I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about a possible fit at our company. We’d worked together in the past, and are good friends, and I thought that our rapport would help to solidify our engineering team. Unfortunately, having just come out of school, he doesn’t have a lot of work experience, and his previous work placements are not at AAA places. That doesn’t bother me per se, but, I explained that my coworkers likely would not be as sympathetic as they had not worked with him.

“I don’t understand why I’m being penalized for not working in my free time,” he told me. “It’s like the chicken and the egg problem: how do I get experience for a job if I need the job to get experience?”

Ignoring the fact that there are lots of ways to get experience, the point remains that you still need to demonstrate that experience somehow. It got me thinking about the hiring process, specifically ours, but hiring in general.

I decided to revisit some old favourite articles. In particular, I was reading Steve Yegge’s Done and Gets Things Smart. After reading that, and reflecting back on a few panels from Anime North, I came to this conclusion:

Hiring is bullshit.

I don’t mean that it is unnecessary, or untrue, or unfair (though it is, a bit); just that it is misleading. It is misleading in a way that you think you understand what is going on right up until the point that you do not.

Suppose that you are in a position to find work. Suppose as well that you find a company that is hiring; you’ve noted that the company has been hiring for the position for quite some time. Let us further suppose that you are actually a perfect fit for the job, that you apply, and that you get an interview. For whatever reason, you don’t get the job. What happened?

Well, as you may have guessed, hiring is bullshit, but that’s not very specific. To be more specific, hiring is not an exact science: there’re a explicit job requirements (those advertised), implicit job requirements (cultural fit, team fit, etc.), perceptions of the candidate (and their perception of your company)… the list goes on, but all of these are inputs to an ill-defined system terminating at whoever is responsible for hiring. All of the inputs are weighted, but you’re not entirely sure how (hirer or hiree), and even if you did know, the inputs aren’t so much weighted as they are a set of preference relationships…

If that sounds complicated, that’s partly because I’m complicating matters, but also because people are really bad at hiring people who aren’t themselves. I’m by no means the first person to come to this conclusion.

Frankly, I’m not an expert, but it seems like a very difficult problem (with low yield) to develop the ‘perfect’ hiring system, mostly due to those pesky implicit requirements, and ill-defined explicit requirements. People just don’t know what they want.

Why do we continue to hire as we do then? If you’ve ever read a book on the job search (like, say, What Color is Your Parachute?) or just happen to know, you’ll know that companies try to do as little work hiring as possible. I don’t mean to say that they’re lazy, but an example is in order. Below I’ve listed a preference relationship as for how companies typically hire (abridged from my 2008 copy of the aforementioned book):

1. From within
2. From proof
3. From a friend or business colleague’s referral
4. From a referral from an agency they trust
5. From an ad they’ve placed
6. From a resume

You should notice two things about this: first, that people look for jobs in the exact opposite way, but more importantly, the further down the list you go, the more work is involved. I don’t blame employers, because its a lot of work vetting people, but it still remains that employers are lazy.

“It’s not what you know, but who you know”, you might say. You might also look at the list above and say that it wreaks of nepotism or other abuses of the system. That is possible, but how do you pick the ‘best’ candidate when you don’t really know what you want?

Well, in the absence of knowing what you want, and knowing how to evaluate someone, you just have a series of cruder and cruder proxies. An interview (or a resume, or whatever) is a crude proxy of knowing you. Since it is unlikely that the person hiring you has ever worked with you personally, all the communication up to the hiring decision is the employer getting a more refined view of you. All that information is a proxy of what its like working with you.

The whole process is just a complex set of communication, starting with you who you are, what you can do, and what you’re capable of and the employer trying to verify these claims and responding with the same information about themselves.

To make matters worse, you (as a potential employee) are competing against lots of other people, you have no idea where they are relative to you (assuming an objective measure), and might even have an edge because they program in their spare time. The playing field is not fair.

It’s unreasonable to get out of bed on a snow day, when school has been cancelled, and turn the downtime into six hours of work on an extra credit physics lab. It’s unreasonable to launch a technology product that jumps the development curve by nine months, bringing the next generation out much earlier than more reasonable competitors. … It’s unreasonable to walk away from a good gig in today’s economy, even if you want to do something brave and original. … It’s unreasonable to devote years of your life making a product that most people will never appreciate. Fortunately, the world is filled with unreasonable people. Unfortunately, you need to compete with them.

