39 : The Art of Self Improvement Through Deliberate Practice with Dan Arwady

Welcome to The Mindful FIRE Podcast, where we explore living mindfully on the path to financial independence and beyond. I'm your host Adam Coelho and I'm so glad you're here.

I am so thrilled to bring you today’s episode with my good friend, Dan Arwady. Dan works at YouTube and heads up Partner Engineering for the YouTube Music Labels operations team. On the side, he's an engineering student, a drummer, a music producer, and an amateur woodworker, and when he's really doing life right he's a meditator and an avid reader too. But in reality, he's usually spending a bunch of quality time with his 1 year old son TJ, his wife Ang, and his dog Levi.

This conversation truly felt like 2 good friends catching up and talking about life and as a result we forgot to have Dan introduce himself until about 40 minutes into the conversation. Luckily we were recording the whole time and caught all of the gems he had to share. Editing was interesting to say the least and took me longer than usual but I am really proud of the resulting episode and it was an exercise in practicing my craft of podcasting, which we discuss in the episode.

In this conversation we dive into the many lessons Dan has learned in his pursuit to constantly learn and grow as a person and musician through deliberate practice. Dan is an incredibly talented musician, playing several instruments but with a focus on drums. We discuss how he approached getting better at drums through deliberate practice even when he didn’t have much time because of work and life. And he also shares how he continues to hone his skills as a drummer by working with expert coaches and now collaborating with friends to put his music out in the world. He just released his first solo track which you can check out on Spotify.

In the last 5 years Dan has also made a career switch from Sales to Engineering at Google, which I can tell you is extremely difficult and not something many people are able to pull off. Dan shares how he came to love engineering and how he went about learning this difficult skills, ultimately finding himself pursuing a second Bachelors of Engineering and Computer Science, all while working full time and starting a family.

Dan shares a ton of incredible wisdom throughout the episode and I throw in a few pieces of wisdom I’ve pi

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This is for you if you’re at or near FI (Coast FI or full FIRE) and:

• You feel stuck after “doing everything right,” but you’re not sure what you’re optimizing for anymore.
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• You want clarity and momentum—but you don’t want someone to tell you what to do.

🔥 WHAT we’ll do together (over 10 weeks)

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• Get clear on what you actually want (beyond expectations, comparison, and “shoulds”).
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• Turn yo...