Sometimes in life, with no warning and no obvious desperate need, something comes from out of nowhere and knocks you out of a complacent stupor.

The book

Last year, someone loaned me the book you see to the left. I decided it looked like a good plane read and took it with me to Ruby DCamp. It wasn’t particularly well-written, and was far from a page-turner. But every few pages, it was like banging a gong in my brain:

“Brandon. Wake the heck up. You are acting like a selfish douche.”

Basically, you need to go right now and buy it. It helped me connect the dots on much of human behavior, especially my own, and the ludicrous things we do to avoid having to change our worldview, even just a little bit.

The basic premise is: If you are treating anyone, anywhere, in any way, as if they’re an object instead of a person, you are chipping away at your own psyche by betraying what you know is right. You’ll then manufacture a story, a version of reality that protects you from dealing with this until you lose the ability to connect with others at all.

All of this caught me off guard. I began to realize that I was wantonly wrecking relationships all around me, merely to serve the need to be right and just. I cried hot tears of shame on the flight to think of the way I’d treated strangers, coworkers, even my wife.

My finely-honed skills of justification were leading me to the kind of callousness and under-the-surface anger that I can pretty much guarantee would have ended my marriage. Basically, pretty serious stuff.

There’s a prevalent metaphor in the book about people being “in the box” that I didn’t really latch on to. However, I was struck with the non-intuitive insight that anything you do to help while in this headspace isn’t really helping. It’s like trying to chart a course to the other side of the world if you believe it’s flat. You have to step into another worldview to do anything of any use.

The Circuit

So we have this big, huge problem in our lives. And no ability to solve it by any conventional means.

Guess what the secret is to stepping out of your worldview? To want it. That’s it.

If you decide to truly desire to understand how another person is feeling, you will almost immediately reverse the effects of objectifying another human, and you will begin to put yourself in their shoes.

Unlike almost anything else in life, you can wish empathy into existence.

You then begin to wish the best for this person. You may even wonder what you could do to help this person. You may even find that there is something you can do for this person.

So here’s the thought pattern I saw emerge from this line of thinking:

1. Judgement/Objectification (or any act of self-betrayal)
2. Justification (the story we tell)
3. Realization of the act of self-betrayal
4. Desire to empathize & correct the action
5. Re-Humanization of those we objectify (and apology)

That’s a circuit. The goal is to close it as quickly as possible. (In IT parlance, it’s about Mean Time To Resolution, not Mean Time Between Failures.)

Two examples

I’ll give two examples: one from the book, and one from my life.

In the book, on of the first stories is of a husband who’s trying to get some rest, with his sleeping wife beside him. Their baby begins crying, which he tries to ignore. He commits the first act of self-betrayal by not helping. “I’m sure she’ll get up.”

Then the justifications. “Why isn’t she getting up?” “Doesn’t she care that I have work in the morning?” “She obviously is lazy and doesn’t care about my needs.”

So here’s a fully-concocted story that buries anger and resentment inside a person. But if he’d stopped, he could have realized that he she was just his loving wife, that she was sleeping, and perhaps she really needed his help with the baby that evening.

In my own life, I’ve spent decades training all my powers of observation, psychology, and analysis on trying to stitch together someone’s story… so that I can judge them. I still have this nasty habit.

Last week, my wife and I were fortunate enough to travel to Hawaii, and we spent a morning on a cycling excursion with a newly married couple. The young lady had nothing good to say about her trip. She was staying in the most expensive hotel and dining at all the finest restaurants on the island, and found faults in every part of her trip. The bed was too soft to sleep in. The food was disappointing.

I used my skills to project into the future for this couple, and see much trouble for this princess and her pea. And what did I get for my efforts? I got to turn this young lady from a human into a measuring stick that found me superior in every observable way.

But I couldn’t leave it there. My brain is now too aware of the concept of self-betrayal to let me get away with it anymore. I began to realize that here was a young lady that had one chance to have a memorable honeymoon, things kept going wrong for her, and she hadn’t yet gathered the life experience to be grateful for what she had. There might have even been something kind I could have done to help make her trip memorable in a positive way. I stewed over this for a while, apologized to my wife for the negativity, and went back to having a wonderful time.

And that’s just one tiny example of many dozens of acts of self-betrayal I commit on a daily basis.

Closing the circuit faster

Trying to close the circuit can be overwhelming.

You have to forge new neurological pathways, which is always uncomfortable. It requires that you assume that you are not necessarily noble and good and just, which chops your ego into little pieces. Many of us rarely get past Justification. Getting past Realization can seem impossible.

