Coby Chapple (@cobyism)

Acting with integrity

2016-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

What does it mean to act with integrity? This question has been on my mind almost continually for the last few months.

Here’s the best definition I’ve come up with so far:

Know thyself. Do the hard work to figure out what’s true for you. Especially seek out those things that perhaps you’ve avoided acknowledging or admitting even to yourself, for way too long. I know you know what they are.
Articulate. Do the even harder work of expressing your truths to those around you. Examine them as much as you need in the privacy of your own mind, but don’t worry about trying to capture them perfectly—authenticity is what matters.
Take ownership. No matter how difficult or painful the ramifications may be, make a deal with yourself to work through anything and everything that comes up as a result. There may be some tough pills to swallow, but swallow them you must. You can’t predict what will happen, nor control how others choose to react, but you owe it to yourself and those around you to resolve things in a way you can live with.

…and repeat. Change is constant. What’s true for you will change over time as you grow and evolve and explore. If you’re going to live with integrity though, this will require continual effort.

I can’t guarantee that this will be easy or pain free. In fact, the opposite will almost certainly be true. What I can guarantee though, is that you and everyone around you will benefit in the long run from your bravery, your authenticity, and the example you set.

On adjusting goals

2016-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

Goals are for creating movement. They’re the flight plan that gets you airborne. Once you get moving though, you must remain aware of the direction you’re heading, and make further adjustments as soon as they become necessary.

Like a pilot flying from one airport to another, you can’t just rely on the initial course you took off with. You need to monitor your course and adjust for the way the wind is pushing you around in the air. You need to observe the weather and fly around any storms you encounter. You need to listen to the radio in case there’s an issue on the ground at your destination and you need to divert.

You shouldn’t be held hostage by the goals you set in the past. If they stop serving you, if priorities change, or if new information becomes available that affects your path, it becomes your duty to stop and reassess.

A personal example

In my case, I made a goal on January 12th to write a blog post every day for six months (I also wrote about that a few days later). For me, the purpose of this goal was to prove to myself that I’m able to beat the resistance on a daily basis, if I choose to. In just under two months since making this goal, I’ve written 50 blog posts, and despite also shipping my book, completing Seth Godin’s altMBA intensive, and taking a vacation, I only missed publishing on a handful of days. I consider this a significant achievement.

Watching myself produce post after post has been a profound experience. I’ve learned that there is no shortage of things to say, and that I’m capable if I show up and do the work. I’ve obliterated the boundary between my old comfort zone and this new one, and it sure feels mighty comfy.

Now that I know I’m capable of beating resistance daily, it’s my duty to reassess. Sure, it hasn’t been six months yet, but everything else about this goal feels like it has served its purpose. Instead of spending months doing something just because I said I’d do it, even after the original function has been fulfilled, I’d prefer to spend my effort beating the resistance in new ways.

What next?

Going forward, my aim is no longer to publish a post every day. I’m still going to write posts on a regular basis, and I may return to a daily schedule sometime in the future, but for now I’m going to relax the pressure a little.

Instead, I’m going to spend some time reflecting deeply on the past couple of months, exploring what else this new adjacent possible holds for me, and planning which direction I’m going to expand my comfort zone next.

I hope that seeing me go through this process of both setting and adjusting goals helps you in some way. What goals are you working towards? Do any of them need adjusting?

So you want a job at GitHub…

2016-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

One of the consequences of publishing a book on how to get a remote job, speaking publicly about distributed companies, and having written things about how GitHub’s hiring experience used to work (that post is over three years old!), is that I receive a significant number of emails from people who want to work at GitHub.

This is awesome. I love hearing from people who’ve seen the things I’ve put out into the world. I love hearing from people who are enthusiastic about the difference GitHub aims to make, I love seeing the great visions people have for the future of software, and I’m amazed by the passion I feel come through from people.

I do what I can do address each person’s specific scenario and questions, and that means I often take a fair bit of time to respond. Many of the questions and scenarios are similar too, and that means I often end up repeating many pieces of advice. So, in an effort to both get you advice without delay, and to better utilize my time, I’m publishing this post in the hope I can serve you, regardless of your specific situation.

Where do we list positions?

First off, let’s talk logistics. You can always find an up-to-date list of our open positions on this page, which also gets pulled in to the list on our careers page. We’re always thinking about what roles we want to hire for in the future, and as soon as we know we want to fill a position it goes on that list. Treat that as your source of truth.

What do we look for?

That depends entirely on the position. There’s no point in us trying to be secretive about what we’re after from candidates, so we do our best to make sure each job description hits on the things that really matter to us. Speaking generally though, the things that we look for across the board tend to be:

Skills and experience that match the levels we’re hiring for. If you’re over- or under-qualified, you won’t be set up for success.
People who invest personally in their work, and who have a deeper “why” that’s clear. Values are important to us at GitHub.
Excellent communicators. Everyone communicates, all the time. Listening to others and being articulate matters more than you can imagine.
High levels of empathy. In a distributed company, everyone (even those people who work at HQ) is remote to someone else, so it’s especially critical that GitHubbers are empathetic and respectful of their colleagues’ realities.
A history of shipping. Perfectly executed work that never ships is useless. Show that you understand the delicate balance required to get things over the line, repeatedly.

There’s always many other things we consider, especially when it gets to technical and operational concerns, but hopefully that gives you some insight into what we value.

What’s the best way to apply?

This one is simple, but it’s surprising how often it comes up. Each job description will have clear instructions for how to apply (hint: the giant “Apply” button is your friend), and that’s the fastest, most helpful, and most direct way to get on our radar to be considered for the role.

Why didn’t I get through?

If you don’t get the job, don’t take it personally. There’s a variety of reasons why you might not hear back, or get through to the final stages. My advice is to stop trying to read between the lines, and turn this into an opportunity for learning and growth instead.

As a high profile company, our positions frequently attract a significant volume of high quality applications, so it’s important for you to understand that not getting picked doesn’t mean you’re not great. If you’ve ever watched the blind audition phase of the TV series The Voice, you’ll understand exactly what I mean when I say that sometimes truly awesome people don’t make it through, and the reasons often have more to do with things like the mix of skills we already have on our team, rather than being because you’re flawed in some way (you’re not).

So what should you do? Pick yourself. Move on, hone your craft, find other opportunities. Prove to us with your success how silly and short-sighted we were for passing on you. We’d also love to see you apply again the next time around, and you’ll have the advantage of going in with the confidence of having had a practice run already. Use this experience as fuel for your fire.

Pause and reflect

If you’re consistently not seeing the success you want, it might be a sign that you have work to do that you aren’t aware of (yet), and some reflection may be needed to work out how you can improve next time.

Go back and reassess the job description, and reflect on the possible strengths and weaknesses of application you put forward, and also on the other factors that might be involved. As a guiding question, ask yourself: How could you convey, with humility and class, that you’re too good to pass up? How can you showcase your skills, your work, and your track record so it speaks for itself?

Final thoughts

While this post specifically addresses seeking employment at GitHub, much of this advice applies equally for other companies too, whether the position you’re after is remote or on-site.

Lastly, don’t let this post stop you from emailing me—I love hearing from readers like you—but please note that if you choose to email me about getting a job at GitHub, or asking for advice on your job search in general, I’m going to point you to this page. Not because I want to brush you off (quite the opposite!), but because I’m confident you’ll find the advice you need to move forward lying somewhere in the points above.

No right answer

2016-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

Seth Godin published an article on Medium the other day which summarises why our notion of online education (and indeed, modern industrialized education in general) is missing the mark, as well as pointing to a new direction. Having witnessed first-hand the power that programs like the altMBA have to bring about drastic change in the ability people have to approach the challenges they face in business, in art, and in life with joy and from a place of possibility—I’m convinced that these ideas are working.

One of the deepest lessons I’ve learned from being involved with the altMBA so far, from both my time as a student and now as a coach, is the simple revelation that there is no right answer.

Modern education, both traditional and online, has trained us to seek out the formula that will give us the correct answer to the problem in front of us. We crave the thing we can memorize that will get us full marks on the test. We crave the specific method we must use to tackle problems like these. When the goal is to produce an army of automatons who all think and speak and behave in predictable ways, that’s fine.

That’s not what we need anymore though—in life, in business, in the world in general—and it certainly isn’t what we as individuals want to sign up for. We need people who not only aren’t afraid to colour outside the lines, we need people who delight in it—people for whom breaking new ground is their comfort zone, and people who can lead the rest of us to the realisation we can think for ourselves too.

The idea that there is no right answer is best illustrated with two related, but seemingly contradictory ideas:

There are plenty of wrong answers.

Laziness. Selfishness. Apathy. Picking small ideas. Holding back so you have more to give later. Giving things a surface treatment. These are all ways of hiding. These kinds of answers not only shortchange yourself, they rob the world of your potential to make a difference.
There are billions of right answers.

How long should this blog post should be? How big should your team grow? What should you call your podcast? When should you take the plunge to go freelance? Which idea should you pick for your new business? What’s the best way to write a funny joke? How can we feed the world’s population sustainably? What should I do with my life? All of the questions that matter have an infinity of ways they can be answered correctly.

In life, there are only answers. You can radically improve the quality of the answers you produce when you stop looking for the formula, kill your craving the “correct” solution, and instead start trusting and taking pride in your inate ability to tackle things in the unique ways that only you can.

Where power comes from

2016-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

Feeling powerless sucks. The good news is that the way out of powerlessness is simple. Take responsibility.

Just because the answer is simple, doesn’t mean it’s easy. Taking responsibility unconditionally is really hard. It means putting your ego aside. It means accepting blame yourself for things that were quite objectively not your fault. It means acknowledging the full burden of the status quo—the good, the bad, and the ugly. There’s plenty of justifiable reasons why most people actively try to resist taking responsibility, instead of seeking it out. Taking responsibility is daunting and painful and scary.

At least to start with. In the long run, of course, it’s a worthwhile trade. It’s a worthwhile trade because taking responsibility delivers us the power to change.

Some people take the view that Uncle Ben’s assertion that “with great power comes great responsibility” is the way it works, but I think Winston Churchill’s earlier version of the same assertion, “where there is great power there is great responsibility” is more accurate. Power and responsibility tend to appear together, but I believe that it’s the act of taking responsibility that must happen first. When we do that, power can’t help but show up.

What could you take responsibility for, today?

Interesting because

2016-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

A common response, when someone sees what you’re doing, or hears what you’re saying, is to say “That’s interesting!”. I find myself responding this way all the time, and over the last few weeks I’ve found myself thinking more about why we respond this way.

My conclusion so far is that to assert that something is “interesting” is a crutch. It’s a way of hiding. It’s what we say when we don’t really know what we think about something, and we say it so we can absolve ourselves of the more difficult task of reflecting on and articulating back what makes something interesting to us.

Here’s an easy way to demonstrate for yourself how much of a crutch-word this is. The next time you say “that’s interesting”, turn that into “that’s interesting because…”. And then force yourself to finish the sentence.

When you stop at “that’s interesting”, you’re robbing others of an opportunity to understand the way you think. When you follow up with “…because…”, your response stops being just a reaction. It becomes valuable feedback that the other person can use to create something tomorrow that’s even more interesting.

There is no shortage

2016-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

You don’t need to fear running out of ideas. You don’t need to worry about not having something to say.

You just need to learn the skill—and it is a learnable skill, which you can get better at over time—of getting out of your own way and letting abundance just… turn up. Trust the soup, as they say.

The funny thing about choosing between abundance or scarcity as the lens through which we view the world, is that no matter which one we choose, what we see in our reality will always end up matching our choice. It starts with our choice, and since either option will end up seeming perfectly valid, the choice then comes down to one question: Which lens is more useful to us?

Reflections on altMBA³

2016-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

It’s been three weeks now since the third session of Seth Godin’s altMBA intensive wrapped up, and I’ve deliberately refrained from writing any more about it (see my earlier reflections on week 1, week 2, and week 3 respectively) until I gave things some time to sink in and marinate a little. As February comes to a close, now feels like a good time to circle back.

Takeaways

In no particular order, here is my attempt to distill the major insights I’m taking away from the altMBA program into a list of concise, actionable “directives”¹:

Use goals to create momentum. Don’t be held hostage by your goals though—it’s fine to revise and curate and adjust and change your mind along the way.
Make decisions rationally, whenever we have a say. When we don’t have a say, embrace the reality that irrationality is inescapable. Don’t try and set the world straight with logic.
Un-frame decisions and challenge constraints like your life depends on it. Hint: the rest of your life does depend on it.
Only say “yes” when you know what you’re saying “no” to. Don’t get crippled by fear of missing out either. Balance these forces using a “hell yeah, or no” mentality.
Notice quality, but take the time to articulate what makes it so. You’ll learn something, and so will everyone else.
Brevity rules. Make your point quickly, and use what’s left over to engage and connect and inspire.
Silence is often the most persuasive argument you can make.
Look for real power structures. Ignore reported ones. Find the right domino, push it over, and stand back.
Stealing creates originality. Borrow ideas deliberately and liberally to remind people of things.
Take stock of your resources, limitations, and the stories you tell both yourself and the world. Learn from what you observe, and then put it all back together in a way that benefits you.

If there’s one theme that runs through all of these insights for me though, it’s this…

No more excuses.

I now know that I possess all of the things I need—tangible or otherwise—to both start and finish any endeavour I put my mind to. At the start of the course, I think I knew this on an intellectual level, but I wasn’t living it. I couldn’t feel it. Now though, I’m beginning to feel this intuitively, and I know it’s only going to get stronger with time and practice.

Next: Coaching for altMBA⁴

The fourth session of the program starts tomorrow, and I’m excited to share that I’ve been invited to step into the role of coach for altMBA⁴. Witnessing the altMBA process from a completely new perspective is going to yield a whole new set of profound insights, and to say I’m grateful for this opportunity is an understatement.

This next wave of ruckus makers in altMBA⁴ are a truly incredible bunch, and I’m honoured to be able to play a part in their journey. I can’t wait to see what happens next. :smiley:

Hat tip to this idea by Derek Sivers to focus on distilling things into directives. I really like the idea of this as a general practice, and it’s something I’m going to try and do more of in the future. ↩

The connection machine

2016-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

Our brain is a giant connection machine. Of all its many functions, the one thing our brains happen to be outlandishly incredible at is making connections between things.

What’s interesting though is that the things don’t have to be related at all in the external world in order for a link to form between them. In fact, these kind of connections—the ones where there simply is no identifoable link in the external “objective” world—are exactly the ones that our brains are best at creating and utilizing.

Hearing a particular song can bring back a minutely specific memory of a kinesthetic memory from primary school. Tasting a particular flavour of chewing gum can fire up your brain’s creative circuits. Seeing a subtle facial expression in another person can trigger a neuronal chain reaction resulting in a sudden flash of insight or a reminder that you need to put the rubbish bins out.

It’s a wonder we don’t make more use of this inate ability. In fact, why don’t we? Memory athletes have worked out all sorts of tricks to get their brains to do impossible feats of recall and connection.

Imagine if we could employ that kind of firepower in our daily lives, and for more than just memory. Imagine if we could harness that potential for learning, creativity, and strategy! Now, while you have that visualisation in your head, why leave it at just imagination?

What if, starting tomorrow, you started a search to both discover and write (since discovery and creation are essentially the same) your own brain’s hidden instruction manual?

Want some starting points? Try this, this, this, this, this, this, or maybe even this.

FOMO at the buffet

2016-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

There’s a buffet for dinner tonight. There’s a salad bar, two soups, and five or six different apetizer things. Then there’s the full selection of main courses. And finally, there’s the desert bar and the ice-cream station, which itself includes a further selection of sprinkles, marshmallows, chocolate chips, and other miscellany.

We can’t help ourselves. We feel compelled to grab a little bit (or a lot) of everything. If we were making something on our own, we’d usually be completely satisfied with a single plate of food for dinner. Here though, we end up walking back to our table with plateful after plateful of food.

And then, after the last bowl of ice-cream with sprinkles and chocolate and marshmallows is all but gone, we act surprised when we feel completely stuffed, and struggle to waddle out of the restaurant as we battle our carb-induced quasi-comatose lethargy.

Why do we behave like this? FOMO. Fear of missing out.

FOMO is a force of nature. It’s hard-wired into our brains. Give us multiple options, and throw in a few peers making decisions themselves next to us, and all kinds of instinct starts to kick in. We have to take a bit of everything, because we can’t stand the thought of someone else experiencing something that we had the opportunity to experience, but declined.

The preemptive anxiety we feel that urges us to minimise our downside completely thwarts our ability to focus on maximising the upside. Being aware of our bias towards FOMO will immediately improve the quality of your decisions, and the buffet is as good a place as any to practice.

Don’t sweat the technique

2016-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

They never grow old, techniques become antiques
Better then something brand new cause it’s real
And in a while the style’ll have much more value
Classical, too intelligent to be radical
Masterful, never irrelevant, mathematical (…)
It’s cool when you freak to the beat
But don’t sweat the technique

—Eric B. & Rakim

Techniques work. That’s what they’re for. Their job is to have an intended and predictable effect when we put them into practice. Their job is to be reliable.

We learn techniques because we often face scenarios where it’s easy for things to go off track, and we need something to rely on when everything else turns to shit. When things are crumbling all around us, we need to be able to recall the technique we learned to deal with situations just like this and deploy it to have the intended effect.

Techniques often feel foreign to us, and this is one of the reasons they are often so necessary. After all, if our instinctual behaviour in a given situation is to do the thing that stands to most benefit us, no technique is necessary. So, part of a technique’s job is to help us reach an objective even if the steps required to do so feel completely counter-intuitive to what we might otherwise do.

There are techniques designed to combat everything from writer’s block to troubleshooting complex software, and there’s probably a whole slew for your field of focus too.

Your job then, is to learn the techniques you need to get your work done regardless of what’s going on around you. Then, rely on them. Tweak and improve and expand upon them, sure—but don’t pretend there isn’t a technique for the situation you’re facing.

