Launching the scholarship bondbreaking advising service
Months ago, I wrote about wanting to set up a simple service to advise anyone considering breaking their scholarship bond. I have thought a lot about it. I thought through many ideas for how to position it. Should I buy a new domain? Should I write a collection of articles first? Should I have testimonials from happy clients?
Basically, I ran into the problem that many of us face with projects: I failed to ship.
Last week, a total stranger emailed me for advice on her bond. This hasn’t happened in awhile. (Been getting a lot more startup related requests lately.) But I was reminded of what I had set out to do in the first place. Pay forward my good fortune at being able to break my own bond years ago. Put myself out there. Help people live more fulfilled lives. Help people as only I can.
She didn’t need me to build a fancy website. She didn’t need me to establish my credentials in some bio. She didn’t even need a form. All she did was find my posts on bondbreaking - hooray for the power of search - and email me. Hopefully she got something useful from my exchange with her. I am immensely grateful for her trust and for the chance to help her. (If you could spend 90 minutes of your time and have a stranger tell you that you are one of the most inspiring people she has come across in her life, you, too, would do the same.)
So I have decided to just ship. Here I am hanging out the shingle.
It’s here! Check it out:
The way to take responsibility
Don’t demand authority.
Eagerly take responsibility.
Relentlessly give credit.
- Seth Godin, on The quickest way to get things done and make change
A few months ago, I reached the point in my job as Product Manager when I became the go-to person if anything related to the product broke. All the complaints came to me. I felt constantly under the gun for things beyond my control.
This was very hard to take. I was constantly caught off guard. To be clear, the product generally works tremendously well. But minor things always come up. I felt like a deer caught in headlights whenever someone raised an issue. Because I cared so much, I took every complaint personally. Not that I felt that I was being insulted per se, but I felt personal grief (as a colleague once said) over the product’s every minor failing. It was very difficult to bear.
At one point, I considered distancing myself and trying to learn to not care. If I cared less, it would be easier to swallow, easier to let things roll off my back. Easier to not feel my stomach clench up every time someone came by to tell me some aspect of the product wasn’t working.
I also got defensive. Totally natural response. Emotionally, in my head, the first reaction was to defend myself. But I didn’t even build this thing! I didn’t know this was going on. (Then I felt guilty - how could I not have known this was going on.) This is not even my customer. (But it is my product.) I can’t even fix any of it. Someone else has to go into the code and fix it. Why isn’t that person being blamed.
Then came the hardest part. I needed to take all of this frustration that was being thrown at me, and I had to swallow it and filter as much of it as possible (which will not be enough), and I had to turn around to the engineer and ask in cheerful spirits if he would please fix this bug, it’s important to our customer.
(In really difficult cases, I had to work through the engineer’s protests and persuade her that this was a good investment of her time.)
Good times.
It was only in the last couple of weeks that it dawned on me that my dad’s job as manager must be like that. All the time. This is the crux of management. You are responsible for everything, even though you don’t actually do anything. But if you want this role, you must take responsibility, regardless of whether or not you think it’s your fault. It is always going to be your fault. So take responsibility. Take it willingly, take it eagerly.
As for feeling like you have no control, that is not an acceptable response. The way to earn authority is to exercise it before it is bestowed upon you. Take responsibility first, act with authority, get things done. Eventually if you keep doing this and do it well, official authority will follow. But by that time, it won’t matter to you. You won’t need official authority to get things done.
And when the bug is finally fixed by the engineer, give away the credit. Give away all of it. That, too, is an act of authority. That, too, is part of the responsibility.
(How’s that for working in public.)
The highest craft
Over the weekend, I saw Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a very lovely film especially if you love sushi. It follows the story of an 85-year-old legendary sushi chef who runs a 10-seater restaurant near a Tokyo subway. Meals start at $300 (USD not yen). He has been awarded 3 Michelin stars. He has been making sushi for 75 years.
I was struck by Jiro’s commitment to this single specific craft. He has dedicated his entire life to perfecting this craft every single day. There is no room for being a generalist here. I think of how in schools, in career advising, we’re told we should acquire transferable skills, skills that are broadly applicable. So many of us are obsessed with keeping our options open.
