It’s easy enough to come up with an idea. Fleshing it out into a fully fledged vision is a fair amount more work. Turning it into reality is more work than the majority would take on. But if you need to lead a team to make that vision happen… A team that has to be passionate and creative if they are to pull it off… If you’re trying to build a Disney World…

Life is full of habits. It’s full of conventions. And traditions. People act how they act because that’s how they acted yesterday. Companies act like other companies because it is easier just to copy one another.

Which is probably a good thing. It holds everything together in a predictable pattern.

But some people get bored with that. They see a way to do things better. So they set to work.

And then the world’s habits gang up on them and they lose sight of what they originally intended. Sometimes they do good anyway.

Good.

Heh.

Visions should change of course; being too rigid leads to failure. But they should change for good reasons. Because better ideas replace them or because the laws of reality were not quite understood. But not because it was too hard.

The world is charming like that. It likes to push you towards good enough.

Screw that charm.

It’s never good enough.

I’m in the middle of reading Good to Great by Jim Collins and have just finished a great chapter on confronting the harsh realities that people love to sweep under the proverbial rug. This paragraph really struck me:

Now, you might be wondering, “How do you motivate people with brutal facts? Doesn’t motivation flow chiefly from a compelling vision?” The answer, surprisingly, is, “No.” Not because vision is unimportant, but because expending energy trying to motivate people is largely a waste of time. One of the dominant themes that runs throughout this book is that if you successfully implement its findings, you will not need to spend time and energy “motivating” people. If you have the right people on the bus, they will be self-motivated. The real question then becomes: How do you manage in such a way as not to de-motivate people? And one of the single most de-motivating actions you can take is to hold out false hopes, soon to be swept away by events.

Acting with reality versus talking about dreams. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

The sprout of an idea occurred to be a couple of years ago while watching Bill Gates give his keynote at CES. He was doing his kitchen-of-the-future thing. Your kitchen worktop, he predicted, was going to be a touch screen monitor that showed you recipes. He followed this with his bedroom-of-the-future, where the walls were covered with monitors and you decorated your walls with the wallpaper of the operating system. Putting aside the nightmare of sleeping in a room surrounded by the Windows desktop, something else was bothering me: I knew this was never going to happen how he imagined it. And even if it did, it would be too many years away and pointless enough that it was not worth caring about.

The same month Steve Jobs got on stage at MacWorld and introduced the iPhone. He said:

When’s it going to be available? We’re shipping them in June — we’re announcing it today because we have to go get FCC approval… we thought it’d be better to introduce this today rather than let the FCC introduce this.

It struck me then why I had started to enjoy these Apple keynotes; every announcement came with a shipping date. They didn’t say anything until they’d built it. They weren’t talking about their plans; they were talking about what they had already done. They waited until they were forced to announce it to start talking.

Since then I’ve noticed this quality in others (though very much in the minority). I have grown to admire it. It’s far more interesting to hear what people have accomplished already, rather than what their goals are. Most people plan, dream and set goals, but how many of these actually get accomplished? I’d prefer someone to tell me they got up early this morning and ran a mile, than to hear them dream of running an ultra-marathon. Reality always trumps the dream.

But I had always thought that telling people your goals was a good thing. Tell a friend or publicly announce your goals and you will be held to account if you fail, right? Well I’ve tried this strategy and it has a fatal flaw: people don’t hold you to account. It is not embarrassing to give up; it just means you are like everyone else.

I started to try the opposite strategy: don’t announce what you are doing until you’ve achieved it. Planning to run that marathon? A week after training you can tell people you’ve been running every morning, but don’t mention the marathon you signed up for until you absolutely need to. This strategy, to my surprise, doesn’t just make you look like someone who gets stuff done rather than breaking promises, it is also motivating in itself. There is something far more motivating about telling people your accomplishments than your plans. It becomes something to look forward to. It’s frustrating to stay in stealth mode because you are excited about your plans, so you make sure you get stuff done so you can talk about it.

This strategy also stops you wasting time. I remember an evening many years ago when my dad couldn’t stop chatting away about a leaking tap in the bathroom. It sticks in my mind because he really didn’t have anything to say, but he kept on and on and I grew very bored. Actually fixing the tap took about five minutes. When you’re bored, you really notice how time consuming talking can be. Well that time stacks up whether you are being boring or not.

