked about this whole idea of goal posts. We didn’t even talk that much about Levels. We talked very little about being a software developer and more about the philosophy of the way she thinks and some of the things that she exposes herself to in the world. We talked about things like happiness, pretty simple things. There’s not a lot of info about metabolic health in this episode, there’s not a lot of info about being a software developer, not even about working with Levels, but if you’re interested in personal stories and you’re interested in learning more about our team members, this one’s for you. Here’s where we dug in.

Ben Grynol (00:03:43):

Before becoming a software dev, you spent a ton of time traveling the world, being a wilderness guide, and you’ve had all of these wildlife experiences. And then one day it seems that you just decided, maybe it was curiosity, but there was something that was yearning inside of you to go try this completely unrelated thing, which is very cool. You don’t hear this type of story too often.

Stephanie Coates (00:04:10):

Yeah. My path to coding and to becoming a software engineer is extremely non-linear. I take a lot of pride in it. I remember are feeling pretty self-conscious at the beginning of joining the field and working amongst other software developers that had spent their entire childhoods and young adulthoods growing up around computers. And for me, I didn’t even know what a terminal was until I went to a bootcamp and really started immersing myself into this, which happened I think three years ago. But now, I think the experiences that I’ve had prior to joining software development have just really shaped me in a positive way to be able to approach problems from an interdisciplinary perspective, or just dip into this depth of knowledge, and like you said, curiosity that I think has been and built up from this variety of life experiences that I wouldn’t have gotten if I had just gone straight into the computer science field from the get-go.

Ben Grynol (00:05:09):

Was there a moment when you were like in the middle of the woods, like somewhere, and then all of a sudden you’re like, light bulb-

Stephanie Coates (00:05:17):

Coding.

Ben Grynol (00:05:18):

How did it happen? What was like catalyst for you to… I guess, interest comes from being exposed to a number of things over time and eventually a person might act upon a certain thing, but was there a defining moment for you where you decided like, “Hey, I’m done with this life I’ve been living, I’m going to move on to a totally different field”?

Stephanie Coates (00:05:41):

Yeah. I’m not sure if there was a very specific Eureka moment of it happening at this minute at this hour, at this time, but the gradual, I think, evolution to the point where I decided I wanted to learn to code and go into this industry was built upon a lot of different life experiences. To rewind, I think that this really stemmed from when I was a kid, and I think this is something that was just genetically built into me where my brain was essentially given an abnormal amount of interest in novelty and change. Even as a kid, every few months, I wanted to repaint my room and rearrange the furniture.

Stephanie Coates (00:06:23):

I didn’t do well with consistency in mundane routine, and I always wanted something new and always dreamed of this idea of moving somewhere new and starting fresh with a totally new identity and didn’t cling onto how things were. And so that has always been a theme in my life. And so when I went to college and was put in the place to pick a degree, and in my mind at that time, there was this idea that whatever I chose as a career path would chain me to that for the rest of my life. And so I had all this anxiety of, “I don’t know what I want to do with my life. What if I changed my mind a few years from now?”

Stephanie Coates (00:07:00):

And so I think that a lot of those just general interests and predispositions of the way that I wanted to live my life materialized in this way of not wanting the traditional career path. If you would’ve asked me at 16 or 18, “Do you want to be a software developer?” I’d say, “Absolutely not. I don’t want to stare at a screen and sit in an office and do this very office-based work.” So it was not on my radar at all, but what was on my radar was this alternative type lifestyle that was full of adventure and full of novelty and full of change.

Stephanie Coates (00:07:35):

So that’s what really brought me into a seeking out career paths like wilderness guiding and like teaching English abroad where I didn’t care for money, I didn’t care for prestige, I really just wanted to feel alive in every single moment. This is a bit morbid, but I think I’m a pretty introspective person and I often think about, life is so finite and I’m scared of falling into the routines where I do the same thing every day and my brain goes on autopilot. And then all of a sudden, I’m 80 years old looking back and thinking, “Gosh, where did the time go?” I was just falling into that easy path of going through the motions and then not really feeling alive.

Stephanie Coates (00:08:17):

And so I decided, I think the original plan before getting into coding was, I just want this extremely fun, adventurous lifestyle. And so I got a degree, my degree was pretty strange and I pivoted a lot throughout college, but I ended up with a degree in, it was interdisciplinary studies in journalism and outdoor adventure leadership. And so after I got that, I didn’t really want to work in the journalism industry and so leaned more into the outdoor adventure leadership side of it. I moved abroad to teach English abroad for a summer, which was a blast, and had a lot of fun, but it began to plant seeds of, yes, this is fun, but it almost began to sour the idea or the hobby itself of traveling because I enjoy traveling as this thing I can do on my own terms and turning it into a career and this obligation soured a bit for me.

Stephanie Coates (00:09:06):

And so came home back to The States and still wasn’t ready to commit to the traditional career path. And so I signed up to be a wilderness guide. And I worked in Southwest Colorado for a wilderness therapy organization. And so every eight days, we were in the field working with adolescents and young adults and guiding these wilderness trips. You’re out there with no cell phones and living off the land it was extremely fulfilling, but also very draining and difficult. It was difficult to participate in what everyone else was doing in life because your schedule was so different. And so eight days on six days off.

Stephanie Coates (00:09:45):

I did that for I think, six to eight months. And again, extremely fulfilling, but that same reasoning came back of, “I’m trying to turn my hobbies into my career.” I wasn’t making much money and couldn’t save for the future and couldn’t travel and live the adventures that I thought I would get while wilderness guiding, if that makes sense. And so, even though I was doing it as a career, I didn’t have any of that flexibility or autonomy in my time off that I really wanted. Something that friends and family had often said was, “Just pick a career that gives you the flexibility and the autonomy to do the things that you really love in your off time.”

Stephanie Coates (00:10:22):

I think both of those experiences of teaching abroad and working in wilderness therapy solidified that idea of, maybe I don’t have to make my hobbies my career, and maybe I can find something that I’m generally good at, but then also just provides this foundation to then do the things that I truly love and do the things that truly make me feel alive in the time outside of work. And so that was the full circle. That was the seed planted to then get interested in coding, in location-independent lifestyles, in careers that gave you a lot of flexibility and autonomy, but still at the same, it allowed you to work towards a fulfilling career and being able to save and invest money and being able to not just live in the moment, but also think about the future.

