Cheat Codes for Life - Episode #298 of CloudFocus Weekly

Machine transcript generated in 2026 from the episode audio (Whisper speech-to-text with automatic speaker separation). Speaker labels are automatic and may be wrong in places. Timestamps shown every few minutes.

00:12 Jason Atwood: This is the 298th episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the first week of December 2018. This episode is titled Cheat Codes for life. CloudFocus Weekly is brought to you by Arkus and we are hiring. If you're a Salesforce consultant or advanced administrator and want to be part of a unique super growing company, send your resume to careers at arkusinc.com or head to Arkus, Inc.com, and there's a careers page. You can see it, and you know it all by there. I'm your host, Jason Atwood. Join me, co-host, 298 times in a row.

Justin Edelstein: Justin Edelstein, Justin, how you doing today? You seemed a little frazzled there. here. Like you were going somewhere and you didn't know exactly where you were going

Jason Atwood: Yeah stopped in the middle was talking to somebody who had been listening to the podcast and Said and was talking to me About this podcast and said oh, I really enjoyed Hearing I'm not gonna say the name because it's the it's the founder's name who should not be mentioned, right? So the person said, and I was talking to the person, and I said,. Well,

Justin Edelstein: It's not even if there's fire. The name.

Jason Atwood: It's been named once. There is a episode. It is. It is. Not named. The history of the podcast because we are getting close. gonna talk about all of them to be clear I've been working on nothing you've been

04:11 Justin Edelstein: Doing absolutely nothing so like the other a let me make it clear. I've done nothing.

Jason Atwood: That's right. That's pretty much right. So, since there's such a big episode coming next week, a little like, you know, a little, bit smaller, little like, you now little there let's call them next one will be a special episode But this one's gonna be a super special episode. Really all that means is we don't make CloudFocus that pixel a week.

Justin Edelstein: That's That's my favorite when you make up the rules on me as we go.

Jason Atwood: I've gotten a lot of feedback from last episode that you were super grumpy. Like on the Grump-o-meter, on the Justin Justo Grump-o-meter from Full Grumpy Cat, like Playful Kitten, or Playful Kitten to Full Grumpy Cat. It's my most end endearing quality. Oh man, I don't know who's telling you that, but they're lying to you.

Justin Edelstein: It's what I'm known for. Okay. It's kind of Iike the Mad Dog. You don't even know his name, but you know there's Mike and the Mad Dog. I mean, those who listen know his name, but it's Mike and the Mad Dog. He's known as the Mad Dog. So you're known as Grumpy Cat? Grumpy Cat. OK. Well, Grumpy Cat's already a thing.

Jason Atwood: So this article came up and I posted internally and everybody was kind of reading it. And then I started sending it to other people like friends. I was like, you know, some of these are really good. And so I thought, you know, it'd be fun to do a podcast on this, just talk about this. So this is a special episode. If you're looking for Salesforce content, go to 299. That will be all Salesforce content. This one's not going to be. We're gonna call this one, the article was called Cheat Codes for Everyday Life and it was, they basically, it was a, this is where articles are now in the world where they take a summary of quotes from another site and then they make an article out of it. It's an article. That's called Content on the Internet.

Justin Edelstein: Like what we're doing right now, where we're just talking about an article that talked about an article that talked about an article. We're gonna talk about it. It's so different. This is very derivative.

Jason Atwood: I'm so grumpy right now. Someone could listen to us and then do a video of us talking. They could do a podcast of podcast. It's been known to happen..

Justin Edelstein: About this podcast.

Jason Atwood: OK, so I gave you and I did give you some warning about this. So don't don't you know. I'm ready. All right.

Justin Edelstein: Look so Look. Look in the collaboration section.

07:12 Jason Atwood: You did some work. So the it's on BuzzFeed. It's called Cheat Codes for Everyday Life. I've read it because that's where they got all the original people. It's called Real News. It's total Real News. But we just picked a couple and we're gonna talk about how we use them in our life and if we do or if we're not. So it's kind of like... Oh, that was funny. Okay. I'm going to... How we use them. Yeah, a couple of these are real.

Justin Edelstein: Left left right right up up down down A B A B. Alright, go.