A year’s worth of gradual understanding recently got summed up by Mike Cane on Twitter:

A lesson I have learned the Hard Way: Those who talk about doing, NEVER DO. Those who STFU and show what they’ve DONE, win.

Shut the Fuck Up and DO IT.

STFU.

Yesterday this was running through my head while I was writing an email meant to motivate someone into getting some work done.

STFU, I thought.

And I did.

If my own motivation gets derailed by talking too much, maybe trying to motivate others by communicating a bold vision is actually destructive too. Maybe the way to motivate someone is not to express a compelling vision of what we can create. Maybe it’s just to start setting tasks and getting something done. To celebrate the achievement; not the vision. To let the motivation build itself.

Having goals, dreams and being visionary are all important. But I’m no longer convinced talking about them is a good idea. Not if you want your ideas to feed reality.

Of course no politician ever got elected by shutting up; so there’s already one case where STFU is bad advice. But then again, how much of what any given politician says actually gets done?

Well, I should probably STFU now.

At last I had made time to step away from my work and relax. Not just for one evening either; I was doing it every day. For a short while I had managed to breath some space into my schedule.

But space is a vacuum.

Currently, my time is packed with chores. I have a speech to prepare. Difficult problems to solve at work. A new project to draw up a proposal for. A diary that has an uncomfortable number of activities in it. Plus the usual pile of paper work to… ignore. To try and fit this all in, and make sure I still create time to relax, is difficult.

But I’ve been doing it.

Today, after doing my set number of hours of work, I pressed play on a new audio book, opened up my sketch pad, and smiled – proud of myself for carving out an evening of casual time.

Time to relax.

But.

By multitasking?

By crafting anatomical drawings in my sketchbook?

By listening to a book on the Six Day War and its impact on the modern-day Middle East?

Somehow it doesn’t quite fit my image of what relaxing should be.

But I’ve tried to fit that image. With a mindless movie or a novelty novel. And I’ve found that bores me. And boredom does not mean the same as relax.

Every so often I feel it is important to take some time to evaluate where I have taken my career so far. Stop, think and make conscious adjustments to make sure it goes where I want it to.

My most recent stop and think has been over the past few hours. I’ve made half the decisions I think I will need to before I’m happy.

My conclusion is that I have become far too generalised. As well as the areas I want to be involved in (design, CSS, JavaScript) I’ve found myself spending far too much time in MySQL and even server administration. I would like to move almost completely away from these areas. I have not the slightest regret about learning them; I just don’t want to learn any more.

PHP is a language I love and would like to continue using. But really, I want to spend less time there and more on the client side areas of CSS and JavaScript. These front end areas are where I want to really specialise. They are where I feel passionate. Databases, in comparison, make my brain eat itself so probably best to avoid.

Generalising, I do feel, is good. It is difficult to completely separate the different layers of a web application and so it is very useful to know enough to interact with areas that connect to my primary domain. In some cases that means communicating with specialists in other areas. In other cases it means setting up proof of concept demo sites that I don’t have to worry about scaling.

So generalising is useful, but two and a half years after starting my journey into web development, I now feel confident that my general skills are good enough. I will invest the time in keeping up, but I want to stop offering some of these skills as a service.

Instead I want to really start focusing on front end development. I want to hone my design skills and my JavaScript knowledge.

I especially want to focus in this area now that it is starting to become more sophisticated. Lots of really interesting things are happening now that browsers are starting to implement new abilities in CSS, JavaScript and even HTML. JavaScript libraries are also having a tremendous impact on the industry. This is creating a lot of activity and I want to be part of this hive.

In a way this isn’t a new decision I’m making. I’ve been trying to focus myself on Drupal user experience work almost from the start. But I’ve not been effective in positioning myself there, because my work has pushed me in a wider arc.

Particularly frustrating is the lack of time this has given me for work on the Drupal 7 User Experience drive. For the past 6 months I have hardly done anything in this areas. I just haven’t had the time or energy to do so. And quite honestly putting time into open source can be both harmful and rewarding. There is just a limit to how much one can offer without financial reward. This has nothing to do with motivation which I have an abundance of, but more about buying time.