Stephanie Coates (00:11:06):

The most pivotal book that I read was Cal Newport’s, it’s called So Good They Can’t Ignore You. I believe I might get this wrong, but his premise was, don’t follow your passion, instead, find a career path that’s in demand, that you’re good at, and that is valuable to society, and then pursue that. And as you continue to grow your expertise in the field and add more value to the world with what you’re doing, that is what generates passion. And that is honestly exactly what happened with coding, is, I started to teach myself to code the summer while I was wilderness guiding.

Stephanie Coates (00:11:42):

Kind of what you had said of, I’m in the field and I’m saying, “This really isn’t working for me,” and deciding to start going down this different path and started to teach myself just through Code Academy. And I loved it. And it was really fun, really creative. I did that for a few months and then… I’m sorry, probably a few weeks and then decided to enroll in a three-month bootcamp to catapult myself into the industry. And the rest is history.

Ben Grynol (00:12:07):

Do you think your curiosity or yearning for experiences, maybe we’ll call it that, do you think it came from growing up in the Midwest? And the reason I ask is, when a person is in a… Let’s go back. So somebody is in a “desirable location,” that being New York City or Los Angeles, we’ll call them these tent pole cities that everybody aspires to go to, that’s where you go to, nobody’s from there, or very few people. I shouldn’t say that, JM is born and raised in Manhattan, and so he is a true New Yorker. Miz is from New York as well, and he doesn’t live there now. But people go to these places. And sometimes when you’re from smaller markets or we’ll call them underserved, underrepresented markets, that being like you are from Norway, Michigan, not you, but a person that’s from a very small place in the upper peninsula.

Ben Grynol (00:13:06):

Did that ever cross your mind as far as having this outlook on the way you viewed the world? Because it was like, “Oh my gosh, there’s so many exciting things that are more exciting than here because I’m just a simple Midwester”?

Stephanie Coates (00:13:20):

Yeah, that’s a really interesting point. And I’ve never thought of it that way, but now that you put it out there, absolutely. I think that growing up in a small town in the Midwest, I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, very predictable, very consistent, very cookie cutter. And I think that coupled with maybe this innate sense of curiosity just really drove me to wanting to discover new things and wanting to get out of my comfort zone and wanting to, I guess you could call it like go west and see these unfamiliar things. And it’s interesting because there’s two parties, there’s people that in my opinion, there’s the people that grow up in these less known areas, a lot of places in the Midwest, that are very content and they stay there, they grow up there, they stay in the same small town. And then there’s the others that just are itching to get out. And I definitely fell into the second category.

Ben Grynol (00:14:11):

And maybe if a person is from a major city, let’s just use Chicago, Chicago is a great city, but being from the suburbs versus being from living in a condo, like off Lake Shore, Lake Shore is the street there, right?

Stephanie Coates (00:14:30):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ben Grynol (00:14:31):

I’m trying to think. I haven’t been there in a couple years, so I’m forgetting. But somebody’s living in the core of downtown, that is a very different city experience than the suburbs. And you’re on the periphery when you’re in the suburbs and everybody who lives in the city, I’m generalizing right now, but somebody might view it as like, “Oh, well, that’s the big city. We don’t live in the big city, we’re outside of that.” And so I asked because of maybe having a similar lens as far as relation goes, being in an underrepresented market, underserved market and viewing all the other things as so much cooler, but still appreciating where you’re from, why you’re from there, where you’re from, what you do.

Ben Grynol (00:15:11):

But there’s a sense of wanting to see the world, knowing that there’s so much more out there. And maybe in some of the bigger markets or bigger cities, you know it’s a really cool and robust city, there’s a lot going on. Let’s use Toronto, it’s a amazing city, but some people that I know that are from there are like, “I don’t really feel like I need to go anywhere.” And you’re like, “Cool, that’s great. Toronto’s an amazing city,” but there’s also a number of other amazing cities around the world that you can travel to. And this isn’t, again, I’m generalizing it, I’m not saying this is everyone’s view, but I find that sometimes when people are from these smaller markets, smaller markets being on the periphery of what is deemed cool, a cool city, a tier one, a AAA city, a person might view it differently.

Ben Grynol (00:16:01):

You want to get exposure to these things, and then you start digging into very unrelated things that being like, “Let’s travel, let’s get exposure to teaching English. Let’s get exposure to the wilderness. Oh my goodness, I’ll try coding.” And it just like keeps going on and on. And then all of a sudden, these unrelated experience, they help you to solve different types of problems. It’s an interesting way of thinking about it.

Stephanie Coates (00:16:24):

Yeah, absolutely. And I think when I was younger, that was the dream, was, in a small scale, growing up in a small suburb, was, “I want to go to Chicago. I want to go to the big city and work in this hustle and bustle and be in the limelight.” And interestingly, that’s evolved a lot, but it’s that same mentality of just wanting to go bigger and wanting more out of life than just the predictable environment that you already know so well.

Ben Grynol (00:16:50):

So having an insatiable curiosity for many things since you’re a kid. It’s just like, you want to paint your room, you want to do all these things. And it’s just ongoing and ongoing. Have you dealt with like this idea of, let’s call curiosity leads to experiences, which leads to investing time in things if you enjoy the experience, that’s the path, let’s like roll with that for a sec. So curiosity is like, “I want to learn how to play music.” Experience is you go and you learn how to play some music super bad, and then you enjoy it so much that that experience leads to investing time in becoming interested in something.

Ben Grynol (00:17:32):

And it’s okay to do that, and some of these experiences carry on throughout life. Maybe camping, like somebody gets into camping and that just becomes a core part of their identity, a core part of the things that they invest their time in, but there are multiple other things when you are a curious person. And sometimes you have to retire things that you really enjoy as project debt so that you can open up the door to other new exploration, if you want to call it that. Does that make sense? How have you dealt with that? How have you retired, we’ll call it project debt, experienced that? How have you retired some of these things where you’re like, “Well, I love doing that thing, I love swimming laps in a pool, and I used to do that three times a week, but I’m going to get into cycling now and I’m going to do that three times a week”? How have you rationalized that?

