We often want to see results all at once, or at least quickly. But that's not usually how it works. In this episode Leon, Josh, and returning guest Al Rasheed explore how the philosophies of slow growth in other areas of our life - from religious to healthy living - inform our expectations with regard to gaining new skills in IT. Listen or read the transcript below.

Josh:      0:00        Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is technically religious.

Leon:     0:22        We often want to see results all at once or at least quickly, but that's not usually how IT works. How do the philosophies of slow growth in other areas of our life from religious to healthy living inform our expectations with regard to gaining new skills in it? I'm Leon Adato and the other voices you're going to hear on this episode are my partner in podcasting, Josh Biggley.

Josh:      0:42        Hello, hello.

Leon:     0:44        And returning guests. Al Rasheed,

Leon:     0:46        Hello, thanks again for having me.

Leon:     0:48        Welcome back again. Um, okay. Before we dive into this topic, uh, as always, we wanted to have everyone, uh, take a moment for shameless self promotion. So Josh, why don't you kick it off?

Josh:      0:59        Hey, so I'm Josh Biggley, I'm a senior engineer in the enterprise systems monitoring space. Uh, you can find me on Twitter at @jbiggley or if you want to follow the chaos of my, my faith journey, uh, you can go to FaithTransitions.ca where you'll be forwarded to our Facebook group.

Leon:     1:16        Fantastic. Al, tell us about yourself.

Al:           1:20        I'm Al Rasheed, I'm a systems administrator here in northern Virginia for a federal contractor. Uh, you can find me on Twitter, @Al_Rasheed and in my profile for Twitter you'll also, uh, you should find my blog URL.

Leon:     1:33        Fantastic. And as a reminder, uh, all those links and everything else we talk about in this episode are going to be in the show notes. So you don't need to scribble madly and just rounding things up. I'm Leon Adatoo, I'm one of the head geeks at solar winds. You can find me on Twitter @LeonAdator and also I blog and just pontificate about life in general, uh, at AdatoSystems.com so you can find me there. All right, so, uh, we're going to divide this up basically into two sections, talking about growth and personal growth in the religious philosophical context first. And then in our IT life second, but in religious context, I think it's important for us to frame out what is there to grow in, in terms of religion or philosophy? I think, I think a lot of folks feel like, well, you know, you just, you show up, you sit down, you listen for a little while, and then ya go, you know, have some fried chicken or whatever. Like what, what is there to do better in religion? What are your, what are your thoughts on that?

Josh:      2:31        You know, Leon, I honestly, I think that, um, the whole premise of religion is about being better. Um, again for the listeners, right? We know that, uh, I was Mormon and Joseph Smith, who was the founder of Mormonism, uh, famously said, and I'm probably going to do a terrible job at paraphrasing him, but, um, no religion, um, that is, you know, worth its weight. Um, that doesn't require a man to sacrifice and become better, uh, should be practiced. So the idea being that if you're going to do religion and you're just going to stay static, why do it that at all?

Al:           3:08        Right. And I, I think there's some people who do show up, you know, look, I belong because my parents belong to this church or synagogue because my grandparents belonged here. I'm j