Jiro’s story preaches the opposite. Be a specialist. It matter less what you choose and matters more that you chose it and continue to choose it day after day. Put in enough cycles of 10,000 hours and you get to reach the rarefied air that is the top of your craft. (By my rough estimates, Jiro has put in more than 20 times of 10,000 hours.)
Choose a craft you love and be an expert. Except that this is not about mere expertise. This is about artistry. Be an artist. Elevate your craft. Invent a new aesthetic.
And that’s where we get to this notion of the highest craft.
In Frank Chimero’s The Shape of Design, there is a story he tells where his favorite professor was reviewing his portfolio and pauses to say, “Needs more love.” Frank goes on to say:
At the time, I took it to mean that I should improve my craft, but I’ve come to realize that he was speaking of something more fundamental and vital. My work was flat, because it was missing the spark that comes from creating something you believe in for someone you care about. This is the source of the highest craft, because an affection for the audience produces the care necessary to make the work well.
Is it about caring for the audience really? Did Jiro do any of it because he wanted to please an audience? I disagree. I adore Frank’s phrasing - the highest craft - but I disagree.
I think the caring, the spark comes wanting to do the work right. Regardless of an audience. Above everything else.
Seth Godin writes of the wonderful Caine’s Arcade, the 9-year-old boy who made a cardboard arcade:
The first thing that made me smile was how willing Caine was to do his art regardless of how the world responded (it didn’t). Caine didn’t care. The goal wasn’t to be accepted, the goal was to do it right.
That kind of commitment, I believe, is the heart of the highest craft.
I think about what I do at work. I think about what I do outside of work. I have to accept that I am not wired to be a specialist the way Jiro is. (I know very few people who are.) I will always be more generalist than specialist. But whichever I am, my work, whatever I choose it to be at that moment, could use more love.
So I ask myself, when was the last time you were performing the highest craft? When will you do it again? Why don’t you do it every day?
Failing successfully
Since starting, I have gone through cycles of feeling like I’m doing well and feeling like I’m failing. From the outside, it probably looks like things are constantly challenging but generally improving. The stages are probably not noticeable at all, or at least nowhere near as pronounced as how I experience them. Internally, it’s helpful to identify where I am in the cycle to maintain perspective. If I’m at a low point, it’s useful to know I will probably not stay there forever. It’s also useful to know that a lot of the stages are defined by changes in my own expectations rather than external factors.
1. Doing well
The good part. I expect myself to be able to do certain things in my role at my level of experience. And I do them well. I am meeting my expectations. Things are under control. To quote Paul Graham, the spinal cord has the situation under control.
2. Failing
Then at some point, I receive external feedback. Why are you not doing X? Why did you not think through Y? Or something breaks and I wonder why didn’t I anticipate that, this is under my purview, I should have known better. I tell myself, feedback is good, don’t get defensive, listen to feedback, keep an open mind, listen! But critical feedback is never easy to stomach.
3. Feeling like I’m failing
So I feel like I’m failing, and it generally sucks. I start to identify all the other things that I should be doing that I’m not doing or not doing well enough. I actually feel like I’m failing at everything, even though I know it’s not true. I become the world’s worst boss of myself.
4. Being prepared to suck
At some point, I realize the self criticism is not helpful. It is also tiring. I realize what is perhaps the most important thing of all - the bar has been raised. I am not actually failing. I am merely failing relative to a much higher bar. I have earned the right to fail against a higher bar, and that’s a good thing. I start digesting the feedback. I accept that I am going to be underperforming relative to this higher bar for awhile. I become prepared to suck. I lean into that awful feeling instead of running away from it.
5. Learning
And this is where the learning can happen, if you choose to accept it. The criticisms, internal and external, are not personal attacks. They are instructions for change. They might not feel great, but if I commit to the work and keep chipping away at it, eventually…
6. Doing well
Eventually, I do well again. The good part returns.
Rinse. Repeat.
Finding the guts to work in public
Working in public. I first came across the idea in Tony Chu’s blog. He talks about opening up the learning process, the creation process by writing publicly about the journey as you go through it. Write vulnerably, gather feedback, expose yourself to interesting ideas.