Jason Atwood: Cheat coat. I aint know is that the first time I remember doing cheat coats. Contra. No, I'm Nintendo. It was way it was way it was in the arcade and it was for Mortal, Mortal Kombat. Oh, you know, you had all the special fatalities. Mm hmm. Fatality kill him. Oh, yeah. And then babyality and they had all the fun. You know, like they got they went crazy in the years that came. Babyality and all these other things. But the first set when you could get. Was a scorpion he could do some really fun ones and you had to go Together that's what I remember trying to memorize Codes. Oh, no you was conga. What'd you say? Contra? Yeah on Nintendo. Yeah Yeah, there was a way to get like

Justin Edelstein: Like unlimited lives or something They only give you like three, you die real quick, and then you're done, so you have to do something. Wait, I wanna play the game a little longer than like three minutes. Maybe you just weren't that good. Well, it definitely wasn't good. That's without saying. So true. I'm so bad at video games.

Jason Atwood: So we're gonna pick some. So why don't you go first, that always make you go first. Even though mine are on the top here, I'm gonna make you go first. You're on the top. All right.

Justin Edelstein: Great, so we don't need to like say what number it is in the article or anything outside. Ken, if you want to, someone can reference it, that'd be nice. I'm not going to. All right, so number 13. Under promise and over perform, say you'll achieve less than you think you will and then do more and everyone will be impressed. Kind of an old consulting adage. It's not really under promise and over perform under promise and over deliver Yep, it's more the common term that I hear But this is a a setting expectations and setting appropriate expectations and sometimes lowering those expectations and then delivering above and beyond It's always better to do that than to promise the world and not deliver anything. That's correct It's always better to exceed expectations.

Jason Atwood: My meta cheat code for this is if you're talking about setting timelines and dates, my cheat and I do teach people about this internally to Arkus, so this is giving it up to the world. I don't give dates. What I do is I give ranges. So when I, so you're talking to me this week and you can pay. Don't give away the cart without the horse. That's not the expression. I, whatever.

10:18 Justin Edelstein: Oh man. Don't put the cart before the horse. Yeah, but that has nothing to do with giving away things. Don't give things away.

Jason Atwood: Anyway, my trick is that I use time frames. So I say. day. Like if we're talking about things for next week, I basically have three times next week. The early next week, middle next week and the next week.

Justin Edelstein: That's right. Doesn't mean anything. Well, it does. It means the early next week, which could be Monday, Tuesday, or maybe even Wednesday morning.

Jason Atwood: Middle next week means anywhere up to sort of Wednesday, and then late next week could be Thursday, Friday. But the beauty is then... If you say early next week and you get them something on Monday, they feel good about it. If you say early next week and something happens on Monday and you need to get to Tuesday, you're still within the time frame that you said. So I like to use the ranges because it's more helpful.

Justin Edelstein: You just cheated on the cheat code. That's my cheat. It's a double cheat. So that counts as yours?

Jason Atwood: So I'm up next? No, I'm going to talk one of mine. Oh, you're just going to double up. Yeah, on each one. Oh, I know. I told you that. Of course you are. Of course. You have so many cheat codes. I'm going to give the cheats on top of the cheats. How to implement the cheats. Whatever. Grumpy. Yeah, sorry. So number two, I thought this is great. This is something that I've learned a long lesson many, many years ago. Wait a minute. You've never done this. Well, that's because you can't use this one. You've literally never done this. Yes, I have you just don't know it because it's not with you

Justin Edelstein: You've literally never said these words to me so go on. All right, but can you just look me in the eyes? Yes Well, I have to read it And I can't read it. Can you say it as though you mean it to me? Sure Thanks.

Jason Atwood: If you admit you're wrong, and to whatever it is that you're wrong about, people respect and appreciate you more. You don't think I'd do that?

Justin Edelstein: Mmm, I don't know if you've ever admitted that you're wrong to me.

Jason Atwood: That's not true. We used to have a chart. We used to track the one time of year that you were right, and we used to put it up on a board. Right. So that was an idiot. And all the other times. That you were wrong. You were right. You were admitting you were wrong. And you were right. You kept the track. And I was wrong. Right. Right. All right.

Justin Edelstein: So I guess you've done it once a year for the last like 13, 14 years. That's 13 times.

