Chapter 40. Bad News About Your Bright Future
A wealth of experience makes decisions appear to be easy. Experience gives you confidence, and you use that confidence to deliver your experienced decisions with moxie. Those watching you think, boy, he’s got it figured out. The rub is this: confidence is a delicious answer to uncertainty, but confidence is a feeling, a perception. What you’re really banking on is your experience and your history of hard knocks, which have given you a useful and valuable perspective on which to base your decisions.
And experience has a half-life.
Confidence working well with experience creates success, and when you’re successful everyone says, “Way to go!” and you believe those compliments and turn them into additional confidence that turns into more success and then more confidence, and the cycle repeats.
Again, you are kicking ass.
Success. Fame. These are a type of experience, but they aren’t what got you the compliment in the first place. It’s that you did something significant; you worked and did something significant. Not that you said you did something with confidence.
Like any industry, high tech is full of folks who are confusing success and fame with experience. They’re thinking that showing up at conferences, giving interviews, and writing books about things they did in the past is experience. It’s not. It’s storytelling, and while it might be valuable storytelling, these people are slowly becoming echoes of who they were and moving further from the work they did that matters. They’re confusing compliments for experience.
You may not be one of these people, but it doesn’t mean that you’re not exhibiting the same behavior. My question is: each day, are you struggling to build something new or just easily repeating the success of your past? Success feels good, but you’re not actually doing anything.
Building stuff every day exercises all the muscles necessary to remaining vital. Experience fades and becomes irrelevant without a constant flow of the new.
I’m happy you are kicking ass. It’s ass that needs kicking, and you are doing it well. I believe the success-based environment can be deliciously deceiving. I think that much of what created that environment was blood, sweat, and tears, and who wants more tears? Look deeply at your favorite success story and you’re going to find a bit of misery. It’s a great motivator, but who wants to do that again?
You do.
What’s Next
This book began with a mantra:
We seek definition to understand
the system so that we can discern
the rules so that we
know what to do next so that
we win.
Each person on the planet has a small set of rules they silently repeat to themselves when they find themselves at a crossroads, and it’s these core beliefs that structure their thinking and give them impetus to choose.
No trait is more important to the geek than their structure. The specific type of structural obsession varies from geek to geek. Some are fixated by the constraints of time, others carefully observe and enforce rules, but for each geek, I believe the quest is: “Learn enough about my world to predict what’s next.”
Surprises disrupt structure, which means when the unexpected occurs, the nerd or the geek panics. Wait, I had definition, I understood the system that dictated the rules...WTF?
There were two goals for this book:
Improve your improvisation skills of the moment.
Define your career strategy.
You’ll notice that “Learn enough about my world to predict what’s next” is not included as a goal for this book, because whether you’ve been wildly successful or not you’ll never know what’s going to happen next, and embracing that idea is a strategic career advantage.
More bad news: not only can you not predict what’s going to happen, I’m pretty sure you’re not even fully appreciating what’s going on right now.
Biased by the Now
The traditional reason to leave a gig is because something has gone wrong or is no longer to your liking. The degree of wrongness varies from simply boredom to complex hatred, but whatever the story is, it’s clear it’s time to make a change. If this is the case, go back to Chapter 2 and get started. Here at the end, I want to talk about non-obvious reasons to make a change and some of the ways your brain is deceiving you. I want to explain why you’d leave your job when everything’s swell and you believe you’re kicking ass. I want you to think about why you’d leave a job you love.
You are biased by the now. I would go as far to suggest that you are incapable of imagining what your professional life would be like if you were no longer doing it.
It’s not that you’re not bright or aware of your surroundings; it’s that there’s too much data. There are the intricate personalities of the people you work with that compose an entire unique culture of the team, the organization, and the company. There’s the politics that change the professional mood of the building every day. There’s everything you’re living and breathing right now, and while I believe you could explain to me over a beer what it’s like to work at the company, it would be a description of the moment. You would carefully and descriptively explain to me what it was like to work there for the past two weeks, but it would not be a complete description, because there’s far too much data to organize and describe.
You have an opinion and impressions about your gig, but these are based on your brain gathering together all the data it sees as important and carefully fitting that data into your view of the world so that it makes sense, so that it fits in the system. After that, the data is thrown away because it’s too much data. It’s not that you shouldn’t trust your opinion about your gig, but I am suggesting that just because you think you’ve got it figured out and are happy doesn’t mean you’re growing.
I’ll ask the same questions I asked in Chapter 3:
Have you failed recently?
Is there someone within throwing distance who challenges you daily?
Can you tell me the story of something significant you learned in the last week?
The intent behind these questions is disruption: when has something occurred that you did not predict? It is these disruptive and decidedly non-geek-friendly moments that engage your brain in interesting ways, and I’m of the opinion that your brain’s reasonable and healthy quest for happiness isn’t always aligned with your professional growth, because your brain does not seek conflict.
An Uncomfortable Ending
You should be uncomfortable with this chapter. I’m uncomfortable writing it. I am suggesting:
Just because you’re kicking ass doesn’t mean you’re successful.
Misery is productive.
Conflict is learning.
My hope is that at the end of this book you’re better equipped to deal with misery, change, and conflict. Perhaps you understand your boss better and maybe the reorganization will make more sense. Your professional improvisation skills may have improved by reading the stories of how I’ve navigated Werewolves and Leapers. Finally, and hopefully, you have a better idea of where you want to head in your career because having that structure can help when your career is not going to plan.
Knowing all of this helps, but misery, change, and conflict are going to show up randomly, and sometimes I think you should create them in a professionally healthy sense. Without reason, with no big plan, just a leap in a strange direction for no other reason than to see what it teaches you.
You’re in a hurry.