But here’s the amazing thing: if you simply expose yourself to this concept and it rings true for you, it will begin to seep into your thinking. You will no longer be able to enjoy guilt-free judgment of other human beings.

I still have these moments of judgement and anger with my wife, but I now have the gnawing sensation at the back of my mind, the Bat-Signal that tells me I’ve committed an act of self-betrayal. That part is automatic.

Then, I try to see how long it takes me to close the circuit. It still often takes me a day or two to come around, but I’m getting faster in many cases. Eventually, I hope to open and close the circuit so quickly that the net effect is that I no longer sit in judgement over (or objectify) anyone.

What to do next

How many times do I need to tell you? Go get the book! But you can play along at home even if you haven’t read it. The next time you find yourself angry or seething at a person, try to just want to know how they’re feeling. Start telling yourself their story instead of yours, and see where that takes you.

I am a relatively new practitioner of this type of thinking, but I can tell you that it will open your heart to serving others. This will lead you to real friendships, lasting relationships, contentment, happiness, and pretty much every measure of success that will matter to you as you look back on life.

Note: please pardon the crudeness of these drawings. They were done on an iPad at 2 AM.

What does it mean?

You know what it is to be introspective, right? To be able to analyze your own patterns of thought? A person I admire a lot told me that in his hiring decisions, introspection was the a primary quality he looked for in candidates. I was surprised to hear that, but I think it’s the wisest job requirement I’ve ever heard.

A lot of people see this and conclude that they are largely passengers in life, blown about by the winds of circumstance:

People who see the world this way often have verbal giveaways. “She made me do it.” “He was really pushing my buttons.” “No one listens to me.”

Why give up so much control? Because it’s easy. When life is just reacting to outside forces, we are not responsible for our situation. The boss won’t implement your ideas. Your spouse isn’t supportive enough. You were passed over for a promotion. But it’s not your fault. You’re not responsible for the outcomes, things just happen.

We get the pleasure of being right, but without the burden of having to do anything other than complain when things inevitably go wrong.

Enter introspection.

People who can introspect recognize the fact that their own biases, distortions, and assumptions sit in between actions and consequences, and they have a dramatic influence over our interpretation of reality.

Five people can literally see the same thing and draw five radically different conclusions. The reason is that they each have a complex set of machinery inside their brains that literally alters their reality. How many times have you perceived a slight when there was none? How many times have you been asked “what is that supposed to mean?” when it was supposed to mean exactly what you said? Have you ever remembered something so vividly, only to find out that wasn’t how it happened at all?

Introspection is the work you put in to see your internal machinery for what it is.

What do you do with it?

Being introspective doesn’t necessarily carry any requirement that you act on it, but it makes justifying inaction very difficult.

Here’s an example. Recently, I had an altercation where I got into a tug-of-war with a coworker, and I angrily and passive-aggressively “took my ball and went home”. He was clearly in the wrong. I was right. I was justified. My position was infinitely defensible. Everyone else saw it my way. I won, case closed.

But there it was, gnawing at the back of my mind… what if I wasn’t right? What if I wanted so badly to be right that I was willing to damage relationships to win? (And make no mistake, that’s how it went down.)

Did I apologize? No. Why not? Because shut up, that’s why not. OK, I’m still a bit defensive about it. But the time I took to analyze my actions and position won’t let me get away with this behavior next time. That’s a tiny, broken piece of me that I will fix the next time I encounter a similar situation.

Maybe over time I’ll be able to deal with these situations in real time rather than damaging one relationship to save the next.

The problem is that we all build a thick, protective shell around our internal machinery throughout our lives. It keeps us from getting hurt by what others say or do, but it also inhibits the ability to take in precious lessons or advice. The great thing about having a habit of introspection is that you don’t have to do anything, this shell breaks down, becomes more permeable, and allows lessons to seep in.

Lots of small epiphanies > one big epiphany

I could tell you 4 or 5 pretty awesome stories of how introspection caused me to shift my thinking in a significant way, but that’s not actually what has had the most major impact on my personal happiness.

The biggest change has been creating the habit of cracking open this machinery to allow me to tinker a little bit, every day. Without much effort, by default I now observe my own behavior and thinking, ask why I did things a certain way, and wonder if it could have been done better.

Just like software developers get used to dealing with hard problems they don’t have answers for, introspective folks get used to challenging their own assumptions and cognitive biases and asking hard questions that may return answers they fear.

What’s the benefit?

Software developers know all about continuous improvement. That’s the whole promise of the Agile movement: small, continuous tweaks based on quick feedback to improve something until it’s shiny and wonderful.