P.S. If, after doing your research, it turns out there genuinely isn’t a technique that covers what you’re working through, why not be the first person to create one?

Obliterate the boundary

2016-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

Some aspects of learning need to happen inside your comfort zone. Learning to stand up on the surfboard when it’s still high and dry on the sand. Learning the correct ski position while stationary at the bottom of the mountain. Learning how to write functional programs in javascript before you have the pressure of someone paying you to do it.

If you just do those bits, you might be learning at an intellectual level—but that isn’t real learning.

Real learning requires a whole bunch of things to happen outside your comfort zone. Learning how to stay standing on the board after you paddle into the wave and it begins to break behind you. Learning to ski a controlled turn when you’re staring down an impossibly steep slope with an equally impossibly breathtaking view. Learning to troubleshoot a program you’ve written for someone who has paid good money for something that should work and currently doesn’t.

The boundary of your comfort zone separates these two aspects of learning. To learn then, we simply need to tread back and forth over this boundary, in both directions—and to tread it so often that the boundary becomes indistinguishable. It’s the movement back and forth that obliterates the boundary.

That’s how learning works.

Make your precedents count

2016-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

Culture is what organizations are made of. It’s the substance that turns into productivity, it’s reflected in the products we create, and it’s where the stories come from that we tell the world outside our organization.

What is culture, specifically though? I believe culture is collective taste. It is the myriad connections between us all as individuals and the agreements (spoken, conscious, or otherwise) we all have with each other about what’s acceptable and what’s not, and how to handle differences in subjective measures within those outer bounds. Taste is awareness of subjectivities and boundaries at the invididual level, and when you multiply that quality of mind out into an organization, you wind up with culture.

So the next questions becomes: how do you create culture? Simple. Culture in organizations is all about precedents. When something happens the organization hasn’t seen before, there is no precedent, and this is an opportunity for the leaders within an organization (note that’s not always the ones at the top of the org chart) to flex their taste muscles on behalf of the organization and decide what kind of precedent they want to set.

After that, the precedent is set, and the organization begins to point at that example as the way their culture responds to scenarios like that. When there is a precedent for something, any individual in the organization can feel confident responding, since they know it’ll be in alignment with what has come before.

This is culture forming, and it doesn’t stop evolving either. It’s shifting under your feet as you read these very words, and if you aren’t consciously building it up and shaping it in the direction you want it to go, it won’t stand still and wait until you feel like it.

Precents are being set all around us, all the time, so make them count. Your culture depends on it.

Movements, in three parts

2016-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

Movements and change of any kind depend on three things: the choice to lead, the choice to follow, and the gap in between.

As leaders, the choice to lead is difficult. Nobody gives us permission. Nobody tells us the answer. Leadership requires us to act on our curiosity and conviction, to speak up—or stand up—and point in a new direction.

This would be easy, except for the tricky issue of necessarily being alone in doing so. Nobody else is saying what you’re saying or doing what you’re doing, otherwise they’d be the leader, not you. The problem with choosing to lead is that it doesn’t make you a leader. You don’t get to make that call. All you can do is create the gap.

Ah, the gap. That incredibly tense and awkward period of time during which you’re just a lone nut doing some crazy dance that nobody understands. You’ll look stupid, you’ll wonder whether you made the right decision, and you’ll feel the fear that nobody else will join you. The truth is, they might not. All we can do, if we hope to create a movement, is to stay the course, and keep our commitment to being the lone nut, and leave the invitation open for other people to connect and join in.

We choose to follow someone else only when we connect with the vision that’s been painted for us. If someone has done that jobs and created a precedent that resonates with us, that’s when we make the choice to follow. It is only then that a lone nut becomes a leader, and a movement is born.

Whether it’s the choice to lead, or the choice to close the gap by becoming the first follower, we’re the ones who decide. It’s always up to us.

A failure a day…

2016-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

For over a month now, I’ve published a blog post almost every single day. When I started upping the frequency of my posts, I watched as the small number of subscribers and readers I had began to shrink to an even smaller number. With each post, a few more people would unsubscribe, and it would feel like rejection. The “0 people are viewing the site right now” message from Google Analytics would stare back at me in a mocking tone with every post, and it felt very much like failure.

Of course, I’m not a failure. This blog’s subscriber count may be small, but I’m incredibly grateful to the few of you that do read my posts (I see you there! What’s up?). I may not have tons of traffic, but that gives me an opportunity to hone my craft without the pressure of massive publicity.

There is no such thing as failure, just results and opportunity.

Each day I manage to hit publish, it’s a result, regardless of what happens after that. If I hit publish, I’ve overcome resistance, and proven to myself that feeling like a failure doesn’t change my ability to ship something. Even on those days I haven’t managed to get a post out the door, I still have an opportunity to experience the feeling of failure—and either way, it serves to remind me that it’s all in my head.

Whatever it is we’re doing, the feeling of failure never leaves us. The doubt we feel about the feedback we receive, the nausea we feel behind the curtain and in the wings, the pre-race overwhelm—even the best in the world still deal with exactly these feelings.

With repeated exposure to this feeling though, what happens is that we slowly inoculate ourselves against the fear of feeling like a failure. That’s why it’s so important to find yourself a way to practice—some kind of daily meditation that lets you confront the pesky voice of resistance inside our head that tells us we can’t do it.

Meditate on failure. Observe the results. Repeat.

Start with empathy

2016-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

I’m fairly sure Justin Keller had an interesting few days this week, for one reason—he didn’t start with empathy. Don’t be like that Justin Keller. Be more like this other Justin Keller and start with empathy as a first principle, and use what empathy helps you see to guide and inform your journey.

Starting with empathy is hard, because you have to put your own head to the side temporarily in order to see the world through someone else’s worldview. This is hard because we always see ourselves as being “right” in some objective sense, and from this point of view, adopting a worldview that sits in opposition to or conflict with our own will, by definition, feel counter intuitive.

But this is life. There are no right answers here, just answers.

You cannot genuinely connect with another human in a positive way unless you understand the way they see the world. That is a prerequisite. For anyone whose responsibility involves connecting with people on a daily basis (and there aren’t many people in the world to whom that doesn’t apply) then, it is therefore our duty to spend a great deal of our time doing two things:

First, we must build up our empathy muscles and get used to how they work.
Second, we must retrain ourselves to have these muscles kick in by default as our first reaction to the events in the world around us.

Empathy is hard, but you should do the hard work to start there anyway. You might be surprised by what you learn.

Our goal’s job

2016-02-19T00:00:00+00:00

What is a goal actually for? First off, a goal is for getting us moving. Picking a goal, and making a start in that direction—even if it isn’t the “right” goal (whatever that means)—at least gets us moving forward. We can always adjust our trajectory and rethink our goals after we take flight. That’s allowed.

Secondly, stating a goal forces us to confront the ambiguity that exists in the gap between our current point A, and our goal’s point B. When we must externally state our aim, it forces us to begin mapping out the potential path, including all of the rocky patches we expect we’ll need to navigate. This lets us focus our energy on the journey instead of whether to even commit to the goal or not, and allows the process to begin.

Lastly, a goal serves us at multiple points along the way towards our destination. There will always be surprises, and when we’re staring down the barrel of this latest catastrophe, we need to be able to return to our original goal and reassess how to approach the remaining stepping stones.

Goals are a tool. They give us leverage over our experience by creating tension between the status quo and a vision of how the future could be, and this pressure compels internal and external forces into motion that push us forward.

What is your goal, right now? Is it doing it’s job?

Cut through the chatter

2016-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

Most of the things you think about aren’t thoughts, they’re chatter. Anyone who’s ever tried meditation before knows about chatter. Chatter is that relentless stream of mental dialogue we think of as being what’s going on “inside” our head.

Here’s an example of what chatter looks like:

Did I have lunch yet? I’ll have to make a decision when I go downstairs about what to have. Yesterday I had eggs and avocado and pesto. That was pretty great. How have I never tried that before. That reminds me, I need to get more pesto. Oh, and milk too. I’m so bad at remembering things. I also wish I was better at writing blog posts. Sometimes it feels good when I write them, but other times it’s just frustrating. You know what else is frustrating? Email. And the new council rubbish bin schedule, because…

We spend our lives listening to this junk.

The buddhists call this our monkey mind for a reason—it’s not our real mind. Real thoughts are rare, and only start to come out of wherever it is they’re hiding when the chatter dies down enough. Until then, this unending river of confused, restless garbage flows forth, keeping us in a perpetual state of suspended satisfaction, blurry emotional vision, and pseudo-effectiveness.

The problem is that chatter doesn’t die down on its own. You have to cut through it. You have to sit with it and stay conscious of it. You have to watch it until your real mind wakes up to the realisation that it stands apart from this mental traffic jam.

What’s on the other side? I’ve only seen glimpses, but it’s nice. I’ll tell you more when I get there, but in the meantime, you should begin cutting through your chatter too.

Create drivers, not cars

2016-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

When Henry Ford created the Ford Model T in 1908—the first affordable automobile, and the catalyst for the entire automotive industry as we know it today—it wasn’t about the car.

Yes, the product was novel. Yes, it was affordable. Yes, it was shiny and black, but all of that is besides the point, and here’s why.

Henry Ford wasn’t creating cars, he was creating drivers.

Before 1900, people weren’t drivers. Nobody had driver’s licenses. Sure, some people “drove” a horse and cart, but the idea of someone being a “driver” as we know it today simply didn’t exist.

The Model T was just a means to an end. It’s job was to enable people to become a “driver”, and in giving people this new superpower, it transformed them.

What does your product transform people into?

Ignore sunk costs

2016-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

Decision making is a critical life skill. We all make decisions, all of the time, but we rarely put as much thought into the way we make decisions as we ought. There’s a number of ways the process of decision-making goes off the rails, but the one we fall victim to most easliy is the sunk cost fallacy.

Sunk costs are a trick of the mind. Our instinct is to see our current status quo as a set of investments in past decisions—we feel like we’re too invested in this career, this business partnership, or this plot of land to consider making new decisions that fly in the face of these “assets”. We see our decision’s “ground zero” reference point as the point in time when we made the original decision that led us here today—but unfortunately, all of that is just an illusion of time.

The reality is that ground zero is always our present moment. The fact that we paid a certain price (in money, time, or energy) to get to where we are now is irrelevant. Recognize your loss aversion for the irrational cognitive bias it is, and acknowledge all of the possible future outcomes you have in front of you—not just the ones that line up with your past decisions.

Don’t let your past decisions hold your future hostage. Ignore sunk costs. Ignore sunk costs. Ignore sunk costs. Repeat that over and over until it’s wedged firmly in your head. Then repeat it a couple more times for good measure. You’ll need it.

Return to analog

2016-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

I never found a to-do list app that really worked for me.

What happens when I use a to-do list app is that I wind up using them as a capture mechanism. As Mr. Allen describes in Getting Things Done, one of the goals of your productivity system is to “get it all out of your head”, so that you can have the mental space you need to actually complete the tasks. To-do list apps always served this purpose well for me.

The problem I have with to-do lists apps though, is that their makers are not incentivised to help you solve your productivity problem. This might seem counter-intuitive, but think about it a little more and you’ll see the underlying truth. It is in the app-maker’s interest to ensure you always believe you have a productivity problem, so that you can need a tool like theirs to solve it.

I tried out all kinds of different apps, but towards the end of last year I realised I was barking up the wrong tree. The question I was asking was “which to-do list app should I use”, so I proceeded to un-ask the question. The question I needed to be asking instead was:

How can I ensure that the important things get done each day?

Once I reframed the question to deliberately focus on the thing that mattered to me, I realised I needed to go back to first principles. What I needed to do was return to analog.

Going analog

Since last year, I haven’t used Things or Trello or Wunderlist or Asana or any other similar application for my personal productivity. Instead, I bought myself a really nice notebook and have been using it daily to keep track of the important things.

So far, I’m 100% more satisfied with my productivity system than I was before, and I’m no longer spending prescious brain cycles wondering if there’s a to-do app out there that’s just waiting for me to discover it.

My system

Here’s a few highlights about the system I’m using:

I’ve borrowed heavily from the Bullet Journal system, but have made a number of modifications and tweaks to suit my own requirements.
I still use a digital calendar, but copy each day’s events into my analog notebook at the start of each day.
In addition to tasks, I’m also keeping track of the habits I aim to build—such as meditation, writing these blog posts, exercise, reading, and so forth.
I’m also doing lots of other small things, such as writing down my workout plans so that I can deliberately mix up the exercises, and tracking my mood over time too (which has shown up some interesting trends).

The specifics don’t matter

What you need to understand here though is that the specifics of my system don’t matter. These are patterns and tools I’m tweaking as I go, so they’ll probably look different in three week’s time. These choices I’m making are also very specific to my personality too—the things that are important to me about my system might not be the same things that would be important to you.

Instead of looking at the specifics, I urge you to consider the wider point about why going analog works. For me, I think it boils down to three points:

An analog system pulls you out of the chaos that is your digital life, and forces you to have a wider view than just the tasks that require a screen. Your laptop and phone are zones of disruption and distraction—so a productivity system that exists outside of that realm has a huge advantage.
Reducing the number of things that can go wrong with your system means you both use and trust it more. An imperfect system you trust and use is infinitely better than the perfect system you don’t trust or never use.
If something isn’t working in a system like this, it’s your fault. The bonus here is in the corollary—you’re free to redesign the patterns you used yesterday to represent whatever you think might work better tomorrow.

I strongly encourage you to question whether the system(s) you’re using to get the important things done are really helping you do that. If, like me, you suspect they aren’t, then I urge you to consider going analog instead.

Design a system that works for you, and tweak it anytime you notice something isn’t working.

Writing to think

2016-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

We live in an increasingly complex world. Externally, there’s a never-ending barrage of emails, calls, and taps on the shoulder competing for our attention. Internally, there’s an equally never-ending parade of ridiculous thoughts that do their best to keep us fixed in place.

We don’t have time to think.

Given that so many of us these days are knowledge workers, where it is essentially our job to think our way through the world’s problems, this presents a significant problem.

What can we do? We can write.

I recently wrote about how, in today’s complex world, discovery is indistinguishable from creation. It turns out that writing things down forces us to discover what’s really going on in our heads. The act of writing is a forcing function—a process that literally lets us shape our thoughts and opinions as we discover them.

We don’t have time to think, so we don’t have time not to write.

Help me help you

2016-02-12T00:00:00+00:00

Now that my altMBA experience is over (I’ll be writing more about that soon), I’m going to be taking some time to reassess where I’m focusing with this blog and my other non-GitHub-work projects. To help me work out what’s next, I need your help. Yes, you.

Your mission today, if you’re reading this, is to send me a five sentence email. Today. Yes, you heard me correctly—I actually want to receive more email. Crazy right? Perhaps, but I want to hear from you, and other people like you, because I want to learn how I can more effectively contribute to your life.

Set aside 2.7 minutes, and write down a short answer for each of the following questions:

Who are you? I want to know who you are, and maybe something else about you like where you’re from, or where you live now. Example: “My name is … and I’m from …”
What do you do? Tell me what is it you do for work, what side-project your working on, or what your forte, passion, or focus is in life. Example: “I work as a … but in my spare time I’m also working on …”
How did you find out about me? I want to know how you came across me and my work. Example: “I first found out about you by …”
What value do you get from me? Tell me, if you can, what aspect of my work gives you something worthwhile. Example: “What I value about your work is …”
What are you struggling with right now? Tell me about that thing you’re currently wrestling with in your mind. I know you’re churning away on something, and I’d love to see if I can help you find a way forward. Example: “At the moment, the biggest thing I’m struggling with is …”

Lastly, address your email to coby@cobyism.com.

I want to level up my ability to help people just like you do things that really matter. I want to reach more people, and I want to be a force for positive change in the world. Narrowing that down so a specific area of focus is important, but it’s really tricky, and that’s why I’m asking for your input.

This is an experiment. It might not work. I don’t know exactly what will come out of your email, but I promise that if you take the time to send me an email, I’ll read every word.

So please—help me help you.

Open up your email now, type five short sentences, and hit send. Who knows what might happen?

Discovery is creation

2016-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

I’m going to posit a phrase. I’m not sure if anyone has ever posited this phrase before (please let me know if they have!), and it may end up being false, but I’m going to go ahead and do it anyway.

In any sufficiently complex domain, the act of discovery is indistinguishable from the act of creation.

— Me. Just now.

Sounds a little pompous and overly academic, but bear with me.

Newton didn’t create gravity. He just discovered the phenomenon, figured out how it worked, and told everyone about it. He created our understanding of gravity.

The same principle applies to us on a daily basis. When we sit down and mull something over to try and discover what we think about a subject, we’re actually creating our thoughts and opinions. When we discover one or two other people who think the same things we do, we’re creating a new set of connections. When we discover a given unfulfilled demand or frustration within a group of people, we’re creating a market. When we discover a way to do something that hasn’t been done before, we’ve just created something new.

The universe in which we exist is the ultimate example of a complex domain. If your goal is to be creative, go discover something.

The real enemy

2016-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

We often define ourselves in opposition to others. We notice that what we believe is different to what those other people believe, and we let that difference define us.

We seek to change people who think differently from us by articulating all the ways they’re wrong and silly and backwards. We start wars and form factions, and even though we may summon more people to our cause, they’re mostly the people who already believe the things you do.

That’s one way to do things, and it might give us some validation—but it’s not real change. If our goal is to make real change, we must let go of the idea that people are the enemy.

If we can let go of this idea that specific individuals or groups are our enemy, then we become free to see that it’s the limiting attitudes and biases that these people hold which we seek to change—and those things almost never change on their own.

Attitudes and biases and beliefs only change through deliberate effort from their owners. Because lasting change can only come from within, we shouldn’t make enemies of the people who hold these beliefs. Instead, we should seek to understand their worldview, show them empathy, and help them see a way to change that fits firmly in their own interests.

