We were given one last lesson from Steve, which he shared years ago in a commencement speech:

“Your time is limited so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition” Steve Jobs

Our mortality is a blessing and a curse. A curse because we continually lose the ones dearest to us, and a blessing because it concentrates our courage and will to live.

Introspection

While out walking yesterday on a delightfully crisp autumn morning, a recurring question echoed with each step. What is my most potent ability, what affinity do I possess which deserves a greater portion of my time and energy, and how can I cultivate this strength to bring prosperity to my family and loved ones?

One answer I came upon early this morning was unexpected. It isn’t my computer acumen, which I’ve spent years experimenting with and honing. It wasn’t my scientific background in school, or my applied engineering expertise acquired on the job. It isn’t my boundless curiosity for learning, a quality which I’m blessed to have and which birthed this blog. The one irreplaceable attribute I possess is a unique gift to all individuals, yet it is a personal quality mired in superstition. It is simply named intuition.

intuition

1 he works according to intuition: instinct, intuitiveness; sixth sense, clairvoyance, second sight.

2 this confirms an intuition I had: hunch, feeling (in one’s bones), inkling, (sneaking) suspicion, idea, sense, notion; premonition, presentiment; informal gut feeling, gut instinct.
(from Oxford Mobile)

Intuition is the attribute which has the highest potential for earning my freedom, if only I can hone it and trust it with my well being. Intuition is a guide that is the synthesis of reason and emotion, and serves as a foundation for all decision making. Unravelling intuition may well be the most productive path of my generation.

The premise is simple, reactionary rules that are put into place don’t make the world a better place, they don’t improve businesses, and they don’t solve real problems.

I hope you appreciate it as much as I did.

For the past few days I’ve been supporting a software delivery out in Arizona¹, and to set the atmosphere I’ll emphasize that it gets warm here in the summer. The team I’ve worked with has provided fantastic support and kicked it up into high gear over the past month. They’ve gone the extra distance by extending the initial delivery date (first date was too optimistic), freed up local top notch developer and analyst time to support integration (sharp team), and minimized meetings (have I told you lately that I love you?).

While cutting corners on a rapidly approaching cut off date, I performed all manners of unsavory software hacks. Most of those were forgivable faux paus, but one in particular I feared would come back to haunt me. You can safely guess the outcome based on the post title.

Hacking the Earth

An Earth model that we developed in my shop back east is driven by a keyed input file, and is composed of an assortment of tables and polymorphic transformations. These structures support line of sight modeling differences for spherical or WGS84 Earth geometries, as well as varied atmospheric conditions.

The host service that this class lives within has a specified copy constructor and as I looked through the nested pointers in the class, I opted for file based reconstruction. And that served just fine and dandy until yesterday.

It turns out the host simulation is normally run on all manner of dynamic mounted drives and, all input files require specification in the main configuration files. Uh oh! This is done to allow relative paths to function with user set paths and run from any location. As we bumped into the issue around 6pm local time yesterday evening, I volunteered (prompted by the disapproving glares of my team) to correct my wrong doings and fix the code before we left last night.

I was desperately seeking any shortcut to avoid having to write copy constructors and clone functions for the Earth model and all its members, but didn’t see any way around it. My refactoring began with a wordpad editor and a browser download of a few svn accessible files. I was pretty foggy by this point as it’d been a long and busy day which began ages ago when I woke up 3am local time. My poor choice of editing environments lead to a quick failure, and a swap to the tech integration lead’s ² sweet Mac and Win VM setup, with Visual Studio loaded and ready.

Pro Tip: Well designed IDEs are a life saver when you’re bleary eyed and the alternative is Wordpad.

The top level of recoding revealed another layer of polymorphic composed object pointers. Like a Russian doll, each pointer referred to a contained base class which in turn required clone and copy constructors to satisfy the parent objects copy. The clock ticked by for a few hours while I hacked my way downward, adding clone methods as I went to all base and inherited classes. We finally left off last night at the bottom of the stack, with just a single class left, with each of it’s children having no further contained classes. At that point I felt guilty for holding up my colleagues Eric and Mikhail who deserved a healthy break and had long since completed their own tasks, so we called it quits for the night.

Lesson Learned

A Sucker Punch quote comes to mind:

“Don’t write a check with your mouth you can’t cash with your ass.”