Stephanie Coates (00:18:19):

Yeah. That’s it. It’s a constant ongoing struggle even now where I would agree with you. And I fall into that same camp of always just being fascinated by everything. Something that was never even on my radar before, if it just happens to show up in my life of, I befriend someone that’s really into cars and then I say, “Wow, this is really interesting. I would love to learn how automobiles work on a lower level,” but there’s already, let’s say that my life is already full of hobbies that I’m working towards building expertise in and leveling up in my career. There is only so much time in a day. And so I guess the way that I approach it is, you have to prioritize. And I think that problem or a mindset that I’ve fallen into in the past has been…

Stephanie Coates (00:19:07):

I remember reading this analogy in a book where there’s a horse and then there’s hay on one side of the horse and then there’s a bucket of water on the other side of the horse, and the horse is both hungry and thirsty. And he takes one step towards the water, but then says, “Oh, I’m hungry as well,” so then he takes a step back and then takes a step towards the hay. And he continuously does this back and forth until he dies because he just can’t make up his mind and dedicate enough effort towards one thing to really reap the rewards of seeing if it will pan out as something that he or she wants to integrate into their lives.

Stephanie Coates (00:19:41):

I’ve fallen into that before of just having so many curiosities and so many things that I want to dig into that I end up not making progress in any of them, and so I think that the way that I approach it now is being disciplined enough to say, “Yes, there’s all these things that I want to eventually tackle and careers that I’d like to explore and hobbies that I want to get good at,” but knowing that my time now best invested in fewer things so then I can go deeper into them.

Stephanie Coates (00:20:09):

As a real life example, I would love to learn Spanish, I would love to learn piano, I would love to… even traveling is a good example where I’m sure we’ll get into this later, but I was, I was full time nomading up until last month. And I think that prioritizing, “Okay, at this point in my life, I’m really interested in leveling up in my career and focusing on technology and also building community and building social relationships.” And so in order to go full throttle on those select priorities, I need to design my environment in a way that’s most conducive to that.

Stephanie Coates (00:20:41):

And yes, the desire for travel and the desire for things like Spanish immersion or piano playing might fall by the wayside for the next year or two, but knowing that I can revisit them once I’ve mastered these current priorities, I think that it’s instilled more of a necessity for patients in me and knowing that I can get to those things, but I can’t do them all at once.

Ben Grynol (00:21:02):

Love the horse analogy. That poor horse has it all wrong, though. That horse should be mixing the water into the hay, carrying it over, and then just getting both at one time.

Stephanie Coates (00:21:13):

So efficient.

Ben Grynol (00:21:15):

There you go. That is how you make it happen. But the interesting thing is that if a person, you hear it all the time, when people start accumulating things. Let’s just use tangible things, people start accumulating all of these things. It’s no different than having interests or experiences. And it’s great to have exposure to many things. It helps your brain. From a neural pathway perspective, neurologically your brain will wire itself differently the more unrelated experiences you have, that’s the reality. But some of the challenge challenges are you hear often where people are like, “I just keep getting all of this stuff, and I’m so unhappy.”

Ben Grynol (00:21:54):

This is thematic, you hear about people saying they can’t figure out why they’re unhappy, well, you’re trying to hold too many things. You’re trying to juggle too many balls at once. And sometimes there’s something really sweet about just saying, “You know what, I’m going to be really good at juggling three balls. I’m going to do three balls and I’m just going to be consistent at it.” And those three balls, like they’re three red balls, and then the next like year or three years, you’re like, “Now I’m just juggling purple ones or whatever color,” you just change this out. But you know that you contain your mind to having a certain number of things that you invest your time in, you invest where you are spending your time, where you’re putting your mind, because it gets really hard, it gets stressful if you’re like, “Okay, well, I want to play piano. I want to do that. And I want to learn Spanish. I’ve got this car in the garage that I started fixing because I’m into that.”

Ben Grynol (00:22:55):

Yeah, that’s very cool, but what would it look like if instead of trying to do… and maybe there’s like 10 other things, cycling and you’re trying to travel and you’re trying to work and do all these things at one time. What would it look like if for eight months straight or let’s just say 12 months straight, you said, aside from normal life stuff like exercising and exposing yourself to knowledge, just from the hobby perspective, “All I’m going to do for 12 months is I got this old beater car. I’m going to fix this thing up. Every minute of my free time, this is what I’m investing myself into.” I know Tim Ferris did this where he would just go deep for like three months.

Ben Grynol (00:23:36):

I don’t know if he still does this, but he would go like super deep for three months. Maybe it was three to six months. Anyways, he would invest his time only in one thing like learning Japanese or I think learning to do like Muay Thai fighting. And it’s a very different mind shift to do that because it’s easy to become immersed in something and obsessed with it when that is what you’re doing. Maybe you learn differently or so much more. You could argue that the more unrelated things you’re exposed to, the different you’ll think about the things you’re working on. But maybe because you’re not trying to knit and bike and do all these things, you actually are able to be way better at fixing the rust on the quarter panel of the car, as opposed to ignoring it, because you’re like, “I just have time to do the breaks?”

Stephanie Coates (00:24:27):

Yeah. I 100% agree

Ben Grynol (00:24:30):

You get detailed. You go super deep on the details.

Stephanie Coates (00:24:33):

Yeah. It’s almost the argument of breadth of experience versus depth of experience. I would take it even further to say, and I’m certainly guilty of this, if I am to balance five different interests at once, work, piano, swimming, automotive stuff, and getting better at JavaScript, it’s almost just too much on my plate at once that if I were, let’s say Sam, our CEO, where he’s extremely good at time blocking and allocating time for all these things and then following that to a T, I am definitely not as good at that. Even if I have the attention to spend time on all five of those things throughout the day, there’s guaranteed to be slipups where I just end up not doing one or two or three or four of them, and they totally fall by the wayside.

Stephanie Coates (00:25:19):

And so maybe for personalities that aren’t as good as being very militant about setting time aside for each thing everyday, because I do think it’s possible to allocate time for different hobbies if you’re really regimented about just making time and showing up for those things, but in my mind, maybe it is better to just say, “For the next three months, I’m only going to focus on leveling up at my career and I’m going to go deep into coding and technical knowledge and all of that stuff.” And then after the three months, I can reevaluate to say, “Am I enjoying this? Do I want to pivot to something else? Has this been a fruitful experience?”