Introspection is the path to an agile life: the ability to frequently refine and improve your interpretation of reality (and your behavior) until you are in a place where happiness is no longer dependent on external sources. And I’d contend that no one ever achieved happiness when it was dependent on external sources.

Introspection also allows you to confront and address the things you fear, to the point where you wonder why you’d ever feared those things in the first place.

Lastly, it’s a prerequisite for true empathy. Once you start asking yourself why you do things, you can’t help but wonder what you would do in someone else’s position. Empathy is a powerful ally (that’ll have to wait for another post), but I don’t believe I’ve met a person in possession of it who lacked the ability to introspect.

So the benefit is lifelong, intrinsic happiness. And mastery over fear. Also the ability to empathize. So, you know, good things.

How do you get it?

You could go become an addict and wake up in a pool of your own vomit. People often take stock of their lives and figure out where they went wrong when they hit “rock bottom”. It also carries with it some downsides… for instance, waking up in a pool of your own vomit. This also generally produces one large, temporary epiphany, rather than establishing a habit of introspection.

You could meditate. I plan to put this into practice in the future, but it’s not how I learned to introspect. I know some people who claim to meditate who aren’t particularly introspective, so it’s not a 1:1 ratio here.

You could ask others hard questions about you. I asked my wife recently if she was disappointed in me for gaining weight after having lost it, and she said “I don’t know… I guess I am.” That’s a hard truth to take in, but you can’t possibly claim to possess true introspection without being open to hard truths.

Hang out with truth-tellers. For my money, hanging out with truth-tellers has had more impact than anything else. Having close friends who are willing to call BS when I’ve deceived myself has precipitated my most painful lessons and greatest personal leaps forward over the past few years.

This is going to sound dumb, but also in this category, I’d put “listen to the Back to Work podcast with Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin”. They are truth-tellers and you should just start at the beginning and listen to as many as you can stand, until you develop an internal Merlin Mann you can hear cajoling you into being honest with yourself.

Ask “5 whys”. This is a classic problem-solving technique. If you hit pause and analyze your reaction to something, ask why you did it, and why you did the thing that was the reason you did it, etc., you’ll often find it relatively easy to untangle the source and reasons for your own thinking and behavior. This is easy to do (but hard to remember to do) and yields lots of insight.

The temptation is to ask 1 or 2 whys and declare victory over self-ignorance. You’ll typically know when you’ve reached internal bedrock though, because it will be uncomfortable, scary, even painful.

Ask “what if I’m wrong?” When I have something negative to say about someone else and I’m feeling aware and introspective, I try to imagine the scenario that would unfold in the completely impossible event that I’m wrong. What if that guy isn’t a douchebag… what if he’s just trying to live his life like the rest of us? What if this thing that I blindly put faith and energy into is incorrect? This is the hardest to do by a long shot, so consider that the advanced course.

This stuff will change your life

I’m infinitely grateful for the friends and situations that I’ve encountered that have opened up this style of thinking to me. There aren’t many things I can share with people that I can guarantee will change their lives, but helping people trend toward greater introspection is one of them.

If you’ll put some of these into practice I can promise some new kinds of pain as you wince at yourself, but also a new or refreshed ability to take control of your own happiness, and even your life. I’m curious to hear back from you (here or on Twitter) if you have other methods of introspection, other examples, or if you find any of this to differ from your experience.

This is a part of a three-article series on my journey so far as a programmer:

1. How I learned to program
2. Programming lessons that changed my life
3. Why everyone should learn to program (and where to start)

I’ve previously said that the problem with attracting new programmers is not in explaining how to program, it’s in helping people understand why to program.

So why learn to program, aside from the life lessons mentioned in the last post? A lot of reasons, actually.

It really is a form of “digital literacy”. Even if you decide programming isn’t how you’ll make a living, having these skills is like knowing how your car is put together: you will often know how to fix problems yourself, but even when you have to take it to the mechanic, you’re more likely to be taken seriously.

You’ll run a better business. If you have an entrepreneurial bone in your body, learning to program is going to return rewards to you many times over when starting your own company. I’ve seen many startups fail because of poor technical leadership by founders, and many succeed due to good communication between management and engineering.

You’re uniquely set up to succeed. Whether your background is as a writer or a pizza maker, it will likely help bring a completely different perspective to programming, which benefits everyone, including you.

Don’t let your subconscious lie to you

One life-impacting lesson I’ve learned recently from Paul Graham is that we too often let our subconscious make the decision to steer away from things that seem difficult. We mentally file it under “impossible” and let our conscious mind plan our goals around the perceived roadblocks.

Let’s run through some of those:

“But doesn’t programming require a formal education?” No. Next question.

