Don't Look Down I've been planning a new project for my team. I'd be exercising restraint to call it ambitious. It's complex, it represents a new direction, and it's not entirely clear at the moment where the resources to see it through are going to come from.



Taken as a rational sequence of steps, and examined in fine enough detail on paper, it seems pretty overwhelming. On paper, it's just a list of stuff we need that's greater than the stuff we have. On paper, it's 1,000 excuses not to start, and as much doubt as you want to find. Not just doubt, but particularly dangerous, supported-by-numbers doubt.



But we don't execute on paper. In a few months, the completed project will somehow emerge from this pool of impossibility.



You can build your plan up axiomatically from perfectly logical blocks, each one making perfect sense, and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that a project isn't worthwhile. Or you can do it.



You can come to the conclusion that it would take twice the team and twice the time. Or you can do it.



The thing that the Gantt chart is missing is the main thing that ever gets anything done: blind, stupid faith. That's the spark of life that takes the inert puddle of planning amino acids and makes them a living thing. It's the secret ingredient that makes a project defy the odds, and it's fundamentally qualitative. It can't possibly appear in a budget.



A completed goal is emergent. It happens out of the project, but it is not the project. It's completed by some idiot blindly believing in it.



This isn't to say that you shouldn't plan, but take it with a grain of salt. With enough detail, you can make anything look impossible.



If you think you can do it, that's as close to proof as you're going to get, so do it.



Just jump, and for God's sake, don't look down.





The Scalable Herd In the future, when someone is curious exactly when I tipped over from quaint, erratic Luddite to full-on paranoid, I like to think they'll find this work of arrogant pseudoscience a useful resource.



I'm a tech-skeptic. I don't hate it, I just don't greedily swallow every spoonful it serves up.



I can certainly see that it has improved "stuff", but I do take the apparently unpopular position that new innovation should have to, like, establish its merits before we celebrate its merits. It sounds super reasonable on paper, but it places me in the position of contrarian about basically everything with basically everyone.



I'm sort of obsessed with the ramifications of technology increasing community size. Specifically, whether it's possible for an ape to maintain a sense of well-being in a community of 7 billion or so other apes constantly trumpeting their status and achievements.



Humans appear to be natural community animals. There are lots of biological and intuitive reasons for my thinking this, but I think it's fairly agreed upon*.



See, we're descendents of these monkeys*, and the monkeys likely lived in communities. This is fairly supported by the fact that today's monkeys live in communities, and that basically all modern humans do, and like a ton of other stuff for which I can't be bothered to dig up references.



Within these communities, we interact. There's some power hierarchy stuff going on, and varying degrees of cooperation. Leadership changes hands, babies are made, the tribe carries on.



While the outward civility of these organized groups has increased greatly in complexity, it's fairly obvious to anyone who has ever visited a playground that there are also some base biological mechanisms at play that govern group behavior.



I don't think that these mechanisms, which worked wonderfully for a relatively long time, were ever meant to scale, and I think expanding that community globally has resulted in a restless and insatiable herd.



Not too long ago (on an arbitrary time scale I'm choosing for this sentence), the prettiest girl in your small community would be the prettiest girl you saw in your entire life. For all intents and purposes, she was the prettiest woman in the world. Likewise, if you saw the handsomest man, or most capable hunter, leader, mason, cook, or humorist, they could bask in that achievement. They would have had a position, for better or worse.



Now, our concept of prettiest woman in the world is the result of an exhaustive search for the prettiest woman in California, and she can only be presented to us after her nose has been destroyed and rebuilt. She's elected by some stranger, and she'll be unseated next year.



We're not satisfied with that process, so some media outlets conduct searches for best breasts, or best legs. We can't even allow one whole person to be satisfied, only her breasts are allowed to be.



We're presented constantly with lists on Pinterest & Facebook of better crafts, better moms, and better people, doing more attractive and more fun things than we could dream of.



From paintings to magazines to iPads, technology seems to follow a pattern of expanding which areas of our life are now held to the standard of this new global monster community. A painting can convey a face, Facebook can convey the heartbeats of someone's life.



There are people who would argue that this new community is somehow above petty rank, but that's observably incorrect. Ask the average woman how a 24x7 global leaderboard of beauty impacted her as a teen. Ask one of the men you probably know who no longer has a solid concept on what being male actually means in the modern world. We're still very interested in where we stand in relation to everyone else, except now "everyone else" is a writhing global monster rather than 40 people you know.



Of course, this process is pretty great for commerce. Contented people don't spend money. Discontented people spend money they've borrowed for stuff they don't need, in the hopes this new thing will help them finally be the best <x>.



We're not alphas or betas, we ran out of Greek letters to distinguish our rank in this impossibly large, tumultuous herd.





*It's up for debate, of course, but I don't personally have much interest in engaging in it.



Boneless Skinless Chicken Breasts We, and by "we" I mean a "me and people like me", live in a time of pretty unprecedented choice.



Where our ancestors struggled to meet their basic needs, a huge and complex mechanism works 'round the clock to assist us in meeting ours.



A band of hunters hoping to find anything to eat has graduated to factory farms that churn out perfect bricks of white meat, the rest of the carcass ground up for the dogs & the poor.



A man who used to dress up in his finest to hear one polished musical performance in his lifetime can now jump back and forth between the choruses of 6 of his favorite songs before he gets bored and tosses his phone aside.