Jason Atwood: I will tell you, this is a powerful cheat, but the way to do this is it's kind of like the sorry thing. It's just do it quickly. Like don't... Don't get into that fighting to not say you're wrong about something. Say it quickly, get it out of the way, you know, and you can do it in a way that you don't have to - there's a whole thing in our society about taking blame and people being blamed for things and like, you're wrong and this person's wrong and starts it in our politics and starts like - And no one wants to ever admit that they've ever done anything wrong. It's like, how about you saying, yeah, I did something wrong. And here's what I'm going to do to make it better the next time. And you say, you know what?

Jason Atwood: I'm going to try this, or I'm going to try to do it. Just say it. It really, really, really, it takes the power out of the conversation. And then people stop fighting to try to make you feel wrong. And then you can work towards a solution. Thank you for your attention. And the story I tell, and I probably told this on podcasts, somewhere in the 300, was there was a guy in IT, I'll throw his name out there, Tom Stadtnick, because he ain't listened to this. And I remember there would be massive outages, we're talking like million dollar outages, trading systems go down, and he'd walk in, like he'd be the, here we go, beat up on the IT guy, he'd walk into the meeting with his people behind him, and you know, this was the, all right, we're coming to talk to business,, and business is gonna give us a,.

13:52 Jason Atwood: You know, like it's gonna be a big fight in the room about how did it go down and why were we down for 11 minutes in the middle of a trading day and he'd come in and the first thing he'd do is go like, hey, I just want to say this is on us. This is our mistake. We made a mistake. Blah, blah, blah. We are going to fix it. Here's what happened. And boom. And then, you know, these, all these business people, my bosses and my bosses, bosses, boss would be sitting there like. Oh, okay. Like they had nothing to say because what they want, what they're going to do is they're going to just want a pound of flesh. They want a pound of flesh, but he took all the power out of it because he just said, we made it.

Jason Atwood: And he said, I own it. It's my organization. I own this mistake. It's mine and we're going to fix it. Amazing. Like how it worked every time. Anyway, so good. Good one. All right, you go.

Justin Edelstein: What percentage of the time did it work all the time? 100% of the time. 100% of the time it worked all the time. Well, 70% of the time it worked all the time. Fantastic. All right. I'm going to put my own spin on. Thank you for doing what you just did. Can you do that again? Yeah, that was useful. Thanks. No, put it in. That was good. All right. So I'm going to put my own spin on this one after I read it verbatim. So set the do not disturb feature on your phone to turn on from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. you'll sleep so much better without constant notifications from emails, games, or your mother-in-law who wants to send a group message at midnight because she's in a different time zone.

Justin Edelstein: So good tip, good cheat code. Amazing tip. I, on, so if you're an iOS user, so if you have an iPhone. I use the the night the good night feature. What's it called? The bedtime bedtime feature. So as part of the newest version of iOS, whatever they're up to, what do they have to do, 12, 11, 12? What's the new one? Yeah, it's I don't know. It's 11 or 12, something like that. Let's just say it's one of those. Well, now when you turn that feature on and it asks you, and I've talked about this before on this podcast, how many hours do you want, or when do you want to wake up and how many hours of sleep do you want to get? And then it sort of calculates and it'll tell you, hey, it's time for bed.

Justin Edelstein: It's bedtime. And how much time do you want to get notified? Yeah, so give me an hour to get to bed. So like tell me an hour before and I'll get to bed But now what it does is once you hit bedtime, it goes into do not disturb. So you you automatically get the do not disturb turned on and then in iOS you can turn on like, you know, VIPs so that you can let people through the do not disturb just in case of emergency. You don't want to like have your phone like just like you're sleeping and like you're gonna make a

Jason Atwood: Plane and someone's calling you and calling calling right right right right.

Justin Edelstein: I think that happened recently. But anyway, that's how, I mean, I do use this, but I do not physically set the do not disturb. It is just set for me automatically by virtue of using the bedtime feature.

16:52 Jason Atwood: And by the way, you can do this not on iOS, you can do this on. Mac OS as well. I mean, I have do not

Justin Edelstein: Do not disturb just turned off on my notification center on a computer but on the phone it's not I do want certain notifications and certain ones I don't hate. Just don't ask you and they just notify you anyway. You just somehow they add somehow they get there somehow like they like like you open it you say no. and then like a month later it's notifying you. And you're like, how'd you do that?

Jason Atwood: I don't get it, what'd I click? It's really good. I would say, I, I always feel like everybody has this on, but then I'm usually up early, and sometimes I will ping someone in the morning and knowing that they have this on, but or not knowing they have this on, I'm like, ooh, I wonder if they get a ping in the middle of the morning that's like. That's their fault.

