You are Who You Choose to Be

I started out this post by looking for a good quote to expand on, but what I found was that many of the quotes I’ve collected through the years seem to be interrelated.  This makes sense, if you think about it, since I am of course attracted to quotes which reflect my own outlook on life; thus, many of the quotes touch on various aspects of that.  In fact, insofar as we do trust quotes to illuminate Truth for us (and I’ve also talked about why we shouldn’t), we must be cautious in trusting overmuch the quotes of any one individual, for there’s a certain amount of editorial censorship going on.

But when several quotes from disparate sources start to form a pattern, supporting each other and giving credence to the idea that a deeper Truth is here embedded, you may want to take notice.

Let’s start simply.  Here’s my favorite line from Men in Black—this is from the scene where K first explains to the soon-to-be J about aliens, and J wants to know why all the secrecy:

J: People are smart.  They can handle it.
K: A person is smart.  People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.

Here K (played by Tommy Lee Jones) makes a crucial distinction between a person as an individual, and people as herd animals, prone to mob mentality.  J (played by Will Smith) is a New York City cop: he does know it, and has no answer to this.

I like this quote because it’s a bit of a meditation on individuality.  As primates, we’re not exactly herd animals, and we’re not exactly pack animals, but we’re definitely not loners.  If you have cats (or have ever interacted with them in more than superficial ways), you know that cats are, by nature, solitary.  They tolerate other cats, sometimes, like they tolerate you ... sometimes.  I am one of those rare people who is perfectly balanced between loving dogs and cats, so I’ve had my share of both, and had the opportunity to observe them in domestic situations.  Every cat is different, as every dog is different, as every human is different, but there are fundamental natures of each.  My favorite Just So Story is “The Cat That Walked by Himself”, and whenever I interact with cats I hear my grandfather intoning that excellent Kipling line: “I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.  I will not come.”

But humans are not like this.  Humans have an instinctive need to belong, to cluster together against the dangers of the big, bad world.  Sometimes this goes too far, and we develop an us-against-them mindset that becomes toxic.  But, in measured doses, this instinct of ours can produce loyalty, self-sacrifice, and a fierce protectiveness of our friends and family—of our tribe.  So this is something that’s neither good nor bad.  It just is.

Of course, there are exceptions.  One of the great things of being a firm believer in balance and paradox is that I can tell you in all seriousness that people are all the same and that all of us are different.  Depeche Mode tells us that people are people, and they’re not wrong.  And Ray Stevens tells us that everyone is beautiful in their own way, and he’s not wrong either.  Indeed, it is the very paradoxical nature of humans that makes them simultaneously capable of such togetherness and such individuality.

Or I could say that it makes them simultaneously capable of conformity and disruptiveness.

There’s no doubt that some value conventionality and orthodoxy, while others value individualism and originality.  Actually, it’s probabaly more accurate to say that most of us value both, just in differing proportions.  I of course favor a position somewhere between the two, and also I value both at once.  But I doubt anyone who’s met me would fail to agree that I come down more on the side of individuality.  If I were a role-playing geek (which, you know, I am), I would tell you that my alignment is Chaotic Good (with leanings towards Chaotic Neutral).

If you find it too difficult to draw deep philosophical meaning from a science fiction movie which was (let’s face it) a bit silly (even though it was lots of fun), how about we look to something Steve Jobs said (this is from a Wired article in 1996):

I’m an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart.  I have a very optimistic view of individuals.  As individuals, people are inherently good.  I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups.

Notice that while this is slightly more learned-sounding, it’s exactly the same sentiment.  Now, I’m cheating a bit here, because I’m reusing both these quotes: I used them in my explanation of Cynical Romanticism.  But there I was concentrating on the downside of people.  Here I want to take the opposite approach: the upside of person.

E. E. Cummings once said (in his Advice to Students, 1958):

To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

and I think this sums up my attitude towards conformity in as concise and complete a manner as possible.  Being different is hard ... this is why we end up with cultures like goths or punks, with gangs of people trying so hard to look different that they all end up looking alike.  Being different requires figuring out what “different” means: for you, in your family, in your town, in your society.  “Different” is different for everybody.

In fact, probably the biggest obstacle to people being themselves is not knowing who “themselves” is.  Before you can shine as a unique individual, you’re going to have to figure out who you actually are.  “Know thyself” advises the inscription at Delphi, but it’s a terribly difficult task.  We humans have a tendency to think we understand our own minds, but it turns out we’re pretty terrible at it, in general.  We lie to ourselves, we exaggerate our strengths and downplay our weaknesses, we avoid the darker corners of our psyches because we’re afraid to find out what’s in them.  But if you’re willing to put in the time and effort, you can come to understand yourself reasonably well, and then you can start truly becoming who you were all along.

And then it gets really hard.

Because, no matter how much we claim to celebrate individuality, we do a damn fine job of ostracizing anyone who doesn’t fit our definition of “normal.”  And “normal” is boring.  In fact, it’s a bit scary.  Jodie Foster once said:

Normal is not something to aspire to, it’s something to get away from.

But of course the farther you get away from it, the more dirty looks and eye rolls and disapproving sniffs you get.  This is why Cummings describes it as a battle.  And all he did was throw the rules of grammar out the window and decapitalize his name every now and again.

So I’ve fought the good fight for much of my life.  I’ve stood out even when it meant sticking out, and I’ve gone my own way when going along would have been much easier (and safer).  Mostly I haven’t done this out of any particular moral imperative, or pride, or anything of that sort.  Mostly I was just too stubborn to conform when I probably should have.  But I’m not unhappy with how it’s all turned out.  I don’t have too many regrets, at least not on that score.

Being yourself is a worthwhile endeavor.  You will stand out in people’s minds, and make an impact on them even when you can’t remember ever having met them.  You will occasionally annoy, and occasionally frustrate, but you will also occasionally delight, and occasionally inspire.  That makes it all worthwhile, in the end.  At least it has to me.

Another quote I’ve always found thought-provoking, even though it’s somewhat trite, is often attributed to Confucius (which, like most things attributed to Confucius, is beyond unlikely and into ludicrous), and sometimes attributed to someone named Patrick Bryson (whoever that is).  But I’ve often thought its pithy simplicity held the promise of something more.

Always be yourself.  Otherwise, who are you?

Good advice indeed.  Along with the advice in the title of today’s post, which comes from The Iron Giant, which is an excellent film about being yourself.  If you haven’t seen it yet, you should seek it out.  Some things are worth the effort.

Everything Old is New Again

I was looking for a poem today.

It was the first poem that I ever wrote, or at least the first I can now remember having written.  It was nearly fully-formed in my head when I woke up one morning, and I remember the experience very clearly.  It was after I dropped out of college and after I moved out of my parents’ house, in that first non-familial dwelling where I lived with countless roommates whose faces were constantly changing.  The quality of light in my bedroom was strained: the sun had no doubt lightened the sky as best it could before actually emerging above the horizon, but there were also curtains to mute the brightness even further.  Everything in my room seemed to have a grainy quality, like a badly filmed movie.  I got up and grabbed one of my college notebooks, which I had not thrown away because there were still blank pages in them, and I wrote it all down.  I believe I had to make up part of it, so the last few verses aren’t nearly as good as the intial ones, which were a gift from my subconscious.  I can still recite the first two stanzas nearly perfectly, after all these years ...

But now I can’t find it.  I know I still have a copy; probably more than one.  I transcribed it several times, in different media.  (No doubt it exists on a few dead hard drives as well.)  At the very least, I should have the copy that I submitted for my poetry class, during my second tour of college, since I saved nearly everything I ever wrote for any of my writing classes: two semesters of fiction, two of non-fiction, one of poetry, and one of advanced writing.  My poetry professor said it reminded him of Poe’s poetry.  I said, thank you.  He said, that wasn’t a compliment.

