Posted on January 13, 2011 by Liviu Lică in Stories & Life
I strongly believe that in everything we do there must be a balance. In Romanian we say “Adevărul e pe la mijloc” which translates into the truth is in the middle. A person I greatly admire and respect told me, not long ago, that saying this is immature, and it’s easy to say it and just wish for a better, perfect world, instead of getting real and picking a side to an argument.
With all due respect, I disagree. Clinging to one side, or the other, of an argument, without accepting compromise is, in my opinion, the immature thing to do. I’ve read somewhere somebody saying that a compromise is a situation where nobody is happy with the outcome and everybody loses. Don’t agree with that either.
My believe is that the great art of making more correct decision in life, than catastrophic ones, is to be able to balance contradictions. To find a balance between the two sides of an argument, or, even better, to apply one side of the argument to one situation and the other to another. Cruising down the middle might be smooth sailing but it can also make everything flavorless, without the extremes that spice up our daily routine.
The whole point of this is to give the background story behind the greatest contradiction with which I fight daily and which I fail to overcome hourly.
Side A of the argument – Sticking with it
There is the common wisdom that ones you start something you better finish it. Seth talks about shipping, other call it the art of Doing, getting things done, setting your mind on doing something. Another popular wisdom that goes hand in hand with this is that the last mile, finishing sprint, the last 1% is very difficult to get right. The devil is in the details, do things right and so on. With other words, once you start doing something you better finish it and, in the end, make it good. Every book about finishing things I can think of talks about the wall, the dip at the middle. It’s that point where you are almost half through, when there is still enough to go but you’ve put in enough effort to be sorry do abandon the endeavour. The advice is – just focus and go on, it will get better. But will it?
Side B of the argument – Drop it and run the other way Tim Ferriss has in the 4 hour week a line that goes something like: if you go to a movie and don’t like it, leave, if you order a big bowl of salad and had your fill before you even got through half of it, don’t eat it anymore. And, of course there is the omnipresent advice – if you hate your job, just leave, life is too short to wake up every morning wishing you were not there.
So, what should you do: stick to something until you get it shipped or drop it and leave because you don’t like it anymore. I had one of these decisions to make after a few months into my PhD and being the overzealous masochist I am the decision was to ship. I’m still struggling toward shipping it and question the decision every time I sit down and loose yet another afternoon or weekend on it. But I’m close to the end and it would really make no sense to give up now. I’m in the last mile(s) and I’ve trained myself well enough not to give up at this stage.
But really, when enough really becomes enough? When should you drop the project and walk away? I can’t decide. Most decisions to drop something are made based on inconveniences of the moment. But the most efficient are those that have a goal in front of you. I want to get to X, therefore I need to drop Y and Z.
I’ve dropped watching news or TV in general, beyond a few movies or Discovery Channel / Nat Geo programs. It freed up time. I’ve dropped buying additional books until I finish the stack of absolutely great ones that await my attention on the bookshelf. But these are easy. The impact is small, relatively.
What about big ones? Keep the current job or it’s time to leave. Keep packing every second of my free time with project after project or give up on this practice and do something more enjoyable now, not in the future. After all, you can love coding and building website all you want but I refuse to believe there is even one sane  person on this planet that will not prefer to have dinner with his friends instead of coding away late in the night, day after day, for the promise of a dream that might or might not come true.
Contradictions… it’s a struggle do make a decision, to find the balance. Following only one side of the argument will exhaust you, in the long run. You can’t commit to everything all the time because you will run out of time and you can’t drop everything because you will end up doing nothing.
My solution is to set a goal, to define what shipping project X or Y means. For my job it means that i had to keep me challenged, month after month and to be able to provide the means for having the lifestyle I want. For project X it might be to see it online, running, after which I’ll have to make another decision. For this blog shipping means either enjoying it or getting enough traffic to make it worth. For now the first one is the reason.