It’s our would-be enemies that we actually need on our side if we ever hope to make a change—because it’s these individuals that at some point must take the step on their own to replace their attitudes, biases, and beliefs with something better.

People are the solution, not the problem. They need our help, not our opposition.

P.S. I’d like to give a special shout-out to my fellow altMBA alumni Laura Lanigan, for being the one to originally make this important point so clearly with her final project of the program. Bravo, Laura.

Make it your call

2016-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

One of the most interesting observations I’ve made watching how people behave in their work environment is the difference between how people handle problems when they’re alone, and how they handle problems when their boss is within earshot (or “pingshot”, a term I’m going to go ahead and coin for remote people).

When the boss is around and we’re confronted with ambiguity, we often stand up from our desks, walk over to their office, and try and get an authoritative answer. An answer we can take action on, yes, but most importantly we seek this answer because we feel like we’re not responsible for the consequences. After all, the boss made the call, not you.

When we’re alone and we’re faced with a difficult choice though, it’s a little different. We look over to the boss’s office door, and notice they’re out on a lunch break. Next we glance at the clock, and it’s clear we’re going to have to deal with this before you have the opportunity to get someone else to take responsibility.

So you think about the problem in front of you, you focus your attention on the tricky bits, on spotting the ambiguity, and you eventually come up with a way that allows you to move forward. Sure, you might feel compelled to check whether your boss things you made the right call after the fact, but there’s no mistaking it: you just took responsibility.

As humans, we like other people to be on the hook. As leaders, we need to create environments where people do the opposite, and make it their call. When we can do that in a systematic way, you’re increating your team’s autonomy, and that’s far more valuable than the reassurance that someone else is on the hook.

Go make something your call.

Our adjacent possible

2016-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

Our future is unpredictable. One thing is for sure though. The only way we can go from point A to any potential point B we can imagine in our future is by passing through the adjacent possible.

What is the adjacent possible? The adjacent possible is a term coined by theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman, and is summarized well by Steven Johnson as follows:

The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself. … The phrase captures both the limits and the creative potential of change and innovation.

This idea is powerful.

It’s powerful because it simultaneously expresses the unlimited potential for things to evolve and change in the future, but it also articulates the limited nature of the future too—the subtle constraint that dictates how we must arrive at any new reality.

Some futures we can imagine are simply too far removed from our current reality to jump to immediately. These are the ideas that might be considered “before their time”. What we have to do if we want to move in that direction is identify what “stepping stones” of adjacent possible we must traverse to move from our current reality to a scenario where our end result is just one final stepping stone away from being realised.

The adjacent possible is inexhaustable. The more we explore the it, the more it grows. With enough steps, anything is possible—but identifying the combination of stepping stones required to reach the future we want is one of the most difficult tasks in the world.

What’s in your adjacent possible? If you open one of those doors, what might become part of your adjacent possible?

Presume you’re capable

2016-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.

— Henry Ford

You probably haven’t heard of tricking, but it’s an incredible discipline. It’s basically a combination of martial arts tricks, freestyle acrobatics, and breakdancing battles, where people string together as many of the most impressive tricks they can do.

Watch this video to get an idea. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

It’s easy to watch something like that and think to yourself: “wow, I’d never be capable of any of that”. Some people do have impairments or disabilities that would make some of these feats out reach, but having taught breakdancing to a wide range of people in a distant past life, I can tell you from personal experience that if you have a somewhat-functional body you can teach yourself how to make it do all kinds of incredible things.

Coordination, strength, agility, bravery. All this can be learned.

What you probably don’t realise, when you think to yourself that you’d never be capable of doing a backflip, is that many of the guys and gals who are into tricking started off not being able to do a cartwheel or a handstand or anything, let alone something as complicated as a swing-through double corkscrew boxcutter.

The trick (pardon the pun) to learning tricking is to start by presume you’re capable, and start down the path of learning the next most difficult thing. That isn’t just true of tricking either, it’s how you learn anything.

Everybody has a day zero. The day you show up as a complete beginner, with no idea what you’re doing. The sooner you get your day zero out of the way, the sooner you can move on to day one, and then day seven, and then day two-hundred-and-four.

As human beings, we’re capable of incredible things, and the proof is all around us. When was the last time you showed up for a day zero at something?

Life’s secret menu

2016-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

When we sit down at a restaurant, we get handed a menu and given some time to look it over. A few minutes later, a staff member comes over and we get asked what we’re going to have. That’s how it works—at least on the surface.

When the waiter asks us “what would you like?”, we unconsciously add a frame on top of it in our minds, and interpret the words instead as “which of these items on the menu would you like?”.

Some restaurants are buffet-style instead, which is a different way of framing the same decision. The buffet says to us “these are the options you can choose from—what would you like to eat?”. It’s like the items on menu, but because they’re all right there in front of you, prepared in bulk, and ready to serve yourself, the frame becomes even more powerful and difficult to challenge.

Frames like a menu or a buffet can work in our favour, because they help us focus and let us enjoy the experience of trusting the frame that’s been created for us. We’re trusting that the chef who designed the menu or selected the buffet dishes knows what she’s doing. We choose a certain restaurant because we trust the person or the establishment that created the frame for our decision. We opt-in to their frame.

Have you ever ordered off-menu? If you haven’t, you should try it the next time you go out for dinner.

Some places have a secret menu. The regulars all know about it, and chances are the things on the secret menu all started off as requests from the regulars themselves—but newcomers never think to ask. Even if the place doesn’t have a secret menu though, they’ll almost always look for a way to give you what you ask for. If what you’re asking simply isn’t possible, they’ll tell you so—but they might suggest something else they could do for you instead that’s just as good.

This can be nerve-wracking to try for the first time, so start by asking for something simple. If you’re ordering breakfast, ask to swap the piece of toast for an extra egg. If you’ve never done this before, you might be surprised to hear the waiter simply say “sure thing!” and squiggle your request down before moving on to the next person at your table. The lesson? Don’t ask, don’t get.

Once you feel comfortable doing this at a restaurant, you suddenly start to see opportunities for doing it in other places too. Not just with other shops or businesses, but with all areas of your life.

This is worth getting your head around, because we often can’t trust the frames we’re given. In life, there is no chef. Everyone has their own agenda for us, and it’s up to us to be in control of the frame we put around our life decisions. The question of “what’s on the menu” suddenly becomes ours.

It’s our off-menu requests that decide what’s on life’s secret menu.

So… what would you like?

Thinking is a skill

2016-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

Thinking is a skill. We all obviously do it. Sometimes we feel like we suck at it, sometimes we wish others would do more of it, but it’s a skill we all possess in varying capacities. What many people don’t realise though, is that there’s lots of different types of thinking, and there’s a time and a time and a place for all of them.

Think of it this way. If the only exercises you ever do are bicep curls, you can’t expect the rest of your body to end up in good shape. There’s a number of core muscle groups in the body, and they all need to be worked in different ways if we’re after well rounded physical performance.

In the same way, we can’t just exercise one type of thinking. Our thinking habits are like water. The longer they’re allowed to run along a single path, the deeper the path will become. This is how a tiny trickle can gradually become a huge ravine, and it’s also how we end up stuck and inflexible in our thinking.

Edward De Bono’s framework of the Six Thinking Hats is worth taking the time to get familiar with. I can personally recommend his book Teach Your Child How to Think—whether you have kids or not, it’s a great primer in thinking differently about your thinking.

Fear never dies

2016-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

Throughout my life, I’ve been fortunate to have had a number of opportunities to get up in front of groups of people. Whether that was taking my turn to jump into a breakdancing circle, teaching modern jive, speaking at conferences, or something else—these experiences all share one thing in common: fear.

It’s really really really scary to stand up in front of people and say something. Even when it’s online, and people aren’t even directly in front of you, the fear gets to us every time. The fear gets to us in the wings before we step out onto the stage. The fear gets to us in the classroom when the teacher calls on us to take a stab at the answer. The fear gets to us when we have to do a presentation in front of our colleagues. It gets us everywhere.

Back when I was doing stuff in person regularly, I’d often have people ask me how to get over the fear.

The honest answer? You don’t.

With enough exposure, we learn that fear doesn’t have any consequences beyond itself. I’ve had a fair amount of practice already, but this is something I want to get much better at—and I think you should too—because it can help us in all areas of life. Moving forward inspite of our fear can help us strike up that conversation with a stranger, or bring up the topic of salary with our boss, or make that connection while we’re out on a date.

Fear is normal. We can learn to sit with the fear, and it will lose it’s power over us—but one thing’s for sure: fear never dies.

altMBA: Week Three

2016-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

I broke my streak of writing a blog post daily yesterday, but since I was busy launching my first ebook—the Remote Jobseeker’s Handbook—instead, I’m comfortable using that as my excuse. Now though, it’s time to get back on the horse, and I’m going to start by following the altMBA summaries I did for week one and week two with a reflection on week three.

Projects

Last week’s prompts were fairly punishing. Let’s go through them and look at what I learned.

Semiotics

The main insight I got from this project was that, as a designer (of any kind, not just in relation to web/interaction design) I should be borrowing more from what’s come before. There’s a lot of hesitation as a designer to do something that could be seen as “unoriginal”, and there’s definitely a lot of people who cross that line—but to discard the notion of borrowing from other things people already know is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

If we can deliberately tap into the human instinct to pattern match—i.e. to take what we see and ask ourselves “what does this remind me of?”—we can give ourselves a very, very powerful tool. I want to learn how to harness this to a greater degree in my work, both as a designer, but also as a manager and leader too.

Speak up. Shut up.

I really enjoyed this prompt—it spoke to a couple of practices that I’ve discovered and used at times in the past with great effectiveness, but encouraged me to take those skills further still. As a result, I’m going be much more deliberate about how consciously I experience other people’s actions and state—with dual goals of explicitly calling out when someone is doing great work (and getting past my own hesitation to speak up in the process), and expanding my comfort zone to also include long, extended, and possibly awkward silences in my interactions with other people, where appropriate.

Choosing to speak up when it’s easier to stay silent is hard. Choosing to shut up when it’s easier to fill the silence is hard. Both of these things are going to require lots and lots and lots of practice.

Constraints

On the eve of shipping the Remote Jobseeker’s Handbook, it was very thought-provoking to take a step back from my last-minute polishing and deeply explore the constraints surrounding the project—both those constraints that I was deliberately imposing on myself, like shipping timeline, and also those constraints that I felt where externally imposed, or to do with the environment.

By articulating all of these constraints, and allowing myself room to explore the hypothetical effects of flipping all these constraints on their head, I highlighted to myself a number of courses of action that I plan to take downstream to ramp up, now that the project is shipped. Not all of the exploration produced things that were actionable, but even still, it forced me to understand the nature of my project at a level I hadn’t previously reached.

Reflections

I was feeling drained and overwhelmed at the end of last week, and this week I think it has broken through into what can only be described as pure exhaustion. What’s especially curious though, is that I’m no longer feeling the overwhelm aspect to quite the same degree. Thinking about the notion of comfort zones, I’m feeling much aware that the capacity for doing anything is within me, and it’s just a matter of building a habit of moving past the feelings of overwhelm and stuckness and allowing myself to take action.

In the spirit of “turning pro”, as Pressfield calls it, I feel like taking action in spite of whatever else might be going on in my head is starting to become a reflex. I’m exhausted, to be sure—but I’m also more relaxed and at home in this state than I was. I don’t want that to be an excuse for me becoming this exhausted on a regular basis, by any means, but I’m hopeful that this comfort zone expansion sticks, and I can’t wait to see how I function when I’m not quite as exhausted.

Up next: Week 4

For this last week of the altMBA, my goals are simple:

Do the work.
Observe what goes on in my head.
Trace out the boundary of my new comfort zone.

Let’s see what happens.

On maintaining state

2016-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

Yesterday, I went up to the local Co-op (a grocery store/chain here in :uk:) to grab some eggs. I was at the checkout when there was a flurry of communication between two staff-members pointing out two young men in one of the aisles. One of them had apparently been caught earlier in the day attempting to smuggle chocolate in his pockets without paying, and one of the staff had identified him and suspected he was doing it again.

He turned out some of his pockets in an attempt to preempt the staff’s demands and to prove his innocence. He began protesting and getting cross. He started raising his voice at the staff and calling them names. He began trying to leave the store quickly before the staff had a chance to search his other pocket further. Once outside the store, the staff stood there to ensure he didn’t come back in, while he continued to verbally defend what he saw as his moral high ground.

The other lad who was with him though, he kept his cool. He had an item in his hand at the time when the staff pointed them out. Regardless of his intentions, I could see that he had a sense for what was about to happen. As his friend chose to react one way, he calmly walked up to the cashier, paid for whatever it was he had chosen, walked towards the door and grabbed his friend by the elbow and pulled him away down the street while he kept shouting back at the grocery staff.

There’s an interesting lesson there about maintaining one’s state.

It doesn’t matter if you’re in the right or the wrong, or if your intent was pure or otherwise—it’s the way you react to a situation that gives you the most control over the way your reality unfolds. Your ability to be aware of—and remain in command of—your physical and emotional state directly controls how other people will perceive and interact with you.

This applies in your personal life just as much as your professional life—and yes, it even applies to a trip to the grocery store or the airport or to the movies too.

If there’s something in your life that isn’t going the way you want, double-check your state. How might it be inviting interactions with others that aren’t in your favour?

Learning how to learn

2016-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

When was the last time you were a beginner at something? Learning is a skill we need our whole lives, and if we stop, that’s when we start to die—creatively, emotionally, and physiologically. Our brains are plastic, and it’s a case of use it or lose it.

So… how do you learn how to learn? The first step in learning anything is to first understand that you must be at peace with being terrible at it. You need to accept that you’re going to be a newbie, at least to start with.

Turns out, that’s really hard.

Being a complete beginner again feels embarrassing. It feels scary. It is scary. But the fear is almost never actually about a real threat to our survival like it used to be. It’s simply the fear of the unknown.

Too many of us are unfamiliar with what it feels like to admit we’re bad or incompetent at something, so we avoid situations where we have to confront that reality. Lo and behold, our natural curiosity begins to fade.

But learning, by definition, requires that we make a transition from the unknown to the known, from the hidden to the revealed, from the confusing to the understood. If we want to learn, we must accept that our brain will tell us to be scared, and we must accept that feeling that fear is both okay and unnecessary.

We must build up a familiarity with the specific state of discomfort we feel when we become a beginner at something. Until we’re familiar with that state, we’ll fear it, and it will prevent us from learning anything—including the most important skill of all: learning how to learn.

Go become a beginner at something today. You’ll be learning that thing, but you’ll also be working on a much more important skill—learning how to learn.

Pay enough attention

2016-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

My late aunty Joan was a truly incredible person. She was New Zealand’s first female reconstructive surgeon, and also the country’s first and foremost specialist in hand surgery.

Hands are incredibly complicated pieces of biological engineering, and after being crushed in a workplace incident or a vehicle collision, putting one back together in a way that it will still allow it’s owner to use it for the rest of their lives is, well… tricky.

After a career of honing her craft, one of the key insights she acquired in relation to solving complicated problems was this:

If you pay enough attention to the information in front of you, you never have to make a decision.

—Dr. Joan Chapple

Decisions are what you have to make when you have imperfect information. There’s nothing wrong with that, but what aunty Joan’s insight points to is that we often have another option when faced with a decision between multiple possible courses of action. We can choose to dig deeper, and observe the information in front of us with increasing detail, until we discover something that indicates one course of action is optimal compared with the other choices. Keep digging, and you’ll always find some unsuspecting nugget of critical data lying there just waiting to see the light of day.

At that point, the decision is made for you.

This approach has helped me in all kinds of situations over the years. In many ways it’s similar to answering “none of the above”, except it’s almost the diametric opposite—instead of calling the context of the decision into question, you’re directly challenging the notion that you’re stuck with imperfect information.

Next time you have a decision to make, try looking closer at the information instead.

In 2001, Joan made the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to medicine and the community. If you’d like to read a bit more about my aunty Joan and her story, here’s an excerpt from a NZ Herald article she was featured in a few years ago.

Saving the day

2016-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

Don’t confuse being a leader with being a hero. That’s a big mistake.

A hero swoops in to save the day. They’re the embodiment of capable. They’re the white knight that takes it upon themselves to carry other people to safety, so that everyone can live to fight another day.

There’s a time and a place for that. Sometimes we do need a hero to dig us out of a mess, and sometimes the job of saving the day does fall on the leader.

But only sometimes.

It’s tempting to think that being a hero makes you a leader, but if you adopt the hero mentality as the way you choose to lead people, you’ll quickly discover that it’s a terrible long-term approach.

Here’s why: If you’re saving people, that means you fundamentally believe that people need saving. You believe people aren’t capable of finding their own way to safety. You believe that, if left alone, people won’t survive without your intervention.

And heroes are often wrong.

We might be grateful initially when you save us, but it’s short lived. We quickly sense that you don’t actually have faith in us, and next time, we’ll probably start to resent your attempts to swoop in.

The problem with being saved is that it robs people of the opportunity to grow. At some point, we need to find our own way out of a mess, and to learn how we can do it again next time with confidence. We need to realise that we’re actually perfectly capable of resolving difficult situations on our own.

It’s one thing for a leader to set an example by doing good work with and for the team. But when a leader takes over other people’s work, because they don’t believe it’ll get done, they become a hero.

Your people don’t need saving. They need you to create potential and then get out of the way.

The leader’s job

2016-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

Leadership is about creating tension. Tension needs to be your comfort zone. You need to be completely comfortable curating discomfort in other people. Not out of spite or malice, but because you believe in people’s ability to resolve tension in a positive way. Not out of a desire for control, but from a fundamental desire to unleash the potential lying dormant all around us.

Why? Because that’s your job. Your job as a leader is to create and curate the fields of potential around us. Just like in electronics, your job is to create voltage—an imbalance in charge between point A and point B—that’s what enables the electrons get their flow on. Without potential, there’s no current. No current, and the lightbulb simply doesn’t turn on.