I never cared much for poetry.  It’s dense, and difficult to parse.  Fiction has a flow to it; once you get properly cranking, you can just write it forever.  Or at least I can.  Poetry is more about agonizing over every word.  It’s spare, and exacting, and needs to communicate one thing while saying another.  If you’ve ever wondered if poetry is as difficult to write as it is to read, the answer is yes.

Oscar Wilde once said, “All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.”  My poetry professor certainly believed that.  His attitude was, if you want to pour all your personal feelings out on paper and call it poetry, that’s fine.  But, as soon as you bring it into my classroom, you give me permission to tell you it’s crap.  He made at least one person in the class cry, that I recall.  I made sure that any emotions I tried to capture in my poetry weren’t my own.  Much safer that way.

While I couldn’t find my first poem, I did find the first poem I submitted for that class.  Rereading it, I suppose it isn’t terrible, though it certainly isn’t great either.  It was based on someone I’d met my first year back in school, and it was an attempt to capture a more complex emotion than just the simple one-word things we typically use in our everyday speech.  I don’t know how successful it was at that, but at least it recaptures that emotion for me, as I reread it.  But then I knew what I was trying to say in the first place, so it may not work as well for you.  But judge for yourself:

I am not in love.
I mean, he’s a sweet guy and all, but
it’s just a fling.
A brief encounter.
A few weeks of passion.
It’s just shallow.
You know?

I met him
where I work.
He comes in a lot.
The stale, smoky air,
the cool green felt,
the constant clack of the balls—
it has an undeniable attraction for some.
Like him.
I remember noticing him.
I liked the easy way he moved,
his long, blonde hair tucked under a hat
or a bandana.
His intense concentration,
his confident style:
he was like an artist at work.
He has good hands.

We never really spoke, he and I,
until that night.
I was drunk and he was drunk
and we were together
and he was intelligent
and witty
and charming.

And I was surprised.
I mean, a lot of guys wear their leather
and their long hair
and play their boyish games,
and they think they’re cool.
But they have no substance.
But he ...
he was different.
He is different.

What?  Yes, I know.
He has a girlfriend.
But she’s far away,
and it doesn’t really matter because
it’s just shallow.
You know?
Am I wrong?
Don’t sit there so quietly,
tell me what you think.
You won’t hurt my feelings.
It’s not like I love him.

The other night I was alone.
It was the first night I’ve spent along since
that first night.
But I didn’t miss him or anything.
I sat around, I did some homework,
different stuff.
And I dreamed ...
I dreamed I was a little girl
and I was standing in a field
and the field was full of beautiful flowers
and the sun was shining—
I remember how warm it felt on my skin—
and birds were singing ...
it was really pretty.
And off in the distance,
way far away,
was a tree.
It was the most perfect tree—
it was a maple,
with perfectly shaped green leaves
and strong, straight branches
that started close to the ground and went up
almost like a ladder.
It looked so cool and inviting,
and I wanted to climb it so badly,
so I started running
and I ran and I ran
and the tall grass whipped my legs
and the wind tugged at my hair
and I was going faster and faster
until everything around me was a blur of sound and motion
but that tree never moved.
It never came any closer.
It was exactly as far away
as it was before.
And when I woke up,
very suddenly,
I felt out of breath
and my legs ached.
Isn’t that odd?

He’ll be over again tonight.
I’ll be glad to see him,
even though I wonder
sometimes.
He’s going away for the summer.
He’s going to saty with his girlfriend.
And by the time he gets back,
I’ll be gone.
Didn’t I tell you?
I’m moving.
To Vermont.
It doesn’t really matter anyway—
it’s just shallow.
I hear him on the stairs now,
so you’ll excuse me.
The time we spend together won’t last long,
so it’s very special.
I treasure each moment.
But, in a way,
I’ll be glad when summer comes.
One can only take so much intimacy.
After all,
I am not in love.

From the condition of the copy I found, I suspect this was a first draft, so it might have gotten better; I can’t recall.  But it still has a certain quality that I like, despite the fact that it was written when I was young and foolish, and (to plagiarize They Might Be Giants) I feel old and foolish now.  It could have almost been a prose piece, but I think the linebreaks actually add something to the flow (or non-flow) of it that makes it more interesting than it would be if it were just written in paragraphs.  But of course I’m biased.

I’ll keep on looking for the original poem that I actually wanted to share with you.  Or maybe the rest of it will come back to me.  In the meantime, I revisited my cento from a few months ago and produced a key for the original references.  I was starting to feel bad about not crediting the original authors.  Plus it’ll save you some Googling, if you really wanted to know the sources.

---

• Title, first half: original
• Title, second half: A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
• Stanza 1, Line 1: traditional (recycled by Peter Straub, Shadowland)
• Stanza 1, Line 2: Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (recycled by Charles Schulz, Peanuts, and Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time)
• Stanza 1, Line 3: Jane’s Addiction, “Of Course,” Ritual de lo Habitual
• Stanza 1, Line 4: English nursery rhyme (recycled by Neil Gaiman, Stardust, and Stratus, “The Fear,” Fear of Magnetism)
• Stanza 2, Line 1: Guadalcanal Diary, ”... Vista,” Flip-Flop
• Stanza 2, Line 2: The The, “This is the Day,” Soul Mining
• Stanza 2, Line 3: Shakespeare, Macbeth, (recycled by Agatha Christie, book of the same name)
• Stanza 2, Line 4: Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, “Canto the second”
• Stanza 2, Line 5: John Irving, A Widow for One Year, (recycled by himself, book of the same name)
• Stanza 2, Line 6: V.S. Pritchett, At Home and Abroad
• Stanza 3, Line 1: Dead Can Dance, “Black Sun,” Aion
• Stanza 3, Line 2: “The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens”, traditional Scottish poem
• Stanza 3, Line 3, first half: Frank Herbert, Dune
• Stanza 3, Line 3, second half: Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
• Stanza 3, Line 4: Emily Brown, “Enemy of Time,” This Goes With Us
• Stanza 4, Line 1, first half: A.S.J. Tessimond, “Cats”
• Stanza 4, Line 1, second half: Po Chu-i, “The Red Cockatoo” (translation by Arthur Waley)
• Stanza 4, Line 2, first half: Tool, “Disgustipated,” Undertow
• Stanza 4, Line 2, second half: Tori Amos, “Happy Phantom,” Little Earthquakes
• Stanza 4, Line 3: R.E.M., “Swan Swan H,” Life’s Rich Pageant
• Stanza 4, Line 4: Incubus, “Pardon Me,” Make Yourself
• Stanza 4, Line 5, first half: Lewis Carroll, “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There
• Stanza 4, Line 5, second half: The Beautiful South, “From Under the Covers,” Welcome to the Beautiful South
• Stanza 5, Line 1: John Mayer, “No Such Thing,” Room for Squares
• Stanza 5, Line 2: e.e. cummings
• Stanza 5, Line 3: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
• Stanza 5, Line 4, first half: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven”
• Stanza 5, Line 4, second half: Shakespeare, Hamlet
• Stanza 6, Line 1: Saiyuki, “Where the Gods Are”
• Stanza 6, Line 2: Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
• Stanza 6, Line 3: Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”
• Stanza 6, Line 4: Blind Melon, “No Rain,” Blind Melon
• Stanza 7, Line 1, first half: Harvey
• Stanza 7, Line 1, second half: Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• Stanza 7, Line 2: traditional (recycled by Peter Straub, Shadowland)
• Stanza 7, Line 3: Satchel Paige (but also attributed to many others)
• Stanza 7, Line 4: Will Smith, “Just the Two of Us,” Big Willie Style
• Stanza 7, Line 5: the Kaiser Chiefs, “Time Honoured Tradition,” Employment

A Cento for a Sunday

When I was in college, I took a Shakespeare class where we had to do a group project.  For our group’s project, one of my fellow students suggested that we put on a short skit, talking about the plays, but using the Bard’s own words.  We carefully culled bits and pieces of dialogue from the plays, put it in the mouths of our characters, and, by putting exisitng things into new context, we created new meaning.  I was fascinated by this process and have occasionally found myself doing it for other occasions.  One of my best friends asked me to do a reading at his wedding, of anything I liked, and I cobbled together several different quotes on love and fashioned a complete speech out of it.  It was generally well-received.