Contradictions are the reason for searching for balance with every decision. Challenge me if you disagree. I’ll make a project out of it to debate with you.
Posted on December 17, 2010 by Liviu Lică in Stories & Life
We, humans, are horrible at judging talent, especially if we don’t know the first thing about the field we are observing. It’s hard to judge the top figure skaters, beyond the “I like her more, she’s cute” level. It’s hard to learn the subtleties of a certain move that seem easy and yet, if you skated yourself, you would know it’s unbelievably difficult.
Yet, in figure skating, we can observe the act itself, the gracious moves. But what about something more common, like a web developer building a website or even more obscure, a delivery firm delivering a much-awaited package. How do we judge that, from our point of view of outsider, uninitiated in the art of package delivery, how do we price the “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these carriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” attitude? By the way, this is actually not the motto of the U.S. Post Office. There is the obvious quality of service, yet many times services have hidden flaws. That beautiful website might be gorgeous, yet, in the same time, completely counter-intuitive to use, coded backwards, a complete mess for search engines to read. Not to speak of the nightmares it gives you when you want to update the smallest thing. But hey, it’s beautiful and it costs half the money the other guy was saying it is worth. And about that package, you only got 4 out of the last 5 packages, but hey, the ones that made it though were here fast, one a little crumpled, but fast!
As sure as the fact that’s snowing right now in Bucharest, there is a way in which you, the business owner and the master of an intricate and well oiled system that provides great service, to show your average un-initiated customer with a great service and a way to tell that you do your job well.
Just put on a show! Make a point of how fast you delivered the package and how reliable you are. Do it again and again, put on a show. Talk to your customers and give him an inside look at the many steps and things you had to consider when you built his website, show him a piece of code to get him grasp the sheer amount of typing you had to do, show him the 50 prototypes and sketches you made, until you found perfection.
It might seem like a scam or bragging but it’s not. You need to give a glimpse into the pains and efforts it takes you to be good a swift so that your customers appreciate you and value your work at its true value. Otherwise you will get exactly what Dan Ariely describes in his locksmith story. The, “What? 50 bucks for 10 minutes of work? You gotta be kidding me, pal” attitude. Yet, make them understand that it took you 30 minutes to get there and 30 minutes to go back and you saved her 200$ a the trouble of buying a new lock and that you performed an act that it took you 10 years to master and it would take her 10 years to do. Suddenly the 50$ for 10 minutes of work seem like a bargain.
Put on a show, don’t overdo it, but put on a show. My father always says that if you don’t brag yourself about your real achievements, nobody will do it for you.
Posted on August 24, 2010 by Liviu Lică in Stories & Life
A little out of place?
Have you ever watched a friend or family member work frantically, almost in panic to do some task, while you inexplicably seemed to want to just get out of the way and do as little as possible, although you know you should be helping? Have you ever asked yourself why you might be doing this?
I am convinced there is a strong tendency, in every social group, be it family members, freinds, a project team at work, the local reading club, to keep an acceptable level of excitement or placidity, acceptable by all. No one likes people dancing on the tables at the book club or people reading a book, sitting quietly in a corner at a night club. That part of our brain that wants only safety does not like extremes.
You can call it acceptable behavior or whatever you like, I will call it the Excitment vs Placidity Index (EVPI). All is well while the EVPI stays glued to the commonly accepted level. However, life has is not as predictable as some fantasize and sometimes things don’t go as planned.
And so you get the family meetings when the self-labeled black-sheep defends an idea that is completely opposite to what everybody else think they believe in, a group of coworkers in which one person depicts with such energy and fury some idea that the rest seem to shrink in their chairs. Or the reverse. A group of friends at a concert, excited and jumping, and the one guy who seems more bored of attending concerts that a cow is of chewing grass.