When you point out a difference between point A and point B, or between here and there, you create a space that’s just begging to be filled. You’re creating a room that other people can step into and furnish with their creativity. You’re opening an invitation for someone to step up and resolve the tension.

People don’t follow leaders when they get told what to do. We begin following only when the leader creates a space that we want to fill. We begin following only when the leader points out that the potential between point A and point B is ours to realise. We begin following only when we feel discomfort with the status quo, and we feel empowered to do something to resolve the tension.

As a leader, it’s your job to both cultivate and curate the tension and potential, and then to let go and believe in people’s ability to step up and grow—to expand their own comfort zones, to fill the space, to make the journey from A to B.

We’re waiting. Where’s the space to fill? Where’s this point B we’ve heard so much about?

Unask the question

2016-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

Did you ever come across a multiple-choice question on an test where there was clearly something wrong with the fundamental premise of a question, such that the available choices didn’t provide you any way to articulate an answer that was “correct”. You’re sitting there, under exam conditions, with an hour left, and suddenly you can’t move forward because the person who wrote the test was thoughtless about a question. I’m sure I’m not alone in having experienced this on a few occasions.

Conditioned dualism

Unfortunately, situations like this are common, and they only teach us one thing. They teach us that we have no choice but to conform to a dualistic reality in order to move forward, even if we know we’re doing so against our better judgement. We learn to think in binary terms. Yes or no. Positive or negative. True or false. Forward or back. On or off. One or zero.

Seeing reality in dualistic terms like this is often convenient for professional survival, especially when you’re trying to program a computer or draw up a budget or solve a discrete math equation or write an exam. Our goals are to get past mere survival though—we want to flourish and innovate and inspire. For these pursuits, thinking along binary dimensions often only stands to limit us.

A third answer

We need a third answer. We need an answer that lets us respond to a binary question by pointing out the implied dualism as false. We need to be able to say that the usual “yes” and “no” answers are neither correct or incorrect answers. We need a way to show that the question is loaded. We need a way to scribble “none of the above” or “N/A” in there underneath the usual answers ourselves, and then proclaim that as our choice.

It turns out this is a really foreign concept to traditional Western thought, and it follows that there is no term in the English language for this answer—”N/A” and “none of the above” are about as close as we get. It’s simply not in our metaphorical vocabulary.

Unasking the question

Eastern philosophy knows what’s up. In Japanese (and some other asian cultures), there is a word for precisely this idea: 無. Mu.

When literally translated, it’s a way to answer the question in the negative. A more nuanced interpretation of this word though, as it’s used in Buddhist contexts at least, is that the question itself must be “unasked”. By responding with “mu”, you’re saying that no answer can exist in the terms provided. You’re saying that a deeper insight is needed than the context from which the question comes.

Next time you’re in a tricky spot, try making “none of the above” your answer. Mu. Unask the question and see what happens.

altMBA: Week Two

2016-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

It’s Monday, which means that week two of the altMBA intensive is over with. As well as reflecting on the second week, this is the half-way point of the course, so I’d also like to look back on the first half of the program.

Note: My summary of week one can be found here.

Projects

Last week’s projects focused on three things: confronting the irrationality we see in ourselves and others, digging deep on the real purpose of things, and looking at organisational structures critically when thinking about how meaningful change really happens.

Irrationality

The key insight I got from this first project is that all humans, ourselves included, act in ways that are contrary to logic. It’s easy to look at other people and say that their behaviour is clearly irrational, but it’s much harder to face that truth’s difficult corollary: so are we. And what’s more, it also follows that because every one of us is irrational, none of us are—that’s just the way humans work.

Rather than pointing out the lack of logic, scratching our heads, and trying to “work out” why people don’t act in their economic interest, or behave in ways that are “obviously beneficial” from our point of view—we’re far better embracing the way things are and learning how to work with these quirks of human nature instead. For everyone’s benefit.

What is it for?

This question is important. So are it’s adjacent questions: “who is this for?”, “how do these people know it’s for me?”. Unless we ask these questions and really strive to get to the bottom of them, there’s a high chance we’ll end up positioning our products in an extremely sub-optimal context.

I also saw a huge overlap between the act of asking these questions, and shifting your thinking into the Jobs To Be Done mindset for understanding products. Like Clayton Christensen famously explains with the milkshake story, when we stop thinking about the functional purpose of a product or service, and start thinking about the surrounding context that makes someone hire a product to do a job, profound insights start to occur that can radically alter what you see as “obvious” ways to improve things.

Influence within organisations

Within any organisation, there’s the way things appear (i.e. the org chart), and then there’s the way things actually work. The two are often wildly different, and it’s important to recognise this difference if your goal is to make any kind of change, decision, or idea happen. Don’t read into this difference too much—it’s probably not there out of malice or deliberate deception—it’s just that the way people say they act and the way people actually act are almost never the same.

Rather than fighting this reality, and wishing that things worked the way they look on the org chart, it’s clear to me that it’s better to go with the grain, and use the momentum and leverage that brings to make important stuff happen. If there’s parts of how the organisation works that need to be changed for people’s benefit, we can always use the way things work now to our advantage in bringing about the new reality we’re after.

Reflections at the half-way point

I’m not going to lie, I’m feeling pretty drained and overwhelmed after two weeks of this. It’s a lot to take in, and it’s tiring. What I think that’s doing though, as I look towards these next two weeks of projects, is it’s forcing me to examine where I think my comfort zones are, compared with where they may actually be.

What seems to be dawning on me as I reflect on the first half of the program is that a lot of my energy went into the worry and the anxiety around each assignment, instead of into getting it done.

That’s something I’m deliberately going to work on for week three: save my energy for the hard part of actually doing the work for each project, instead of wasting it fretting over the process of deciding what approach is best. Go with the flow, and use the additional momentum that generates to relax for the same result instead.

Practice. Practice. Practice.

Name your ambiguity

2016-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

“Named must your fear be before banish it you can.”

—Yoda

Just as we must call out our fears in order to vanquish them, so too must we call out the ambiguity in front of us if we are to move forward with specificity.

We encounter ambiguity all the time. It’s in the email from your boss. It’s in your homework assignment. It’s in that comment your colleague made about your work. It’s all over that brief your client just gave you.

What do you do with ambiguity? Usually we let it paralyse us.

There’s a few other things you could do though. You could let it sit in the hope the fog will clear on its own. You could accept the vagueness and move forward anyway. You could dig into it further and see if there’s specificity lurking underneath? You have lots of options for dealing with ambiguity.

But first, you must identify it.

Name it. Call it out. Draw a dotted line around it. Even if you can’t tell exactly where it is, point in the general direction your gut tells you is most likely. You must be explicit about where the ambiguity lies—with yourself at least. Even if you end up being wrong, at least pointing in a direction lets you begin exploring.

It’s either that, or remain stuck. Your call.

Time is nowhere to be found

2016-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

Who has time? Who has time? But then if we never take time, how can we ever have time?

—The Merovingian, The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

Whether it’s things we want to do, or things we must do, it’s always hard to find time to fit it all into the day. What I’ve discovered in the years since I first heard this dialogue from The Matrix Reloaded is that time is very very rarely something that is just found. We don’t just stumble upon a chunk of time in the middle of our day, in the same way we might discover a stray coin in the bottom of our pocket we’d forgotten about.

Even on the rare occasions that we do unexpectedly find ourselves with a spare hour in the day, it usually makes much more sense to make the most of the downtime in-between other things. We take a moment to breathe, to clear our heads. It’s rare we get a respite like that, so we take it for ourselves.

In fact, that’s exactly what we should be doing more often. We don’t have to wait until we have an unspoken-for block of time to take part of it for something we value. Turns out that even when time is spoken for, we can still take some of it for a different purpose and usually we find a way to still meet all our commitments.

Sure, we could just hope that the things we want our life to consist of will find their way into our lives, but I’d rather not chance it. I’d rather take time every single day for the things that are important to me. That way, even if I lose control of the direction of my life, I know for sure that life will be made of what I want along the way.

When was the last time you took time for something you value?

Put things in your way

2016-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

Behaviour change is tricky. It’s hard because we have to remember to act differently, and our brains are unfortunately very good at unconsciously chugging along doing things the same way we’ve done them every other day for the last 5 years.

To get around this, we have to hack the system. We have to identify when there’s an opportunity to interrupt the old behaviour (or lack of action, as the case may be), and hook into that opportunity in such a way that the new desired behaviour becomes the path of least resistance at exactly that moment.

We have to put things in our way so that we don’t have to rely on our memory and willpower, since they often fail on their own.

The path of least resistance

If you’re building a habit of running regularly, put your running gear out the night before, so it’s easier to throw that on than it is to open your closet for regular clothes.

If you’re working on waking up earlier, set your phone’s alarm, but leave your phone charging on the other side of the room so you have no choice to get out of bed to turn the alarm off in the morning.

If you’re trying to drink more water, and less of other things like coffee or soft drinks, leave a full glass of water in front of the coffee machine or next to the fridge, so that whenever you go to get a drink that’s not water, you’ve got an easier option sitting right there. Drink the water, refill the glass, and place it back there again for when you’re back next.

My doorway reminder

One of the things I’ve done along these lines is that I have a pull-up bar set up over the door to my office, with a set of gymnastics rings hanging from the bar at waist height (see photo above), a bit like a hanging fly screen of sorts. I have to navigate past this setup every time I enter or leave my office, and it reminds me to do just one or two reps of an exercise—to “grease the groove” as Pavel Tsatsouline would say—whether that’s a pull up, leg raises, or just hanging from the bar for 15 seconds at a time.

The desired behaviour needs to be easier than the status quo. If you do this right, even the laziest of us can produce radical changes in a very short amount of time. What behaviours do you want to change? How can you interrupt them and replace them with a better option?

Something to say

2016-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

Since making a goal of writing a blog post daily for six months, I’ve been thinking a lot more about the emotional labour that writing entails. Funny that. There’s many things I’ve realised I’m afraid of, but one of them sticks out. I don’t want to just write for writing’s sake.

Writing needs to be about something, otherwise it’s just fluff. We need to have something to say when we write, otherwise we’re just wasting people’s time. The time someone invests in reading your words needs to pay them back somehow. Reading this blog post needs to be more valuable to you than spending the same three minutes doing something else. Or nothing at all (that’s always a valuable alternative too).

How does one go about having something to say, though?

The reason this is a difficult question is that there’s so much in the world that someone could write about. We have so much to write about in fact, that it completely overwhelms us with choice to the point that it feels like we have absolutely nothing to choose from.

Not having something to say is an illusion.

One way around this is to narrow it down. Zoom in. Get specific. Ridiculously specific.

Zoom in

Perhaps the best explanation of how to zoom in I’ve ever come across is from Robert M. Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”—one of my all-time favourite books. There’s a great passage where the main character, Phaedrus, is giving one of his creative writing students an assignment to write about the town of Bozeman, Montana. The student just couldn’t think of anything to say. So he narrowed it down. “Just write about the main street of Bozeman”, he says. Still nothing.

So he revised it again. “You’re not looking”, he insisted. “Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.”

Here’s what happened next:

She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. “I sat in the hamburger stand across the street,” she said, “and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn’t stop.”

When you zoom in to just one brick, you have no choice but to start seeing things with your own eyes, rather than through the eyes of other people. We see for ourselves, and this starts a chain reaction that leads to thinking for yourself. This forces you to have something to say that’s unquestionably yours.

What do you have to say?

We’re all waiting to hear what you have to say. Don’t let yourself fall for the illusion that you have nothing to say. That’s baloney. Zoom in on something and start writing. Or take pictures. Or build an app. Or start a business. Or pick up a paintbrush. Or something. Now!

Thinking for yourself

2016-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

Thinking for yourself used to be dangerous. Run with the crowd so you don’t get picked off as easy prey. Stay in the shallows so you don’t get swept away and drown. Don’t go up the mountain or you’ll freeze. Don’t question the king or you’ll wind up in locked up in stocks feeling the scorn of the whole community.

Thinking for yourself meant death. Or worse—the psychological torture of humiliation, embarrassment, and unshakeable shame.

That’s no longer true for most of us. If you’re reading this, chances are you’re privileged to live in an environment where we have a huge amount of freedom to think for ourselves, and that changes everything. In the economy we find ourselves, where the bold ideas are the ones that win, it’s now risky not to be thinking for ourselves. We risk being mediocre. We risk being passionless. We risk being boring. We risk being dispensable.

What can we do when our instincts tell us to do the opposite of what today’s world demands?

Just start. In the safety of your own head, start allowing yourself to think things that other people would probably laugh at. It will feel weird (at first) to let go of the need for reassurance from the people around us and society at large. It will feel weird to think a thought and not know whether its “right” or “wrong”. As soon as you start thinking for yourself, you’ll soon realise that you aren’t going to get eaten by a bear or shunned from your village.

Who knows, you might even find that you’re not alone in thinking that way after all. :wink:

Expect more

2016-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

I haven’t done a very good job, historically, of setting expectations for my writing on this blog. I never made internal commitments to write along certain themes or publish with a certain frequency, nor did I have a good understanding of what I was trying to write for. Since I didn’t do these things even in my own mind, I did an even worse job of communicating those things outwardly to readers like yourself. I’d like to change that.

If you’re subscribed to my mailing list, you’ve probably noticed a sudden increase in the frequency of my posts—I’ve published a blog post every day for the last week, in fact. I realise that may represent an unwelcome surprise for your inbox, and I’m sorry I didn’t set better expectations earlier. I’d like to briefly share why I’ve suddenly been posting more regularly, and what to expect going forward.

Resistance

Of all the books from the altMBA welcome pack, Steven Pressfield’s “The War of Art” has had the most profound impact for me. In it, he talks about The Resistance™—that invisible, insidious, internal force that gets in the way of us producing and creating—and all its myriad forms and tactics. The Resistance can be beaten, but only by facing it down systematically, repeatedly, and patiently. Show up. Shut up. Sit down. Work, even if it’s crap (to start with). Pressfield calls this “turning pro”—that’s the way to conquer Resistance.

“Turning Pro”

After being challenged to set a goal as part of the first altMBA exercise, I decided that I would choose a goal focused on beating my resistance.

The goal I’ve set myself, is to publish a blog post every day for six months.

Having done this for a week already, I’m not sure of a better way to drive my Resistance into the ground than to stare it down every morning, and write something. To start with, it’s definitely going to be a struggle—and quality may not be the best I can hope for. As my Resistance gets weaker and weaker though, I’m confident my voice will start to find its groove.

Contingencies

Sometimes things happen that are simply beyond our control, so I’m accepting that there may be a day or two where I fail—but I’d be a fool to allow that get in the way of the larger purpose here. If something stops me from publishing one day, my course of action will be to get back on the horse the day after, and looking back at the end of the six months at how I did.

I’m also aware that there’s a lot of unknown unknowns for me going into a goal like this, so I’m also granting myself permission to modify or discard this goal along the way, provided I communicate that change publicly.

Expect more

What should you expect from this blog going forward then?

Topics. My writing is mainly going to be focused on improving various areas of oneself. I’m writing about the things I feel I need to wrap my head around myself, and the ways I’m attempting to work through challenges of one kind or another. I’ll try and keep things general, but often I’ll use analogies and references from the things in my life: product design, software development, leadership and management, writing, philosophy, self-learning, health and fitness, and generally things that any student of life should relate to.
Length. I’ll try to keep things short and punchy. Being concise is hard though, so sometimes things might have an extra few paragraphs. I’m doing this every day remember, so I have a clear incentive to keep things short (unlike this post).
Quality. Expect the quality to get better with time. I’m new at this, and I’m not perfect. I’m going to err on the side of shipping something valuable and iterating rather than trying to reach perfection in a single post. Hopefully, my ability to articulate things with elegance gets better. Only time will tell.

Accountability

If you can tolerate reading a short email every day, I’d love your help to stay accountable on this journey. You can sign up for my blog posts via email using the form below.

Mailing list subscribers: If you’d rather not get an email from me every day, I completely understand. If you need to unsubscribe, there will be a link at the bottom of any email you get via my blog.

altMBA: Week One

2016-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

As those of you following along will know, I’m in the process of undertaking Seth Godin’s altMBA program. This Monday morning I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the first week, so I can share the things I’m learning with you lovely people, and also to help me cement in my own head some of the changes that are taking place.

Projects

The first three projects (of thirteen!) we worked through this week revolved around setting goals, ideation, and decisions.

Goals

Until we pick a target, we’ll never know if we’re hitting the right mark. I’ve always had goals of various levels of specificity for different areas of my life, but this project really challenged me to first get really specific about the what of setting a goal in a way I don’t feel I’ve ever dug deep enough for before.

Dig deep enough into the what of a goal, and you’ll get clear about the why in the process. If you still aren’t crystal clear on the why, you need to keep pulling back layers.

Ideation

It’s amazing how much of the time we’re just getting in our own way. The people who are prolific aren’t really any different from you and I—all they’ve done is figured out how to get out of their own way a little bit and let the stream pour forth. So it is with articulating ideas. Judging and filtering are mental processes that have a clear time and place—and a critical role in producing anything of quatity—but most people thoroughly overuse these tools in the early stage of the creative process.

First you need to go for quantity. Everything else—format, detail, and yes, even quality—needs to stay flexible to start with while you focus on getting past your inner critic. Only once you’ve done that should you pick up the filter tool, and even then, don’t be too eager.

Decisions

The prospect of being eaten if we made a crappy decision has baked a natural propensity for loss aversion into us over the millennia. That turned out to be a hugely successful strategy, but now that it’s led us to these recent innovations in social structure and technology, that software routine is all but obsolete for making optimal decisions. To make good decisions today, we need to not only understand the fallacies that humans succumb to, but experience first-hand what it’s like to observe your brain falling for them even though you know better. Once those insights have marinated a little bit, you need to commit to making decisions using external tools to keep you honest.