These situations have been explored to death, and I honestly don't care about them that much. I'm unencumbered by the plight of the factory chickens, or the decline of the arts. I'm sure I should care, I just don't.



It does seem weird though, and probably deleterious, that we can choose to avoid so much stuff.



It's as if we're ordering from a menu of life experiences, and we're allowed to customize every item. "Let's see, I'll have the meat with no hunt, the wait in line with no boredom, and the cake with no calories".



Now, this ability to customize our experience extends to time itself. We can slip in and out of actually living in the time we're having at will.



When we run off to Cyberspace™ and disengage from every negative (or even simply not-positive) activity, it means we've reduced what used to be a wonderful and balanced life to a grimy clip show that only includes the crowd-pleasing gags.



I'm concerned that, increasingly, we're going gonzo, with no time to waste on the boring verses between the choruses, or the talking between the hardcore scenes, or the car rides on the way to the cool stuff. We want to cut to the chase, then immediately cut to the next chase.



The problem is that the boring stuff is the majority of the stuff there is to experience. Sitting in the waiting room in quiet contemplation before you go find out the sex of your new baby is a part of that experience. I don't think that simply choosing to skip that part leaves your life intact.



Of course, we don't actually want to skip those things, in the same manner that a dog doesn't want to bite its stitches, it just does. We check out because it's in our nature to do so if we can, and now we can. We've adapted to having distraction on tap about as well as we adapted to having sugar on tap, and like sugar we tend to consume past the point of satiety and into the point of gluttony.



Lao Tzu observed that a vase is useful not simply because it has form, but also because it has emptiness. They define one another and without both, the vessel is useless. We're skipping the emptiness that defines our form.



I'm not speaking from authority. I don't even know that this is bad, but it doesn't feel right, and it doesn't feel real. Does it feel real to you?



Doing Enough A couple of years ago, my close friend Mark went into the ICU and he never came out. At the time, I was living in a city that was a 3 hour drive from that hospital. I had a new job and young kids. We all knew Mark's situation was serious, so I went to see him when I could. We visited a few times over the course of a month or two, then he became unresponsive and died shortly thereafter. If I'm being honest, though, I didn't go to see him when I could; I went when it was reasonable for me to go, and when it required a reasonable amount of effort. However, I wasn't dealing with a reasonable situation. My dear friend, with whom I had shared a lot of great moments, was about to stop existing as I knew him. That's an unreasonable situation, and it calls for an unreasonable amount of effort. I had mistakenly applied my everyday sense of "doing enough" to an exceptional situation. We have this shared concept that there's some baseline level of effort, at which point you've absolved yourself of finger-pointing for things going badly. It's a concept the people who support you will fiercely defend. When you're venting to your friends, you'll hear things like "You did everything you could", or "Well, you've got a lot on your plate". This soothing advice is in basically unlimited supply. No matter how much effort you've expended, you can probably find someone somewhere willing to let you off the hook. If you choose to focus on it, you can take comfort in it, but I like to think there are situations where I aim to do more than take comfort. There are exceptional situations where the outcome is more important than what you feel is reasonable to do. There are even situations where the outcome is more important than what you feel like you can do. Don't let those moments get by you without being able to tell yourself you gave them hell. If it's your family, your friends, or your dream on the line, you can't trust reasonable effort. They're worth more than that. If you aren't breaking yourself to make it happen, you'll never know if you did everything you could. You'll always wonder what part you didn't bring to the fight because it wasn't convenient. Don't trust the people who want to let you off the hook. I didn't cheat Mark, I cheated me. Like a lot of us, I treated a stop-the-fucking-presses moment like it was the normal hustle and bustle and shortchanged myself, and I won't let it happen again.

The Code You Don't Write When I began working in software, I tied my sense of accomplishment to the stuff I was able to do. I used to get a huge feeling of satisfaction from a weekend spent working on a clever hack. I would spend serious effort making something run twice as quickly, even when there wasn't a problem with how quickly it was running in the first place. Meeting those types of challenges was my primary motivator. Now, in a leadership position on a talented team, I find myself just as much in the business of avoiding writing code as I am in writing it. A clever hack used to be improving an algorithm, and now it's avoiding writing an algorithm. The clever achievements I'm most satisfied by now are improvements to processes or documentation that make things better without having to open vim.

When I reflect on something I'm proud of, it's usually finding a way to deliver the same value with none of the code. To me, that's the definition of a win.

Every line of code we don't write is dollars we didn't spend, and time on the calendar we get back for free. The opportunity cost of writing one piece of software is not being able to write another piece of software. We've all got to be judicious with resources, but this is about more than that. It's not just efficiency, or focus, it's about getting to the heart of what I'm here to do.

My job isn't to write code. It never was. It has always been to make people's lives better and more productive. I used to focus on one tool to do that. Now, it's just one tool in a versatile toolbox. It's not even the second or third option I reach for. This philosophy forces me to get to the bottom of what someone is wanting to achieve, rather than assuming software is the best way to solve the problem. It makes me think an octave higher. To me, this process offers priceless insight. Assume you're incapable of writing code. How would you solve this problem? What if you had to solve it with money?

What if you had to solve it with a paper-based process?

How would you hire temps to do it?

Could you solve it with hardware? Usually, by the end of this, I know a ton more than I did before, and I've found out how many of my initial assumptions were stupid. It gets me closer to adding value directly, instead of shoehorning my preferred solution onto a problem.

Related Successfully Avoiding Blame