Finally, I think as the web tries to do more and more crazy things, specialising is going to be a requirement to avoid mediocrity. I would have been specialising about now anyway, but I think this means that I need to take this a bit further and hyper-specialise. I’m not sure what that will be exactly yet; perhaps the industry will guide me there.

That’s the general plan. Just need to refine and execute it.

If you haven’t already read Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘How David Beats Goliath‘ do so now, or this will make less sense.

I’m still slowly making my way through Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals (I am about a third way through). At this stage it is easy to see Lincoln as a David who won the presidency by fighting the complacency of his rivals (the Goliaths). Lincoln was far and away the underdog, but he was very good at doing what those who thought it their destiny to win the presidential nomination would not. Goodwin writes (chapter 8):

Lincoln, like Seward, had developed a cadre of lifelong friends who were willing to do anything in their power to ensure his nomination. But unlike Seward, he had not made enemies or aroused envy along the way. It is hard to imagine Lincoln letting Greeley’s resentment smoulder for years as Seward did. On the contrary, he took pains to reestablish rapport with Judd and Trumbull after they defeated him in his first run for the Senate. His ability to rise above defeat and create friendships with previous opponents was never shared by Chase, who was unable to forgive those who crossed him.

Lincoln also broke the ‘rules’ by purposely remaining unknown as a contender until the last moment so that there would be little time for him to cause ‘offence to others’; which is exactly what Seward, who was favourite for the nomination, had unwittingly done. Instead the little-known Lincoln took his rivals by surprise and seized control of the political conversation at the critical moment, steering support away from his rivals and towards himself. He was able to do so because he had cultivated his army of supporters. And, perhaps just as crucially, by the hard task of also establishing friendships with those who could so easily have become enemies.

That’s a pretty obvious lesson that is technically easy for us all to use and benefit from. But how many of us are prepared to? Not only is it hard work to always make friends, but resentment feels a little too natural to fight.

I used to be a pessimist, and found that didn’t work out so well. Over time I became an optimist, and found that didn’t work out so well either. Eventually I learnt to be proactive.

Optimism is far superior to pessimism. You look for the best, you find it and that makes you happy. But, I found it also made me slightly delusional. At some point reality came knocking and I realised that thinking positive thoughts only brought peace and happiness to me and to those I now smiled, rather than frowned, at.

Other people, on the other hand, were still bullied, fell ill, got injured, got killed, still suffered financial hardship, took addictive substances, still had their woes.

So the next stage was to be proactive. I used my re-awakened pessimism to find the problems. Looked for the good, the opportunities and the solutions with the optimism. Then got to work.

When I first made the distinction between dreaming and doing, it felt like an insight that would dramatically change my life in an instant. But the trouble with self-improvement is it’s never as easy as the books tell you. Yes, I thought to myself, I shall be proactive… but my first attempt involved pacing my house merely thinking about being proactive while the washing-up remained un-washed-up.

Over time, I did start being proactive on things that really mattered. Lots of things. A new thing every day. I wanted to solve all the problems in the world, and ended up solving nothing.

I learnt that I had to focus and the focus was to start with something selfish. I was reaching my middle-twenties and I had not yet established a career for myself. A career had to be the first stage, and I’d been neglecting it. I had fallen in love with the open-source software movement. I saw what good it could do to provide useful software to everyone for no cost and with the freedom to use it how they needed. More specifically, I found Drupal and examples of it being used by charities to help them organise, raise money and communicate. I loved how I could work on building a tool for commercial or even fun reasons, and then see the tool used for great things I could not foresee. I had found my career.

When that clicked I really did become proactive. I had found what I wanted to do and so stopped getting distracted. Over the past year I have spent my time learning to code, learning to design, and learning all the other ins and outs of being a web development professional.

I’ve learnt a lot in that year and a half. Not in small part because I didn’t stop for things like evenings or weekends. I got hooked on a dream – had a solid reason for following it – and managed to block everything else out.

My view of the world over that time has gradually matured. I keep on finding new bits of the puzzle and figuring out how they fit into the big picture. That’s exciting. Sooner or later I realised that I could make my own pieces and change the picture slightly. That is even more exciting.

It is addictive.

Right now I am learning how to make my first piece. It’s difficult and hard work but I am determined to figure it out.