Ignore sunk costs. Deliberately question the frame of every decision. Make sure you know what the decision is for. Understand the decision tree, and the probability of all the contingencies along each branch. Rank your priorities. For decisions big and small, these tools will always improve the quality of your choices (or at least your understanding of them).

Giving and receiving feedback

In addition to the projects themselves, the exercise of reading other people’s work, processing it, and finding ways to comment on it that challenge people to go further into the nooks and crannies where there’s still room for more substance is very thought-provoking. More than anything, including receiving the comments of others on my work, this aspect of the course has forced me to re-examine my own work and thought process and look for ways to level-up. It’s hard to say exactly how I’m changing as a result, but I can tell something is happening.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

On their own, these projects are all showing me useful things about myself, my process, and my potential. Collectively though, I can already sense some changes happening in the way I’m approaching my work, my writing, my conversations, and my internal dialogue. It’s still a bit blurry and hard to make out, but the shapes are moving around out there, and I’m certain they’ll come in to focus more and more as the weeks roll on.

I can’t wait to see what week two has in store.

Update: Read my week two summary here.

Layers of audience

2016-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

When most people think about the idea of an “audience” for their creative work, what comes to mind is a direct connection. The ballet dancer walks on-stage, and once the spotlight hits them, the only thing between them and their audience is the air hanging in the theatre.

Unfortunately, chances are that if you’re reading this, you don’t work in a field were you have a single, direct connection with your audience like that—it’s probably more convoluted. Most of us work within a team of people, and this creates a second layer of “audience”. Nowhere is this more true than someone in a leadership role, even if that leadership isn’t explicit or permanent.

Our work within the group dynamics is now the first layer of audience. You have to “perform” for, and with, the group in a way that achieves the outcome you want—like shipping the software release on time, or diagnosing a particularly nasty bug that cuts across team responsibility lines, or agreeing on a new direction for the company brand.

Think of it like taking a shot on the pool table where you have no choice but to use the knock-on effect. You have to plan for the ball you hit to knock another ball in just the right way to put the latter in the pocket.

Being a leader means being aware of all possible layers of “audience” you’re working with, and perform to the first layer in a way that ensures the last layer get what they need—the software upgrade, the resolved issue, or the refreshing re-brand.

It’s tricky, but them’s the breaks.

The power of short feedback cycles

2016-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

Getting feedback quickly is important in any creative undertaking. If there’s a long time between making a tweak, and seeing the results that change has on the output, feedback can end up as the bottleneck for how fast you can work while maintaining quality.

Take a potter’s wheel for example. You start with a spinning lump of wet clay, and as you begin to shape it with your hands, you get instant feedback—both tactile and visual—about the effect your hands are having on the form as it takes shape. If you make a change that sends things out of balance, you can instantly correct it and take things in a better direction instead.

As you start to introduce more tools in-between your hands and your material, introduce layers of abstraction in the form of planning and prototypes, and even introduce different individual roles (or whole departments!) that sit in-between the person who does the direction and the person who executes the result—things start to go off the rails in direct proportion to the length of the feedback loop.

The sketch you thought looked great on paper looks clunky when seen as a 3D printed prototype. That really clever algorithm you wrote doesn’t even compile. The change you made to the font size gives all the paragraphs later in the documentorphaned words. Your quadcopter crashes because the image of the tree branch was delayed by 500ms on its way from the camera to your video monitor.

There might be a limit to how short we can make the cycle for our specific field of work, but that shouldn’t stop us from trying to get as close to that limit as possible. The shorter we can get the feedback cycle, the more expressive and prolific we can be.

If you consider yourself a maker of tools (I’m looking at you, software people), you need to think very long and hard about whether the tool you’re building puts the creator further away from their material, or helps them be more in touch with it. Is the feedback cycle shorter by adding your tool into the mix, or is it longer?

Make the decision once

2016-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

When we want to make a change, like losing weight, exercising more, eating more healthy, we often make the change way harder than it needs to be by re-examining our decision every day. Again and again, we wake up and force ourselves to recontemplate the decision—”Do I still want what I wanted yesterday? Am I deciding to stick by that decision today?”

Two weeks after our original decision, what was originally one decision has turned into fourteen decisions.

Making any decision repetitively is tiring, and decision fatigue is a real thing. If we take this route, we inevitably hit a threshold from all the mental and emotional effort, and we give in to the easier, more immediately gratifying options. We eat the greasy burger. We stay in and veg out on the couch. We wind up back at square one.

Make the decision once, instead.

Catch yourself before you try and make that decision each day. Realise that you already made this decision yesterday, or last week, or last month. Unless new information comes to light (whether that’s external changes, or new insights from within your own head) that indicates there might be a compelling reason to make a new decision, you’re better off taking your first decision as a given, and spending your daily decision fatigue budget on making other, more impactful decisions (once).

Don’t ask, don’t get

2016-01-14T00:00:00+00:00

Don’t ask people to sign up for your email list, and you’ll never have any subscribers. Build an app that doesn’t ask people for money, and it won’t earn any. Do freelance work without invoicing your clients (and remembering to following up), and you won’t get paid.

It’s easy to keep your goals, and requests of other people, to yourself—but that doesn’t get you anywhere. All you’ll do is end up grumpy when your outer reality doesn’t match up to your inner vision of how things could be. What’s hard is to move past your shame of asking for the things you want. Sure, people might say no, but that’s the price of playing to win.

If you have an end goal or result in mind, at some point you’re going to have to ask for that in unambiguous terms. You won’t always get what you want—at least not on the first try. By asking though, you at least make yourself eligible.

What are you putting off asking for?

(While I have your attention, I’m going to take my own medicine and invite you to do something for me, if you’re feeling generous. Find something I’ve created that resonates with you, and share it with someone else who might enjoy it too. It could be one of my other blog posts, the Remote Jobseeker’s Handbook that’s coming out soon, a photo of mine, or something else.)

The best shot is often backwards

2016-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

What’s that sound? Clicking, clacking, snapping, and whirring, all around…

We hear the buttery soft sound of an SLR camera shutter (or the tacky fake shutter sound effect phones make), and we immediately jump to the conclusion that someone else is getting the shot of a lifetime. Fear of missing out (FOMO) kicks in. We reach for our own camera, or into our pocket for our phone to join in. We follow along with the crowd and take the picture the crowd has decided needs to be taken, based on what someone else originally saw. You’ll almost never take a compelling image this way.

Do the opposite instead.

I know it’s hard, but building this habit into my photography is responsible for many of the photos I’m most proud of. The incredible photo below isn’t mine—it was taken by John Blanding from the Boston Globe—but this photo captures this concept perfectly.

Photo credit: John Blanding, Boston Globe

Check out the old lady with purple glasses hanging over the rail. Everyone else is preoccupied with trying to capture the moment, but she’s there enjoying the experience unfiltered. It’s not the content of this photo that’s instructive (although there’s an incredibly important lesson there too), it’s what the photographer did.

He took the photo everyone else missed.

That’s the lesson here. Look in the opposite direction for the shot other people are all missing. Or look sideways. Or turn the camera on the crowd itself, like the photo above. If you’re out walking, or on a journey of some sort, turn around and look behind you every now and then. The view backwards or sideways will often surprise you, and you’ll completely miss it if you’re only ever focused on facing forwards in the direction you’re going.

Oh, and if you think this principle only applies to photography, you’re mistaken. :wink:

Calm before the storm

2016-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

Late last year, I applied for Seth Godin’s altMBA intensive, and I was fortunate enough to be one of the 100 people to be accepted for this third iteration.

It starts this week. Yesterday, the first projects (of thirteen total over the 4 weeks!) were released, and it’s a significant understatement to say this month is going to be a doozy. If I’m honest about what it feels like to be staring down the barrel of this month, I feel anxious, overwhelmed, curious, excited, and oddly skeptical. It’s an odd mix, but there you have it.

In the spirit of letting go of the brakes, I’m doing everything I can to lean forwards instead of backing off, and it’s going to be incredibly interesting to see what happens. The altMBA is all about change, and I know I’m going to change as a result.

I just don’t know how. Here’s to the unknown! :sweat_smile: :beers: :tada:

Letting go of the brakes

2016-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.
Steven Pressfield, The War of Art (Buy on Amazon: UK or US)

First instincts tell us to sit on brakes while we ride doing the mountain track, lest we hurtle out of control. To push the stopper down of our rollerblades, lest we get speed wobbles. To keep thinking about thinking when learning to meditate, lest we actually allow ourselves to be empty. To keep our eyes closed underwater, lest we open them and discover that the water doesn’t hurt our eyes after all. To keep our self-consciousness so engaged with worrying about what to write that we feel stuck and unable to write anything at all—let alone (heaven forbid) actually writing something good.

At first, letting go only happens for a second or two at a time. Glimpses of release. In those glimpses though, we travel much further forward than you imagined, and not having the brakes on is no way near as frightening as our first instincts promised us it would be. We discover that even though we’ve let go of the brakes, we can still guide the bike with the small adjustments to the handlebars, and by leaning our bodyweight. These insights change everything.

Most of us understand this phenomenon to some degree, but putting it into action is a whole other thing. Turns out it’s really hard to relax your control in a controlled way. Our instincts can’t fathom how to reconcile the simultaneous lack of control and the presence of safety, calmness, and flow.

It seems like a contradiction, but it’s not.

Soon, with practice, we allow ourselves longer dashes of freedom. Longer stretches of joy and flow between the still-instinctual cautiousness and perceived safety of the brakes. Soon we’re more confident that gravity will pull us forward, and that we’ll still be able to guide the bike down the hill. Soon even more comfort with letting go, with leaning into the corners, and maybe even beginning to pedal faster as we head towards a jump. We relax into the joy of momentum, and our newfound comfort in a state that used to be entirely outside our comfort zone.

Instead of making resolutions this new year in an attempt to add to who I am, my aim is to identify the areas of my life where I’m hanging on the brakes, and to find ways to relax that instinctual reflex. I have a sneaking suspicion that learning how to let go will have a far more positive impact than the alternative.

Where in your life could you do with letting go of the brakes?

Go remote in 2016

2016-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

It’s a new year, and a new work-week. For many of you, today is your first day back at work after the holidays. Tell me… how does that make you feel? I want you to really ask yourself: Is this job, in this office, what you really want? Do you ever wonder if there’s something better out there for you, waiting around the corner?

Two possible futures

I’d like you to take two minutes and visualise something for me. Imagine yourself in your current job, at the desk you’ve come to know so well, and I’d like you to look around in your mind’s eye. Not just at the computer in front of you, or the walls and the carpet and your surroundings, but also sense how you feel when you’re there. How do you feel when you’re on your way there, and more importantly, how do you feel when you’re on your way back home at the end of the day?

Now… I’d like you to take that state of mind, and without changing it, fast-forward a month, 3 months, 6 months, and then a year into the future. Visualise it. You’re sitting there, on the first Monday in January, 2017, and a year’s worth of that feeling has been compounding and swelling the whole time. How do you feel now? If some part of that state of mind was negative or frustrating, then chances are a whole extra year on top doesn’t feel that great, am I right?

Ok… now let’s rewind to present day.

This time, as you begin to fast-forward, I want you to do something differently. I want you to see yourself making a change. All change is scary at first, but as you fast-forward a few weeks, or a month or two, you step up to the challenge of starting a new phase of your career. You examine the reality of what’s daunting you, and compare that to what’s actually possible instead of taking it at it’s intimidating face value. As you fast-forward further still (3 months on now), you push through into a new reality where you’ve made the shift to working remotely.

But the fast-forward doesn’t stop.

You whiz through your first few months in the new job, you start to get the hang of working in a distributed team, and you eventually wrap up the year, the holiday break is a blur (even when you’re not fast-forwarding, that’s how it often feels!), and then you finally come to rest, again… on the first Monday in January, 2017, but you’re in a whole new dimension.

Look around. Where are you? Are you relaxing in your home-office? Are you working from your favourite coffee shop? What are you wearing? How was your commute (if you even had one)? Most importantly, how does all this make you feel? How does it feel to tell your friends and your loved ones about the positive shift you made all those months ago?

Where you end up is up to you. The only thing that’s ever really in your way is you.

I want to help you make the switch

Last year, I mentioned that I was writing a book with the goal of helping people like yourself make the switch to working remotely. I was overwhelmed with the response I got. I couldn’t believe it. Hundreds of people have now signed up to the launch list, and despite my original timeline estimation being off by several orders of magnitude (I’ve never written a book before—gimme a break!), I’m at the point now where I’m just about ready to let this baby loose.

So! If pulling the trigger and going remote in 2016 gets you gears turning, then I’ve got some great news to share: The Remote Jobseeker’s Handbook is almost here!

On your marks…

Mark this date in your calendar. The Remote Jobseeker’s Handbook will be available to purchase on Feb 1st, 2016. If you’ve ever dreamt of making the switch to working remotely, then you better start gearing yourself up for the positive change you’re about to make!

Get on the launch list

If you haven’t already signed up for the launch list (note: not the email newsletter at the bottom of this page, that’s for my blog!), you should do so right now, so you can be the first to know when it’s available to purchase. Who knows, there might even be an early sneak peek inside the book, and an even sneakier launch discount in it for you if you behave! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Head on over to the book’s landing page for more.

We’re not done yet

2015-12-23T00:00:00+00:00

My 28th birthday has now been and gone, and thanks to all of you wonderful people you’ve helped me raise over US$900 for charity: water. What an incredible birthday present! I’m humbled, and I want to extend my sincere gratitude to everyone who has donated so far. Because of you, 30 people will get access to clean water, and their lives will be permanently changed in a multitude of ways as a result. Thank you.

… but we’re not done yet.

My birthday may be over, but there’s still far too many people in the world who don’t have access to life’s most basic need: clean water. The good news is there’s still time to join in. My campaign will stay open for donations until December 31st—just enough time for any of you who haven’t (yet) had the pleasure of donating to jump on board and help change the lives of a even more people.

My challenge to you

Donating the age I just turned in dollars (US$28) is enough to permanently give a person access to a clean water project somewhere else in the world. Chances are that’s not an amount that will make a massive dent in your week, but to someone elsewhere in the world, it means a permanent change in their quality of life.

It’s christmas, after all—and most of us already have everything we need. Why not change someone else’s life for good this year?

I hereby invite you to:

Go to my campaign’s page
Choose an amount. I suggest my age in dollars (US$28), but it’s up to you. What about donating an amount matching your age?
Hit the button.

You’ll feel great all week, I promise. :yum:

I’m donating my birthday

2015-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

I’m turning 28 in a little over a week. Scary stuff. :scream:

Know what’s really scary though? About 1,400 children from around the world die every day from diseases caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation. That’s roughly one person per minute. One child. A human just like you. Gone. Every minute. Clock’s ticking…

Even if you take disease and death out of the equation though, water affects so much more. Education. Poverty. Food supply. Gender equality. You name it.

Here’s a video that does a great job of explaining things:

What are we to do? Well, it may only be a small gesture, but this year I’ve decided to donate my birthday to charity: water. I’m asking those close to me to forgo presents and make a small donation to my charity: water campaign instead, and I hope that there’s a few people out there on the internet like yourself who’ll join in too.

My goal

Even though my birthday is in a week or two, my campaign is going to run until December 31st. I’ve set a goal of raising USD$2500 by the time the campaign ends. Achieving this goal would be the most amazing present I could ask for, because even just USD$20 can provide one person with access to a clean water project in their village.

Why charity: water?

I chose charity: water because they do truly inspirational work. Here’s a few highlights:

They’ve funded 17,370 water projects in 24 countries so far.
Private donors fund their operating costs, so 100% of every donation goes directly to building clean water projects.
They prove every project. Every time a clean water project is completed, they prove it using photos and GPS coordinates. You can explore their completed projects on a digital map.
Their solutions are simple. No grand solutions or billion dollar schemes. Just things like freshwater wells, rainwater catchments and sand filters. Stuff that costs $20 per person, and changes people’s lives permanently.
Read this. And then read these other things.

Now it’s your turn.

Here’s what to do next.

Go to my campaign’s page
Make a donation, even a small one.
Bask in the warm and fuzzy inside feelingness you’ll receive.

Water is life’s most basic need, and with our help, charity: water can make a real difference.

P.S.: You could even consider donating your birthday too. :ok_hand:

Something by you

2015-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

We went out for dinner at a local hotel, and while waiting for our table to be ready, we sat in the lounge-bar area and listened to a local acoustic music duo do their thing.

They sounded great, and the songs they were choosing to do covers of showed incredible taste. In between songs, the girl who was playing guitar and vocals mentioned that while they couldn’t promise anything, if anyone had a song request, they’d give it a shot. Nobody from the audience (there were only a handful of us) seemed to have an immediate response, so the drummer began to ease them into another cover.

After the next song finished, we asked them: “What about something you’ve written?” The girl remarked that they were flattered, as they hardly ever get asked that, and after some quick back and forth they decided on a song and began to play.

The song was brilliant. It was rocky. It was honest. It was dynamic. It was real. Some kids from the table over from us got up and started bopping and grooving. New listeners materialised from the hotel’s foyer. The room buzzed.

It turns out, that song hadn’t been heard by a soul in over a year. Nobody—not even the artists themselves—had laid ears on this marvellous piece in far too long. They’d just been playing covers—the songs that people already know.

Songs like that deserve to be heard, just like the covers did when they were shared with audiences for the first time. It’s not just songs though, or people who’re brave enough to do things that’d typically “count” as artistic. It could be software. It could be knitting. It could be a photo. It could be a tennis match. It could be a garden. It could be a team you’re building to tackle a problem. It could be anything, even something that doesn’t have a name or a Wikipedia entry yet.

We all have “originals” lurking within us, even if we’re still yet to find our stride, or settle on the thing we feel destined to do.

It’s our duty to ensure these originals see the light of day, to share them with an audience, or a market. We serve nobody by keeping these wonderful creations within us.