Stephanie Coates (00:25:54):

I do enjoy becoming obsessed with one thing and rolling with it. And the coding bootcamp was that exactly of 10 hours a day of education. And even when you weren’t in the classroom, you were at home coding or sleeping or eating and that was it. And it was such a cool experience to go so deep into something and fast track the progress versus needing to wait years for something to really materialize as expertise. I like that idea and I’d be interested to try that of just prioritizing one thing.

Stephanie Coates (00:26:26):

I also think that idea of consistency with it also reaps so many benefits, and that’s become such a theme in my life lately too, is just the value of consistency and showing up every day. And so if there’s only one thing that you need to show up for, then of course you’re destined to make progress in it.

Ben Grynol (00:26:41):

Yeah. It’s a weird thing to get obsessed with things, but it becomes a bit of a game. A terrible example but top of mind is, and not top of mind because it’s current, we have snow all over the ground right now, but when we got our house, I don’t know, 2017, I think we got it, something like that, the grass was objectively bad. And I’m like, “I’m going to make this some good grass. And then didn’t have a clue how to make the grass look good. There are ways of doing it. There are people that take pride in their grass. And so you try to figure out like, “What do I have to do to get this grass looking good?”

Ben Grynol (00:27:18):

And it’s no different than gardening or doing something, you become almost so invested or so obsessed, and it’s not about spending hours and hours, but you really want to figure it out. It’s trying to solve the problem. And it’s a small problem and it’s very much a silly surface level problem that we won’t get into all the macroeconomics of whether or not people should water and take care of their grass, that’s a different conversation. But the whole idea of, “Can I make this thing look pretty good? How do I get rid of the patches? How do I make it look consistent and green?” And all these things.

Ben Grynol (00:27:50):

You have to figure it out. You watch some videos, you read a couple of things and then you know. And then once you know you’ve figured that out, that’s no different than saying, “All I’m going to do is cook Greek food for an entire month,” and that becomes your constraint. You give yourself some goal posts and then you just try to figure out how to do that. And you get really good at it because you’re not allowing yourself to do something else. It’s an immense amount of focus. And then you can like move on as far as having other interests or determining that cooking Greek food every day of the week is now project debt and you no longer want to do that. And you’ll do it occasionally because it’s fun, but it’s not something you’re investing a ton of time in.

Ben Grynol (00:28:34):

It’s a different way of looking at things when you just say, “Yeah, I’m going to put my time here. This is something I want to figure out.” Then it becomes a challenge, a problem. And it’s no different than coding, going really deep on finding the bug. There’s some people that are so good at finding bugs and can do it quickly probably because they’ve spent a lot of time thinking about backwards induction.

Stephanie Coates (00:28:56):

Yeah. I like that framing of, rather than saying, “Okay, I’m going to spend four hours a day doing this thing that I think I’m interested in and then I’ll evaluate three months from now,” if you assign a specific goal to, “I want to get to the point where I can build websites, or I want to get to the point where I can fix this car or be an expert chef in Greek cuisine.” I think that’s way more fulfilling and motivating to be working towards that goal and this end point, rather than saying, “I’m just forcing myself to show up for X amount of hours every day,” without specific goals in mind. That’s definitely played a part in my own life.

Stephanie Coates (00:29:33):

You could even argue that people join startups for that same reason, everyone’s coming into this very unpredictable thing and we’re all figuring it out along the way and we’re all working towards this goal of building a successful company, but it’s a very different model from going into work at a large corporate bureaucratic company where it’s much more predictable and there’s not as much excitement in it. And so I like that framing of applying that to two hobbies as well.

Ben Grynol (00:30:01):

When you talk about the idea of settling down, what was the thing that made you decide that you wanted a routine? Because I remember that was a draw too, where you’re like, “I’m ready to be settled in one market.” And I don’t know if the timing just happened to be consistent from coming on board with the team or if they were unrelated and you just felt these two things happening together at the same time where you happened to start with Levels and you happen to want a sense of routine and community around you. What did that look like?

Stephanie Coates (00:30:33):

This has been a huge evolution. And it goes back to that same point of, in my life, I was born and I grew up and there’s all these things I’m interested in. And I think throughout life, it’s just been a process of experimentation and a process of elimination of constantly narrowing that scope to figure out exactly how I work best, where I live best, what sort of lifestyle best suits me. You only figure those things out through experience. And so growing up and while I was in this mindset of, “I want flexibility and autonomy, and I love traveling and I love really feeling alive,” and so as I read articles about the digital nomad lifestyle and Tim Ferriss’ work, it really got pounded into my head of, “Oh, this is my dream. If I can pair coding or some location, independent job with being able off of the world full time, that is absolutely the lifestyle that I want to live for the rest of my life.” And continued to work through that, went to the bootcamp.

Stephanie Coates (00:31:29):

I got a job at a big corporate company and did that as building the foundation, but the end goal was always to work remotely and travel. And so COVID hit, I got a remote job at a startup, laid low for a while, but then once I got vaccinated, I did start to travel and lived this digital nomad dream. And interestingly, it turned out a lot different than I expected. And of course, this always happens, if you go into something with all these preconceptions of what it’s going to be like, and often the experience doesn’t match your expectations and by and large, absolutely amazing experience.

Stephanie Coates (00:32:02):

I still love travel, but there was a lot of things I didn’t realize and new insights that came about through the process. And so a few of those in terms of talking about the specific digital nomad lifestyle of just living minimally, living out of a suitcase, having your computer with your work tied to that, and then having total control over where you live, when you move from place to place, as long as you have your laptop, you’re set. And I think that a few things that I wasn’t aware would hit me as hard as they did were…

Stephanie Coates (00:32:35):

And one thing, when we’ve talked about this before, the value of consistency and the value of routine, I’ve painted routine as this horrible thing, this enemy of time that if I was in a routine, then time would fly by and I’d be dead before I know it. And yes, that’s true where I don’t want to be working this boring menial job where my days fly by and I don’t find any fulfillment out of it, which isn’t at Levels at all, but I do think that routine has a time and a place. And so routines for going to the gym, or routines for eating habits, or routines for hanging out with certain friends.