I’ve also tried my hand at creating poems like this.  It turns out that poetry created thus actually has a name: it’s a cento.  I’ve done a few over the years (despite the fact that poetry isn’t truly my forté), but none of them were particularly good.  Today, I give you a new cento that I “composed,” which I think is better than my previous efforts, although perhaps still not great.  The lines (or in some cases half-lines) here are mostly quotes from other poems, books, songs, or movies, although some are old things other people have recycled before me.  Most are quotes that appealed to me and ended up in my quote file, but a few I had to hunt down specifically to fit parts of the “narrative.”  All I personally added were a few connecting words here and there, and the first half of the title, which doesn’t necessarily mean anything (contrast with the second half, which is rather deliberately chosen not only to offset the first half euphoniously, but for its meaning in its own source).

I thought of listing all the sources here, but I’ve decided against it, mostly because it’s more fun to let you discover them on your own.  I’m pretty sure that judicious Googling will turn them all up, so I don’t worry that the original authors will fail to be attributed.

Consider this a first draft and be kind to it.  It’s new, and doesn’t much know what it’s saying yet.

Cobblestone Fray, Cottleston Pie

Once upon a time, when we all lived in the woods,
on a dark and stormy night,
all of the animals are capably murderous—
still, you may get there by candle-light.

You got devils living in that head,
watching the whites of your eyes turn red
by the pricking of my thumbs.
Where’er we tread ‘tis haunted holy ground,
like someone trying not to make a sound.
At sunrise, there is the sound of drums ...

It’s all sex and death as far as I can tell,
drinking the blood-red wine.
Fear is the mind-killer; blood is compulsory.
And I’ve made an enemy of time.

No less liquid than their shadows, speaking with the speech of men,
Satan must be our cousin, and does his crossword with a pen.
What noisy cats are we,
with the perils of being in 3-D,
and why the sea is boiling hot?  He’s won a lot of friends ...

There’s no such thing as the real world, but
there’s a hell of a good universe next door.
Little things are infinitely the most important.
Respite and nepenthe: to die, to sleep no more.

We’re all alive for a reason.
People need good lies.
Thou wast not born for death, but
when you stop dreaming, it’s time to die.

I recommend pleasant, but we’re all mad here.
I am the king of the cats!
Dance like nobody’s watching,
cry, ain’t no shame in it,
and that is the end of that.

Cynical Romanticism

Many of my friends seem to think I’m a pessimist.  They’re then quite surprised when I seem to display some trait of stunning (and often naive) optimism.  The truth is that I’m not a pessimist; nor do I have moments where I transition to being an optimist.  I am, in fact, a cynic.  But I’m also a romantic.

I’ve mentioned this dichotomy of mine before (more than once, even).  What does it really mean though?  To understand, it’s useful to examine the roots of both terms.

Cynicism is actually an ancient Greek philosophy.  You remember the story of Diogenes, don’t you?  (Of course you don’t—I shouldn’t either, really, but my mother had an odd idea of what constituted a well-rounded education.)  Anyway, Diogenes was the guy who lived in a bathtub on the streets of Athens.  He carried around a lamp in the daytime, waiting for someone to ask him why.  When they did, he would reply that he was looking for an honest man.  The Cynics were sort of proto-hippies, living “in accord with Nature” and eschewing things like wealth and fame as non-natural.  It wasn’t enough to reject these things, though: a Cynic was required to practice shamelessness (sometimes translated as “impudence”), by which they meant that they should deface laws and social conventions.  So they were sort of in-your-face hippies.

You can vaguely draw the connection from this attitude of telling everyone that they were fools for letting things like greed and conformity take them further and further away from the natural state of living and the ultimate meaning that cynicism has today: the belief that people as a whole are vain, gullible, avaricious, and generally not that bright.  Steve Jobs once said:

I’m an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart.  I have a very optimistic view of individuals.  As individuals, people are inherently good.  I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups.

Although I’ve always preffered the version from Men in Black:

J: People are smart.  They can handle it.
K: A person is smart.  People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.

J has no answer to this, of course: he is a New York City policeman.  He does know it.

When I was young, I did the required stint in fast food.  My particular greasepit was Burger King.  I worked there when chicken tenders were introduced, and I lived through the “Where’s Herb?” campaign.  Part of this campaign was to get a particular burger for a dollar by mentioning the fictional Herb’s name.  During this period, I saw innumerable people in Burger King ordering a “Herb burger.”  Yes, that’s right: they had absolutely no idea what they were ordering—just that it was cheap.  I am fond of telling people that we could have served them a shit sandwich and they’d have been happy as long as they thought they were getting a bargain.  I’m also fond of telling people that Burger King is where I first began to lose my faith in humanity.  Looking back, I’m not sure that’s entirely true, but I can’t deny that ol’ Herb played a large role in pushing me down that road.  Certainly it’s the place where I learned to appreciate H. L. Mencken’s observation that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the common man,^* and surely Mencken is a big a cynic as Twain or Voltaire, two of my most cherished quotemeisters.

So do I have, as Wikipedia puts it, a “general lack of faith or hope in the human race”?  Yeah, pretty much.  My experience with politics, business, financial institutions, organized religion, and even smaller coteries of humanity such as neighborhood homeowner’s associations or Internet forum denizens tells me that, if you expect the worst from people, you’ll rarely be disappointed, and occasionally you get a pleasant surprise.  Which is much better than the inverse: expecting the best yields constant disappointment and the occasional situation where your expectations are merely met.  Thus, I’m entirely comfortable with being considered a cynic, even though I don’t think that’s the same as being a pessimist.  I’m happy enough to consider the glass half-full ... I just remain convinced that there’s every likelihood that someone else will come along and drain the glass before I get any.

Romanticism is also tied to nature: it was in some ways a revolt against the rationality of the Enlightenment, a way of stressing that one should go out into untamed Nature and stop trying to analyze it and categorize and just feel it.  Romanticism was a validation of strong emotion—be it wonder, awe, passion, or even horror.  Especially for Art.  As one early Romantic German painter put it, “the artist’s feeling is his law.”  This was a movement of rejecting rules, particularly rules about Art, and it led to the Gothic horror tale and luminaries such as Edgar Allen Poe ... it’s certainly no wonder that I would experience a feeling of kinship towards it.

“Romantic” as a term implying love came later.  Even before Romanticism, “romance” was a term that referred to knights and heroic quests: Shakespeare’s The Tempest was considered a romance.  From knights to chivalry, and rescuing damsels in distress, plus Romanticism’s emphasis on strong emotions (such as passion), we eventually came to think of “romance” as primarily a love story, which today leaves us with Harlequin and Titanic.  Sort of a step down from Romanticism, if you think about it.  Not that there’s anything wrong with romantic love, of course: just that love is only one small part of Romanticism.