When are you going to decide it’s time? When will you have waited “long enough” in the wings? When you’re old and weary? I don’t mean to be morbid, but what if you don’t live as long as you hope? Don’t rob us of your art, but most importantly, don’t rob yourself of the joyful opportunity you have available, to experience what it’s like to express your passion with the world. You might not have the opportunity tomorrow.

We want to hear you, and we’re ready to applaud and cheer. We just need you to step up to the mic.

Go on. Stop playing other people’s songs for a minute. Play an original.

Take the power back

2015-09-24T00:00:00+00:00

Wherever you are in life, take responsibility for being there. Everyone’s situation is unique, with their own set of setbacks in the rear view mirror, and their own set of challenges in front of them, but what unifies us all is the reality that nobody but ourselves can step up and take responsibility for the direction our life takes.

Friends will support you, mentors will guide you, family will love you—but only you are in a position to own your life.

Until you acknowledge this, you will remain powerless. If you’re sitting around on your couch hoping that somebody else is going to step up, or that the tide of the universe will change and start to carry you to the top, then you’re giving your power away.

Once you do acknowledge your responsibility though, things change. In the wise words of Rage Against the Machine, you’ve got to take the power back. Change your worldview so that the power over your fate lies within (I know it sounds cheesy, but it’s true), instead of being something external. Take responsibility for getting yourself in shape, for improving your ability to manage your finances, for nurturing your friendships so they don’t go stale, for progressing in your career or business, and for any other area of your life that could do with some love. Would you rather leaves all these things up to chance? I think not.

But how?

Orientate. Take stock. Be honest with yourself about where you are, and how you feel about being there. Consider the trajectory you’re on, and where you might end up if things continue as they are.
Set goals. Make time to set goals for yourself, if you don’t already have them. List out the significant areas of your life and fast forward a year, five years, and ten years. Where could you be? Where do you want to be?
Plan a path that you think has a reasonable chance of taking you from where you are to where you want to go. I like to work backwards from,y goals. For example, “In order for this to happen, what else needs to be true first?”
Discipline yourself to take the daily actions necessary to keep you on track.
Be patient with yourself. Meaningful change won’t happen instantly, so don’t beat yourself up. You have to persist, despite not seeing results right away.

Or… do something different. Approach it another way if you want, but do something. This is how I’ve been approaching things, and it might not work for you. Heck, it might not work for me either, but if that turns out to be the case the I’ll change tack and try something new until I get where I want. That “until” is key. Do whatever you need until you achieve your ambitions.

Remember, you’re responsible for your own life, whether you’re conscious of it or not. Better make the most of it! :smiley:

It’s easy

2015-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

Every achievement I’ve been proud of in my life has been the result of countless small, trivial, and seemingly easy actions taken over the course of days, weeks, months, and years to create the grander end result.

Each keystroke, sentence, and paragraph of this book I’m writing has been easy to type so far, but together they’re turning into something I’ll be incredibly proud of. Every minute of the months I spent in high school teaching myself to do a backflip went by without thinking too much, but to this day it’s one of the challenges I’ve enjoyed most. The emails I sent and the conversations I had that secured this marvelous opportunity I have to work at GitHub weren’t especially challenging on their own, but the positive impact this job has had on my life has been remarkable.

These are a few of the things in my life I’m incredibly proud of, but I’m not sharing them to brag. I’m bringing them up because I think they point to a useful lesson that anyone can harness for themselves. All significant achievements look challenging, daunting, and nebulous when thought about in aggregate. When you deconstruct the individual daily actions each outcome actually requires though, what’s there? Not much. Just a few simple actions that stack up on the ones from yesterday.

What’s interesting is that the exact same thing can be said about all the times I’ve wound up disappointed at the outcomes I’ve created for myself. Equally countless, small, trivial actions taken each day can result in you becoming entrenched in behaviour patterns that keep you miserable and frustrated. Losing your physical fitness happens one day at a time. Becoming resentful about your job can happen one email at a time. Finding yourself in crushing amounts of debt can happen one credit card swipe at a time. Winding up with a blog that never gets updated happens… you guessed it… one day at a time.

Even little things that don’t appear to have tangible cumulative effects will sneak up on you. Hitting the snooze button on your alarm like you did twice this morning didn’t hurt anyone, right? Well, that’s debatable. If you start every day for 30 years with the mindset that you’d rather be unconscious than face the first hour of the day, that will definitely have some kind of effect on the direction your life takes. It’s probably not a net positive.

Hitting snooze is easy. Swinging your feet over the side of the bed and standing up is also pretty easy. The individual actions are easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy, either way. What’s hard is to stay aware of the direction your daily actions are taking you, and to be deliberate about which set of easy actions you decide to take. Moment to moment, it all matters.

It’s important not to make yourself feel guilty or ashamed of the times when you’ve made decisions that haven’t helped you get where you want to go. Making yourself wrong isn’t helpful. Instead, what’s helpful is to focus your energy on what you can control. What are the easy things you’re going to do today to get you where you want at the end of the week? What easy things are you going to do today to put you in a great position at the end of the year? What can you take action on today in a small way that will move you closer to where you want to be in five years time?

Whatever your definition of success is, it’s easy to become that. Whatever your definition of mediocrity is, it’s easy to become that too. It’s the decisions you make about which set of easy actions you take that will make the difference.

You’ve already made a number of decisions today that are taking you somewhere. Are you happy with that direction? If not, what are you going to do about it?

Creating bootable USB Installers for OS X

2015-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

At yesterday’s WWDC event, Apple announced the that next release of OS X, version 10.11, will be called “El Capitan”, and made a developer beta version of the OS available for download via their Apple Developer Program. I’m itching to try it out, and I’m sure you are too, so I thought I’d write up a guide to walk you through how to create a bootable USB installer.

Psst! Ever wanted to work remotely? Check out this ebook I’m putting together called the Remote Jobseeker’s Handbook »

Preparation

Here’s what you’re going to need:

A suitable USB drive. It will need to be 8GB minimum, and it will be completely erased as part of this process, so if you’ve got anything on it already make sure you back up the contents somewhere first.
The “Install OS X 10.11 Developer Beta.app” installer application. To get this, you’ll need an Apple Developer Program account with access to the beta release download. There’s probably other ways you could obtain this too, but I don’t condone doing anything shady.
About 5 to 10 minutes to create the installer. The installation process on the target machine will probably take much longer.

It’s not required, but for simplicity’s sake I like to manually erase the USB drive myself using Disk Utility beforehand, so that I can be sure which drive it is I’m erasing. If you do this using the default settings, you should wind up with a blank drive mounted at /Volumes/Untitled. If your USB drive’s volume is called something else, you’ll need to substitute the correct volume name when running the commands below.

Also, note that this is a Developer Beta version of OS X. It’s probably not a good idea to blindly install this on your primary machine, or you could be stuck with buggy software until a more stable release becomes available. I usually install beta versions of OS X on an older spare macbook.

Creating a bootable installer

You could use a program like DiskMaker X to create a bootable installer disk for you really easily, but the downside is that you often have to wait for the program to be updated in order to support the latest version of OS X. Most people don’t realise this, but it’s actually really easy to create a bootable installer using the createinstallmedia command supplied as part of all OS X installer images since Mavericks.

The command lives under the /Content/Resources path of the installer image, so presuming you have an installer image for the OS X 10.11 Developer Beta sitting in your /Applications directory, you can run the command as follows to see its usage instructions:

/Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ 10.11\ Developer\ Beta.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia
Usage: createinstallmedia --volume <path to volume to convert> --applicationpath <path to Install OS X 10.11 Developer Beta.app> [--force]

Arguments--volume, A path to a volume that can be unmounted and erased to create the install media.
--applicationpath, A path to copy of the OS installer application to create the bootable media from.
--nointeraction, Erase the disk pointed to by volume without prompting for confirmation.

Example: createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled --applicationpath "/Applications/Install OS X 10.11 Developer Beta.app"

This tool must be run as root.

So, with the USB volume ready to go, we simply need to run the following command to create the bootable installer:

sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ 10.11\ Developer\ Beta.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ 10.11\ Developer\ Beta.app --nointeraction

It should take between 5 to 10 minutes to complete, and you should see the following output:

Erasing Disk: 0%... 10%... 20%... 30%...100%...
Copying installer files to disk...
Copy complete.
Making disk bootable...
Copying boot files...
Copy complete.
Done.

Congratulations! You’re now the proud owner of a bootable USB installer for the developer beta of OS X 10.11 El Capitan.

Booting from the USB installer

To boot from the installer, reboot your Mac and hold down the ⌥ option key, and it will let you choose to boot from the USB disk instead of the built-in hard drive. Once the installer loads, you can either install El Capitan over the top of whatever you currently have installed, or you can use the Disk Utility to erase the built-in hard drive first and do a fresh install.

Future versions of OS X

The createinstallmedia command was introduced with Mavericks, and there’s even some official documentation referencing the command, so it seems like this should be a reliable way to create installation media for any future release of OS X too, whether pre-release or stable. If this changes, and you notice before I do, let me know!

I’m writing a book

2015-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

TL;DR: Want to make the switch to working remotely? Subscribe over here for updates.

Through my position as a product designer at GitHub, and having worked in the past as a freelancer, I’ve always been creating things for other people. I get a huge amount of satisfaction from that—and I don’t plan to stop—however I feel like creating something entirely myself from start to finish is one of the best ways for me to continue challenging myself and my skills, while helping other people in the process. For that reason, I’ve decided that this year I’m going to try my hand at creating products myself.

I’m going to start with a book. Well, an ebook to be specific. It’s going to be called the Remote Jobseeker’s Handbook. I’ll talk about the choice of topic in a sec, but first…

Why a book?

Why start with a book? Well, the simplest answer is that writing a book is one of the most efficient ways of providing value to other people. I’ve been fortunate enough to have some incredible experiences in my life, and I’m fairly confident that many of the things I’ve learned are things that other people want to wrap their heads around too—so a book makes perfect sense as a way to make that knowledge transfer happen.

Another point of consideration is more practical. The number of things that can possibly go wrong with a book compared with other types of products is an order of magnitude lower. As an ebook, the cost of manufacturing and distribution is virtually nil, and unlike a software product, it can’t really crash. The thing you’re reading the ebook with could crash of course, but that’s an acceptable risk as far as I’m concerned.

The Remote Jobseeker’s Handbook

Working remotely—both as a freelancer/contractor, and at my current position at GitHub—has had an incredibly positive impact on my life, so when I was considering putting something together as a book this topic stood out naturally as something I wanted to share. I want to help people who want to work remotely make the switch too, so I’m hoping that writing down the insights I’ve learned about navigating the unknowns of getting remote work ends up helping people do exactly that.

The book I’m putting together is going to cover all of the main points along the way from the basics of why people might want to go for a remote job (and when it might not be a good move), to reviewing all of the most popular (and often hard to discover) places that remote job listings are lurking online, as well as issues like how to tackle the conundrum of how to show off remote skills when you’ve never actually worked remotely before. Having been on both sides of the hiring coin now, I believe that having an understanding of the things companies are actually looking for when hiring for remote positions could be really helpful for a lot of would-be remote employees.

Progress and timelines

As far as actual content goes, it’s coming along nicely. Since I haven’t done this before, my estimates are probably going to be off no matter how I do it, but if I had to hazard a guess I’d say I’m approximately 50% done with the actual content of the book. I’ve thrown together a simple landing page so that anyone who’s interested can begin signing up, and I plan to keep other aspects of the marketing, distribution, etc. fairly lightweight, so I’m hopeful that there won’t be too many obstacles in the way of this getting :ship:ed.

As far as timelines go, I’m going to draw a line in the sand and say that this will ship within two months of today. For anyone playing along at home, that’s July 25th, 2015, which could end up being a very naive deadline to set myself considering I have three weeks worth of international travel to do spread throughout that period, as well as moving house (I’m moving to Scotland!). :sweat_smile: is without a doubt the emoji that best represents how I feel about this.

But what if it fails?!

Why set a deadline that I’m already admitting could be overly optimistic? Why put myself out there and risk failure and public ridicule? Why not just keep doing what I usually do? The answers to these questions are simple. Public accountability is a powerful motivator, and changing up the challenges I’m committing to is going to push me to both learn new skills and refine existing ones. I feel like I owe it to my future self to be continuously looking for ways to push past my comfort zone.

If you’re at all interested in making the switch to working remotely, I’d love it if you’d go sign up so you can stay in the loop and follow my progress as I get this thing :ship:able! As the Remote Jobseeker’s Handbook gets closer to being ready, I may even send out some sample chapters (and possibly a special offer) to early subscribers! :smiley:

GitHub Flow for Heroku with Pull Request Apps

2015-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Heroku recently announced a public beta of a feature I’m really excited about, and that’s Pull Request Apps.

When you’re making changes to any codebase, it’s hugely important to see the diff and discuss the change before merging. That’s the whole premise of GitHub Flow, and it’s why GitHub’s pull requests have had such a huge impact in the open source community. For many changes, seeing the diff is sufficient, but often, especially if there’s changes to the UI or interactions that aren’t easily testable from a CI standpoint, it becomes necessary for anyone reviewing a pull request to pull the branch down locally to their laptop and fire up the development environment in order to verify the change works as expected.

That’s fine as a workflow, but as soon as someone needs to review the change that doesn’t have their development environment set up—perhaps they’re on another team, or are maybe browsing from a mobile device—then they have to either ask someone to post screenshots of the changes, or ask the team to wait, which can block momentum. This is why staging environments are helpful in many situations, but if you use Heroku to host your applications, then having to push your branch to a second “staging” remote manually each time you want to preview a change in an environment that mirrors your production setup can be a real pain. Not only is it a hassle logistically, but it essentially also requires everyone on the team to be comfortable with both the command line and the deployment process. Many people simply don’t have that technical expertise.

This is where Heroku’s new Pull Request Apps feature comes in.

How it works

The way Pull Request Apps work is as simple. When you enable it in your dashboard, Heroku sets up a webhook on your chosen GitHub repository, which gets triggered each time a pull request is created (or updated with new commits). Heroku then pulls the latest code from that pull request’s branch, and uses the app.json file in your repository’s root directory to configure a new, temporary Heroku application with the environment and resources it needs to run. When it’s up and running, Heroku updates the pull request on GitHub with a deployment event (using our Deployments API, containing a clickable link that takes you to the URL of the temporary Heroku application.

As an example, check out the pull request I opened to add this post to my blog (meta, right?). While the version of my site you’re reading now is hosted with GitHub Pages, I also have a Heroku application set up to mirror the site, and it’s configured so that a Pull Request app is created anytime a PR is opened on the GitHub repository. So, as you can see, Heroku spun up an app called cobyism-com-pr-7.herokuapp.com and updated the PR with a link for me to click through. Neat, huh!

Why this is awesome

This new feature is particularly great for testing design and interaction changes. Screenshots are all well and good, and seeing a diff of the code is great, but being able to fire up the new version of your app there and then in your browser to click through everything yourself takes visualising a change to a whole other level. Even for people working solo on a project (e.g. for many of my own private projects), being able to spin up a Heroku app with my changes is a huge help in terms of giving me confidence that the changes I’m making will have the intended result when merged and deployed to production on Heroku.

People have come up with ways to make similar functionality possible in the past (e.g. using Fourchette, or perhaps something along the lines of LayerVault’s Divergence for teams that aren’t running on Heroku), but it’s really a lot of overhead to set up that functionality and maintain over time, so the fact that this is being built into Heroku’s functionality as standard sets the bar really high for other platforms to compete with.

Integrations like this with GitHub, when taken in combination with other functionality Heroku have recently been rolling out (such as the totally awesome “Deploy to Heroku” button—see my Ghost On Heroku project for a demo), paint a really incredible picture of the direction Heroku’s platform is heading. While Heroku might not be for everyone, anybody building web-based products who doesn’t want to spend their time and hassle managing their own servers and debugging their deployment processes should seriously consider just choosing Heroku and being done with it.

Try it out for yourself

To try Pull Request Apps out yourself, check out Heroku’s dev center article on the feature, and also have a read of their general GitHub integration article too. If you’re the kind of person who’s into this kind of stuff, I also highly recommend signing up for Heroku’s private beta program, through which you can find out about the odd new feature like this as they get rolled out.

Remote guinea pigs

2015-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

or… Why convincing your boss to let you go remote is probably a terrible idea.

Recently I wrote a post called Going remote: the freelance option, so today I thought I’d follow up with some thoughts on one of the many other ways people suggest for making the transition to working remotely: going remote at your current job. Why go through all the hassle of searching for a new job, rejigging your resume, running the interview gauntlet, and so forth if you can just… stay where you are?

I understand why this is a tempting idea for many people, however there’s a few things you may not have considered. I’ve never been in a position where I’ve had to try and convince my boss to let me go remote, so take this all with a grain of salt, but having worked remotely in a number of different scenarios I’d like to share a few reasons why I think you should be wary of taking the “convince your boss” route.

It’s in the water, baby

This whole issue completely depends on the company you work for. If you work for a company that’s at all forward-thinking, there’s a chance you may be able to transition your current gig to be remote without running into any serious problems. For companies that already have other people who work remotely, this could be a fairly easy thing to negotiate, especially if there’s others on your team who work remotely. Having a precedent (and colleagues who can offer you empathy and support) helps. Big time.

In places where there’s less of a precedent for remote work though, I’m sceptical of how viable it is to try and transition your role to be remote. The problem is that if the whole company isn’t committed to making remote working work (and I mean really working well not just limping along), there’s a high chance that being remote will feel like a second-class experience. For an insight into how that can make you feel, check out this post by Scott Hanselman. I’ve felt the “Looks like you’re the only one on the call” rage before, and I can tell you it is Not Fun™.