“Isn’t it hard?” Yes. But not in the way you’re thinking. It’s hard in the way that playing an instrument is hard, in that it is merely a matter of practice. In fact, learning to play a musical instrument is the most direct parallel to programming of which I’m aware.

“Isn’t it just for antisocial, nerdy guys?” Oh dear, let’s dive into that one.

First off, it’s time to let go of the programmer stereotype from the 1980s, because it’s not useful and no longer accurate. We have a whole new crop of stereotypes for you to choose from.

Most distressing is the fact that most women have had a lifetime of exposure to the idea that “programming is for boys”, and from a young age, mentally wall that area off. This costs us in software quite dearly, both in sheer numbers and in the diversity of perspective that smart women bring to the activity.

Don’t let a lifetime of people trying to intimidate you (even subconsciously) prevent you from realizing that you have all the capability they do.

Programming is a special ability, akin to a superpower. It transforms you from a consumer into a maker. But it’s not for special people.

Some programmers feel otherwise, that programming is something you need special skills for. Instead of punching them in the face, just remember that a few hundred years ago, these are the types who thought reading and writing should be reserved for clergy. Learn and make all you can, so that these code hipsters can someday complain that they were programming before it went all mainstream.

Starting on your own path

Learning to program isn’t as hard as it sounds if you’re working with people who know how to ramp up the difficulty properly (and speak English instead of jargon). The Learn to Program (Ruby) book I used is a tried-and-true introduction to programming concepts, and I recommend it highly.

Because I evangelize programming to non-programmers, I am often asked, “What language should I learn?” That actually does matter, but mostly because the quality of materials available varies greatly from language to language. This is why I’d say Ruby, Python, or Javascript are great first languages: the quality of instruction materials available for all three is quite good, and they’ll have you actually building things relatively quickly.

There are great resources for new programmers online at Codecademy (Javascript), RubyMonk, and Learn Python the Hard Way. But my personal favorite, by a wide margin, is Hackety Hack (Ruby).

Find the community

Plus, with those languages, there are communities of people who are knowledgeable and generally helpful. There’s simply no substitute for personal, interactive feedback with experienced mentors. Even as a brand-new programmer, I found the pattern of showing up to local Ruby User Groups and following the attendees on Twitter to be incredibly valuable. It helped me create a support network of people who could answer questions or buoy me up when I felt like I was underwater.

Finding a local User Group, following helpful people on Twitter, joining related IRC channels (I use the fantastic IRCCloud service for this), and generally trying to grab the attention of people who do this for a living are all good ways to help luck start to fall in your favor.

Later this year, my understanding is that Mendicant University will be holding classes for newer programmers, and that may be a great time to start. If your local programming groups don’t offer workshops for new programmers, I bet they’d be open to the suggestion.

If you’re interested in learning to program, find me on Twitter and I’ll do my best either to help you or line you up with people who can.

If you knew half of the doors it’d open for you, you’d be starting one of these books or tools tonight and beating down the door of your local programming community leaders to build an initiative for new programmers. If you give learning to code half a chance, I can promise that in some significant way, opening your mind to it will have an impact on the course of your life.

This is a part of a three-article series on my journey so far as a programmer:

1. How I learned to program
2. Programming lessons that changed my life
3. Why everyone should learn to program (and where to start)

In the last post, I talked about how I learned to program. This process has had a profound impact on the way I think, the way I approach problems, and my outlook on life in general. Here are just of the few of the lessons this process has taught me:

Unknowns are not bad. I used to work from a place of fear. If I didn’t know how we’d solve a problem, the risk was unacceptable and we’d abandon the effort. Programmers almost never know exactly how they’ll solve a problem, only that historically, they’ve been able to solve them. This is a much better place from which to start thinking if you want to change the world.

Breaking problems down is my job. Along with the last point, if a problem looked too complex, it was easy to get overwhelmed. But programmers know they’re the last line of defense: the enzymes whose job it is to break complexity down to manageable chunks. This is the key mindset difference that makes programmers so damn special.

Sharing is good. Previous jobs, Marketing in particular, taught me each and every idea is a trade secret and must be protected. Programming leads the way in thinking that “none of us is as smart as all of us,” which is part of why software is moving humanity forward at an astounding pace.

Black boxes are stupid and harmful. I used to think that if I didn’t understand how something worked, I probably never would. Programmers don’t allow “black boxes”: they have to tear everything apart to know how it works. It’s okay to not care how something works precisely, as long as you have a general idea of what’s going on. My friend Dave Brady calls it “Leaver’s Law”: “Anything that a system does for you, it also does to you.”