– Seth Godin

So if employers don’t know what they want, are lazy, are bad at hiring people that aren’t themselves, and the playing field isn’t fair, what can you do?

…

Be really good, and really lucky?

…

Really, I wish I had better advice, but based on what I’ve read, that’s all that can be done. You have control over what you learn, how you communicate, and how much you practice, and those ultimately affect the goal of being really good. As for being lucky, just look for opportunities. I have gotten where I have because I have been fortunate, and not a total idiot.

I can’t claim that our hiring isn’t bullshit, but if you’re a front-end developer who loves python and javascript, you can contact us. At least then you just need to be really good.

I might have mentioned going to Anime North a few weeks ago. I might have also mentioned, as part of that, the hotel troubles that I had gone through before hand.

Organizing everything for attending a convention can be stressful enough as is: Getting enough people for a group, booking the right number of hotels rooms, figuring out transportation, distributing the passes, collecting all the cash; it can be a serious pain, but it is one that I typically take in stride.

The biggest pain this year was, as mentioned, having our hotel rooms cancelled unexpectedly, without warning. To elaborate more on the circumstances, I had only received any notice whatsoever because I had booked extra rooms, and was giving the extra rooms away as a favour. When one of the rooms was being transferred, the other party had been told that the reservation had been cancelled, and thus the other party alerted me. This lead to a series of phone calls wherein I filed several complaints with the hotel, sought any sort of recompensation, and deperately sought out alternative means to obtain a room. Had I not done that person a ‘favour’ I would not have been alerted at all, despite booking more than seven months in advance. The hotel was overbooked and they “couldn’t do anything about it”.

You might expect this is the point where I start a crusade. Fire the social media cannons! Call up anonymous! Get outraged!

I’ll admit, I’m still sore about the situation, but I don’t think that being outraged is really going to accomplish much, nor that I would get very far with. I’m also not convinced such action is necessary as it appears that the hotel will be losing the ‘Doubletree’ moniker, which I suspect means that the hotel has suffered enough complaints to become disenfranchised. I can only speculate, of course.

No, I would rather talk about what I did to improve the situation, and improving the situation is necessary as the hotel is already fully booked for next year. Really.

…

More than a year ago, as github would tell me, I started on a project called HotelTracker: a crude python script that effectively scraped Anime North hotels for availability. The goal of the project was, and continues to be, developing a tool that can help other people find out about hotel availability. It’s come a long way since its inception, but there are still many changes and improvements to be made.

I realize that I don’t often talk about technical subjects on this blog, and when I do I tend to focus on things at a higher level, and I hope that I can continue to talk about subjects at a high level… but I think that there’s a lot of opportunity to explain the process of going from an idea, to a concrete implementation, especially with HotelTracker, as its a relatively simple software project. I want to talk about how it started, how it has come along, and where it is going. As a software developer looking to become a better developer and a better writer, I’m hoping to post about HotelTracker more often in special blog posts like this one.

While I may not have succeeded at getting a hotel room yet, I’m hoping that HotelTracker will find me a room, and, in the long run, other people as well. I’ll have to tell you all about how it got started… another time though.

A recurring theme on this blog is that of careers and the job search… not because I’m constantly looking or anything, but mostly because of my own track record, and how I seem to have accumulated some experience on the matter. Ocassionally, I take people down a notch (unintentionally) or issue imperatives, or even vent or just observe. Most of the time, these posts just end up read by friends and family, which I appreciate, with the ocassional post reaching a lot further.

… that is a lot of self-references…

In any case, I don’t have a magic formula for success. I haven’t perfected or even begun to master the way to reach out to broader audiences; those are things I have yet to experiment with. But, I do know how to get noticed (to some extent), and I’ll share those methods with you today.

They are by no means secret, or the fastest means, but they will work in the long run.

No memes this time folks (sorry).

Do Good Work
No tricks here, just do good work. Whatever that work is: be it a blog, or a comic, or a novel. Work at it, make it the best you can, make a lot of mistakes; just keep working on whatever it is until you have good work. Keep at it!