Stephanie Coates (00:33:09):

And so I’ve put more value onto routines ever since really losing them while doing the digital nomad thing because everything is so unpredictable and it does get drained after a while, or at least it did for me of having a total lack of stability. And so lack of consistency was one thing that I realized I did want more of that and that’s part of what prompted me to then decide to sign a lease and settle down for a bit. But also I think that the bigger thing was the context in which relationships and friendships take place while you’re always on the road. And I think we were talking about this in a separate context of breadth of relationships versus depth of relationships.

Stephanie Coates (00:33:46):

When you’re on the road and you’re constantly traveling and you’re always meeting new people, it’s extremely fun and stimulating, and you’re always having these interesting conversations with people from all over the world, and it’s extremely like mind bending and mind opening and an incredible experience, but what you’re missing out on is the depth of relationships that happen when you’re in one place for an extended period of time. And you have a chance to go deep with the select amount of people where you’re going through important moments together and sharing struggles and building that camaraderie just through time.

Stephanie Coates (00:34:18):

And so I think that I did get pretty burnt out after doing the digital nomad thing for several months and thinking, “Yes, this is fun, but I’m still working eight plus hours a day. I’m still largely in work mode, but just in a different environment.” And the mental bandwidth of trying to juggle both at the same time was pretty tiring. And I really missed out on that sense of belonging to a community in investing in these long term relationships where it wasn’t just the, “Hi, where are you from? What do you do?” But really getting deep into the vulnerability and knowing each other beyond the service level.

Stephanie Coates (00:34:51):

And so I think that now my approach to it is travel is great. I absolutely love having a remote job where I can go fly out for a month to go work from a beach in Mexico, let’s say, but also having a place to return to and having a sense of belonging into a community. That’s something that I didn’t put a lot of emphasis on before, but once I had it removed from my life, I realized how much I missed it. And so, I’m excited to over the next few months, that is one of my priorities, being in Colorado now is just digging deep into the community and really establishing this as a home base that I can continue to return to.

Ben Grynol (00:35:26):

Do you ever think about the idea of traveling and then how it relates to interest? So if you try to hold all these interests in your mind at one time and you feel a sense of… Well, let’s just say, and I’m not using you, I’m using you as like generalizing, but a person holds all these interests simultaneously in their brain and it builds up maybe a sense of anxiety because you’re not able to do them all at once and you’re like, everything is opportunity cost where it’s like the horse’s like, “If I do one, I can’t do the other. I can’t physically bike in a pool.”

Ben Grynol (00:36:02):

I guess you can, but you can’t bike laps in a pool, it’s just not possible. You’re either swimming or you’re biking. You’re on the road or you’re in the pool. They’re just unrelated. You can’t do both at one time. When you don’t have goal posts in your mind, you don’t create this goal posts of like, “I’m just going to work on the car for 12 months. I’m just going to do this,” and you could still have like three, four or five. There’s some end number that makes sense and I don’t know what that is, but maybe is there a sense with being fully nomadic that you don’t have goal posts, so then your brain is always like, “I could be anywhere. Why am I here? Now I have to be in Sri Lanka, what am I doing?”

Ben Grynol (00:36:39):

“I’ve been here too long, I should really be there. And if I’m going to be a nomad, I have to go to all these places to take advantage of it because this is going to end one day.” Whereas when you are in one place, your goal posts become the geography that you’re in. And I mean relative goal posts because you can always travel, you can always do all these things, but mentally you’re like, “This is my routine, I get up, I go, I don’t feel a pull to go somewhere else. And if I want to go see my friend or I want to go to Sri Lanka, I’m going to do that, but then I’m going to come right back to the place where it’s like, ‘This is my home base, this is my routine.’” Do you ever think about that?

Stephanie Coates (00:37:15):

You articulated it so well, and this is something that plagued both me and other travelers as well that I met while nomading is this idea of… I remember watching a TED Talk and this was long before I got into the nomading thing, but I believe it was a psychologist named Barry Schwartz, and he gave this TED Talk. He also got to talk about this.

Ben Grynol (00:37:36):

Paradox of Choice.

Stephanie Coates (00:37:37):

Yes. Yes.

Ben Grynol (00:37:37):

Beautiful man.

Stephanie Coates (00:37:38):

And the idea of when you have unlimited options and there are no constraints or goal posts on the way to live your life, it could be paralyzing to say, “Yes, I’m in Sri Lanka, but maybe I’m happier in Thailand, maybe I’m happier in Russia, maybe I’m happier in Canada, maybe I’m happier here.” And it’s this constant, just mental washing machine of the grass is always greener. And I would even argue now, and maybe I sound like too much of a pessimist on the digital nomad track, but a lot of people in the digital nomad world and people at large tend to, I don’t know the word, just look down upon those that are very materialistic, that are constantly accumulating things and saying, well, yes, I’ll be happier once I buy this new couch or once I buy this new chair or this new car and I certainly don’t want to live that way either.”

Stephanie Coates (00:38:27):

But the materialism in the context of, I guess you could call it, maybe experientialism, I don’t know, it’s on that same trap of just saying, “I need to accumulate the most experiences possible and I won’t be content until I check off every box and I’m here, but I want to be there or I’m going to be happier in this other place.” And it can be just as dangerous of a philosophy to follow in the sense of you’re never happy because you’re always just looking forward to the next itch to scratch, versus I think that something I’ve been forced to face over the past year or two has been, can I just sit in one place and be content and find joy in the little things and the simple pleasures and not always be seeking the new thing, which is very foreign to me because growing up with this just extreme sense of curiosity and love of novelty, that’s what comes naturally.

Stephanie Coates (00:39:17):

But it’s been a fun challenge to really channel in and say, “I’m going to go deep in one place or one thing,” instead of just on a whim, jumping to every new thing once I get bored with a current task.