But here is the problem: I hunger for my picture of the world, and the disparity between that and reality annoys me. There is a sense of having my optimistic delusional-self back, but somehow being aware of it. There is an arrogance in there, which wraps itself around an inferiority complex. And probably worst of all, although I love my family and my friends and would go to huge lengths to help them, I also resent them interrupting me or otherwise distracting me from seeking the world I would like to create. I want to help on my own terms. Somehow I’ve found a way to mix selfishness and selflessness together.

It’s not like this is a new personality for me. I’ve not really changed just because I now have a solid goal. It’s just that there now seems to be a reason for being the way I am. Not a cause, but a reason.

Unfortunately, I’m not really happy with who I am. I don’t have the fun that I could fill my time with. I don’t live stress free like I could. I’m not always there for my friends like I probably should be.

And yet, for the first time in my life, I am not willing to change.

I used to watch a telly program called ‘You’ve Been Framed’. It was basically a collection of home video clips that were funny. Until, that is, they ran out of new clips, and it just became a series of people falling over. After not too long, I stopped laughing and started to actually feel sorry for the poor people who slipped, fell, had a piano land on their face, etc.

Then there was the presenter’s commentary.

In order to escape this commentary, we invented the web and waited patiently for YouTube to arrive. Which is fine as long as you ignore the comments. (Why can’t I can’t ignore the comments?)

Finally, today I came across an example where the commentary actually helps make it funny. I think the trick is to use it to tell the story behind the clip.

We like stories. And the best comedians tell stories rather than jokes.

Have a read and listen.

(I really do hope he doesn’t make it a ring tone.)

(If you don’t think kids are funny, try dads)

Wow. I completely missed the important England football match today because I was busy working. Not that I had to work, I was just so absorbed in it that I forgot.

I’m not sure if this is a problem or not. I mean, on the one hand I know it’s unhealthy to be obsessive. But on the other hand, most of the people I think of as personal heroes are. It kind of goes with the territory of doing amazing things.

So maybe I shouldn’t fight it.

Another personality trait I hate having is an inability to see when I’ve done good work. I have never produced anything that I’ve believed is good. Yet logically I know that I must be good at certain things because of grades or random praise from strangers. It doesn’t make sense that these could be lies, but I still feel in my gut that they are lying. I just can’t figure out why.

This is a good trait though. I think without it I wouldn’t really achieve anything. I certainly wouldn’t push myself.

But I hate it because it means that any feeling of a job-well-done lasts no more than ten minutes. Ten minutes before I come to my senses and realise what utter crap I have produced.

It drives me crazy.

But I don’t think I should fight it.

If I ever make you a cup of tea, the worst thing you can do is say ‘oooh, that’s a nice cuppa!’ I won’t believe you, and I’ll start stressing about it. The other worst thing you can do is say nothing.

In defiance I’m not going to proofread this post and I’m going to make myself publish it. Because it’s fine to push out crap every now and again. In fact, failing to do so might make me ill.

Oh crap.

Mike Cane has kindly reminded me of a horrific film moment from my childhood. I have just one scene in my head, because it is the only one I watched. That TV went off damn quickly, but the scene stayed firmly embedded in my head.

Stills from that scene are on Mike’s blog post. The film is The Reflecting Skin. I did not know that until just now.

Funny, how the emotions stay with you.

Deep breaths.

There is only one other film I can remember when I had a similar reaction. I remember it had subtitles and to my great surprise my first view of an adult penis. I was so shocked that I turned off the TV!

Next day I was a very confused young man. Kicking myself for turning off the TV and trying to convince myself that it was only the woman I was interested in seeing again. That scene is still firmly embedded in my head. Still no idea what the film was called.

Funny how the emotions stay with you.

Deep breaths.

Mum and Dad went to Lincolnshire today to look at puppies.  Apparently they can only walk a few steps before they fall over. Hopefully this is just because they’re babies and it’s not a permanent condition.
Pictures were taken, but father used the automatic focus and it automatically focused on the wrong thing.  We have clear shots of the bitch we are not getting but frankly I’m unimpressed — even though they basically all look the same.

So end of November we should be collecting a brand new Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.  Many of this breed always look angry (due to their eyebrows), but the blurred picture suggests Mum may have chosen one with a cute look.  But being a puppy (and blurred) it’s a bit difficult to tell for sure.