Speak up
Let people know about what you’ve done! You don’t need to brag, but share what you’ve created. Expose your work to the world, and bear the criticisms; take the praise, and whatever else comes.

Why do I bring this up? Earlier this week, I was approached about writing a book. A technical book mind you, but a book nonetheless.

So what?

I’m certainly capable of writing a book, but the fact of the matter is that someone reached out to me; someone approached me about writing a book as a result of my stackoverflow account.

Someone noticed me. Of no particular action or promotion of my own.

And that’s what I mean. I do good work on Stackoverflow and elsewhere, and even though I don’t say much about it, that work is there: it exists; it is out for the world to see. I have spoken up, to some extent.

And that’s all it takes anyone to be noticed. Just those two simple things. They are by no means the fastest or only ways, but they do work.

It’s not surprising that I’ve been talking about how we lost a team member lately. Firing people just sucks, for everyone involved. It sucks, and as much as I had said that I’m over it (which I am), there’s one little lesson that I’ve been leaving off until now.

I think it’s important that I preface this ‘advice’, as I should preface all ‘advice’:

• n = 1: This is merely my experience; I can’t claim that it applies in the general case
• It came from me: who doesn’t like a little self-deprecating humour, eh?

Hiring is tough; there’s no shortage of articles on the topic. The prevailing advice is hire smart people and get out of their way. It’s all about the team.

Of course. It’s so obvious! Just build a team of amazing people.

Nope, that’s not it. Not quite. Let me explain by way of poor analogy:

“A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.” – Agent K, Men In Black

I knew how to build the perfect team. I’d read all the articles: Find people who are smart and get things done; find the people who aren’t on the market; hire the top 1% (not just the 1% who apply). I’d read it all (well, not quite; I’ve yet to embark on reading Topgrading).

But these articles, as famous and valuable as they are, are taken from a very particular perspective. Usually, they’re from the perspective that you have a team and you’re adding on to it. Or worse, they’re talking in generalities (which I am certainly not guilty of) about hiring technical talent. And, while that’s helpful, it just doesn’t quite apply to my circumstances.

And that is because the team is what matters, at first, at least.

In this case, we hired a smart person; I have no regrets about that. Unfortunately though, that person just wasn’t as dumb, panicky, and as dangerous as the rest of the team, to stretch a metaphor too far (which, to be honest, works in this case; it makes our team sound really badass).

When you have a small team like ours, more than anything, the team has to get along and work together. There can’t be a lot of internal conflict: conflict kills companies in the same way that a lack of funding (usually) does. It really helps if the team works in similar ways, communicates (even to the point of overcommunication), and has a similar culture. It doesn’t matter if your team is a bunch of superstar A-players if it doesn’t function.

In our case, we needed a high-functioning, agile team instead of a bunch of rockstars. That meant that we had to take a look at our team, and how we worked, and evaluate if that team would succeed. We determined it would not, based on past experiences, and acted accordingly. And so, we had to let that smart person go.

To put it more directly: Right Person, Wrong Team.

And really, it’s not mindblowing that sometimes, there is a person on the team who is not a good fit, but when you’re in the trenches, its hard to see the forest from the trees (apparently, I’ve never met a metaphor that I didn’t like).

Sometimes, it doesn’t matter how smart you are if you can’t work with those other dumb, panicky, dangerous animals.

As you may know, the last couple weeks have been hectic, to say the least. The combination of different stresses from work and hotel shenanigans really got me down.

For the first time, in a very long time, I felt in over my head.

I think grumpy cat has something to say about that:

First off, notice the past tense? I felt in over my head. I am no longer feeling that way because I’m over it. Over the course of the last weekend, I had the chance to attend Anime North, which is often an uplifting experience to me, as I may have mentioned. The newfound optimism from the trip has given me the opportunity to re-examine what that ‘in over my head’ feeling really means.

It means knowing and overcoming your limits

I’m not saying that what I’ve experienced is the furthest I’ve been stretched, nor the worst I am likely to face (I fully expect things to get worse in the short term), but what happened taught me a valuable lesson in what I am capable of. Working late nights, early mornings, weekends, sure, that will do in the short term, but on week three of get this project done I was definitely feeling it, and by that I mean I’ve only really recovered just now.