Ben Grynol (00:39:30):

Yeah. It’s a sense of your identity gets wrapped up when a person, and I’ve never been digital nomad so I can’t say from experience, but when a person, their identity is very much wrapped up in that as you alluded to, what it becomes is this idea of a passport flex, like, “I’ve been to 192 countries, I’ve been to 4,537 cities. How many of you been to?” And it’s not that people are talking, but mentally even if you never tell a soul, you’re telling yourself that, you’re like, “Well, I have to get to 5,000 cities, what am I doing? The world is so big. There are so many countries to go to.” And assume if somebody had been to 192, that would be off the list, it’s, “How many cities can I get to now? Why am I sitting in Denver right now when I really enjoyed my time in St. Petersburg, I got to get back there. What am I doing? The culture was rich and I have to go to new cities in Russia now.”

Ben Grynol (00:40:32):

That becomes the draw. And then you get to St. Pete’s and you’re like, “Oh man, what am I doing? Shenzhen was so cool, I got to get to China now.” And you just start going down this like laundry list of all these things and mentally you’re never in the place that you physically are because you’re trying to leap to the next place that you should be because you’re so autonomous that you need to just rewind and step back. Whereas when you have the goal post, it’s probably a lot easier to find happiness because you’re like, “I just have a little cabin in the woods and quite happy actually. And one guitar and that’s all I do.”

Ben Grynol (00:41:09):

You work, you do whatever, but you don’t feel the need to get the, let’s use the cabin in the woods analogy. You don’t feel the need to get the car to work on in the garage because you’re like, “I don’t even live near a road. What am I going to do with a car? I might be interested in it, but you know what, I’m just going to focus on whittling because there’s a lot of trees around here.” And you pick up like very different hobbies because of the lens through which you see the world.

Stephanie Coates (00:41:35):

Yeah. I think the way that I framed it in the past is I do believe that striving towards future goals is a great thing, it can be really rewarding, but then also balancing that, and balance is this constant theme that I seem to keep going back to in my own life, but balancing that with also just this art of being fulfilled with exactly where you are and not always saying, “Well, what’s next? Well, what’s next? Well, what’s next?” Because I was just talking about this with a friend the other day, but it was probably a corny Pinterest quote or something like that, but this idea of we’re always looking forward to the next thing of you can’t wait to graduate college, then you can’t wait to get a job and then you can’t wait to get married.

Stephanie Coates (00:42:15):

And then you can’t wait to buy a house and have a kid and all of these things where we’re always so future focused versus just being present in the moment, that really does expedite life. And all of a sudden you’re at that end stage where you’re retired and then only next thing to look forward to is death. And so that it was quite existential, but I think lately, especially after the digital nomad thing, it’s definitely forced me on the opposite trajectory to say, “How can I find as much joy as possible in exactly where I’m at?” And fulfilling the hobbies that make sense with my current environment and not always thinking, “Oh, the grass is always greener.”

Stephanie Coates (00:42:52):

And because I have this lack of constraint, which can definitely be more of an easy hole to fall into when you have a remote job, because you don’t have the automatic constraints of a business forcing you to be in one place. And so not always acting on that anxious itch to say, “I got to go somewhere new because I’m not happy where I’m at now, and so all of my ailments will be fixed by just fly to Costa Rica or somewhere else,” because your problems follow you no matter where you go. And so I think that learning to enjoy those novel experiences when they’re appropriate, but then also being just as content with sitting still.

Ben Grynol (00:43:28):

Yeah. You find the reasons, you find the ways to be happy instead of all of the things that should be unhappy about, like, “I’m unhappy that I’m in this one place, I’m unhappy that I’m doing this one thing.” And it’s a mind shift, very much a mind shift. I miss step two to rewind, according to Dr. Google, uncle Google, aunt Google, there are 195 countries in the world. And it’s still questionable because not everything is classified. Some are member states or non-member states. I’m not even going to get into it, but 195 factual correction.

Stephanie Coates (00:44:06):

Interesting.

Ben Grynol (00:44:07):

Very interesting. But there’s still a lot of places to go. That’s the thing.

Stephanie Coates (00:44:11):

When you said that, a specific memory came to mind. When I was teaching English in Thailand, I had a private lesson with a college student and his name was Tony. And we were having a conversation one day and it was really fun because he was at a conversational English level where we really were just talking about life. And I remember him asking me, he said, “Steph, why are you traveling? Why are you by yourself at Thailand? Why do you have this goal of going all over the world?” Because I’m sure at that point I had told him verbatim of, “I want to go to every single of the 195 countries and check all those boxes.”

Stephanie Coates (00:44:45):

And he had said, “Why? Isn’t that lonely? Why does that bring you fulfillment?” And I guess you could argue that this is also a benefit of travel of how mind opening it can be to other people’s perspectives that America is certainly a place of wanting to explore and wanting to bridge out and challenge yourself. But his perspective growing up in Thailand was, “I have everything I need right here. My family is here, my friends are here, I feel this sense of belonging here. I don’t need anything else. I have no desire to travel.”

Stephanie Coates (00:45:15):

And so I think about that often of just of course, I don’t have the same experiences as he did, and so my own interest and dispositions in life are going to be different than his, but it was certainly an interesting perspective to have it framed that way of there are people out there that’s not a necessity and travel isn’t the end-all-be-all. And like we were talking about before of just finding the joy in the little things and having a lot of gratitude for exactly where you’re at right now can help battle some of those anxieties of just, “I need to go everywhere and I need to accomplish all these things.”

Ben Grynol (00:45:48):

And so, as it relates to living here, there are a lot of people that say like, “Man, why would you live in Winnipeg?” Aside from there’s family stuff, grew up here. That’s fine. Neither here nor there, but why would you live there? The winters are not just cold because they get to be like minus 40 Fahrenheit is normal. That’s not out of question at all, but they’re really long. So we’ve like, gosh, what is it now? December 9th, so we’ve probably had snow for a month now and the snow will be here until we can get blizzards, even at the end of April.

Ben Grynol (00:46:23):

It doesn’t happen all the time, but that’s not out of question. The snow is definitely here until the beginning of April though, first or second week of April. So they’re pretty long and they’re cold and people are like, “That just sounds miserable.” And the idea is that, at least the way I look at it is, I feel grateful to experience seasons. So we get really beautiful changes in seasons and something feels refreshing when it’s spring. And it’s very dirty going from winter, the winter thaw. You’ve seen it in the Midwest where things thaw and the roads are really gross with sand and it looks dirty, and that’s fine. But then everything gets into bloom and it feels refreshing, it feels like growth.