As a would-be-writer who idolizes Steven King (among others), how could I not be attracted to the movement that gave us Poe?  Certainly there is no King (nor Straub, Koontz, Barker or Gaiman) without Poe.  This is a movement that also (albeit more indirectly) gave us Robert Browning, who I quoted in my deconstruction of one of my all-time favorite quotes, and who also inspired King’s Dark Tower series.  Like Cynicism, Romanticism was a rejection of rules, and especially the “rules” of conforming to a polite society.  Throw off the chains of conformity, they both proclaim.  Be an individual.

And that’s the heart of my outlook.  Note how both Jobs and Tommy Lee Jones laud the individual person.  And we don’t have to look far to hear more famous people doing so.  Margaret Mead once said:

Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world.  For indeed that’s all who ever have.

How can you not take inspiration from that?  Pearl S. Buck said:

The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible—and achieve it, generation after generation.

So I believe that, despite the fact that humanity in general is close to useless, every individual human has a potential for greatness.  I believe that the universe works hard to put me in good places, and succeeds a surprising percentage of the time, even when the formless churning rat race of mankind is working hard to push in the opposite direction.  I won’t say I’m an optimist—the glass may indeed be half-empty.  But somewhere out there is a person who’s willing to refill it for me.  If I’m fortunate, and if I really need it, I’ll meet them.

This is not a philosophy so much as an outlook.  If you ask me about my philosophy, I’ll go back balance and paradox.  But that theory is how I attempt to make sense of the world when it doesn’t seem to want to make sense on its own.  That’s different from how I approach the world, and what I expect out of it.  When it comes to that, I don’t expect much out of people, but I will never give up my idealism.  The world doesn’t owe me anything, and I wouldn’t expect to receive payment if it did.  But I continue to believe that the universe is a decent enough place, and that there will always enough light to balance the dark, and that what you give out will surely come back to you.  In the end, Good will always triumph over Evil, even if Evil usually gets more votes (and always has better financial backing).

So I suppose it’s a bit like Mel Brooks says in The Twelve Chairs:

Hope for the best.  Expect the worst.
Life is a play.  We’re unrehearsed.

Although I would favor the formulation of Benjamin Disraeli:

I am prepared for the worst, but hope for the best.

Because I’m not a Romantic Cynic, after all: I’m a Cynical Romantic.  I may start with dread, but I always try to end on a note of hope.

__________

* Technically, what he said was: “No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the record for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

Another Mother's Day

Sometimes when you pick up your child you can feel the map of your own bones beneath your hands, or smell the scent of your skin in the nape of his neck. This is the most extraordinary thing about motherhood—finding a piece of yourself separate and apart that all the same you could not live without.

— Jodi Picoult, Perfect Match

Last night I had a dream.

In it, I was back in college—not my past, college-age self, but my present-day self.  In the dream, this was a bizarre experience, both better and worse than it was at the time.  On the one hand, age and experience makes it much easier to be able to handle some of the things that we handled badly at that age.  On the other, perspective and an ever-increasing awareness of the preciousness of fleeting time means that’s it’s very hard to take some things seriously, like whether you got an A or a B on some test.  At least that’s how it was in the dream, with the result that I would shake my head fondly (but calmly) at the things my fellow matriculates were freaking out about, but attack seriously the things they blew off to have one more beer.

Many of those attending classes with me were actual people I went to college with.  Not my close friends, but friends of friends, or people who were just in the same class with me, or lived in dorm rooms next to friends of mine.  You know the people I mean: the ones you’d drink with at the parties, or debate points of philosophy with in the library, or perhaps sit with in the cafeteria if there wasn’t anyone else around you knew, but that’s about the extent of it.  In the dream, more than going to class, we would sit around and talk about stuff—I don’t know about your college experience, but that was a big part of mine.  You’d take some class you never really knew much about before, like anthropology, or psychology, or Eastern religion, and you’d learn these things that blew your mind, and you just had to share them with people.  And they were sharing with you the things that they’d learned which had blown their minds.  And you all worked together to make these things relevant to your life, dithering over whether the Heisenberg uncertainty principle could be applied to Jung’s theories of déjà vu and synchronicity, or whether believing that the rites of cannibalistic tribes are acceptable for them but not for you was simply intelligent avoidance of ethnocentricity or downright moral relativism.  A whole hell of a lot of what you learn in college is just facts: sparkly, and exciting, but useless in isolation.  Those long talks over alcohol, nicotine, illicit drugs or no drugs at all, just constant lack of sleep—those were how we developed the framework on which we hung all the pretty facts.

For some reason, all my opinions and outlooks on life surprised my former classmates.  Perhaps it was just that they’d never known me that well.  But, the more we talked, the more I realized that my responses were peppered with phrases such as “there’s just no way you can maintain that philosophy once you have children.”  Which is odd, because all of my perspectives on parenting were developed back in my college days, and they really haven’t changed very much.  But none of these disucssion were actually about parenting.  They were about ... well, it’s hard to remember—you know how dreams are .. but things such as foreign policy and population control and spirituality vs religion and those sorts of abstract things upon which we all have strong but mostly uninformed positions.  But all my ways of looking at the world, my entire weltanschauung (to use a fancy word I learned in college), seemed subtly but irrevocably altered by my fatherhood.

And (I don’t know how I can know this, but, in that strange way of dreams, I do) it wasn’t merely the fact of my fatherhood.  It wasn’t just the existence of my children, but the children themselves.  Them as individuals, the particular people that they both already are and are growing to be.  There is a certain, inexplicable way that any new person you develop a close association with modifies your course in life, but the way that children do so is more profound, somehow. 

Abraham Lincoln supposedly once said:

All that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to my angel Mother.

(A shorter version of the quote is also attributed to George Washington.)  So it occurs to me that, if my children are responsible for changing the way I view the world, the ultimate repsonsibility for that lies with their mother.

Now, I’ve explored this concept before, both explicitly and abstractly, but apparently my subconscious felt there was more ground to be covered here.  Perhaps the annual recurrence of a day devoted to the celebration of motherhood was just seeping into the undercarriage of my brain.  Or perhaps my super-ego is trying to tell me that I need to appreciate The Mother a bit more.

On the one hand, it’s silly that I should need to be reminded to do this.  Without her, our children would never get educated, our bills would never get paid, our vacations would never get planned, and very little of our home would ever get improved.  Many of us would never get fed ... or would get fed infrequently, at least.  Tough to take all that for granted.

On the other hand, it can be too easy to forget the details as life goes whipping by.  There’s always something else to quibble over, some point of parenting to disagree about, some monetary issue to agonoize over.  Children can be annoying, whether human or otherwise: they pee on the carpet, spill your giant cup of water, feel sick to their stomachs, require help with video games or Legos or having their nails stuck in blankets ... there’s an endless amount of need to deal with, and sometimes you get lost in it, forgetting to pop your head up every now and again and remember how good you’ve got it.  Because they also curl up on your lap, nuzzle your legs, chase you around the house, challenge you to games, or just sneak up on you while you’re sitting on the sofa and lick your nose.  And none of that—not a single giggle or adoring look or nuzzled neck—would be possible without The Mother.

So one really shouldn’t require an annual day of celebration to remember all these things.  But I suppose one does, if only to force one to stop and ponder.  How much she has given.  Author Elizabeth Stone said:

Making the decision to have a child—it is momentous.  It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.