Technical debt has a way of demanding compensation at inopportune moments, and while it’s not inevitable, it is mostly avoidable. In this case if more care was taken with specifying polymorphic base classes with clone and copy constructors, my refactor work would have been trivial. This morning I’ll review last night’s dicey hacks and ensure that checks for self assignment are done in the copy constructors, while validating the new code.

Notes:

1. For background see A Tale of Two Sims, and it’s sequel.
2. Eric has been doing a killer job pulling the code all together with meeting “point defense” by Greg (epic tech management). The entire team has been a pleasure to work with: Mikhail my partner in modeling, as well as Dan and Cort for c++ wizardry. We’ve had some rough spots the past couple of days, but it’s all coming together.

Too focused

For a guy who’s attention drifts like a summer breeze, I had thought it impossible to be too focused. But I was wrong. While strolling in the southern outskirts of Tucson’s desert this morning and quietly listening to the chorus of birds and crickets, I could clearly see the drawbacks of getting lost in the details.

The idea for this morning’s riff was born in a place far from the quiet desert dawn, in the chaotic realm of startups. The concept coalesced as a pattern between technical founders and naive business plans, which I admit to observing in my own startup thinking. The recognition was triggered by Patrick McKenzie’s well thought and articulated analysis of customer acquisition channels. Fellow Hacker News regulars might recognize Mr. McKenzie’s handle there, he’s patio11. Here’s an excerpt from Patrick’s post which describes the naivete of technical founders when it comes to business strategy:

Taking A Hack From Tactic To Strategy
I think this isn’t exactly a new insight. There are lots of folks who, when asked for their marketing plan, will say “Oh, we’re going to get lots of search traffic” (indeed, that is probably second only to “it will grow virally” in terms of signaling “has probably not thought this through.”) What separates hopes and dreams of future success from very valuable businesses is a strategy which, with execution and refinement over time, will actually achieve the goals.

We often hear products described using something like “It’s like Facebook, except for dogs.” How about, instead, describing businesses like “It’s like Quicken, except Quicken sells primarily through boxed software channels and we’re going to sell primarily through banks which will deal with us for a cut of the sale price and the ability to deepen relations with small business customers, who consume lots of high margin services and stay locked in for decades at at time.” (That may or may not actually be true.)

We often accept previous experience or minimal proof-of-concept prototypes/MVPs in lieu of a functioning product when evaluating whether someone is capable of executing on building something. Why not do essentially the same for proving that one is likely to get customers? A previous background in revenue maximization through negotiating cross selling deals for banks, or evidence that you have enthusiasm from a few bankers who like the concept and want to hear more when you have something to show, demonstrates a certain likelihood that marketing challenges will be overcome like technical challenges will be overcome.

Similarly, for a startup hoping to make inroads for SEO, I’d be thinking less along the lines of “we’ll sprinkle some SEO on our website” and more along the lines of specific plans for scalable content generation, securing backlinks at scale, and winning the support of influencers either in the niche or in other addressable niches which your competition may not be aware are relevant to that facet of their business.

My take on this: as one’s perception bends more heavily towards technology, they are apt to see every problem solved by a technical solution. After reading that passage I shared feedback on the importance of learning from experimentation and discovering a signal of success, then left to go out on a walk wondering where my search for a MVP would take me.

By and large I’m thankful to have streaks of hyper focus where I get a lot of work done in a short period of time, but this extreme form of productivity comes at a cost.

It is eerie how concentration steals away moments. Time flows endlessly while we are in the zone. The rest of the world fades into the background as all attention zeroes in on a single task. Concerns outside of the zone of concentration are inconsequential, the universe becomes a solipsist existence of action. We become blind to broader perspectives. Tunnel vision leads to trivial solutions falling just outside the horizon of our perception.

Instead of focusing too tightly on a single task, a more stable and effective approach is to drift one’s attention about focus points. The pattern of that lens motion is a function of the observer’s expertise and style. By nutating our perception and balancing our understanding, we increase the likelihood of recognizing resilient multidisciplinary approaches.

1. One customer is a small company which is incredibly satisfied with your current product. Their future is uncertain, but you feel their needs are well matched to your product’s roadmap. They’re low to zero maintenance.
2. The other customer is Huge. They are the dominant source of your company’s revenue. They make heavy customization demands which are a distraction to your team’s product plans. Without them your business will need incremental funding within a few months or faces drastic downsizing or shutting down.