Despite what a pain it was, I learned about my breaking point, my point where returns diminish dramatically. I also learned how long it takes me to recover. I also learned a lot about how much stress I can take and how hard it is to balance work and other aspects of live, but knowing what I know now, I’m better equipped for future incidents.

It means making mistakes, and learning from them

“There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.” – Donald Rumsfeld

There’s plenty that I know that I don’t know; those mistakes are to be expected (e.g. I know I need to do caching properly, but that doesn’t I know how to do it properly) but there’s also a lot that I didn’t know I didn’t know (continuing in the parlance of the quote). I leaned on my team members, as I had to in order to get the project done, and I didn’t know that the team member wouldn’t work out and would ultimately need to be let go; Can’t say that I saw that coming. I also forgot a lot about how our system is set up, and consequently, had to relearn a lot.

Being in over my head meant I needed to learn to really take charge and be on top of things in a way that was never really necessary previously. It meant I had to make some tough choices and be able to live with them. Also, if you don’t make mistakes and aren’t under some pressure, how are you to learn and progress?

It means knowing that you’re awesome

Being under pressure means that you’re awesome. Why? Because people are depending on you. That means that you provide some vital service that (presumably) only you can provide. If you can deal with that pressure and fear of failure, then you’ve come out on the other side stronger and more prepared than before. Heck, even if you’re being held under and fight for air, just surviving is something.

And, I mean, if things get too bad, being under pressure and all, they probably can’t get much worse, right? Only so much shit can hit the fan.

… Probably.

The next time I’m in a bind, sure, I might not be at my best, I might not be fully prepared, I might feel pretty crappy, but that doesn’t matter because being in over your head isn’t the end of the world.

I have been putting this off for a while; almost two weeks at this point.

At first, I was going to entitle this Why you shouldn’t fire your first employee, launch your first major customer, and have your hotel reservations accidentally cancelled in the same week, but that was getting a bit long in the tooth, and I kept finding outer things to complain about. I think that paints a bit of a picture as to why things have been delayed.

But let’s take this and make it a positive experience. Let’s take a look at what good fortune has come out of these circumstances. I’m going to touch briefly on what happened

On firing your first employee

I’ll admit, this was not easy. At my company, we aren’t exactly bursting out the seams with staff, so every person matters, and losing a team member is rough, as its both difficult to hire a suitable replacement, difficult to explain to the person that things are not working out, and difficult to deal with the lack of that extra set of hands in the interim.

What good came out of this? If you’ve ever been in a situation where it feels like the entire team is being brought down by one member, then you should know how good it feels when either the project is completed, or that person is removed from the team. In as much as that’s a marginal good, the loss of one teammate also means a gain in terms of my experience: I now know what its like to see an employee from hire to fire, and the ups and downs involved in that process, which really conjures up the common idiom of hire slowly and fire quickly

… and Launching your first major customer

The above in combination with launching your first customer can be… troubling. We managed to deliver the project on time, but there have been quite a few weekends and late nights in order to get it all done, and we had to work down to the wire to do so. I’m still working my way back to a normal level of stress after all the hard work and hacking that needed to be done to get things in order.

On the upside, we managed to get an opportunity with a particularly large brand, and we saw what good we are capable of doing (at the cost of having a big mess to clean up, but hey, progress).

… and having your hotel reservations cancelled

This one is a bit random in comparisson. Every year (almost) for the past many years, I’ve been attending Anime North in Toronto, and, generally, I reserve the hotel rooms. Because the rooms tend to book up quickly, I wrote this script which posts to twitter if there is at least one room available at the hotel. It’s not perfect, but it gets the job done and its better than nothing. This year, despite booking in November, I got bumped because the hotel overbooked. I won’t get into too many details (this time) but needless to say, the reservations were cancelled and now at some inconvenience and with little notice I have had to obtain lodging elsewhere.

What have I learned from this mess? Build a better mousetrap so to speak: either make the script better, and possibly book rooms automatically, or just book earlier (which I would rather not, as I feel it is rude to the event organizers).