Sleep is amazing. Programming has taught me that your brain will chew on things for you and often bring you the answer after a good night’s sleep (or even a long walk). Letting your subconscious process things for you is a gift and a curse: I’ve had horrible code nightmares where I couldn’t solve a problem. But more often, I’ve awoken to find last night’s unsolveable problem quite easy to untangle.

You’re a free agent. I used to feel chained to my employer, completely subject to the ups and downs of the company. I felt if I lost my job, I might just die. Programmers tend to think in projects, and an employment contract is just that: a contract that needs to be mutually beneficial, or they’ll find somewhere better to spend their time.

Develop, then trust, your intuition. Programming is a surprisingly intuitive process. Things that just “feel wrong” or “feel right” typically are. You can then find the principles that define and back up these intuitive feelings.

People get paid to do this? If you don’t marvel at that from time to time, chances are your work isn’t aligned with your passion. Even on rough days, programmers generally have a sense of how fortunate they are.

Don’t give in to the overwhelming temptation to quit. The highs are high, but prepare for soul-crushing, ego-obliterating lows. It’s important to build a network of people who know exactly how you feel.

They’re not going to eat you. You will embarrass yourself. You will write hideous code. You will ask stupid questions. But all the embarrassment you’re conditioned to feel is unwarranted, because 99% of the time, sharing things you make with other makers is a safe thing to do.

It’s not as hard as it looks. There are a number of reasons that programming looks hard from an outsider’s perspective, but it’s only hard work (there’s a big difference). Things that appear to be a cliff to newbies actually have a gentler slope on the other side. It’s still a hike, but it’s doable.

Feeling dumb is normal. We’re trained like seals to bark the right answers back at teachers, bosses, etc., and to feel awful with anything less. Programmers get really comfy with not having any answers upfront, and finding fulfillment in the discovery process.

Your capabilities are limitless… eventually. Programmers are special because they tend to look at ignorance on a topic as a passing phase. Because they have to re-learn their own profession as it’s reinvented every few years, they know that given sufficient time and attention, you could become an expert on anything you want.

Show me the code. Years ago, I figured I had to try to play political games to get ahead. I even tried to learn to golf to get in my boss’s good graces (shudder). Not so with programming. Coders either deliver a result, or they don’t. Next to sales, it’s difficult to imagine a more results-driven culture. It’s basically impossible to BS your way through, because you either make things or you don’t.

Feedback is feedback. It’s better to move forward on the wrong information or without permission than to sit still and wait for the perfect opportunity. Being proven wrong is always an acceptable outcome, because it means you’re moving, and the “perfect opportunity” seems to prefer a moving target.

It’s about the journey. This is probably the lesson that’s had the biggest impact on my life. It’s too easy to become so focused on chasing some big reward while missing all the wonderful experiences in between. If you can’t enjoy the journey you’re taking, you probably won’t love the destination either.

Above all this, I’m generally a much happier, more patient person. I’m infinitely grateful to all the people who taught me these lessons and encouraged me to keep pressing forward.

Learning to program has changed my life in vastly more ways than listed here, and it’s why I’m so passionate about making the onramp less steep for new people. In the next post, I’ll talk about why you should learn to program and how you can get started.

This is a part of a three-article series on my journey so far as a programmer:

1. How I learned to program
2. Programming lessons that changed my life
3. Why everyone should learn to program (and where to start)

Quite often, when I tell people I left a career in marketing to teach myself to program and develop software, they react with surprise or even amazement. As much as my ego wants it to be, it’s really not all that special, and it’s something I believe anyone can do, and many should.

Here’s how I learned to program, how it changed my perspective, and how you can do the same without falling into some of the same pitfalls I did.

The spark of interest

After spending nearly 5 years learning online marketing for the startup I worked at, I had become profoundly unhappy in my job. The only path forward I saw for myself was “marketing guru” (ugh), and I was constantly depressed.

Several people, including my dad, suggested that I pick up programming, and that I might enjoy that more than my present career. I perceived it as a serious affront to my abilities as a marketer and fumed at the advice.

But eventually, I decided to take a few minutes to talk with our lead developer and brought the idea up. His response surprised me and sidestepped all my concerns: “Everyone should know how to program. It’s a part of living in modern society. It’s like knowing how to change your oil or change a tire.”

We talked late into the night, and he wanted to show me how amazing programming was. He wrote a little program in Ruby that would create different animals, give them stats, let them fight, and see who would win.

I watched the strange symbols dance around the screen and was totally fascinated and thoroughly confused.

He handed me Learn to Program by Chris Pine and suggested that I start reading it. He said that I’d know whether I had any interest within two weeks, and my response would be either “this isn’t for me,” or “people get paid to do this?”