Which do you see as the right path for your business? The answer appears clear to me, but it’s never so cut and dry for a cash starved startup. Choose your customers wisely.

You have two immediate job opportunities:

1. One you’ve been doing for years and pays handsomely, but future prospects and satisfaction look grim
2. the Other is a spectacular risk which will pay a fraction of the salary while requiring a much greater demand on your time, yet opens the door to a new world of opportunity

Which do you feel instinctively drawn to and why? I know my answer.

Your future splits off in a finite but huge number of potential branches. Each branch sprouts forth from a node you call home. Where do you choose to live?

1. There is a place thousands of miles from where you live now that has unmatched opportunity, but is far from family and has a very steep cost of living
2. The alternative is the home you’ve been living in and made into a calm and comfortable environment, is close to family, and is relatively cheap.

Where you choose to live will impact your life partner, your families, and professions. Home is where we rest, rejuvenate, and do our most delicate planning, but it’s location affects nearly every other aspect of our lives.

Decision making is almost never cut and dry. The big decisions we make in life are far more nuanced than the simple examples listed above. Successful decisions are the ones we make consciously and openly with those who are impacted.

While probing the above trend, I wondered what happens when we segment each year into months, weeks, days and hours. Do the same benefits result from balanced intervals of work and down time? Is there an optimal rhythm for attaining peak productivity? If so is it unique for each individual? And finally how do we determine the best balance for work intervals?

Before exploring the questions posed above, I’d like to briefly review the rationale for expectations on the modern work force. Just a hundred years ago much of the US labor force was still dedicated towards agriculture. After the peak period of the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, there was relentless transition of the labor force from farms to factories. The modern work day was born out of the friction between big businesses and labor unions.

If a robot can do your job, ultimately, one will. http://nyti.ms/m136ef

June 10, 2011 10:53 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@mattmireles

Matt Mireles

One of the fallacies of the industrial work culture, is that employees working longer hours leads to greater productivity. This faulty line of reasoning was predicated on making the analogy of humans to machines. For trivial labor which is capable of automation this assumption wasn’t far from the truth. But the never-ending work day analogy breaks down for dynamic roles which require critical decision making. These are precisely the type of jobs which drive the US economy today, and many of them are not what you’d expect.

Work life balance

I continue to see sharp professionals and entrepreneurs herald their busy weekends and long nights at work as a badge of honor. To these ladies and gentlemen, I raise a counter example. One subtle error in judgement made while exhausted can cost your business significant dollars and man hours to rectify. Beyond critical decisions, the overall quality of our work deteriorates due to a lack of exercise and rest.

If juggling periods of work and other activities is key to optimizing personal productivity, how do we define an exceptional personal equilibrium. Unfortunately I know of no algorithm which defines the delicate balance between song and silence. Experimentation is required.

Individual expertise and reputation, combined with investments, and lifestyle demands are (soft) boundaries and forcing functions on how much (additional) income we need to generate each year. They help define how much is enough. Ambition and enthusiasm drive us far from questions of satisfaction, into the realms of social status. The scales tip heavily in favor of work when our reputation is on the line. The closer we associate our labor with our sense of self, the harder it is to take time off.

Genuine Comfort and Confidence

Communities who’s members exhibit authentic comfort in their role and confidence in their team are an obvious signal of a healthy group. The community may be chillaxin’ or working tirelessly, but they continue to exude an aura of quiet confidence in just about everything they do. To me, there is no trait more attractive in a community than the unspoken bond of trust between it’s members.

Members by Choice

It almost goes without saying that the healthiest communities are comprised of voluntary members. There’s strong internal friction in groups forced together by external forces, and those communities last only as long as they absolutely must. Involuntary organizations include the likes of drafted soldiers, prisoners, and slaves.

Tightly Coupled Locally, Loosely Associated Globally

The implicit distance metric I refer to above for local and global relationships is not bound by geography. The separation between community members today is the alignment of personal and sub-group goals. The larger community is loosely associated through broadcast web, email or occasional video communication. The local group is tightly bound through more frequent personal exchanges of information, as well as in person meetings. One mind, lots if adjacent neurons.

Belonging

Belonging is being able to disagree with your community without fear of excommunication. It’s a healthy response to voice opinions and be heard. Strict hierarchies are only as smart as a single leader, and often much dumber . Empowering individuals to make expert decisions with periodic peer review strengthens individual skill, team productivity, and enhances community perception. By accepting individual feedback the whole becomes smarter than the sum of its parts.