He linked to a post over at Snarkmarket - the art of working in public. The post is about other (famous) people’s working in public. On BERG’s Matt Webb and The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal:
They both conjure a sense that the piece is almost being written as you read it. It feels like they’re just a [paragraph] or two ahead, and if you picked up the pace, you could catch them—overtake their blinking cursors. It feels slightly chaotic and totally thrilling. They both let you inside their heads.
You see, I’ve been trying to find the guts to work in public. I want to write about product management on this blog. But I am terrified.
I don’t know where to draw the boundaries. I feel like I cannot say too much about what goes into building our product because I don’t want to reveal trade secrets. I feel I shouldn’t write about my coworkers, even though I think extremely highly of them, because it doesn’t seem fair or polite to expose their learning experiences here. (I am also still getting used to the idea that some of you, dear coworkers, read this thing. Hello! I am flattered that you bother to read.)
I feel that I cannot write about when things go wrong. I feel I cannot write about when I’ve screwed up or have fallen below the mark. I cannot write about all the times I am totally making up my job as I go along. I cannot write about the moments when I face severe decision fatigue and struggle to stay objective and positive and helpful. Or the days when I do all that and I am still asked why I didn’t do better, and then I just want to hide under a rock. Except I can’t. Because someone else is pinging me with an issue.
But that is where it is all fascinating. Where I most need to take a magnifying glass to the problem and study and learn.
I want to reveal things to you and to myself, because I want to think more critically, more clearly, more originally. I want to ramble about things I still don’t understand, about the gaps in my knowledge, about the things I’m only vaguely aware that I should pay more attention to. So I can figure it out. I want a record of when I didn’t know.
I want to work in public because a lot of this work is utterly and endlessly interesting to me.
There you have it, the struggle. I’ve been trying to blog more to find the guts to work in public, but all you get are posts about everything else. Some of it is better than I expected, even as I go after volume over quality. But I am still trying to crack the heart of it.
I want to talk about product management.
The Snarkmarket post describes the sensation of reading weeknotes by CEO Matt Webb of the design firm BERG:
For the span of a few thousand words, you are riding shotgun as co-CEO of BERG.
There is often an extra office chair stationed right by my desk. I have taken to calling it “my office hours chair”. There is almost always someone - a PEM, an engineer - sitting in that chair asking me a question, a problem, a thing I need to make a decision on, a thing I need to commandeer resources for so I can say yes to, a thing I need to find a reasonable way to say no to.
If I could figure out how to work in public, this blog would put you, dear reader, in that chair. Imagine that blog.
How to work in public and reveal nothing. That is the question. That is the art.
Meanwhile, I’m going to cross industry boundaries and go read some weeknotes over at BERG.
Habits (or how I got myself to go running)
In most areas of life, I am relatively disciplined. But when it comes to exercising regularly, I have failed time and again.
A few months ago, I made a new friend. She is a triathlete. She was so enthusiastic, so effusive about getting me to exercise, I couldn’t say no. She broke it down into a simple routine. Run 3 times a week, 30 min each time, pick a route you like. She wakes up early anyway (4am?) so she said she’d even text me in the mornings to encourage me. External accountability. Great. This is supposed to help, right?
So I went running. Twice. Maybe three times. Not per week, but in total. And I did not feel better. I felt more tired and irritable, probably because the routine was cutting into my sleeping hours, so I stopped. I felt bad about it - failed yet again - but the running clearly made me feel worse than any guilt from not running. I decided I just wasn’t cut out for this.
But 3 weeks ago something changed. I started getting up before 7am to go running. I ran 3 times the first week. It rained the second week, so I ran once. I thought my momentary success was short lived, but on the third week, this week, I ran 3 times again. How about that. I would hardly call this a habit, but it is also more running than I’ve done in the past year. I feel pretty good that I will run again next week and the next.
This feels different. This feels like the beginnings of a habit.
So what changed?
Charles DuHigg has done some interesting work on habit formation. Essentially, a habit is defined by a loop that has three phases:
1) the cue - the trigger that causes the habit to occur in the first place
2) the routine - the behavior itself
3) the reward - something pleasurable, which is the brain’s way of saving the habit and encoding it for future use
The key is finding the right reward. I’ve had other people tell me that the endorphin rush will be reward enough to keep me going. Uh, no. Totally didn’t work for me.