Ben Grynol (00:47:07):

I don’t know a better way of articulating it. And then it becomes summer, and summer is very, very hot, but it’s also very short. We don’t get long periods in the summer, extended periods where it goes on forever. So you know that that’s going to end and it’s going to come to fall and things will change and they’ll be very colorful and it’s beautiful, and then it’s winter again. But in the summer when it’s there, you don’t take it for granted that it’s really beautiful and it’s really hot, and there’s a lot of different things you can do. So in the summer you cycle outdoor, that’s what you do. You go outdoors and you cycle or you run or you do whatever you do and you still can be outdoors in the winter, but your activities change completely.

Ben Grynol (00:47:53):

So winter is an opportunity to go ice skating, to play hockey outside. You can play hockey indoors all year round, who cares, but to actually do… The river here freezes and we have one of the, I think it’s the longest skating trail in the world. I’m pretty sure, but it’s maintained in stuff and you can skate down the river for miles and miles, even when it’s freezing, but you’re like, “I’m experiencing this thing because there’s been a change that’s allowed me to do this. And I know this change is going to end at some point, which is going to be summer again, and then I’m going to be able to do different things.”

Ben Grynol (00:48:29):

So you bucket this mindset, or bucket these experiences where you are grateful that you get to experience that thing. And you’re grateful that you get to be in, it sounds totally absurd and probably maniacal in some sense, but you’re grateful that you get to experience this idea of, what does minus 40 feel like? Because you don’t need to go to the Arctic to feel cold temperatures and it does get colder up there than it does here, but it’s not that far off. You get to experience things that you don’t get to experience everywhere.

Ben Grynol (00:49:03):

And by looking at it through that lens, it’s a different mindset shift or a way of being happy with the location you’re in, versus yearning for something that you don’t have, which is like, “Well, I wish it was summer all year round.” And if you do want summer year round, then don’t live in a place that you get experience this. That’s the way of thinking about it. So it’s just your goal posts are constantly changing, but the sense of refreshment and change is maybe what allows you to be happy with the conditions that are around you. If that makes sense.

Stephanie Coates (00:49:35):

Yeah. The finiteness and the change of seasons. I just had this revelation recently, I was hopping around mostly within the US and I think it was October getting cold. And Helena and I had actually just wrapped up our month-long Airbnb stay in San Diego. And I said, “Oh, well, wouldn’t it be nice to live in warm weather for the winter?” And I moved to LA and Ben, I lasted a week because, one, I just don’t think that LA is really the place that I would thrive the best, but also I was faced with that idea of… especially growing up in the Midwest where you have this intense joy that comes from the change of seasons and the excitement of, I almost frame it in a way of, I don’t know the right words for it, but summer is this time of aliveness.

Stephanie Coates (00:50:19):

And then fall is this time of reflection, and then winter is this time of closing in and almost a hibernation, and then spring is the reawakening. And then to not have that, I was surprised at how much it negatively impacted me, where November was coming around and there was no snow and it was still 70 degrees and I thought, “Gosh, I want to live somewhere that’s four seasons where I’m forced to contemplate and be grateful for these seasons that are finite, where I appreciate some a lot more when I’m forced to go through winter. And I appreciate winter a lot more after a hot long summer.

Stephanie Coates (00:50:51):

And so I think that there’s a beauty that comes from the evolution of seasons and being in one place and then seeing how the environment changes and noticing these little things of getting to look forward to them and then appreciating the other side of it because you know that it’s not going to last forever.

Ben Grynol (00:51:09):

Okay. Wait a minute. So you’re telling me you don’t love driving down the 405? That’s not like on your favorite list of things to do?

Stephanie Coates (00:51:17):

Is that a highway in LA?

Ben Grynol (00:51:18):

Oh, come on, it is the highway. It is the road. Hinny and I have joked about it many times where the drive from San Diego to LA should be like, I don’t know exactly how long it should be, it’s probably like 45 minutes or an hour if you’re properly cooking it, maybe it’s a little bit longer, but 405 time it’s like 92 hours, it’s just so absurd. You basically go bumper to bumper, it can get really bad, the 405 gets very congested very quickly.

Stephanie Coates (00:51:48):

Oh, gross. That’s a benefit of working remotely is I never had to get in my car and drive once I got there, but the traffic there is horrible.

Ben Grynol (00:51:56):

Yeah. Well, it’s very different because of sprawl. But it’s funny you say that because I’d spent some time in LA working in the fall. This was like a long time ago. Gosh, this was probably more than 15 years ago, but I was there for an extended period of time. Not super long, but long enough that I left and it might have been, it was September or October. And when I came back, let’s say it was like a month, I can’t remember the exact timeframe, it wasn’t long, it might have been, let’s say three weeks or three and a half weeks. And all the seasons had changed here where when I left, everything was green, and when I came back, there were no leaves on the trees.

Ben Grynol (00:52:38):

But there, it was Groundhog Day. It was just smog and palm trees and nice consistent weather. And I enjoyed it, it was great, but I didn’t really feel any different. And then I came back and I felt almost like something was like taken away. I cannot explain this feeling, but I felt almost like hurt, if you want to say it, or just like I missed out. I really felt like, “Gosh, I missed out, the season changed here and I missed it. I’ve just jumped into a new season and I didn’t experience that change. It feels really weird because the world that I was experiencing didn’t feel like anything was changing and now it’s just winter.”

Ben Grynol (00:53:23):

It was a very weird feeling and it’s really hard to explain, but I think that the lens is so consistent with like, you get used to that and then that becomes your benchmark for the way certain feelings. Maybe it evokes certain feelings subconsciously in the brain and then you think about things differently, it’s now to your point of you go into, “Now it’s time to hunker down.” It’s in hibernation mode, make sure that you’ve got the right clothing and it’s the mindset shift. It’s maybe because it’s really hard to survive in the winter, you couldn’t just be outside anywhere that it’s cold for extended periods of time, it’s like survival mode. It really is different.

Stephanie Coates (00:54:05):

Yeah. I like that.