Author Debra Ginsberg went further:

Through the blur, I wondered if I was alone or if other parents felt the same way I did—that everything involving our children was painful in some way.  The emotions, whether they were joy, sorrow, love or pride, were so deep and sharp that in the end they left you raw, exposed and yes, in pain.  The human heart was not designed to beat outside the human body and yet, each child represented just that—a parent’s heart bared, beating forever outside its chest.

It’s a lot to risk, bringing a child into the world.  More than thrice as much, to risk bringing three, not even considering those who were lost along the way.  It’s hard, and joyous, and terrifying, and rewarding, and painful, and the most important, vital, life-affirming thing you get in this difficult, bitter world.  I’m lucky enough to have three quite pretty ones, and a mother for them who takes care of them, and of me.  It’s perhaps more than I deserve.  And a lot to be thankful for.

And I am.

Little Things Add Up

It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.

— Sherlock Holmes (“A Case of Identity”, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

A few years ago, the architecture team at my work (of which I am a part) put together a presentation for the business designed to explain why a serious rearchitecture was important.  We all contributed ideas and analogies and metaphors, and different ways to illustrate the problem.

One of the ones that I contributed was this:  Many times throughout your work week as a programmer, you run across things in our ten-year-old codebase that you just don’t understand.  Things that look insane.  Things that look like they couldn’t possibly work, and may in fact represent subtle bugs that no one’s ever been able to catch.  When you find such a thing, you have two choices: you can ignore it, or you can fix it.

If you fix it, you risk breaking something.  This, after all, is the source of the ancient adage that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” By “correcting” something without a complete understanding of just what the hell it’s supposed to do, you may correct one subtle bug only to introduce another.  The new bug could be worse.  It could cause a loss of revenue that’s not immediately obvious, and you might end up six months later in some business meeting trying to explain how you cost the company tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands, or millions) of dollars because you “fixed” something that no one asked you to.  If you are a corporate programmer with any reasonable amount of experience, this has already happened to you in your career.  Probably more than once, even.

So, for any one given situation like this, the smart thing to do is to ignore it.  That is, from a risk vs reward perspective, or from a return-on-investment perspective (both of which are very proper business perspectives), the right thing to do, the responsible thing to do is to just leave it and move on.  Because the advantage of making your codebase just a tiny bit more sensible and sane isn’t worth that risk.

But the problem is, all those little things add up.  When you stand back and look at the big picture, over the course of ten years you’ve made thousands (or even tens of thousands) of individual decisions where each one was the right decision individually, but together they spell disaster.  Together, this approach means that you are literally incapable of ever improving your code.  Your code is, by definition, continually going to get worse.

Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige’s wall there was this one: “Matters of great concern should be treated lightly.” Master Ittei commented, “Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.”

— Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure

It’s very popular in business culture to quote Sun Tzu.  After all, the competition of companies often seems like a war.  Plus pithy quotes like “attack the enemy’s strategy” and “speed is the essence of war” sound really cool when you break them out in a business meeting.  In reality, The Art of War does have quite a few valuable lessons for us.  For instance, “lead by example” (technically, “a leader leads by example not by force”).  That’s pretty good advice.  Or how about this one: “Pick your battles.”

Actually, what Sun Tzu said was: “Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.” But most people interpret that as just a more flowery version of “pick your battles.” And plenty of people have expounded on this theme.  Jonathan Kozol, educator and activist, once said: “Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.” It seems like where Sun Tzu started was an aphorism on trying not to get into battles you know you can’t win.  But where Kozol, and most of us, seem to have ended up is closer to the military version of “don’t sweat the small stuff.” That is, learn to let the little things go so you can save your strength for the big ones, the ones that are really worth fighting for.

And certainly this seems to make good sense.  If you’re going to be losing any battles, they probably ought to be the ones that don’t matter as much ... right?  As we contemplate where to direct our energy, where to concentrate our efforts, when each little battle comes along, it’s always going to make sense to let it go and wait for the big problem that’s inevitably going to show up tomorrow.  But, the problem is, there’s a flaw in this reasoning.

See, little things add up.

I think we’re looking at the wrong end of the trite maxim spectrum.  Maybe we should be considering that “mighty oaks from little acorns grow.” Or that “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” This is what disturbs me about the (quite common) corporate attitude that, as employee freedoms are eroded bit by bit in the name of increased efficiency, each such loss is a small battle, and not worth fighting over.  I often speak out about such things, when I have the opportunity.  And I’m often told that I need to learn to let these little things go, because, you know, there are bigger fish to fry.  Pick your battles and all that.

So I get a lot of eyerolls, and shaken heads, and derisive snorts, because I’m making mountains out of molehills.  I need to go along to get along.  Because my argument is one of those “slippery slope” arguments, and you know how silly those are.  Let gay people get married today and tomorrow we’ll have legalized bestiality.  Stop people burning flags and next thing you know our free speech is gone.  That sort of thing.  Poppycock.

But here’s the thing.  When you first start a job, the world is full of possibilities.  And the environment of the place—the culture—is awesome ... if it weren’t, you wouldn’t have taken the job, right?  And if, later, after you’ve been there for a while, some little small thing that attracted you to the job is taken away, it’s not a big deal, right?  There’s still all the other things you liked.  And, the next year, if one other little thing disappears, it’s still no big deal, right?  This job is still far and away better than anything else you could find out there.  And if, the year after that, one more little thing is taken away ...

Here’s another saying for you: death by a thousand cuts.  None of those individual cuts hurt, really, but one day, you just realize that there’s no point in going on.  And you start to question whether it really is true that there couldn’t be something better out there.  And you toss off an email to some random recruiter and next thing you know you’re moving across the country to an even more awesome job.  (But then I’ve told this story before.)  And then you start the whole cycle all over again.

The really sad thing is that, no matter how often this happens, the corporate managers will never see it coming.  See, from their perspective, people are quitting over stupid, trivial things.  And people that will quit over stupid, trivial things ... you don’t want those people anyway, right?  There was nothing you could do.  They were unpredictable.  Anything might have set them off.

They’re missing the big picture.

They let the little things slide, because they weren’t worth fighting for, and the little things added up.  There were haystems snapping dromedary spines right and left, to coin a phrase.  Is it really true to say there was nothing they could have done?  I wonder ...

I wonder what Sun Tzu would say if asked that question.  It’s sort of difficult to know for sure, seeing as how he’s been dead for about 2,500 years.  But I could hazard a guess.  I think he’d say this:

Treat your men as you would your own beloved sons. And they will follow you into the deepest valley.

— Sun Tzu, The Art of War

I'm too old for this shit ...

I believe in self-reflection and self-analysis.  (Of course, I also believe that such things are necessarily flawed, but perhaps that’s a topic for another blog post.)  I think it’s important to know what your faults are, what your limitations are.  Of course, I think that sometimes people want to identify their faults so they can correct them.  I have a slightly different approach:  If I can’t identify all my faults, I’m a blind moron, bumbling through life not even knowing the damage I’m doing.  Contrariwise, if I can identify all my faults, and if I could somehow correct them all, then I would be perfect.  I know that I cannot ever be perfect.  Therefore, either I’m never going to be able to see all my faults, or I’m going to be able to see them all but never fix them all.  I choose the latter.

That is, there are some faults that I have that I’ve just learned to live with.  They’re bad, sure, but they’re not so bad, and, if one has to have faults anyway (and, lacking perfection, one does), you may as well have some that aren’t so bad, right?  For instance, I’m too loud.  I have a naturally loud voice, and it carries, and the more excited I get about a topic, the louder I get.  Especially in an office environment, I’ve been asked many times throughout my life to keep it down.  Another problem I have is that I get pissed off at little things.  Not things that people do, so much: more like inanimate objects.  Like if I drop a cup and spill water all over the place, I am pissed at that cup.  This is moronic.  I know this.  But I still do it, and mostly I can live with that.