Learning to program

I started in on the next night, and asked the second question within hours. Captivated, I spent every night for the next few weeks working through the exercises in the book.

Each day I’d run into the developers’ room to talk about concepts, check my code, or get help on the tougher exercises (looking back, a recursive algorithm for parsing an array of arrays is a bit much for beginners).

Clearly, it was a stroke of luck that I worked with wonderful, knowledgeable people who were too happy to help me along the path.

I continued this pattern of learning new concepts through several more books, the best of which was Beginning Ruby, by Peter Cooper. I then picked up Agile Web Development with Rails and started building Rails apps along with the tutorials. I was actually making stuff, and felt like I could take on the world.

Getting overwhelmed

From there, the books thing was working so well that I kept rolling with it. I picked up several advanced books that started to take me off track. Somewhere between Design Patterns in Ruby and Test-Driven Development, I started to feel like I’d gotten in over my head.

To make matters worse, I couldn’t separate what I was learning about Ruby from Rails. I didn’t understand where the language ended and the framework began. Did I have to read the whole “Programming Ruby” book? What about Rails books? What was MVC? I had to learn Javascript too? And CSS? And HTML?

I confided in my friend and admitted that I’d failed as a programmer. I couldn’t do it all at once, and there didn’t seem to be a way to break it up. He told me, “That’s enough, your problem is too many books. You need to write some code and go from there.”

My first projects

My friend was right: it was time to just start making things. I got tiny assignments from the dev team: small copy or functionality changes, or bite-size features that were low-risk if I failed.

The things I built were embarrassingly elementary, but it’s an amazing feeling to ship code, and I felt back on track.

I tried and failed at a few more side projects. I was wholly unprepared to build the square-foot-gardening app I wanted to make, having underestimated its difficulty.

It was about this time that the company started to go under and I was shown the door. I suddenly lost my support network, and it became more difficult to practice my coding skills.

Luckily, just a few months later, I discovered Ruby Mendicant University. Started by Gregory Brown, it’s a free online school for intermediate programmers with a strong focus on building stuff for real-life situations.

Going full-time

After completing the core Mendicant University course, my projects became slightly more ambitious: A video upload site that limits you to 1 minute (a terrible idea, if you’re considering it), then a lunch-voting app, ToDoGroove, and now Hashbadges, which is mostly under wraps for the time being.

Even with all that, I still had a mental block about becoming a full-time programmer. I was more comfortable hanging back a bit and helping manage programmers than trying to write code that would actually be used in the business.

Luckily, I had a friend call me out on this and tell me that it was do-or-die time. I either needed to start coding and stop making excuses, or be happy with a non-technical role. We spent the next week pair programming, and I realized that I really am capable of programming full-time.

That week, I moved my desk into the programmers’ area and decided to become a full-time developer. (Kudos to my employer for not firing me for that one.)

I’ve only been a full-time programmer for about 5 months, but it’s been the most fun and interesting few months of my career thus far.

I have no idea where the future is taking me, because I’m having so much fun with what I’m doing now. No matter what I decide to do next, the act of learning to program has taught me lessons that completely altered the course of my life.

I’ll outline those lessons more fully in the next post.

by Cyron via Flickr

Specifically, I’ve drawn a lot of value from the story of Stone Soup.

The story

For the unfamiliar, it’s a very old story of a tramp who travels to a town in search of some food. Hungry and destitute, he knows better than to ask the townfolk for a handout. Instead, he offers the villagers the best soup they’ve ever had, “Stone Soup.”

Having intrigued the villagers, he drops his “soup stone” in a large pot and brings it a boil. He tastes it, adding that it just needs a bit of barley and salt to be complete. Then, the story goes, he gradually asks other villagers for more ingredients to make it “just right”: chicken stock, celery, flour, and so on. Everyone shares in the soup, and the stone is extracted, ready to earn a free meal for its owner in the next town.

Starting with nothing

Most projects (especially software projects) are astonishingly like this story.

If you’re building software for a customer or group of customers, you must start with only a stone and a promise of soup to come. That’s probably a familiar feeling to many developers.

Unless you’re writing software to an exact set of specs (in which case, you’re doomed, sorry to say), your customers don’t know exactly what they want. They also don’t want to provide you with the tools, data, and requirements you literally can’t move forward without.

Making matters worse, their expectations are that you’ll magically appear with the project, after reading their minds, overcoming all obstacles, and satisfying all dependencies.

Stone soup is how you show them some of this magic.

Some see the tramp in this story as a charlatan, but I am going to use the term “instigator”: the guy or gal with the guts to set up a pot of boiling water and throw in the stone. The instigator goes out on a limb to make things happen.