Ben Grynol (00:54:06):

And I’m being extreme, but you know what I’m saying? It’s not the same as it was in the summer when you could probably just be outside for a really long time.

Stephanie Coates (00:54:14):

Yeah. A change of seasons and how that reflects our own internal change of emotions and behavior and thoughts is really interesting. And not to rag on people in LA, I’m sure that there are people that really thrive in that environment of stable weather year round, but I agree with you. I think that there is a joy and a beauty that comes from the constant evolution and then having different priorities during different seasons like you said, versus hunkering down and being more of a time to look inward versus a time of a lot of action in the summertime.

Ben Grynol (00:54:46):

It’s very, very different. Well, what are you thinking about moving forward with dev? Now you’re, gosh… You could have started four years ago and were only a two-year-old company, so that’s why it’s great to be hyperbolic, but you could have started four years ago and it could be also like four months ago. I have no be for what the start date was because we’re moving fast, but you started in, it’s December now, you started –

Stephanie Coates (00:55:14):

August.

Ben Grynol (00:55:14):

You started in August. I was going to say July, something like that. You’ve been here for three, I guess like four months now, an entire quarter. What’s your thought process moving forward as far as you’re settling down, you’re working as a dev, you’re immersed in the Levels culture. How are you thinking about things from the dev’s standpoint?

Stephanie Coates (00:55:38):

It’s interesting that you mentioned the time warp. No one really knows how long we’ve all been there and I feel that exactly. There’s days where I feel like it’s still day one and there’s so much to learn and discover and I still absolutely feel like a total novice. And then there’s other times where I think, “Gosh, I feel so rooted here and I feel so connected with the people that I work with,” and it feels like I could have been here for years. I work really closely with Justin and another engineer on the team. And it’s funny to think that he only started, I think, three months or four months before I did.

Stephanie Coates (00:56:14):

And so sometimes I look to him as this expert that’s been here since the origination of Levels, but we’re learning on the same trajectory. And so it is, the sense of time at startups is certainly very strange, but on the low level of Levels specific, not to Levels zone horn too much, but I love it. The culture and the mission and the work, I would say, especially the people, that has been the most differentiating factor. And I think the culture ties very closely with the people, but getting to work on a team where everybody… There really doesn’t seem to be any pieces missing in terms of this just really strong culture around hiring the right people that all care about this mission and all have this incredibly high level of respect, integrity, and trust in each other.

Stephanie Coates (00:57:05):

It’s a dream environment to work in. And I remember when I was applying at the company, I was happy in my current job, but when I discovered Levels, I just thought, “I can’t stop thinking about this company, I want to be a part of it.” And everyone seems to emulate that same belief of just no matter where we were in our lives prior to joining this, it’s such an honor to be a part of it. And it’s so great to be a part of a company where there is so much gratitude and excitement for what we do. And I hope it stays that way going forward of just this really strong appreciation for what we do and for each other. And it makes the work environment so fulfilling to work in.

Stephanie Coates (00:57:40):

And I like coding. It’s still extremely new, I have so much more to learn, and especially at a company that moves so fast at a startup. There’s days where I just feel like I’m completely drowning, but I would rather feel like I’m completely drowning and there’s more to learn and there’s opportunities for growth rather than feeling stagnant and rather than feeling like I’ve done everything that I could do, and now I’m just bored. And so I think that’s what keeps me at startups, which definitely applies to other parts of my life too of just this constant seeking of novelty and challenge and new experiences.

Stephanie Coates (00:58:15):

And you get that at a startup in a work environment where there’s always a new thing to tackle. And I was just talking about this with Justin yesterday during our one-on-one of, if you want to learn something new, there’s an opportunity to do it. And so it’s a joy to work at a startup for that reason. And on a higher level, in the sense of getting into coding a few years ago, I have no idea where the future will lead. I think that five years ago, if you would’ve asked me, do you imagine that you’ll be coding and working at startups in the metabolic health industry, I’d probably say, “What’s coding? I don’t even know what that is.”

Stephanie Coates (00:58:50):

And so I have no trust in how my own career will evolve. I really love that there’s this innate sense of curiosity. And I remember thinking as a kid, “It’d be cool to try a new career every decade of be a doctor for a decade and then be a software engineer for a decade and then be a marine biologist diving in the ocean for a decade.” There are so many exciting things to do in life. And so, I don’t know, there are some people that I think take a lot of solace and going deep in one thing for life and I’ve never fallen into that category.

Stephanie Coates (00:59:23):

And so whether it’s evolving within my own career path at Levels, which that would be wonderful as well, or if long time down the road if I evolve into a totally different career path, I don’t know, I’m not tied to an outcome. And just as I said before, continuously narrowing the scope of, “Here’s what’s worked, here’s what hasn’t worked. Here’s new things that I’m curious in,” and not being attached to how things were before, I think that’s served me well in the past of just being open to changing my mind and constantly being humbled by these new opportunities that sprout about.

Stephanie Coates (00:59:58):

And so I’m certainly excited for both the trajectory of Levels and where this company will go and going along on the ride with it for it, but also just long term of, I have no idea where I’ll end up, and I think I attribute that largely to just the environment that I’ve grown up and the sense of the degree that I studied in college, and just all of these emphasis on interdisciplinary learning, and open to change, and tolerance to challenge and adversity, and a lot of the experiences that I’ve had in the outdoors as well have really set me up well to be open to uncertainty, and now I really enjoy it.

Stephanie Coates (01:00:35):

I’m not sure if that answers your question, but I have no set plans for what the 10-year plan will look like or what the 20-year plan look like, but where I’m at right now of being a software engineer at Levels is an absolute dream come true.

Ben Grynol (01:00:55):

How is it going?

Stephanie Coates (01:00:56):

It’s good. How are you doing?

Ben Grynol (01:00:59):

Doing well, doing well. I’m sitting in a room here surrounded by Barbies and LOL, and I don’t even know what other kind of dolls, but an LP decided yesterday when Tony and I were recording one of the culture videos that it would be a good idea to come in during the middle of it and bring all her dolls into my office. So have not cleaned it up, but there is definitely a surplus going on in here.

Stephanie Coates (01:01:21):

I love it.