Author: josh

Pain is information. It tells us that something’s not right. Our reaction to pain is often to stop doing what we’re doing: touch a hot pan, feel shooting pain, take your hand off the pan.

Insulating yourself from pain or friction or conflict robs you of the information that comes along with it.

A smooth ride is a tradeoff. Good shocks on your car give you a smooth ride, but they also mean you don’t feel how bumpy the road is.

A cup of coffee in the morning might help you get work done when you haven’t had enough sleep, but it also subtly encourages you to value sleep less. It helps you ignore what’s essentially pain: Your body’s telling you that you should sleep. Chronic sleep deprivation has worse and less obvious effects than the one-night effects that a cup of coffee solves.

When you test your customers’ interest in your new features only every six months, you’re again avoiding pain. You defer finding out whether they’ll actually use those features for those six months. (Sure, you can ask them what they want. Good luck with that.) Unwilling to fail fast, you get the pain of being wrong way later than you might have, and then it tends to be larger.

I want to protect my kid from pain, large and small. I often see when he’s about to fall or about to fail, or when he does fail. When the stakes are low and my mind is clear, I’ll let him fail. A scraped knee is a lesson. When I deprive him of the information that comes with bumps and scrapes and knocked-over block towers, I do him harm.

Dear reader: Where do you have a smooth ride right now? What kinds of bumps are you being insulated from? Might there be long-term consequences of those bumps that you’re not seeing?

When was the last time you scraped your knee?

Intuition leads us to make good decisions, but we don’t always notice what’s happening.

Maybe it comes from trial and error: You do it once, it makes life easy, so you’re more likely to do it again. And maybe you don’t notice.

You might find yourself writing functions without side effects well before you learn about purity. You don’t need to understand why they’re simpler to benefit from that fact, and thus you might easily stumble into the habit on your own.

Similar: You might find yourself bobbing your newborn to calm her without being told that it commonly helps. And without further being told why it tends to help. Again, you don’t need to know the why to get the benefits. With a crying baby on hand, you’ll try stuff until something works. You’ll stumble onto that, and it’ll become one of the first things you try, pretty quickly.

There’s a lot we know but don’t come to via reason. When we recognize it, we can start to understand it. We can share it. And we can build on it.

I talk a lot about awareness and mindfulness, I know. That’s because they can be the root of a lot of really positive stuff. Knowing ourselves isn’t a prerequisite for bettering ourselves, but it makes it a hell of a lot easier.

Goals based on things you control are good. Goals based on outcomes from complex systems you can’t really control… those will break your heart.

A small daily goal, “eat salad for lunch every day”, is good. Fail today? Maybe you succeed tomorrow. Eventually, maybe you build a habit.

Making your goal “lose 20 pounds” is less good. Your weight is an emergent property of a pretty complex system. There are lots of variables involved. It’s much harder to control. Whatever changes you make to the system around your health and habits to get there might or might not be sustainable. So even if you lose the weight, you might gain it back.

Aim low with a plan to build on little wins. Think micro-goals, not monoliths.

If I pick up my kid and he smells like shit, I don’t spray him with air freshener. I look in his diaper. It probably needs a change.

Sounds obvious, right? And yet we so often react to problems by trying to resolve the symptoms. We don’t stop to think about what’s causing the symptoms.

You have a system. People use it. (Congratulations!) But people find bugs. So you have a bug tracking system. And you have a support team, a team of developers dedicated to addressing bugs in the system.

You get an email from an important user with a list of issues she’s uncovered. And, oh crap, several of them are definitely urgent and important. Enough so that you think the support team should probably (and would probably want to) drop what they’re doing to fight this fire.

So, wasting no time, you copy and paste the text of the email into a new ticket in your bug tracking system and send it to the support team.

Boo.

What happens when a developer fixes the two high priority issues in the email, but there are three left? What if those three are low urgency, low importance, and high effort? It’s one item in your bug tracking system. The implication, of course, is that they should fix everything before marking the bug fixed. But that’s not what you want done in this case, surely.