Now here’s the fault that I wanted to talk about today: I try to be too helpful.  Yeah, yeah, I know that sounds like one of those bullshit “flaws” that you dredge up during an interview.  (“Mr. Jones, what would you say is your biggest failing as an employee?”  “Well, sir, I’ve often been told that I just work too gosh-darned hard.”)  But note that I’m not claiming that I actually am too helpful, only that I try to be.  And, really, it isn’t correct to say that I try to be too helpful ... the truth is that I try too hard to be helpful, which is subtly different.

If you ask me a question, I want to give you the right answer.  If I can’t give you an answer, I feel bad.  Like, unreasonably bad.  Much worse than I would if I were to screw you out of a parking spot—worse even than if I were to screw you out of a job (unless perhaps I knew you personally).  That’s messed up.  But that’s the way I am.  If I give you an answer and it later turns out I was wrong, that’s even worse: then I feel hideously awful.  I have friends that think I have a burning need to be right.  I don’t think that’s true.  My father, for instance, has a burning need to be right.  He doesn’t ever admit that he was wrong.  I, on the other hand, have absolutely no problem admitting I was wrong: I just feel really crappy about it, if I think that someone was misled somehow (and that’s nearly always true, unless you were talking to yourself or something).  It’s sort of like a savior complex, but on a smaller scale.  I don’t feel the need to save people, only help them out a bit.

And, at first blush, this doesn’t seem so bad.  So I go out of my way to help people; what’s wrong with that?  Someone with a savior complex often has the problem of taking care of others so much that they forget to take care of themselves, but I don’t have that issue.  So where are the downsides, and how is this a fault?  Well, there are two main areas that I’ve identified, one smaller, and one larger.

The smaller issue is that I’m so constantly afraid of giving people the wrong information that I often over-qualify all my statements.  Now, I’ve talked before about my fear of absolute statements.  So, in one sense, this is just another facet of that.  But it goes further, I think: if I qualify everything I say to a large enough extent, I can never be giving you misleading information, right?  Many of my friends think I’m wishy-washy.  I don’t think that about myself, but I certainly understand why they do, and this is at the heart of it.

But here’s the bigger problem.  When I think someone is wrong, I have a desperate desire to “help” them by correcting their misconceptions.  Which can be okay, sometimes, if the person is receptive to that sort of thing, but often people aren’t.  And that just makes me try harder.  Which is code for “I’m a jerk about it.”  And, of course, it’s one thing if it’s a fact we’re discussing.  If I can tell you that you’re wrong, and we can look it up on Wikipedia or somesuch, then the question will be settled.  You may not appreciate my correcting you (especially if I did it in public), but at least there’s no more arguing about it.

But suppose it’s more of a matter of opinion.  Now, I’m okay if you have your own opinion about something.  If you have an intelligent, informed opinion, and I just happen to disagree with you, then fine.  I don’t have a need to “correct” you then, because you’re not really wrong.  But, let’s face it: most poeple’s opinions are not intelligent, informed opinions, and that includes mine.  I try (really!) to have the good grace to back down when it’s obvious that you know more about something than I do, but I find that I’m in a minority there, and sometimes I can’t resist either.

Here’s the situation that brought this to the forefront of my mind and inspired this post:  Just two days ago, I was in a meeting with several other technogeeks that I work with.  There were five of us, and were talking about architectural decisions.  For some reason, the topic of TDD came up.  Now, I’ve actually talked about this exact situation before, and I even specifically mentioned TDD in that post.  I also mentioned my good friend and co-worker, and he happened to be in that meeting.  Perhaps I didn’t mention it, but he’s also my boss (everyone in the room’s boss, for that matter).  We don’t usually treat him any differently for all that, but it’s a fact that should not be ignored.

So, suddenly we find ourselves debating the merits of TDD (again).  What those merits are is not important to the story.  Suffice it to say that my friend, and one other co-worker, took the con side, and the remaining three of us took the pro side.  And the discussion got heated.  I found myself geting more and more frustrated as I tried to “help” them understand why TDD was so cool.

On the one hand, it made perfect sense that it should upset me so much.  Neither of the fellows on the con side had ever actually tried TDD.  And it was obvious from the statements they made that they didn’t have a very thorough understanding of it.  Them saying it was a bad technique was basically the same as my six-year-old claiming that he’s sure he doesn’t like a food despite the fact he’s never tried it.  It’s just silly, and therefore somewhat maddening.

But, on the other hand, I have to be careful, because I know how I get, because of my fault.  Here are people making a mistake: they’re espousing an opinion based on incomplete information and zero experience.  And, trust me: even if your opinion happens to be accidentally right, that’s still a mistake.  So, I see people making a mistake and I want to help them.  And I know that’s going to blind me to common sense.  (Well, I know it now ... seeing that at the time was pretty much a lost cause.)

And, here’s the thing: the other two people on the pro side didn’t get into the argument.  Why not?  Is it because they were scared to get into it with the guy who’s technically their boss?  No, not at all: we’ve all had technical discussions where we’ve been on the other side from our boss, and we don’t back down when we think it’s important.  So maybe they didn’t think it was important, then?  Maybe.  But I think I see a better explanation.

When your own kid tells you he’s not eating the fish because he doesn’t like it, even though you know perfectly well he’s never tried it before, you can get into it with him.  As the parent, it’s your job to teach your children to try new things, not to be close-minded.  If you don’t, who will?  Because, when it’s someone else’s kid telling you he’s not eating the fish, you just nod and go “okay, sure, kid, whatever you say.”  Because, and here’s the crux of the matter: why the hell do you care?

These other two guys are both younger than me, but they’re apparently much smarter.  The fact that our two colleagues are radically misinformed about TDD and think it’s bad even though they don’t understand it isn’t hurting them one whit.  It’s not stopping them from using TDD: the boss has said he doesn’t believe in it, but he certainly hasn’t banned it or anything.  In fact, he’s been supportive of other people using it.  So why bother to get into it?  Let the unbelievers unbelieve, if that’s their thing.

At the end of the day, who really gives a fuck?

Apparently I do.  Apparently I have this burning desire to convert all the non-believers and help them see the light.  And here’s where we fetch up against today’s blog post title: I just don’t have energy for that shit any more.  I’m looking at myself doing it and thinking, “why oh why am I even bothering?”  It’s not like these guys are thanking me for my “help.”  No, they’re just irked at my stubborn insistence.  And who can blame them?  ‘Cause, as I mentioned above, the longer this goes on, the more of a jerk I am about it.  So, here I am, pissing off people that I care about, over something that really doesn’t make that much difference in my life, just so I can say to myself afterwards that I corrected a misperception.  Seriously: what the hell am I doing?

I really am too old for this shit.  I need to learn to let go.  Today, when I logged into my work computer, it presented a pithy saying to me, as it always does.  I mentioned previously that I’ve customized these quotes, so mostly they’re familiar, but every once in a while it surprises me and hits with something I’ve forgotten, or something that’s just eerily appropriate.  Today it was both.

The aim of an argument or discussion should be progress, not victory.

    — Joseph Joubert

Yeah, good advice.  I think I’d forgotten it, somehow.  I need to try to remember that, next time I have this burning desire to “fix” somebody else’s “wrong” notions.  I’m going about it all wrong, I think.  And my family has a history of high blood pressure, so I need to chill the fuck out.

Ommmmmmmm ...