It’s almost impossible to retrofit the idea of embracing remote work onto a company’s existing culture if it wasn’t something that was there (and valued) from the outset, and this is why so many companies struggle to make being remote a good experience. In the case of GitHub, people were distributed essentially since day one, so remote is pretty firmly baked into our company’s values and habits. For companies that didn’t start off that way though, or maybe were founded before the technology existed to make distributed communication possible (let alone effective), there’s a much bigger hill to climb.

Testing the (remote) water

Often what happens is that when a company that hasn’t traditionally been distributed wants to test the water, they volunteer one person or one team to “try out this remote thing”. This person is who I call the “remote guinea pig”, and it’s important to understand that this is a natural reaction for most companies. Whenever you’re unsure how something will work, the last thing you want to do is commit everything you have, right?

You absolutely don’t want to be the “remote guinea pig” though, and here’s why. The tricky thing is that in order for remote to be successful, it’s not just the people that are going remote that have to change. Every single relationship and communication those people have with other parts of the company must accommodate this new dynamic too.

Guinea pigs are cute, but you don’t want to be one

If one person in a team goes remote, but the rest of the team that person must interact with don’t change their habits, the remote person will quickly become disconnected, feel out of the loop, and generally end up “out of sight, out of mind” no matter how productive they are, how well they communicate, or how effective they are at their work. The remote experiment breaks down through no fault of their own.

When this happens, there’s a real risk that the decision makers (likely still back at the office) take a look at how the experiment went and conclude that it was a failure. Their assessment is correct—it definitely failed—but what they probably don’t realise is that experimenting with remote work this way is doomed from the start, and it’s not the remote guinea pig’s fault.

In order for a company to make remote working work, it’s not the people going remote who have to change their habits (although that’s definitely part of it), it’s the people who are still in the office that will make or break whether remote working is successful in your company.

Of course it all depends on the company and your situation. Transitioning your role to be remote absolutely can work, but if it looks like you’re going to be a “remote guinea pig” for your company, proceed at your own peril.

The alternatives

So what should you do if you’re seeking the freedom and flexibility that working remotely brings? Well there’s a couple of options. One option that I can personally recommend is to consider going freelance. The other is to take the plunge and look for a position at a new company that perhaps has more firmly embraced remote working as the status quo.

Don’t touch that dial

I’ll be writing more on how you can make the switch to working remote soon, so if it’s a remote job at a new company you’re after, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter to get future posts in your inbox. Stay tuned!

Going remote: the freelance option

2015-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

Having the freedom to work from home is a dream for many, but you don’t have to rely on remote positions being available in your profession or throw yourself into the daunting gauntlet of resume templates and highly competitive interviews to make that dream happen. One option you may not realise you have is to go freelance or start a small business that lets you work from home.

It’s obviously a whole different ball game compared to being a remote employee of a company, but if your goal is to ditch the commute and have complete autonomy over your work, your hours, and your financial independence, then going freelance might be better than going remote as an employee. Depending on what it is exactly that you’re awesome at, this might be tricky, but for designers, developers, writers, marketers, illustrators, and many other types of professions, this is more of an option than you might realise.

If you’ve never been self-employed before, there’s a reasonably steep learning curve, but the best thing to do is view it as a bit of a game and enjoy the challenge. You’ll go through plenty of ups and downs, but you’ll learn a surprising amount about yourself, and gain a ton of confidence along the way.

Before my current gig working remotely at GitHub, I worked freelance for the best part of 8 years, and to this day I still believe going freelance was one of the best decisions I ever made. I credit the skills that I gained as a freelancer with being able to get my current job, so even if freelancing isn’t what you want to do long-term, it’s a great way to build up your experience and get a taste for what it’s like to have the flexibility of a remote job.

One of the most important things that distributed companies look for in remote employees is a proven ability to get important work done without needing someone else to motivate them on a daily basis, so there’s almost no better way to prove your potential for impact to future employers than through experience as a freelancer. If you’re at all curious about this option, you should absolutely check out Brennan Dunn’s post on preparing to quit your job and go freelance and perhaps look at his courses to make sure you start off on the right foot.

Freelance life isn’t everyone’s cup of tea though, so if you’re after the freedom and flexibility of remote work without everything being on your shoulders, make sure you sign up for my newsletter below, because I’m planning to write up some more advice soon outlining other ways you can make your dream of working remotely a reality.

Have a question about going remote? I’d love to hear from you. Send me an email and I’ll do my best to help. Seriously.

The Burnout Equation

2015-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

Let’s take a minute to talk about burnout. The reason burnout is so insidious is that the higher your stress levels rise, the easier it is to bury your head in the sand and keep on keeping on in the hope that throwing more hours, more focus, and more energy at the situation will make all your problems go away. As anyone who’s been through burnout will tell you though, it simply doesn’t work that way.

In an industry like ours where our daily output is mostly intangible (or any industry dominated by knowledge work), it’s incredibly easy to dismiss burnout. After all, how hard can it be to sit at a computer all day? Right? Turns out, when your work is intangible it can actually compound the pressure we feel to produce results. Add being remote or (gasp) genuinely caring about your work into the mix, and you have a seriously flammable concoction.

Understanding the burnout equation

In my experience, burnout is usually the result of a cocktail of overlapping issues. Lying at the root is usually one or more negative emotions combined with some form of pressure. When that mixture is allowed to fester for a prolonged period of time without respite, you wind up with burnout. I like to think of it as an equation:

(negativity × pressure)^time = burnout

That isn’t at all mathematically (nor even logically) sound, but you get the picture. Let’s look a littler closer at each of those factors.

Negativity

The negativity can take all kinds of forms. Resentment, boredom, anxiety, fear, and apathy are a few I’ve had to wrangle at different points in my career, but you might have some different examples.

The specific variety of negativity doesn’t tend to matter as much though. The problem is that negativity (of any kind) has a pesky habit of reinforcing itself. You feel shitty because you feel shitty about feeling shitty, and it feels really shitty. Ring any bells? This negativity is typically the catalyst for burnout just like the dust particle high up in the sky around which a snowflake starts to crystallise (except imagine the snowflake is evil). Terrible analogy, I know, but it’ll do for now.

Pressure

The pressure in the equation comes in two flavours: self-inflicted and external. External pressure is fairly self-explanatory. Tight deadlines, tighter budgets, company politics, career concerns, awkward team dynamics, economic climate, family issues, and so forth. The self-induced pressure is a bit harder to pin down though, because it’s often subconscious, and it can even feel like external pressure. Sometimes it takes some serious introspection about the things you experience as external before you realise that really it’s pressure you’re putting on yourself—pressure to keep going, to save face, or to measure up to some ill-defined and infinitely elusive standard of perfection. It’s important to identify what kind of pressure(s) you’re really dealing with if you want to have any hope of doing anything effective about it.

Time

Last but not least we have time. Time is a bastard when you’ve got a giant cauldron of self-reinforcing negativity churning away in your head. Dealing with negativity and pressure wouldn’t be that bad if it remained static—you’d get in the swing of things eventually, but time takes that combination of negativity and pressure and turns it into a pressure cooker (which is actually another good metaphor for the equation: heat + pressure + time). The important point here though is that if you chart the path to burnout, it’s not linear, it’s exponential, and that’s because of time.

Short-circuiting the equation

So what can you actually do about burnout? Well, whether you’ve officially hit rock bottom or you’re just beginning to suspect you’ve got an express ticket to Stressville, I think the solution looks pretty much the same. Instead of wasting time on the endless treadmill of symptom fighting, you need to step back, take a breather, reframe what’s going on, and look for ways to tackle the root cause(s) of your predicament.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
— Alanis Morissette¹

In an ideal world we’d recognise burnout approaching far enough in advance to prevent it from happening at all. For people who haven’t ever experienced full-on burnout before though, it can be tricky to gauge how far along in the process you are, so the key is being self-aware enough (or having people around to drop some hints) to realise you’re on a bad path and take preventative measures. Here’s a few to think about.

Get better at saying no

Whether it’s unreasonable expectations, tight timelines, or even commitments that are perfectly achievable, saying no helps stops things accumulating on your plate in the first place. You should be especially wary of accepting tasks that seem like they’ll be unrealistic (or even just not enjoyable) from the outset, but even tasks you enjoy can contribute to the number of open loops you have to manage at any one time, and that extra mental overhead is the last thing you need when you’re getting burnt out.

Talk to people

Seriously. Go talk to another human. Everyone always underestimates how much this helps. The most helpful person to speak to will be different depending on your situation, but here’s some ideas to try:

Talk to your manager (if you have one). What they want is for their team to be firing on all cylinders, so it’s in their interest to make sure you’re happy, and that you’re able to focus on quality work. If there’s unrealistic pressure on you coming from somewhere, they need to know about it, and it’s their job to help you find a way through it.
Talk to your colleagues. If you’re feeling pressure, chances are the people you work with are feeling it too. Talk to other people on your team, or in other parts of your company, and you’ll probably be surprised to find that you’re not alone.
Talk to your non-work friends. You really should try and cultivate friendships outside your job (and even outside your industry as a whole) if you don’t already. One of the most helpful things for burnout is a change of context to distract you from your professional life’s fatigue, and healthy social time with friends is unbeatable in terms of grounding you in the bigger picture. This is something I’ve personally struggled with over the last little while due to moving countries, but that’s just helped me realise how important it really is.
Talk to your family. It’s not a great idea to continually bombard your loved ones with negativity spilling over from your professional life, but the people who love you want you to be happy, and they know you better than anyone else, so make sure they know what’s going on in your head. It can also be really helpful to get fresh eyes on your situation from someone who isn’t immersed in the daily reality of your work, and who you can be sure will advocate for your best interests.

Confront the negativity

Take the array of negative things you feel and look them dead in the eyes. If you feel resentful about your work, ask yourself why. Do the goalposts keep shifting on this project? Do you not think the scope is realistic? Are you being micromanaged? If you’re afraid or anxious about a looming change, look at what it is exactly you’re afraid will happen. Is that apocalypse scenario really that likely? Even if the worst did happen, how bad would it really be?

I don’t know what it is that you’re feeling, but the most useful thing you can do with negativity is examine it and acknowledge it, instead of just bottling it up and carrying on in the hope it will go away. Sunshine is one of the best disinfectants, so bring your underlying problems and fears to the surface and work out what it would take to make them less of an issue. Again, talk about these things with the people around you (see the above section). If you can limit the negativity you experience, you’ll minimise the effects of the whole equation.

Relieve the pressure

Pressure cookers have safety valves for a reason, so find a way to let some of the steam to escape. If the pressure in your situation is external, speak frankly to the people from whom the pressure is coming from about the way it’s affecting you. Try and find out the background context that’s causing the pressure in the first place. It’s entirely possible that they may not realise the toll it’s taking on you.

If the pressure is self-induced, that can sometimes be much harder to defuse, because it’s much more difficult to stay objective about the forces at play. One thing that I’ve found helpful is to run my internal expectations past someone else as a sanity check. Sometimes having someone tell you that something you expect of yourself is bat-shit-crazy really does put things in perspective and act as a circuit-breaker. Again, talking to people helps more than you probably think.

End of the line

It’s obviously better to prevent burnout happening in the first place, but sometimes reaching maximum frazzle happens before you know it and you have no choice but to deal with the fallout. If you get to this stage, the first thing you absolutely must do is stop. Just stop. Get off the train. The worst thing you can do is continue to push on. If you keep pushing, nobody wins. You’ll suffer, the people around you suffer (it’s no fun living or working with someone at the end of their rope!), and the quality of your work will suffer too.

I know I keep mentioning this, but if you haven’t talked to people about your situation yet, go do that. If they care about you at all, then they’ll tell you straight up that what you need is to take a hard break and completely disconnect for a bit to recover. While you’re disconnected, take care of yourself. Make sure you eat well, get plenty of sleep, and get outside and be active if you have the energy. Whatever you do, for god’s sake don’t try and keep one eye on your work emails or you’ll never truly disengage to the extent you need to in order to decompress.

Once is enough.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
— Arnold Schwarzenegger¹

Once you’ve taken some time to pull yourself together, consider doing a personal retrospective or post-mortem (with your loved ones, or with the people you work with, if either of those feel safe) of what the hell happened that caused your burnout, so you can make sure you don’t let those same factors build up again.

I feel like it’s also worth explicitly calling out that if you’re in an environment where people don’t recognise the true costs of letting people reach burnout, and actively take action to support people who are in that state (or on their way), then you should seriously consider leaving and finding another job. It’s almost impossible to get burnt out if you aren’t passionate about your work in the first place, so if you’re one of the people who do care, then there’s plenty of other places who’ll gladly consider you.

It’s not all about you

One final tip for breaking the burnout cycle is to think of all the other people affected by your burnout other than yourself. If you’re not on top of your game, the effects ripple outwards to your loved ones, your colleagues, and even further downstream to your clients and customers. It’s easy to lose sight of that when all you can think about is the knotted ball of stress bouncing around inside your head, but sometimes forcing yourself to think about your burnout as an expression of selfishness can be a good way to kick-start your motivation to seek help. It may make you feel guilty in the short-term, but if that’s what it takes for you to take action, everyone benefits in the long-term, not just you.

BOLO for Burnout

Burnout is a real thing, and nobody is immune. Look out for burnout in the people around you, even those people who you wouldn’t usually expect. Whether it’s yourself, or someone you know, aim to step in and prevent it ever getting to the point where you need to look up blog posts by strange people like me on the internet. Remember, it always helps to step back from whatever situation is burning you out.

Do you know someone on the verge of burnout? If you know someone who might benefit from reading this, then please share the link with them. If I can help even one person by writing this, then it’ll have been worth it.

I have no idea who actually coined these quotes. It’s fun to imagine though, right? ↩ ↩²

Aim for timelessness

2015-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

It’s almost a cliche thing to say, but I believe that the things that draw people in, that inspire new ideas, and that effectively connect people to one another share one important quality—they’re timeless.

An exceptionally great counter-example is the realm of politics. One of the most frustrating things about politicians is that they only ever seem to be focused on issues that fall within the scope of their current term. When they’re incentivised to only focus on the next election, issues that need to be resolved on the scale of decades and generations fall by the wayside. Nobody wins.

This kind of short-term thinking is a direct result of the structures we’ve put in place as a society, but the underlying pattern of thinking extends far beyond the realm of politics.

This is especially true in the realm of internet start-ups (and all-too-frequent subsequent shut-downs). Looking around at what this industry is building, the idea of creating something to theoretically last for a generation is almost unprecedented.

It’s hard. It’s elusive. It’s nebulous. But the responsible thing for us as designers to do is create work that’s enduring. I’m not sure there’s a repeatable formula for it, but to have any chance of success, I believe you have to let the patterns and decisions and structures in your creations emerge as organically as possible. You have to constantly return to first principles and make the best choices for what you’re building. There’s no room for cargo-culling your decisions, for presuming something works because it’s what “everyone” seems to be doing.

If your thing is built with only the current trends in mind, then in two years time (or two months, with the speed our industry moves) there will only be one conclusion: your now-old and dated design simply has to go, and so the whole thing has to be reworked. Do you really want that to be the fate of your work?

Aren’t there far more important things that both you and other people should be dedicating their time, money, and effort towards than redesigning your thing again because it’s no longer in-line with the current trends?

Don’t be like the politicians. Aim for timelessness.

Being proud of your past work

2015-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

It’s a new year, and for many of us that means taking a look back at what you’ve done over the last year. Problem is, it’s easy for this to quickly fill you with negativity.

Pretty much everyone I’ve ever spoken to cringes when they look at the work they’ve done in the past. It’s almost inescapable. The very nature of our role as designers and engineers and builders in this day and age involves learning the ins and outs of various domains over time, so it’s easy to look back and view your earlier decisions as naive. Hint: they were.

Accepting that our decisions are always going to be naive is a tough pill to swallow. The decisions you made yesterday, the ones you made today, and yes, even the ones you’ll make tomorrow (and the day after) will all look like straight-up rookie mistakes in a year’s time, or maybe in even a couple of months. Choose to be proud of the learning process instead.

The only way to learn to be better is by shipping, and watching what happens. Your only job (whether it’s officially or not) is to make decisions based on imperfect information, ship, and observe the result. Then repeat, with the first result as new information. And repeat. And repeat again.

Don’t dwell on what didn’t go according to plan (there will always be an oversupply of that). Learn to be proud of the things you got right. Learn to be proud of what you learned, and learn to enjoy the perpetual journey through naivety.

A remote state of mind

2014-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

Today’s office: fireside. pic.twitter.com/leuL67KqmM
— Coby Chapple (@cobyism) December 15, 2014

I work remotely, which means that for the vast majority of the time, I’m working from my home. A lot of people who ask me about working remotely tell me that they think they’d struggle to be productive working from home, and they’re probably right—at least to start with. It took me a while to get the hang of working from home when I first started, and even having done it for 8 or 9 years, some days are still trickier than others.

Anyone can become productive working from home though. The crux of the problem is that establishing clear boundaries between your professional and personal lives is really tricky when they have to coexist in the same physical space. If you want any kind of balance between your work and your personal life, you have to find a way for them not to continually collide with each other.

The commute

For people who don’t work from home, the commute to their place of employment is mostly what establishes that boundary. When you’re at work, you don’t have immediate access to the physical context of your personal life, and vice versa, so it’s rare for them to collide in undesireable ways. When you’re surrounded by your work and your colleagues, or by your family and your home, there’s a lot of very powerful environmental cues to help you focus on just that respective area of your life.

The commute isn’t the barrier itself though. Think about it. People sometimes do personal tasks in their lunch break, and people sometimes take work home or perhaps work from home one day per week. Even during the time you’re at work “working”, it’s possible to spend years of your life in an office without ever really engaging in or feeling passionate about your work. It’s also possible to do the most important and rewarding work of your career from your couch with your dog curled up beside you.

States of mind

The key lies in understanding that “work” (or “office”) and “home” are just states of mind, and how you use that understanding to stay focused and effective on the right things at the right times.