Enduring communities know when to at least temporarily go out of book, and buck any of the above trends. Instinct guides us as individuals to survival actions which we’re not necessarily proud of, the same holds for social groups. Cognizance of community health helps balance group demands with individual needs.

The attention cult adores fame for a number of reasons, with good odds on cashing in at the top of the list. It takes little imagination to perceive of the dilemma which substantial attention introduces.

The temptation to cash in on fame is palpable

Once well known a creative can pursue a conservative path of upgrades and spin offs on prior work, overcoming a number of challenges while doing so. Alternatively she can continue to embrace the same risks that brought her fame in the first place. One of these directions is a steeper ascent towards mastering a craft or style, the other at least temporarily, satisfies the hunger cry of an empty bank account¹.

Rebuke adoration of the crowd, embrace expert criticism

Effortless to say, not so easy in practice. When last I visited this subject, the decision was clear and remains so. With neither fame nor mastery, I choose to cultivate pro chops. Schedule allowing, I consider any and all work that I’m confident will expand my expertise and repertoire. Credit is not a dominant criteria while developing skill, although a pat on the back never hurts. At present I’ve got an overloaded schedule, but look forward to having more time available in a couple of months.

Notes:

1. Gradients vs Benjamins: Are you climbing a hill or enjoying the view? If you do both at once you better have wings.

Somewhere along the way, between garbage input, inconsistent coordinate transforms, and concurrent execution everything went south. The easy plug and play wonderland you were pitched has been replaced by a gruesome truth. In reality your work will rely on a sinister rats nest of dependencies and complicated constraints.

Your nerves are rattled, the project deadline is looming and for the past couple of weeks all you’ve discovered is one can of worms after another. Team members introduce delays based on the problems they ran into. Managers setup more meetings to ensure the project is on schedule, forcing you to travel and devouring your precious and ever dwindling productive time. Project managers demand resuts even when the product is far from ready to ship, and don’t even think about excuses…

SAY WHAT AGAIN

Schedules never get better

It’ll be a cold day in hell when you hear a project lead tell you that you’ve got additional time or that requirements have been reduced. Like rain falling, you can count on budgets shrinking and everyone’s schedule slipping right but yours.

Every project is composed of a multitude of smaller tasks and yours is no different. Now it’s time to prioritize which features will get executed, and which will be put on the shelf scrap heap (don’t kid yourself).

Slice and dice the work into required plumbing, immediately possible, short term, and larger efforts. Throw bigger efforts into the scrap heap right away. If you work hard, and are lucky you’ll complete a few short term niceties before you’re done. And you will ship, because that’s what builders do.

Regardless of your specific team role, there is a familiar pattern to breaking ground on a new program. Each time you create or join a fresh project it’s common to go through a ramp up phase which may last minutes or a few weeks depending on project maturity, complexity, and schedule.

During the learning phase it’s customary to understand the project goal(s), what’s already been accomplished, and what other sharp folks have done to address similar tasks (research). Then based on loose to well defined requirements, a good enough approach is executed and examined. For a given task successive satisfaction tests are applied by the individual, team and leadership until one of several conditions are met:

1. the task is judged complete
2. the task is handed over to someone else who can better execute
3. the task is determined to be too challenging, impractical, or ineffectual and is cancelled
4. the plug is pulled, and the project is cancelled

What are the outcomes of the above options? The first results in moderate success, the second occurs when leadership overestimates individual strength in a particular area, the third happens when a team is learning and isn’t afraid to change direction, and the final option is all too likely in large organizations where lower priority projects are killed off regularly.

Recipes vs Improvisation

The above case is generic, by the book, and is absolutely horse shit if you are building anything novel. The risk reduction strategy is a recipe for minimizing failure, not for succeeding brilliantly. There is no cookbook for creativity.

If you’re the type of person that relishes in well defined objectives and organized execution, you’ll embrace and adhere to strict recipes which result in predictable results of limited productivity. If you prefer stomaching huge risk and the unknown just for the chance at bringing a brilliant solution to life, then you’ll lean far more heavily towards improvisation. Real projects lie in the region between polar extremes, requiring adept skill to keep in harmony or purposefully out of balance.