Employees First

I had occasion this week to discuss my software business, which I started in 1992 and ran for 12 years.  I never made a lot of money with it, but then that was never the goal.  Unlike many people who start technology companies, I never had an “exit strategy”—the concept of building a business just to sell it to someone else was utterly foreign to me.  The only point to my business was to provide myself a living while being able to do things my own way, and, for that purpose, it was remarkably successful, for a while.  It wasn’t just for me, though; I employed many of my friends, and many other people who later became my friends.

In the context of a discussion earlier this week, I outlined my primary business philosophy, and, reflecting on it now, it occurs to me that it was pretty damned radical, for the time.  And still is, to some extent.  So I thought I might expand on it a bit in the hopes that someone else will pick it up and make it their own.  We could use more businesses like mine was.

Now, full disclosure: my business was never hugely successful, and for the last four years or so, it wasn’t very successful at all.  We made money every year, though ... considering I started the business with around three thousand dollars and never took a dime of venture capital or bank loans, we had to make money every year, or else there was no business.  But I’ll freely admit that there were several years where we made close to nothing, and eventually we called it quits.  It is my opinion that what I’m going to talk about below has nothing to do with the failure of my business—I posit that it was partially because of macroeconomic factors, and partially because of my continued failure to locate a partner who could handle the sales and marketing side.  But that’s just my opinion, and you’re certainly free to draw other conclusions.

Here’s my philosophy, stated simply: every day, in every business decision I made, I put my employees first.  Now, you may very well say, this is foolish.  You should always put your customers first.  But I think that’s the wrong approach, and I’m going to tell you why.

Over the years, both from the outside and from the inside, I’ve observed many, many companies who put their customers first and treated their employees like shit.  This approach is always doomed to failure, for one simple reason: the work that your company delivers, the work the customers receive and pay for, is performed by those employees.  Unhappy employees produce crappy work.  This is unavoidable.  There just is no way to get good work out of people who don’t give a crap if they’re there or not or, even worse, who actively want to be somewhere else.  The entire field of “management” exists to try to solve this problem.

A moderately well-known quote (usually attributed to Robert Heller) states: “The first myth of management is that it exists.  The second myth of management is that success equals skill.”  Like any quote, its exact meaning is open to interpretation, but I’ve always interpreted it to mean that management is mostly imaginary, and when it does work, it works mostly by accident.  And let me tell you why: because you wouldn’t need to manage employees if you weren’t treating them like crap, or at best mostly ignoring them.  Study after study shows that employee engagement boosts productivity, increases efficiency, and improves the bottom line, but, in your typical company, little more than lip service is paid to these concepts.  True, there are some companies who are starting to realize the potential here ... Zappos has become somewhat well-known for it, and to a lesser extent Google has made some waves in this area.  There are others.  But these are the exceptions.

So here’s a large body of research telling us that employees do better jobs and make their employers more money if they’re happy, and yet most employers don’t bother trying to make their employees happy.  Most companies put their customers first and their employees a distant second ... if the employees are lucky.  Now, many people would say, aren’t the customers supposed to come first?

But, here’s the thing.  Your customers really only care about one thing.  They don’t care about fancy lunches or swag with your corporate logo on it or the fact that you remember the names of their spouses and all their children’s birthdays.  Oh, sure: sometimes the people who work for your customers care about those things.  And sometimes you can get pretty far by using such things to fake it.  But, in the end, the one thing that your customers really care about is: results.  Results trumps everything else.

Your customers want excellent work done for reasonable rates.  And here’s what I discovered when I ran my own company: if you make your employees happy—not just a little happy, but deliriously, ecstatically happy, or as close as you can damn well come—they will do excellent work, and they will do it for reasonable pay.  If they get reasonable pay, I can charge reasonable rates.  Now I have excellent work for reasonable rates, and that’s called outstanding value.  If I put my employees first, I can make my customers happy without even trying.  If I put my customers first, my employees are not as happy, and they won’t do their best work for reasonable pay, and I can’t make my customers happy.  Maybe I can fake it for a little while, but I can’t deliver in the long term.

So I tried every day—every single day—to put my employees first.  And my customers being happy mostly took care of itself.  As it happens, I learned a lot about how to keep the people who worked for my customers happy.  I learned about managing expectations, and I learned about communication, and I learned about honesty and forthrightness and avoiding playing the blame game.  I learned when to give in to my customers even when they were wrong, and when to put my foot down and say “no” even when they were right.  There’s a lot to be learned about those things.  But, you know what?  That stuff still isn’t the most important part.  Because the weird thing was, I wasn’t learning those types of things as a businessman or company founder.  I was learning those things as an employee, and my employees were learning those things too.  Because I, like them, valued my employment so much that I wanted to do everything in my power to keep it going.  And keeping the customers happy was one way—the most important way—that I did that.

I think I was actually very successful at making my employees happy.  Several of them told me that it was the best job they’d ever had.  Very few of them ever quit; mostly it was a matter of us no longer having work for them.  And most of those ended up coming back to work for us later; I had one employee who waited for my call for nearly a year and a half without a job.  And he eventually got that call, and he came back to work for us.

I paid my employees well, but not outlandishly.  They all worked hourly, and they were paid for every hour they worked.  They all knew what everyone in the company made (myself included), and everyone was paid a rate based on their proficiency at their job.  In most companies I’ve worked at, the programmers have a lot of competition amongst themselves: there’s always a constant struggle to prove who is the alpha coder.  But, at my company, you could just look at your hourly rate and compare it to everyone else’s and you knew where you stood.  If you thought you deserved more, you had to work hard and prove it.  And there was never any silliness about raises not being handed out more than once a year, or not allowed to exceed a certain percentage.  I gave raises whenever you showed me you were better than your rate said you were, and the raise was for as much as you deserved.  I gave someone a 50% raise once.  I gave someone a raise once before he ever got his first paycheck, and I made it retroactive to his first day, because he demonstrated that he was better than I thought he was when I hired him.  Also, every employee got a commission of some sort, above and beyond their hourly pay.

Every one of my employees earned stock as well.  Not stock options, but actual stock.  The company was employee-owned.  I maintained a majority interest, but I kept giving more and more of my stock away every year, and, when there were stockholders’ votes, I proxied many of my votes to the other employees so that their vote was not hollow.  I constantly refused both the CEO position and the chairmanship of the board of directors so that other people could take on those jobs.  I never had any desire to be in control.  I only wanted to make this the best place to work in the whole world.  I know I was not a perfect boss.  I know I pissed people off sometimes, and frustrated them sometimes, and made them crazy sometimes.  But, in the end, they were who I cared about, and they knew that.  They knew they weren’t going to get a better deal anywhere else.  They worked their asses off for our customers, and they pushed themselves to excel, and they did things they wouldn’t have dreamed of doing for faceless corporate overlords who wouldn’t bother learning their names.

If I ever start another company (and it’s a giant pain in the ass, running your own company, so I don’t know how likely that is), there are many things I will do differently.  This is not one of them.  I will continue to put my employees first, because there just isn’t any better way to get the best out of them, and that means there isn’t any better way to deliver value to my customers.  Would my customers be upset that they don’t come first?  They might be ... except for those pesky results.  That excellent work at reasonable rates: it can’t get any better.  And, when you’re getting the best results you could possibly be getting, isn’t that all you really want?

Delays and Excuses

So remember how I said last week was a reading week?  Well, I’m still reading.  I went all the way back to the beginning, and it takes time to work through all that text.  Man, I wrote a lot.  I could probably use a good editor.  Except that she (or he) would probably cross out all my adverbs, and that would just piss me off.