…

There were a lot of other unfortunate things that took place, but what’s important is to keep on keeping on and not have a bad time.

Because honestly? It’ll all be better, in the grand scheme of things.

Wow, I sure hope that this code was written using test-driven development in an agile environment … said no customer, ever.

Let’s face facts. Customers don’t care about your code.

It’s nothing personal: They don’t care about anybody’s code.

You care about code (hopefully). Your team cares about code (again, hopefully), but customers? Nope!

What does that mean for you, a developer? If the customer really doesn’t care about your code, then there are some interesting conclusions that you can draw.

• You’ve probably heard that version one of your software will suck, and that you should ship it anyway. I’ll assure you that this is not the case; version two will probably suck as well. Before I had joined a startup, I thought that this talk was absurd, clearly version one of something couldn’t be that bad… Regardless, the take-away from this is you need to learn from your mistakes quickly, move on, and improve as you go along. Unfortunate as it is, “there’s never enough time to do it right, but there’s always enough time to do it over.”

• Customers do care about your product. They care about how easy it is to use, how it responds, and what it looks like. Unless you’ve got some serious bottlenecks, don’t worry so much about whether or not a solution is inefficient (unless that’s your business); focus on achieving what it is that the customer needs to do, or better yet, learn what it is that the customer wants to do.

• Customers not caring about your code is not a license to be stupid; it’s a license to be mindful of the decisions that you make. It means being aware of what areas the customer is likely going to need next, and making it possible to extend those areas, and improve on them.

• Accessibility, security, internationalization and all those -ity’s and -ion’s are important, because they build trust with the customer.

It’s by no means an epiphany, but the past few days its been on my mind. No one cares about your code but you, so focus on making a good product for your customer instead.

I might have mentioned that you should do something every day. Lately, I haven’t been the best example of this, but its a goal I strive for nonetheless. However, there comes a time when you just run out of steam; the ink pot is dry, for the time being.

Now, under the circumstances, you might reflect back on past entries of mine, tell me that I’m full of something (hint: it’s brown and sticky!), and that I should stuff it and get back to work. To that I would say, “Sorry mister boss man! It won’t happen again, honest!”

Ha ha ha ha ha.

…

I do seem to put an emphasis on getting things done, but there are times when you get worn out, or just tired of doing something, perhaps even bored with it. You might run out of ideas for your blog, for example, because you can’t think of anything else job-related to talk about, and you aren’t looking so you don’t really have anything to add.

Ahem

When you’ve “run out of ink”, so to speak, consider the following:

Y U NO THINK ABOUT WUT UR DOIN?

Why are you working yourself so hard? Why are you bored? Why are you sick of whatever it is that you’re doing?

Is it because the thing you’re working on is hard? Is it supposed to be hard? (If so… tough?)

Maybe you’re working on the wrong things; things that don’t really matter to you. Things that you feel obligated to do but you really don’t need to do. Maybe you’ve made commitments you really don’t need.

Think about why you’re doing what you’re doing; you might learn that you really shouldn’t be doing it. Alternatively, you might rekindle why it is that you enjoy doing what you’re doing.

I’m writing this blog mostly for myself (though, if it became super popular for whatever reason…), so I don’t mind getting hung up on the topic every once in a while.

Try something else

When I was younger, I played a little gem called Blast Corps where the objective of most levels was to destroy everything in the path of a giant nuclear truck. The truck, of course, would drive ever so slowly forward into buildings and whatnot, and the slightest touch would trigger a detonation. Anytime you were doing something stupid in the game (like trying to get out of a vehicle with no way to get out), it would tell you to try something else.

So, if you’re doing something stupid, like going around in circles trying to get back into something, try something else

Move on!

Take a break

Uh-Duuuuuhhhh. Don’t beat yourself up.

Just keep going

Didn’t I just suggest taking a break? Well, yeah, but different strategies work at different times. I want to post a blog entry every week, so, I can’t really take a break if I want to accomplish that (see thinking about why you’re doing what you’re doing above).

Often times, getting something started is difficult, but continuing is easy. If you’re doing something like writing, you can often get unstuck by just writing something, even if it is the wrong things. Or, as I did for NaNoWriMo just sit down and do something for some time period.