Justin Edelstein: Honestly, that's not your fault.

Jason Atwood: It'd be like calling somebody. You would never call somebody like into their home phone at 5 a.m. Yeah, see, that's not a thing anymore. I know.

Justin Edelstein: I call whoever whenever because it's like, if you don't want your phone during, relenting, you have control over that now. so true..

Jason Atwood: Alright this one's a good one And man, it really got deep. This one went deep. Number 12 on the list. Actually, someone else called this out, I think, in our arcas. And so I was like, oh yeah, I like that one. Number 12, when married, don't stop treating your significant other like you did when you were trying to win them over. the great way to show them that you're still as infatuated with them as you. you were in your first met. So funny story today, I was talking to someone, an arche, and they'll, they're big podcast listeners, so they'll enjoy this. They're on their vacation in Hawaii right now. We were chatting about, we started chatting about some work stuff, and then we started going into. it. I was like, oh, what are you doing in Hawaii?

Jason Atwood: And they just celebrated their anniversary. So then I was like, oh, you know how many years? And I made a joke. The first 10 years was the toughest. Anyway, went through this whole thing. And then I made the joke of my wife, who we were friends. We were friends for a while. We were in the friend zone. I was in the friend zone for a long time. You were in the friend zone. I was in the friend zone for a long time. We were in the friend zone. So. It's funny because she'll turn to me sometimes now. We've been married for 15 years. And she'll put you back in the friend zone. No, she says, she's like, you better remember, you chased me. You were after me. Like, I was the girl. You got the girl.

Jason Atwood: And so we always have this funny running gag. You were in the friend zone. I was in the friend zone. She had you locked up in the friend zone. Damn right. Did he escape? I don't know, is that what you do out at the friend zone? I don't know, did you? He escaped. Is that what you called for? Yes, I got out of the friend zone. So he called. I produced this little 13-year-old one around here. No 13-year-old. I just see a bird. She is being very quiet. That is good Jesse. That could be a tricky question. What is the bird's real name? What is bird? Well, I don't consider Jesse Bird's real name. Jesse Neymar is Bird's real name. Neymar's Jesse.

20:00 Justin Edelstein: Neymar is Bird's real name.

Jason Atwood: I don't know where Jesse came from because it's a girl. Y'all made that up. Y'all? Y'all. All right. Y'all didn't go. What's your next one? All right. My last one.

Justin Edelstein: Last one. walk with a purpose. For some reason, people think you're busy and you don't get hassled. This is more of a New York thing, but like, walk down the street and just like have the 100 yard stare and just walk. Yep. Like, no one will bug ya. The homeless people begging for money aren't gonna talk to ya. The people trying to hand out like pamphlets and cards and things and doodads in the subway, they're not gonna look at, they might look your way, but. it. Don't look at them and just keep walking like you've got something somewhere and something to do and they won't bother you much. It's true. It is. Have some headphones in perhaps. That helps. This is very much a New York thing. Like don't talk to me. I am on the way somewhere.

Justin Edelstein: I am going to go to a place. Like, you know,

Jason Atwood: Nice places. You could tweet. It's like you walk down the street. It's like, hey, how's your day? It's super sunny out. It's like. Don't bother me with that nonsense. There's only 10 million people in the city, so it's a little hard to be like, hey, if you stop by everybody, it'd be like, elf. I feel like it's like the movie elf with that, you know, he stops, he starts talking to everybody. Hi, how are you? Hi, how are you? Hi, how are you?

Justin Edelstein: He's an elf and he knows Santa. Such a good movie.

Jason Atwood: That's a good one. It's very good on public transportation if you don't want to be bugged I think there are two types of people there's the type of people who have that look on their face that they're gonna get bugged and I know many of them and then there are people who like have that look on their face that you don't get bugged If you bug me, I will kill you. You have this very stern straight up like I'm I'm in business mode here. Don't bug me.

Justin Edelstein: You can use this a dreamforce, by the way, if you want to get from point A to point B and don't want to be like, oh, that's down the street. Just walk with the purpose. Walk with the purpose.

Jason Atwood: Terrible, terrible. Dreamforce, you stop every five seconds to see. So oh, hey, oh, hey, sorry.

Justin Edelstein: I'm on my way somewhere. Got to go. Got to go.