Apparently, the best way to get yourself to develop an exercise habit is to give yourself a treat right after. I know someone who would treat herself to a piece of chocolate. I have considered this, but I’d rather eat chocolate at other times of day. I have also considered enticing myself with an elaborate breakfast. But that’s too much effort. I have also once bought myself nice exercise pants to entice myself to go running. I have worn those pants a fair amount. I just wear them for other occasions like doing errands on Sunday.
Like I said, repeated failure. Or as Mr DuHigg is more likely to point out, I have not found the right reward. This is the hard part.
Three weeks ago, I accidentally discovered a reward that works for me. I was making another attempt to go running. The day before I came across a bunch of blog posts linking to talks I wanted to listen to. This was Albert Wenger’s talk to the Entrepreneurial Design class over at the SVA IXD program. So that morning, I remember the talks and played them on my run.
The interesting thing is that I really enjoyed it. I already listen to podcasts on my drive to work, but there are always more I’d like to listen. For instance, all the Stanford eCorner podcasts.
I figured out a few other reward attributes that were important to me. I needed to be sufficiently engaged, so I wouldn’t think about how much pain I was in or how much longer I had to run. Music doesn’t work for me for that reason. Music is distracting but not engaging for me. Something with a story or with content I cared about (startupy, techie stuff ) was perfect. I needed to find series of podcasts, so that I wouldn’t have to find a new podcast every single day. I needed the talks to be longer than 30 minutes, so I would run for at least 30 minutes.
The research says that eventually my brain should be able to find intrinsic reward in the exercise, and I won’t have to trick it with a reward. The research is unclear on how long it will take me to get there. Based on my track record, let’s just say I am glad that the internet has a large supply of good podcasts.
Next up, how do I get myself to blog more regularly…
**
P.S. This is not my running route, but one positive side effect of running is being able to take in gorgeous 7-mile hikes.
Ducklings vs. rainfall on water
A friend explained to me that at her school, the students were described as “ducklings” - calm above water but paddling hard beneath the surface to keep up. The same can probably be said of people who work in startups in the Bay Area. People appear chill, and they sort of actually are, except when you discover how hard core they are about their work.
I prefer the opposite analogy.
(What is the opposite of a duck? I have no idea. But bear with me.)
There is this print I bought from 20x200 by Chikara Umihara titled Rainfall, Upstate New York. There is nothing eye catching about it. Heavy rainfall on a lake. What caught my imagination was Umihara’s interpretation of the image.
Here, in this work, a downpour violently hit the water; there weren’t ripples and nothing is reflected on the surface. But after I printed this image, I realized that this is my first image that perfectly reflected my subconscious mental state—disturbed, but calm.
I think of what it’s like on my craziest days. The ones where people keep asking for 5 minutes of your time, and your attention is pulled in a hundred directions. The ones where someone is agitated, occasionally blaming you or someone on your team for something you had limited control over. A confrontation. Or the ones where you know you’ve fallen below the mark because you couldn’t quite get your act together and it’s all too much.
Disturbed, but calm.
There are many things that I cannot change about my environment. The “violent downpour” is an intrinsic part of the role, and indeed often the source of the intensity, the fun.
But what I would like to be more of is the “calm”. To be like that body of water. Agitation absorbing. Unshakeable beneath the surface.
I have a long road to get there.
Ari Wallach’s synthesized problem solving
“All Synthesis is, is myself and my partner running the back end. It’s like cloud innovation; we’re really trying to build a next-generation consultancy, drawing on a different kind of expert network…
“We’ll hire a stay-at-home mom who doesn’t want to return to a position at McKinsey, but will give us 15 brilliant hours a week in between everything else she’s doing in her life. We can bring in an urban-graffiti practitioner or someone who builds amazing shelters at Burning Man and used to build DARPA-contract structures and get them to reframe what they do so it’s relevant to a client’s issues. We don’t have a one-size-fits-all process like other consulting firms have.”
- Ari Wallach, Founder of Synthesis, as interviewed by Fast Company as a Real Life Problem Solver
**
I love this. I have minimal interest in politics, but I am totally inspired by what Ari Wallach has done with his career. Here is someone who has figured out how to do what he is.