Conclussion

If you’ve ever run out of ink, just try one of the above. The strategy you pick might not necessarily give stellar results, but often times you just need a push in the right direction rather than perfection.

Jobs. Jobs jobs jobs jobs. Hopefully you won’t get too sick of that word, because I reckon I’m going to be tossing it around quite a bit in this here blog.

Have you ever had to look for work before, and conduct a real job search? No? Lucky you.

If you have, you know how much of a pain in the ass it can be. Scouring job boards online, loading up your resume shotgun (or minigun, as the case may be) and firing away, all hoping that might work out (you fool). In as much as that will eventually work, it can be pretty exhausting just relying on those two methods, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you missed out on certain opportunities; opportunities that you might not have known about. Enter the honeypot.

If you are a savvy computer security expert (which I am… not), you might recognize the word honeypot; If not, you might know of a certain Disney bear who often gets into a spot of trouble regarding the contents of a honeypot. Today, we are not concerned with silly ol’ bears.

A honeypot is a sort of trap: It lures in prey, like a fly, with something tempting and alluring, like… honey. If that made sense to you, that’s fantastic, because I just realized how phenomenally stupid it sounded. In computing, it’s a bit more specific, referring to a trap to detect or deflect access to some unauthorized access of a system, either to learn more about the attacker, or to keep the attacker away from the resources. In our case, it’s a metaphor: the prey in this case is a recruiter or other person looking to hire, and the honeypot in this case is… whatever you have that’s alluring and tempting.

There are lots of things that alluring, tempting thing could be, but for the sake of today’s post, lets say it’s your LinkedIn profile.

I’ve gone to some length to explain what a honeypot is, but why?

Why? The honeypot is your passive job search.

Surprise!

Let’s dig a bit deeper.

If you have a honeypot set up, then you can passively hear about new opportunities as you conduct your normal job search. Potential recruiters or hiring managers can stumble across your profile, portfolio, whatever, and get in touch with you. I imagine that’s a welcome change of pace! You can even have your friends lend a hand; should they hear of something interesting for you, just tell them to point to your honeypot.

Setting up a honeypot is by no means a guarantee of success: you can receieve unsolicited job offers that you just aren’t interested in, as an example, or you can fail to receieve any interest, leaving your honeypot empty. But hey, it’s kind of like a mousetrap; you set it up once, and you decide what to do with it after the trap goes off.

Once you have the honeypot set up, you can start to do fancy things, fancy things that you should already be doing in your search, like tracking your progress. You can make changes to your profile, see your response rate for a month, make changes, and see how they compare for the next month. Of, if you run your own site (you clever reader you) you can even run some A/B tests on your content, layout, etc. to see which performs best. With that information, you can start tuning things to attract more / less results, and of what kind.

Now, I don’t mean to say that you should mislead people, or misrepresent yourself. You definitely shouldn’t do that. But, you can take different aspects of your experience and show it off differently; Highlight different areas of your career.

Honeypots; pretty sweet, eh?

…

Right, the leaky part. Let’s get to that, briefly.

Imagine that people are contacting you. Fantastic. Better yet, you’ve found a job. Amazing! People are still contacting you even! You are so successful that you have way more results than you need (although, in this case, any is probably more than you need).

Now what?

Normally, you’d just refer the jobs to other folks that could be a good fit. In this case, and I may be mixing my metaphors, none of that delicious honey goes to waste.

In my case, I often don’t have anyone to refer; hence, my leaky (job) honeypot.

It’s too bad really. Referrals are mutually beneficial: you help out a friend, the recruiter, and potentially yourself, as many recruiters offer a referral bonus.

I’m not one to toot my own horn, but I may have covered this before. Please, bear with me, as I feel it necessary to reiterate the point.

Originally, I was going to call this Why you should do something everyday, but today I’m taking the imperative approach instead.

Do something every day. Take five minutes, half-an-hour, hours, it doesn’t matter to me how much time you take, just do something every day. What consitutes something? I’m not too picky. When I set out to do something, I usually write a blog post, make a commit to a project I’m working on, or work on a story or campaign that’s been mulling about in my head.

Not compelled eh? What if I write it in big, huge letters?