The commute is mostly just a glaringly obvious mental cue to switch your thinking between “I’m at home now” and “I’m at work now”. It’s a cue you’ve probably been exposed to ever since you got our first job. It’s so ingrained in the way our culture thinks about work, that it’s easy for people to not understand how it’s possible for things to be any other way. And yet, working remotely is clearly a growing trend, and maybe the new normal in some industries.

Replacing the commute

So what do you do when the environmental cues you’re used to aren’t there anymore? With a bit of effort it’s easy to replace the cues with mental discipline instead. Here are some things that have worked for me.

Mimic physical separation if possible

You might not have a commute to use as a cue for switching into your work context, but you can still use location as a trigger. Find a space within your home that you can dedicate to being work-only, and make it your own. Clear away any clutter. Make sure the tools you absolutely need are within arms reach. Get yourself a cup of your favourite beverage, and get to work.

I often tell people jokingly that my commute is a short one (only a few metres!), but the hidden truth there is that it’s still effectively a commute in the sense that it helps me switch contexts.

Nothing’s stopping you from working elsewhere in the house, but I think it’s important to have a dedicated place that you know for sure you can go if you’re struggling to focus. I think this is especially useful when you’re just starting out with your first remote gig. The longer you spend working from your new “workplace”, the more you’re reinforcing the mental cue that it’s time to work when you’re there.

Build routine

Another reason the commute reinforces the mental barrier so effectively is that most jobs you’ve worked have probably started at a reasonably predictable time each day. Having no choice but to get into action at a certain time builds habit fairly quickly, and it can be effective for working at home too.

It doesn’t matter if the constraints you choose are real of contrived. What makes routine effective is repetition. After enough practice at focusing on “work” at a certain time in the morning, and switching to “home” tasks at a regular time later in the day, sooner or later those thought patterns will start to become automatic.

Set expectations

Communication is important. The best thing you can do is set clear expectations with both those you live with, and those your work with, so everyone you interact with knows how they can support your distinctions of “work” and “home”. It’s for everyone’s benefit after all: the better you are at focusing on work when you’re in your “work” mindset, the better you can focus on spending quality time with your friends and loved ones when you’re in your “home” mindset—and the reverse is also true.

Protect your state of mind

Be proactive. Clear the decks. Take a guess at what might disctract you in the next 5 minutes, the next hour, or later today, and see if there’s a way to minimise the possibility of that event disrupting your focus.

What works for you?

These are all just suggestions, and some of them might not work if you try them out. That’s okay. Everyone’s different. You just need to accept that it might take some time to discover what works for you and your unique circumstances. Remember, “work” and “home” are just states of mind, and what helps you switch between the two best will almost certainly be different to the next person.

So what works for you? Send me a tweet or an email, because I’d love to hear. How do you switch between “work” and “home”?

Building anti-bloat muscle

2014-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

One of the best ways to fight getting soft around the middle is to get to the gym—or do other activities like outdoor sports—on a regular basis. By slowly burning away the squidgy bits, you build habits and muscle that will help you stay in shape in the future.

It’s the same with building software. Unless you make a habit of regularly and proactively taking action to fight bloat, one day in the not-too-distant future you’re going to wake up and wonder how your app got to be so god damn pudgy around the middle. You know the kind of products I mean. Nobody sets out to build things that end up that way. Even with the best of intentions, your app will suffer the same fate unless you actively work towards a more focused trajectory.

New features

The most obvious time to do this is when considering new features. It doesn’t matter how exciting, feasible, or popular an idea is. You still don’t have to do it. Choosing to pass on a good idea is perfectly acceptable, yet it’s an option people frequently overlook. You are in control of what goes into your product, so don’t just add things because you can.

Existing features

It’s not just new features this applies to though. Any time you’re touching an existing feature, take the opportunity to reevaluate whether it still needs to be there. Why are you changing it? How many other times have you had to tweak something there recently? Is maintaining this aspect of your product really worthwhile, or would you and your team’s time and mental energy be better spent elsewhere? Would it feel great to never have to worry about this thing again?

Get proactive

Don’t just wait till you’re focused on changing something either. Try to actively seek out things that might be candidates for the chopping block. It doesn’t matter if you don’t go through with most of them—what’s useful about being in the habit of regularly proposing that things be removed is that you build up muscle for fighting bloat.

How to tell if you’re doing it right

To start with, this will feel really odd. You’ll know you’re doing it right when it feels noticeably uncomfortable to be carrying on without something that previously seemed important. If things grind to a halt, then perhaps what you just said no to really was necessary, and should be reconsidered, but if you never get to the point where leaving something out is actually hindering your progress, then you’re not being ruthless enough.

What are you waiting for? Go put something on the chopping block.

Proving taste

2014-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

We’re currently (Oct 2014, for people reading this in future) looking to hire for product design at GitHub, and in that context, someone recently asked me:

How do I accurately represent my experience with product design on paper?

It’s a great question, and I didn’t have an obvious answer to start with. After some thought though, I believe being great at product design boils down to one thing: taste.

At GitHub, taste one of the things we value the most in people, whether they’re designers or engineers or anything else. We care deeply about this, because in addition to taste being critical to product design, taste is also what defines the culture within your organisation. Culture is collective taste, but that’s something for another blog post…

It’s not important to us that people have taste that agrees with other people at the company—in fact it’s the opposite, we’d far rather bring new and diverse perspectives into the company. What’s most important is that people are able to both recognise and communicate the quality (or lack thereof) they see in things. That’s what I believe taste is at the end of the day—the ability to perceive and articulate quality.

The problem with taste is that it’s subjective. You can’t prove definitively that taste is something you possess, in the same way you might convey other more concrete things in a resumé. In terms of the original question, I’m not sure there is a way to show on paper that you’re a good product designer.

The only option I see is to lay your cards on the table for people as best you can, and let the context you present collectively show that you have the right kind of taste.

It’s not enough to just say you worked on with client W on project X, or worked closely with group Y on building a whiz-bang new Z. You have to dig deeper so people can appreciate why the things you built and shipped worked out he way they did. Help people understand the factors you took into account when making choices. Explain the intricacies involved in the tricky bits. Share the decisions you’ve made, big or small. Tell people why you made those specific decisions, or reached those specific conclusions instead of the available alternatives. Show the end result too, and talk through what you’d do differently next time. And then ultimately, you have to sit back and let people judge for themselves (using their own taste!) whether or not they feel comfortable saying “yes, this person has good taste for product design”. The last step is to let go.

Sure, there’s more to being a product designer at GitHub than just some arbitrary definition of having taste. You have to write well. You have to be able to empathise with people who are radically different from yourself. You have to habitually question your assumptions, and admit when you’re wrong. You have to be able to deliver and receive feedback maturely. You have to be able to code your designs as well as defining the visuals and interactions between states. You have to be able to ship your ideas instead of just talking about them, and so on and so forth.

Without taste though, all those qualities lose their value.

Just play

2014-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

“Master your instrument. Master the music. And then forget all that bullshit and just play.” – Charlie “Yardbird” Parker

This is one of my favourite quotes about creativity, mastery, and expression. It’s great because it succinctly captures an important nuance—that the final expression of any mastery involves a delicate balance between preparedness, surrender, and commitment. Good things happen when you just let go.

This doesn’t just apply to music. It applies to any creative endeavour—design, code, business, writing, art—you name it. Whatever your field, you can prepare all you want, but if you’re attached to your eventual performance going perfectly according to plan, you’re going to be disappointed.

The truth is that it won’t, and that’s fine. That’s completely normal, and it helps to remember that anyone who has ever achieved anything great has faced the exact same truth. Change is constant, and you’ll always be rolling with the punches to some extent. You should embrace this, and make it as integral to your performance as your instrument and your music.

So, next time you’re worrying about your next project, design, presentation, or performance, stop and focus your attention on this idea. Be confident in the instruments you use to produce your work. Trust in your knowledge of the subject matter involved. Then, let go, and just play.

Interfaces all the way down

2013-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

If your job involves designing interfaces for the web, it’s easy to think that the interfaces you work on are experienced in isolation, but that’s almost never the case.

The truth is that any digital interface is unavoidably going to be nested inside at least one other layer of interface, but probably more. This is something us designers would do well to keep in mind more than I think we often do.

First up, most designs for the web are going to be contained within a browser interface. The size and location of things like tab lists, back buttons, location bars, loading indicators, and so forth will be different between each browser, and will often vary across different platforms too. There could even be extra indicators or notifications from the browser itself too, about things like updates or security warnings, or extra buttons or panes added by plugins or extensions the user has installed. Add to this the fact that almost all modern browsers allow multiple tabs to be open at once, and the amount of extra potential mental overhead quickly starts to skyrocket. If you’ve ever experienced the frustration of having sound begin to play from an unidentified background browser tab, you’ll understand how critical it is that your interface to be sympathetic to complex intra-browser navigation concerns.

The next layer of interface after the browser that users will almost certainly have to deal with is the operating system’s interface. When you’re using an application on a mobile or a tablet, chances are the only visible artifact will be a small status bar at the top or button of the screen. There could be other things going on at various times too though: alerts or messages from other applications might pop up over the top of your interface; the user might switch between the app containing your interface and other apps; or a range of other things could happen.

At a minimum, there’s going to be a device involved with a screen of some sort. Even if it’s a phone or a tablet where the screen is the interface, the device itself will likely have a frame with a button or two around the outside somewhere, and maybe a camera with an indicator light too, with the screen eclosed within that bezel. On a laptop or desktop computer the interfaces you have with the device are obviously going to be the keyboard, mouse or trackpad, monitor(s), power button, and so forth. Each of these different types of physical interface with the device have their quirks, and represent one layer of extra interface your design will need to account for at all times.

Whenever you have multiple layers of abstraction operating at once, like you do with the different purposes and scopes of each layer of interface described above, the number of things that can negatively affect a user’s experience of your interface is staggering. If something goes wrong inside one layer, or there is friction for some reason between two layers, your interface will be what suffers at the end of the day. To use an analogy, a designer not factoring in the environment within which their interface lives would be like an architect designing a building with no consideration for neighbouring property, sunlight direction, road access, surrounding trees, ground drainage, and so forth—the building could easily end up being dark, damp, difficult to access, and devoid of privacy. Such a project can only produce a low quality experience for its inhabitants.

All of this might seem obvious at first, but how often do you consciously factor these extra layers of interface in when designing an interface? I know from my own experience that I don’t think about these things anywhere near as much as I probably should, and I’d wager that for many designers, the answer is “never” (or maybe “rarely”), and that’s a little unnerving to think about.

I see this as being another argument in favour of designing interfaces in the browser whenever possible, so that you experience the full heirarchy of interfaces at all times as you build your interface. The ramifications that nested interfaces will have will differ from project to project, but in general, the more conscious you can be of the many layers of interfaces that might surround your interface, the more enjoyable your end product will be to use.

Thoughts on in-browser design

2013-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

In-browser design

After giving a talk at Refresh not that long ago, I’ve had a number of conversations with people about some of the things I touched on in my talk—one common topic people ask me about is the whole “design in the browser” issue, so I’d like to articulate some of my thoughts on the matter here.

Adoption of in-browser tools and workflows

I think in-browser design is definitely on its way to becoming commonplace, especially with the improvements in the pipeline in terms of what’s possible within browser’s developer tools (source-map support for Sass, CoffeeScript and so forth). It’s not catching on as quickly as I feel it should be though (given the benefits I feel it has), and honestly I feel like that’s simply because it’s hard for people to drop the tools they know and love cold-turkey. It can take a while to adjust to new tools and workflows, and to be able to afford the time in-between where you just have to accept that you won’t be as productive as usual is a difficult thing to accept. I think what will speed up the adoption of these types of workflows is when people can gradually bring small parts of the in-browser workflow into their existing tools—things like exporting the CSS attributes from an object in a visual design tool (like you can do with Sketch), and live-reload style tools are great examples of improvements that will make transitioning more productive.

Why design in the browser?

As I see it, the key advantages are as follows:

You can interact with WIP designs in the browser. You can’t interact with a photo of a website you’ve designed in Photoshop. This allows you to actually pay attention to the subtlety of interactions, transitions, and performance considerations of a design as you build it, rather than thinking of these things as an afterthought.
Designing in the browser forces you to think about things in a more sane order. If you start your design from a blank canvas and are immediately thinking about “pixel-perfection” level details of the first element you draw, you’ll spend much less time thinking about the higher level aspects of a design like information architecture, layout considerations, and so forth. When you start your designs in markup, you almost have to think about layout and document structure before you think about what your buttons are going to look like, and I think that results in a better end product.
When you design a web interface in a visual tool, you have no choice but to have an extra secondary step of taking that design and actually coding it up in HTML/CSS after it’s finished. When you factor in the amount of time it takes to complete both of these phases, I believe it actually takes a shorter amount of time to design in the browser instead, because you don’t ever have to reimplement your design—it’s already in the format it’s going to live in.
Similar to the above point, a problem of using a visual tool to design interfaces that live in code somewhere else is that you’re effectively maintaining two versions of the same interface, and it’s really easy for them to get out of sync with each other. Changes and bugfixes made in production code that affect your design don’t automatically get updated in the saved visual file, and any changes you subsequently make to a design in a visual tool will need to be reimplemented in code again too. This effectively doubles the amount of work required to maintain a design over a long period of time. When you design in the browser, the code is the design, so it’s simply not possible for the design to be out of sync with the implementation in any way.
Visual design tools don’t encourage collaboration, but code is easy to collaborate on. If your designs are all done in proprietary programs with no functionality for collaboration, then it’s unavoidably going to affect the ability of your teams to work together on designs. Code on the other hand isn’t a proprietary program. With version control tools, functionality like merging changes from multiple people working on the same set of files are literally built into the system, so if you can do your design work in code you instantly open up doors to collaboration on design to everyone in the team. This increases visibility into the design process, and encourages more discussion across disciplines within teams, which can only be a good thing.

In-browser design and “client” workflows

At GitHub, we’re a product company, and don’t have “clients” in the same sense that many design studios and freelancers do. From my past personal experience as a freelancer though, I’d say that really what most clients want is to see projects become real things as fast as possible, and they don’t really mind what tools or workflow you use.

I think clients are very comfortable being shown mockups of designs before the real thing exists, but a lot of the time I think that’s just because that’s how it’s worked for so long. I believe that if you could invite a client into your office, and show them working prototypes and mockups in a browser that you can interact with, they’d be more impressed and feel happier about the progress you’re making on the project than they would be if you’d shown them “pixel-perfect” photos of their website printed out on paper for them to approve.

Regardless of whether you do client work or product work though, I believe that the closer you can be to the real, finished product, the better your feedback process will be.

Open Source needs a new UI

2011-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

As a freelance web developer, I’ve seen and used my fair share of open source web applications (and desktop software), and I’d like to point out something that I see all too often in open source projects: the user interface almost always lets the project down. Let me explain…

The Problem

I’ve used a considerable amount of open source software (web-based and desktop), and I feel that a large portion of them are let down by their UI. The functionality is brilliant, the code is great, and the product is useful, but the user interface often just lacks the smoothness and level of polish that people tend to expect these days if they’re to download an application and give it a fair go.

First Impressions

Most of the time, it’s not even the software itself, but rather the promotional site—the face of the project—that makes me cringe. For example, as I explore the web, I come across sites for open source projects on a daily basis — recent examples from my browsing history include Cyberduck, FileZilla, GnuCash, BambooInvoice, GitX, and Vim — and while the promotional sites convey all the necessary information, most of these sites look stuck in a much older paradigm of thinking about web design. It’s not just a handful of projects, though—I actually think it is by far the rule rather than the exception with open source projects in general. Surely it’s not the best first impression to be making about your software.

The Products Themselves

It’s not just the promotional websites though—if you look at the actual software products themselves in many open source projects and compare them with the commercial applications they’re essentially competing with, it’s usually the UI that is the separating factor. Take ProjectPier for example: it’s functionality is significantly similar to that of commercial projects like Basecamp and activeCollab (which is actually a direct descendent/fork of ProjectPier that went commercial, by the way), however ProjectPier’s UI feels miles behind to me. Despite moving to a new theme in their more recent releases, the default UI (and most other themes available too) is still reminiscent of websites that were all the craze before YouTube was around. It’s a similar situation when you look at projects like Cyberduck and Filezilla compared with commercial FTP applications like Transmit and Forklift; or for Git GUI apps GitX compared with apps like Tower and Gitbox; and I could think of numerous other examples in just about every other problem domain too. What it boils down to is this: as a consumer of software, it’s the quality of the UI that sways my decision in almost every case.

Getting it right

There are, however, plenty of great examples in the open source world of good UI design in terms of both promotional sites and software products. Here are a few examples (not an exhaustive list though, by any means) of projects I think are getting it right:

There’s also a few community projects to do with the open source community in general, which are placing a focus on the UI of open source in general. The most readily available example of this is MoveTheWebForward.org which aim to make it easier for people to get themselves involved in the open source community. Sites like this are fantastic, but I don’t think it’s just the web that needs to be brought forward—I think it’s the UI of many aspects of open source software too.

Maybe this is just a rant

Who knows? Maybe I’m just being an elitist snob because I’m a designer for a living myself—but I wonder what effect a focus on improving the UI of open source software would have on the rate of uptake of open source software projects, especially by users who are less technically minded (and thus more interested in the elegance of the UI than the elegance of the code). Is there a preconceived notion held by the open-source community that paying attetion to design (especially of the promotional websites for projects) is superfluous? Or is it just a shortage of time, effort, and contributors? Do we need to get more designers involved in open source to balance out the focus on development?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic, so if you’ve got an opinion about what I’ve said, let me know on Twitter.

Disclaimer

If you happen to be involved with one of the project’s I’ve used above as an example, then I apologise—open source software has made my life a great deal easier, and for that I’ll always be grateful. My intention is not to offend, or to belittle the valuable contributions people have made to the projects mentioned above, however I stand by my point that open source UI in general has a long way to go to catch up to its commercial counterparts.