Jason Atwood: All right. Last one for me and last one in our list. It's. This is a person responding to it, but it said the best cheat code ever Got was a word of advice from my dad don't go out and try to make friends instead go out and don't make enemies Interesting. I totally misread this one. Oh What do you think I left the word don't out of the last part of it and make enemies? Yeah, make enemies Yeah, that's why I didn't get it. I was like what kind of cheat code is that because it required reading I just missed a word.

Justin Edelstein: Happens. Well, you never missed a word. You never missed a comma in a formula. You never missed a parentheses. I have a comment. You never left something open when you were supposed to close it? Wow I missed the word! Yeah, anyway. That's why it didn't make sense to me. I was like, this one's stupid. That's why it's last.

23:06 Jason Atwood: The reason is, yeah, it's like, you know, be nice to people. Don't try to piss people off, and that'll get you more friends than, you know, just trying to make friends. Frenemies. Yeah, it's kind of tough. Making friends, like, why is it like it was so easy when you were in your here. teens and college and stuff. You feel like you just made friends constantly.

Justin Edelstein: You were in a forced environment where you kind of had to. Kind of like work? Well, not like work. You were in school and preschool and day camp and all this stuff where it's like, what are you going to do, sit there by yourself and not talk to anybody? It's just not going to be a thing. Now, we have to sit there by ourselves and not talk. Like job is to sit there and not talk to people. Well, your job is to get your job done, not to make friends. At camp, your job's kind of to have fun and make friends. Camp. Yeah. In this camp.

Jason Atwood: Right? Yeah. That's why. Did you a go into day camp, and day camp. Did you go to a day camp that also had a sleep away at it? No. Because sometimes you have those, and then we called you like day people or something.

Justin Edelstein: We had something terrible named for. Went to camp, got on the bus, came home a and is that distinction Wait,

Jason Atwood: Wait! I'll tell you, in country, I don't even know what it's called, country Country, but glared at me. It's been a while, 30 years. So you sit back, it's like the one you see with cowboys, or sitting back in their, like, doo-doo, doo-doot, and you're just kind of sitting back and letting the horse go. In English, you're actually up on your legs in the stirrups more. the horse goes and so you have to time it with the horses and so much harder when we're watching like the Kentucky Derby they're riding English style because

26:18 Justin Edelstein: They're up and like I think they are.

Jason Atwood: Yeah well that's racing they're they're risen, and No, no, let's go do this one out and we'll call this a call this the day. Call today. We got to leave something for 300.

Justin Edelstein: That's true. I mean, we have to talk about your your exploits of elephant and camel riding.

Jason Atwood: Never wrote an elephant. No I don't think so. Do you ride in between the humps Well there's different types of camels. There's camels with two humps and camels with one hump How do

Justin Edelstein: You ride a one hump camel a saddle and how do you ride a two hump camel? Saddle in between the hump. Where's the where's the saddle on the one? Yeah, cuz on the two hump camel I assume it's in the middle It's on top of it's

Jason Atwood: On top of the hump my goodness That's like a way extra height and up there Google something ever, but R get off my hump basically this bit.

Justin Edelstein: You get I get it. I'm really bite like if you're walking around you got a cool hump And then all of a sudden someone just sitting on it and be like, who the heck are you? Get off my hump, man. I'm going to spit on you. Wow. And that will wrap up this episode. And that'll be it.

Jason Atwood: All right. 298. Going to put that one in the books. Don't put that. Don't write that one down. Yeah, we write that one down. There's the missing episode. How'd you guys get to 300? I missed 298. I don't know. That matter. And we published it. Justin just went crazy over horse riding and. Camel riding. I mean, we published it. It's fine. We had to stop the whole thing. All right. Next week. How dare you cross out my pick next week? How dare you? Not doing picks this week. Jerk. Next week, we're going to come back and we're going to do. We're going to do the final. We've been talking about this forever.

Justin Edelstein: This is a tasty 299 to lead up to 300. Yes.

Jason Atwood: We're going to do a lightning debate. We're going to debate lightning. Well, we're not going to traditional debate style, but we're going to talk pros and cons.

Justin Edelstein: You're going to take the I'm taking lightning experience, not lightning, lightning experience versus classic.

Jason Atwood: Great. We'll be back. We'll do that next week. Until then, as always, Justin J. Say, enjoy those cloudy days.

29:37 Justin Edelstein: You