DO SOMETHING EVERYDAY!

…

Still nothing?

Alright, on with the why! Starting with the ‘small’ stuff.

Feels good man

Hey, let’s not underestimate how good… feeling good is. Seriously though, when working on something, you should feel good, or at least feel accomplished. Otherwise, why are you doing it?

Sure, lots of things feel good (video games, sex, etc.), but it isn’t often that you can feel good and feel accomplished unless you just managed to get some super hard achievement… or are trying to make a baby, I guess.

The point is, doing something feels good man, so do something!

All the ‘small’ things

You’re a smart person, otherwise, you wouldn’t be reading this blog! Well, you’re probably a smart person, and I’m not sure why you read this blog, but that’s besides the point…

Imagine that someone offered you $100, or $0.01, but double that amount every day for a month. Which would you take?

What’s that? You’ve heard that one before? You know math? I’m trying to make a point here!

Obviously, you ought to pick the penny deal, and the penny deal, in this case, is analagous to doing something every day. Even if you don’t put a lot of time into doing something, every day, as you add more to that something, that something builds into something better than the previous day, and so on, until someday, you’ve made something great.

This time last year, I was working on a crappy script to check hotel availability. At the time, it did a poor job of checking availability of a single hotel. Now, it does six or seven hotels, and its easy to add new hotels.

Working on something a little bit adds up in the long run.

Learn something new, try something new

I am not the most adventurous person in the world, and some would say I’m pretty set in my ways. I would say that some people shouldn’t say such mean things, but then I wouldn’t get to make straw man arguments.

However, when I work on something, something for me; not for work, or anything else I’m obligated to do; I can try something new. Write a novel in a month? How hard can that be? Make a proton-pack for Halloween? What do you mean spray paint dissolves polystyrene!? Write a blog every week? I GET IT GUYS, I’M NOT PERFECT.

When you take the time to work on something, you don’t generally have any constraints. You can try something you’ve never tried before, and probably learn a lot too. You don’t need to worry about failure; why do that? You learn from failure. Embrace the failures.

Practice leads to mastery

“Oh, but I’m only putting in a few hours a week on this something”.

So, what?

There’s a popular (and potentially true) idea floating around called the 10 000-Hour rule where mastery requires 10 000 hours of effort. Even if you don’t believe the number of hours, it shouldn’t come as any suprise that the only way to improve is via doing things, that act of practising.

Did anyone great get to be where they are by doing nothing? Do great musicians and artists rise to … um, greatness … by not practicing? Hell no.

As much I would attempt to go at length about practice and mastery, a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic speaks to the matter in a way more profound way than I ever could. So, you go on and read that and come back here; I’m not going anywhere.

Doing things matters

It doesn’t matter what you make. It could be a novel, an application, a piece of art, a business, a t-shirt, a cake, whatever. Doing things matters. Every thing you learn, everything you apply, everything you create matters.

When I look at job candidates (that’s right folks; stealth job post), I don’t really care about their resume. What I really want to know about what those folks have done, what they’ve accomplished, what they’ve made. I’m probably not the only one who things that resumes are a stupid way to show off our accomplishments…

What’s that you say? I don’t have anything to show off?

Oh ho ho, but you do. What about that something you’ve been working on?

“Oh my yes! Thank you so much! I never realized I had it in me all along.”

Enough with the strawmen! In all seriousness, that something you made matters. For example, if your something was…

• a blog, then you’ve got all sorts of skills and talents you can show off. Analytical ability, writing and editing, maybe even marketing and design to make your blog look great and to attract readership;
• an online roleplay, then you have all the work you did creating / finding a community, managing everyone’s writing schedules, or coordinating everyone getting together, maybe setting up a server with a website and forum;
• a piece of art, or something geeky you’ve knit, like a hat which you used as a to start an etsy store before you got to learn a lot about copyright

And those are just a few examples that I fabricated! Sure, some things matter more than others (e.g. started a business, wrote an app, etc.), and, I’ll admit, it’s not easy taking some things and making them matter (for example, your erotic Star Trek fanfic where Kirk is a furry, and… I’ve said too much) but you’ve got something damn it, and you can show it off!

In summary…

Do something everyday.

That is all.