Here’s how you can start making some soup:

Find your stone

You are now the keeper of the stone. You’re the instigator. Why you? Because you are probably the only person that knows there’s even supposed to be a stone.

In my experience, throwing the stone into the pot involves skipping a lengthy requirements phase and taking that risky first stab at the product.

There are arguments for building low-fi mockups and some for high-fi, functioning prototypes. As I’ve gotten better at building products, I’ve found high-fidelity prototypes to extract more valuable feedback.

I’ve also heard this called a “straw man”. The point is to start the conversation by putting something in a customer’s hands to either love or hate.

Adding ingredients

Projects often grind to a halt when people fail to deliver on their part of the bargain. This is where I’ve watched projects languish and then die.

Momentum is everything in this phase. No, you won’t get all the ingredients you think you need for your soup. But you do need ingredients of some kind or the boil dies down, interest is lost, and everyone goes home with empty stomachs.

So if one person or group isn’t delivering and is holding things up, it’s time to get creative. What can you put in that would move the conversation forward? Can you get data from a different source that would still be valuable? Can you show a reasonable facsimile of this feature using only the tools you have on hand?

This ingenuity both helps solidify the product and creates a vacuum for the actual item you need, pointing a spotlight on the reason it’s being held up.

The finished product

Actually, that’s kind of a misnomer. The product is never finished.

But after a few iterations on the original concept, you have something worth sharing, even if it’s not perfect. You may never have all the ingredients you’d planned on, but just getting the wheels unstuck generated an outcome that would never have existed otherwise.

At a micro level, the instigator never knew how the soup was going to turn out. The ingredients and tools on hand vary wildly. But at a macro level, he or she knew enough about the process to guide the participants to a shared goal: making something great.

Want to change the world? Be an instigator.

To be successful as an instigator, you must have a decent mental picture of how the soup gets made. If it’s a software project, you’d better have a working knowledge of the parts of the process, from servers, to data, to code.

Once armed with this knowledge, developing a habit of making stone soup is what sets leaders apart from those who are led. It gives you the ability to know that you’ll be able to deliver a result, even without a sure knowledge of exactly how you’ll do it.

Most people aren’t wired to want to be instigators. It’s scary and the risk of failure or embarrassment seems high. But it’s a skill that can be learned, and whether you’re a coder, a manager, or an entrepreneur, it’s required if you want to help lead successful projects and create great products.

I found this terribly moving, despite the fact that the idea of work/life balance is somewhat clichéd. (via @ashedryden)

by Daniel Incandela via Flickr

This time last year, my wife and I were planning her escape.

We worked together at the same company, and she had a promising executive career track mapped out for her there. She’d been promoted several times, and would have actually been my boss (but for that bit about her being my spouse).

So when she talked about how unhappy she was, I resisted. I didn’t want to let her give up on a great career. We never loved the idea of conforming to stereotypical gender roles. And perhaps the fact that she brought in two-thirds of our income played a part.

Ultimately though, she helped me realize that putting our son in daycare and going to work was chipping away at her self-esteem and putting her into a pretty scary depression.

So, we started plotting her exit. If we could just pay off the credit cards, we could eke by on my income. It only took a few months of austerity before she was able to say goodbye to the golden handcuffs and stay home full-time.

A couple of weeks ago, while pushing Soren in the grocery cart, she ran up and down the aisles of the store to get a laugh out of our son, who invariably requests, “go faster, faster!” While speeding down the aisle and laughing herself, she nearly ran over a group of our former coworkers.

They stopped for a few minutes to exchange pleasantries, and she trotted off, a bit embarrassed for the display.

The picture in my head of that scene makes me a bit misty-eyed, remembering the depression and pain she was in while I was encouraging her to “stick it out”, contrasted with the carefree happiness of hurtling down a grocery aisle with our three-year-old.

My wife’s been a stay-at-home mom for nearly a year now, and it’s certainly been a tough adjustment. But as long as I can help it, I’ll never ask her to trade it back away. That was her dream, and she pushed herself and me until she reached it.

So now, I have to wonder: Is what I do every day the equivalent of running up and down the aisles? For sure, some days are like that. If not, what am I trading them for? How many of those days will I let pass without doing something about it?

Credit: ShoppingDiva via Flickr

“You have to face the fact that maybe you’re just unemployable.”

I flushed with anger. My dad knew my job was on the bubble, and it was a pretty callous and insensitive thing to say.

It wasn’t until a few years later that he explained that he meant that as a compliment. He said, “unemployable means that you stop being able to work for idiots, and you start realizing they’re all idiots.”