If you want them to consider the issues separately, you should log them separately. Track them separately. It tends to take just a few minutes and can save more than a little angst.

Developers! You’ve seen this. Maybe you’re nodding knowingly or shaking your head sadly as you read this. But do you think you’re immune to it? You’re not. You do basically the same thing when you change a whole bunch of stuff with one commit.

What if we want to roll back two of the six things you changed in that commit? What if something breaks after that commit gets integrated? Now I have six places where something might have gone wrong.

Boo.

You check twitter first thing in the morning, something kicks you into someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet mode, and you accomplish far less that day than you should.

Often this power goes for evil: You get distracted from what’s actually important to you. You waste your time.

But maybe you can harness this power for good sometimes: Nothing motivates me like having something to prove. Often this involves showing somebody they’re wrong, especially if they’ve corrected me about something.

There are some decisions you don’t get to not make. That is, not making a decision is a decision in itself.

You don’t get to not decide what to do today. Time passes. Avoiding a decision about how to spend it just means you’ll spend it doing nothing of consequence.

If you make stuff, there are decisions about your work that you don’t get to not make. You don’t get to not decide how to do design. Design is inherent in creating a thing. If you make a thing, the thing has a design. If you don’t think about the design, it’s probably bad.

If you don’t make stuff, maybe you deal with people for a living, managing relationships, communication, etc. These, too, are things you don’t get to simply ignore. Relationships don’t go away when you stop thinking about them. Not giving thought to how well you’re communicating probably means you’re doing it badly. And simply not communicating is a communication in itself. (We wonder: Is something wrong? Was it something I said? Or is nothing important happening?)

So: There are these things that happen whether you give thought to them or not. You should always be thinking about them as much as possible, then, right? Well, no. You simply can’t always give as much time or thought to them as you might think is ideal. Even if you could, more effort isn’t necessarily better. Sometimes less design ends up better. Sometimes a relationship benefits from a break.

What you can do is be aware of these kinds of things. Remember the tradeoffs you make when you spend your energy elsewhere. And remember that not thinking about them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

When you tell a someone again and again and again, “Hey, this is a problem, here’s why, here’s how we can fix it”, and they smile and nod and say “sounds good, bro”, but then they gently take no action… Well, their actions suggest that maybe they don’t actually care. And actions speak louder than words, as they say.

Just about everyone at least claims to want to do their job well. It would be career/social suicide to openly declare otherwise, right? They might think they care, too. Sometimes I’ll remind myself to be optimistic about this, via Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity”.

But at some point, you have to look beyond intentions and weigh actual results. The difference between stupidity and malice starts to become irrelevant as time goes on, as occurrences add up.

(Also: You have to at least consider the notion that stupidity can be a convenient front for malice.)

So I’m coming around to a new way of thinking on this: making judgments about people’s intentions and making predictions about their future behavior not by what they say but by what they do.

Feeling dumb is underrated.

Here’s the template:

I felt pretty dumb when ______. But it taught me ______. And now I can ______.

Some of the best things that have ever happened to me involved finding out that I wasn’t so smart. They didn’t feel good at the time, but looking back now, I see that they were good for me.

My best ideas come when I’m relaxed, when I’m at ease. Loosened up. I make connections better when I’m not focused on a particular thing. When I don’t have blinders on. I’m more comfortable being silly, and silly often leads to “oh, wow, that might actually make sense”.

Take a second to think about this.

No, seriously. Stop. Look out the window. Go find a window if you need to. Take a walk.

Do it. I’ll wait right here.

Okay, so: That second you just took? That’s the trick. Take more of those. Don’t fill your schedule. Don’t read the whole book in one sitting. Don’t fill the sprint with feature work. Take a big bite, but then take some time to digest it. Embrace slack.

Creativity happens in the gaps. And creativity is a force multiplier. Creativity is where bright ideas come from, where competitive advantages are born.

Embrace slack. Embrace redundancy. Embrace downtime. If it feels like waste, if it feels inefficient, maybe just maybe it’s a space for your mind to wander.

(Also: Turn off your notifications.)