What goes wrong here? What’s with this differences? And what happens when the group is faced with this discrepancies. As I see it there are two outcomes:
- conflict
- equilibrium
You either get somebody stand up, usually a power figure in the group, and say ‘Geroge, just sit down and stop making a fool of yourslef’ or, the group works toward adjusting the EVPI to the usual value or a new level of acceptability for this EVPI is considered, at least temporarily. Big words for simple things. If somebody starts dancig on the tables the rest will wither make that person feel emarassed and come down, they’ll follow the example or they’ll get into a fight and put the wild dancer outside the boundaries of the group. Check out this guy (it gets interesting after around 1 minute):
Read Seth’s comments about this clip, written from the perspective of his book Tribes.
I believe there is a very strong social force, in every group, that fights to preserve the usual acceptable level of the EVPI. Not too much excitment, not too much placidity, just enough to make you be part of your group. A Rock concert is heavy on the excitement, a bus ticket line is high on placidity.
Next time when somebody, maybe from your friends, family or coworkers seems to be more than usually excited and you seem to be sitting in you chair and beeing more quiet that usual ask yourself, what are you doing? are fighting to keep the acceptable level of Excitment vs Placidity? And if yes, why? And should you?
The same force is one of the reasons it’s so difficult to move a group of people with a very well established level of acceptable excitement vs placidity entwined into the very fabric of the group. I believe that understanding this is hugely important if you want to bring change inside a group.
I’ve been working on a small project which consists of taking a picture through the webcam or recording the video stream it provides, fascinating, isn’t it? Nothing fancy, just the standard things you will find all over the net, programs like this one.
But what amazed me, while working on this, were the print screens you see in the explanations of these programs. You see the author, bent over the keyboard in a more or less messy room with various degrees of uncombed hair.
And then it dawned on me that the test shots I’ve been taking myself look horribly close to those. I mean, how can you look at 1 am, after a full day of work?
And then I wonder – how many of these programmers that post their projects all over the web, some of whom are reaaaaaaally good, realize that when they look at those test pictures, besides the quality, size and so on they should be looking at their congested geek eyes, shut down the computer and go for a walk IRL (that’s In Real Life for those of you who actually look out the window to see if it rains instead of Googling for the local weather).
At least I realized it! And now I’m going for a walk…, oh wait, I’ve just figured out how to fix that zoom problem, let me do that first and then… What’s that my Spirit of Self Preservation? I said what? Just now? Did I? Are you sure?
Posted on April 16, 2009 by Liviu Lică in Stories & Life
When you set up to build something, be it a new company, a great service, a product that the world can’t live without, one of the greatest barrier you hit is made from stereotypes. Let’s take luggage as an example. It took us so many years to put the tiny wheels on it yet people knew what the wheel was for many a year. And every year hosts of designers were thinking on how to make the next great bag and didn’t think about it. Why is that? Because a bag should look like this and this and that and doesn’t have wheels. So go wild boys and put flowers on those bag but no wheels. Luckily something snapped and they figured it out, after all.
But what if you took a guy that had never seen a bag yet knows what wheels are and you tell him to build some contraption for moving his belongings from point A to point B? Is he more likely to make a box with wheels on it than something that you have to brake your back to carry around? Probably.
Stereotypes kill ingenuity. Not because people are stupid, nor they lack creativity, it’s just hard to make a different sort of bag when you know what a bag should look like.
That’s why interdisciplinary approaches sometimes give incredible results. See Gary Vaynerchuck, who is a wine guy that started using the web tolls that were available in a way he thought it would work, and it did work! Look at Loren Feldman from 1938Media. Comes from outside the whole web geek culture, takes a different approach, which made sense to him, and nails it.
So next time when something you don’t know how to do comes your way, don’t run the other way, just do it the way it might seem natural to you and maybe you will do it differently then the rest and your way will be better.
Posted on December 18, 2008 by Liviu Lică in Stories & Life
That’s an easy one – we don’t have any traffic, why bother?
This guy has a better reason for it – see here. I like @Jimconnolly‘s approach to business. Very clear and open about everything and that, to me, seems the best way to do it.