I still don’t know about the “unemployable” bit, but imagine the hell it would be to live as someone who fits that definition of unemployable and yet tries to fit into a mold of the model employee. I think I could live down the legacy of, “Wow, he sure was lame at working for idiots.”

I used to get frustrated with my wife for not caring enough about her work. Where was the ambition? Her coworkers and bosses recognized her potential, so why didn’t she?

It turns out that their (and my) mold for her wasn’t what came naturally to her. She wanted to be a mom, and she’s turned out to be so wonderful at it that I could burst with pride.

What about you? You’re probably awesome at a lot of things. You’re probably also lame at a bunch of other things. Those peaks and valleys make up your gifts, temperament, skills, and pretty much everything else that we cobble together to form an identity.

And it’s all too tempting to look around and see the peaks in others’ lives and fixate on the valleys in your own. How hypocritical and unfair is that?

If you’re anything like me, you too often spend your days filling in the valleys, obsessing over your weaknesses, then start piling up guilt for not having the time and energy to get it all done (which itself deserves another post).

Meanwhile, you’re sitting on a gold mine of talent. There are things you do naturally 10 times better than most of the people around you, and it’s likely that you’re downplaying those gifts to fit in a mold that was cast for someone else.

Most people I meet who feel insufficient and broken are exactly the right fit in a completely different puzzle.

The most innovative and successful people of our time have almost universally been unemployable misfits. The universe needed exactly them, and they were lucky or brave enough to discover why before they let society hammer them into the wrong holes.

Let me break it down for you:

(Stuff you’re good at)  x  (Time you have on earth) = Your impact

There is simply not enough time to get really great at everything, even if you did have the capacity. Which you don’t. Sorry.

I believe that if you’re not spending the majority of your days exploiting your own talents and experience, doing what comes naturally to you, you’re not having the impact you could at your work, in your life, or in the world.

This is not to say you won’t have to do hard things! But life is hard enough, you don’t have to dial the difficulty up and handicap yourself.

Stop for a moment. Think about what it is that you do really well. Do those things give you a multiplied impact where you are? If not, that may be a sign that you’re the exact right fit for something else.

Will this guarantee that you’re happy? No. But not following the simple formula pretty much guarantees you’ll be unhappy.

So go ahead, keep improving you, but exactly you is just great. You need no additional skills or experience to do amazing things. Ironically, to do so, you have to make peace with being lame at everything else.

Pop quiz: what’s your vision for your current job or project? For your career? For your life?

Don’t know? Many of us don’t. And that’s a shame.

You can knock the Color guys for having a comparatively short-sighted vision, but Nest creator Tony Fadell’s original vision was to be acquired by Apple. That seems to have worked out relatively well for all involved.

Whether they succeed or fail, they’re likely to win eventually, because they have a vision, and it’s theirs.

I spent years throwing myself wholeheartedly into helping realize “someone else’s vision”, but came up empty and disappointed. After that, I bristled at the idea of fulfilling and enriching someone else at the expense of my time and talents.

Back then, I used to sit around and wait for “leadership” to come down from the mountain with their “vision” engraved on stone tablets. But that’s a copout, and like all forms of giving away personal control and accountability, it’s likely to end in frustration and resentment.

Not long ago, I was talking with a friend who said of his boss: “I can’t wait to go make him a bunch of money.” I was surprised. Why would he want that?

When I thought about it, I imagined that it was twofold: 1) This meant my friend knew that if he could make someone else a bunch of money, he could do it for himself if he really wanted to, and 2) He got to have a clear idea of what he wanted to accomplish and how to measure his success.

After that, I started thinking about my areas of influence, the things I was good at, and the things I cared about, and picked something to try to drastically improve at my workplace. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be mine.

I now make a point of developing a very clear idea of what I want to accomplish and how I’ll measure it. It helps to write it down. I try to keep this vision short-term, and re-evaluate about every 90 days. I’ve also found that it’s crucially important that this vision is of  your own making, and not handed to you.

Having a clear vision like that puts all of your thoughts and activities into a crucible. It’s easy to turn down distractions like needless meetings, tasks, or time-wasting when you have a strong, understandable, near-term vision for what you want to accomplish.

There’s a sort of primal, inherent fear of taking the risk in accepting that kind of responsibility. But if you really analyze it, would you trade risking greatness for a guarantee to wallow in the hell of mediocrity?

Yes, it can be scary. But if you are able to discover a vision, nail it down, focus on it, and achieve it, I promise you won’t find many things in life so energizing and rewarding. And it won’t be long before yours is the only vision you’re striving to achieve, while others line up to join you.

Think about it. Are you laboring for someone else’s vision? Have you been frustrated by it? What can you do to find your own?