He started out with a degree in political philosophy, and since then has done everything from working for the Democratic National Committee, to doing new-media projects, to consulting for nonprofits, to leading the “Great Schlep” campaign for Obama. It’s random, it’s all over the map, and together, synthesized, it makes perfect sense. Now he gets to be his own boss and work with clients ranging from the US State Department to the Ford Foundation to CNN.
Above all that, in that quote, we see that he is contributing both original solutions in his work for clients, as well an original business model that solves the modern day work/life/talent balance dilemma. I am drawn to people who cannot figure out take time to figure out how to do what no one else can do. And this, this is awesome.
Not urgent but important moments
If you work in a startup, you will understand that it is very, very hard to get out of operating in the urgent bucket and into the not urgent but important bucket. The bigger important things are easier to identify (you should build X). The smaller important things, those are hard to catch and sometimes seem frivolous, but they add up. They matter.
From the not urgent but important bucket this week:
Spent 45 minutes shopping online on behalf of the company for a gift for a well-loved coworker who is a brand new dad. Smack in the middle of a day when I should have hurried up and finished work so I could leave for an event which I missed. What can I say, I really like picking out nice gifts when I care enormously about the recipient’s happiness.
Two long chats with someone I rarely have long conversations with about recent company culture. It is a privilege to work with people who care so much about building a company that’s a great place to work.
Invested many hours this week trying to find new contractors to outsource some work. Who knew trying to get other people to do work would be so much work! I want to get better at this. I’d like to outsource more of my life.
Blogging. I have been trying to hit publish more often without worrying so much. I’m intrigued by this 750words thing. I would sign up except that 750 words per day (3 pages!) is too daunting. But really, I am under all kinds of fascinating, if sometimes crushing, pressure lately. It makes me think a lot about how I could do just a little bit better in every single moment.
What actually matters in goal setting
The engineers on my product team asked why I didn’t defend their interests in our quarterly goal setting meeting. This is presumably part of my job as Product Manager. (This is funny to me, since it’s the only time they have ever accused me of not defending them. Whether they like it or not, I have far more frequently erred on the other side.)
The senior leadership exec was doing his job of raising our goals. All the numbers were being adjusted upward. By “adjusted” I mean ratcheted way up. We have been here long enough to know he does this every time. This time, as with all previous times, a couple of the engineers tried to convince him that these goals were impossible.
I would agree, except for this:
Two quarters ago, the leadership set a revenue goal that I thought was a major stretch. To give you a sense of magnitude, I think most people would agree that any goal that requires more than a 100% increase is intimidating. But we blew through that target. In fact, we blew through it with a month left to go in the quarter.
Last quarter, encouraged by our success, we set what we all believed was a genuinely bold goal ourselves, only to see the leadership raise it far beyond (what I considered) reasonable reach. The number was so ridiculous that it made me nervous to think about it seriously, so I turned it into a bit of a joke. When we made major decisions or shifts in the way we operated, I would say, “Oh yeah, we need to hit that $X revenue goal.” In the end, we missed the ridiculous goal but came surprisingly close to it. We are likely to pass it fairly soon, if we haven’t done so already. The joke, oddly enough, became inspiring because it was a Big Hairy Audacious Goal.
With this track record, we’ve pretty much lost all credibility for our claims that certain goals are impossible. We have done “the impossible”. A slightly bizarre, mostly good problem to have.
So this time I didn’t step in to argue down the numbers.
First, we have consistently lost this argument over numbers with the leadership. We can persuade but cannot control what number they want. Similarly, they have limited control over whether we reach that goal. They cannot force us to reach it, if it really is beyond reach. Ultimately, we build what we build.
Second, the number doesn’t really matter. I mean, it does matter in terms of training our motivations. A very high goal trains us to raise our ambitions. On the flip side, if we set a more humble goal, it’s not like we’re going to reach it mid-quarter and go take a vacation for the rest of that quarter. We don’t operate that way.
Third, we were in broad agreement with the direction of the goals. These were priorities we had selected. We believed they were the most important goals for our product at this stage. So regardless of what the numbers were, the work wasn’t going to change very much. Our team was going to put its best foot forward in the direction of the goals.
I have no idea if we’ll reach these goals this time. I never know. But I’ve learned that that’s part of the point. If you can see a clear path to your goal, you’ve set the goal too low.