So I’m not ready to present a new semi-chapter of my ongoing book.  My next thought was to fall back on a technical blog, but I’m not ready there either.  I’ve got a couple of really good ideas, but I’ve not had the time to work on them sufficiently to make them ready for blogination.  In at least one case, I think I could actually slap together a CPAN module, which would be pretty exciting.  Of course, to do that, I’d probably need to finish my Dist::Zilla customizations which I’ve been working on forever—well, I don’t need to, per se, but it would be more convenient, and I really want to finish that anyway.  Except, I got stuck on this other thing that I wanted to do for that, and I ended up making a suggestion to another CPAN author and then I agreed to do the thing with the thing and ...

Sometimes I worry that I’m too much of a perfectionist.  I do like things to be just right.  Sort of like Tolkien was ... or at least, like what the stuff I’ve read about Tolkien indicates that he was.  He always wanted to create just one more grammatical construct in Elven, detail just one more century of Númenorean history, retranslate just one more line of Beowulf ... so much so that he had difficulty fininshing things, at least according to some.  Not that I’m claiming to be as brilliant as Tolkien, of course—I still have some modesty—I’m just saying that perhaps I feel his pain.

I’ve often been told that Meg Whitman was fond of saying that ”‘perfect’ is the enemy of ‘good enough.’”  To which my response is, generally, “perhaps, but ‘good enough’ is often the enemy of ‘we’d like to have it last for a while instead of falling apart due to shoddy craftmanship which was deemed “good enough” at the time.’”  Still, there’s no doubt that Meg’s formulation is pithier than mine, so probably hers is more true.

That was a bit of sarcasm there.  Sorry.

Still, one can’t deny that she (or, if we want to be pedantic about it, Voltaire, who originally said “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien”) has a point.  As you may guess from my previous posts, I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle.  But the tricky part is knowing where to draw the line.

Today I’m leaning a bit more toward the “perfect” than the “good enough.”  Although, one could make the argument that, in settling for this particular blog post (which is about a third as long as I normally strive for), I’m actually taking a pretty firm stance on the “good enough” side.  But mainly I’m saying I want a little more time to polish things.

Also, I’ve been putting in an unusual number of work hours lately, and that ain’t helping.  Plus ... I ran out gas.  I had a flat tire.  I didn’t have enough money for cab fare.  My tux didn’t come back from the cleaners.  An old friend came in from out of town.  Someone stole my car.  There was an earthquake.  A terrible flood.  Locusts!

Or, er, something like that.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.^*





* Eek! Stop me before I cross-reference again!^**

** Too late: SNL trifecta.

A Mistaken Hue

A ship in a harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships were built for.

This is one of the earliest quotes I can remember being inspired by.  Like many quotes, its attribution is uncertain; when I first came across it, in a calendar I bought at the college bookstore my freshman year, it was ascribed to that perennial wit, Anoymous.  Then I found out that it was said by someone really famous (undoubtedly either Voltaire or Mark Twain), and then that it was uttered by Willaim Shedd (whoever that is).  Now that I check again, Wikiquote tells me it’s a quote from John Augustus Shedd, from his classic tome Salt from My Attic.  Which is apparently a book so obscure that some people question its very existence.

But no matter.  The quote is a good one, regardless of who said it.  It’s simple, direct, and evocative.  I immediately interpreted it to be a reference to matters of the heart, but of course I was young and stupid then (and, as it happens, in love with someone who didn’t return my affections).  So of course I would see the romantic side of this quote.

And yet ... this quote can be interpreted so much more broadly.  It can be a metaphor for the folly of playing it safe, in life in general.  Perhaps you’ve seen some variation on this old chestnut:

If I had my life to live over, I would try to make more mistakes.  I would relax.  I would be sillier than I have been this trip.  I know of very few things that I would take seriously.  I would be less hygienic.  I would go more places.  I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers.  I would eat more ice cream and less bran.

I would have more actual troubles and fewer imaginary troubles.

You see, I have been one of those fellows who live prudently and sanely, hour after hour, day after day.  Oh, I have had my moments.  But if I had it to do over again, I would have more of them—a lot more.  I never go anywhere without a thermometer, a gargle, a raincoat and a parachute.  If I had it to do over, I would travel lighter.
:
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If I had my life to live over, I would start barefooted a little earlier in the spring and stay that way a little later in the fall.  I would play hooky more.  I would shoot more paper wads at my teachers.  I would have more dogs.  I would keep later hours.  I’d have more sweethearts.

I would fish more.  I would go to more circuses.  I would go to more dances.  I would ride on more merry-go-rounds.  I would be carefree as long as I could, or at least until I got some care—instead of having my cares in advance.

As it turns out, this was not written by the mythical 85-year-old “Nadine Stair,” nor is it an English translation of a Spanish poem by Jorge Luis Borges.  It’s actually a piece from the Reader’s Digest (which makes sense, given the tenor), written by a 64-year-old named Don Herold.  Again, though, it’s irrelevant who wrote it: does it ring true?  Does it say something worth listening to?  I think perhaps it does.  I think it tells us to take the ship out of the harbor.

Here’s another, different version.  When I get a movie on DVD, I often watch the “special features,” which my eldest used to call the “great theaters” (when he was much younger, of course).  Watching the Great Theaters on a DVD is one of my habits that most of my family could care less about; generally they all get up and leave the room while I check out all the behind-the-scenes info on the making of the cinematic magic.  Often I do this whether I particularly liked the movie or not; sometimes I even find the making-of bits (or the bloopers, or the deconstructions of the stunts and special effects) more entertaining than the movie itself.

But I digress.  The point is, when I first watched Bend it Like Beckham (which I actually did enjoy), I watched the Great Theaters.  All of them.  The movie is about a British girl of Indian heritage, and her father is played by Anupam Kher, who’s a rather famous Bollywood actor.  Throughout the Great Theaters, he kept saying this quote over and over again, using slightly different words, because he felt it summed up the spirit of the movie so well.  I’m sure he was quoting someone else, but I’ll give him the credit, since he’s the one who burned it into my brain.  Here’s my favorite of the several different ways he phrased it:

If you try, you risk failure.  If you don’t, you ensure it.

I rather like this, because it takes the original quote and steps it up a notch.  Now it’s not just a missed opportunity you’re stuck with if you don’t risk taking the ship out of the harbor.  You’re actually failing by failing to move.  You’ve not only gained nothing, you’ve lost everything.  You think you’re staying out of the game by refusing to play, but you’re not: you’re forfeiting.

Anupam Kher gives us the short version.  If you’d like it spelled out a bit more clearly for you, how about we listen to Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the NAACP from 1977 to 1992:

The tragedy in life doesn’t lie in not reaching our goals.  The tragedy lies in having no goals to reach.  It isn’t a calamity to die with dreams unfulfilled.  It is a calamity not to dream.  It is not a disaster not to capture your ideal.  It is a disaster to have no ideal to capture.  It is not a disgrace to reach for the stars and fail.  It is a disgrace not to try.  Failure is no sin.  Low aim is a sin.

Hooks was a Baptist minister and a lawyer, so I tend to trust the man when he talks about sin.

I often say that I am a romantic, despite the fact that I’m a cynic (a dichotomy to which I should really devote its own blog post).  This is one of the expressions of that outlook.  I will continue to write my novel even though I’m far too old to become a famous writer (although of course Stieg Larsson is always an inspiration—hopefully I won’t need to die first, as Larsson did).  I will continue to demand a work environment where I can relax and have fun even though it’s “unrealistic” to expect a business to be run that way (never mind that I myself ran a business exactly that way for 12 years).  I will continue to encourage my children to follow their own dreams, even if those dreams are completely ineffectual ways to earn a living.  Because, as Robert Browning tells us:

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for?