It’s estimated that the average human has 60,000 thoughts a day. This is not surprising. What is disconcerting is that 90% of the thoughts you have today are the ones you had yesterday. Deepak Chopra, M.D.

Ever since I read this passage as a teenager one of my goals was to do better than repeating 90% rethink. One way I tried to accomplish this was to be endlessly curious about anything and everything. I carefully investigated, considered and questioned what appeared to be an unrelated set of interests. Of course, I was the rhyme to my reason knitting together my evolving point of view and discovering what makes me tic.

Experiences in doing are not only tied to a person’s day job. In fact what someone is interested in on the side is often more interesting than the remarkable but expected accomplishments of talented professionals. For me, this year launched a new chapter in my family with the arrival of my daughter in August.  She is currently amazed by her hands, that they are useful and more recently that they are her own. Babies may be sponges, learning all the time, but parents are blessed with the opportunity to learn as well in a deep and personal ways. Sleepless nights are rewarded with knowing how precisely delicate a baby’s breath can be – subtly sweet and endlessly delicious. Our daughter gets the majority of our attention and in turn the things we use to make time for get brutally prioritized (Did you notice the gap in posts!). It also drives a new level of communication and compromise as mother and father work as a team to ensure things get done despite the competing desires.

Recently I was on a three month assignment to a large customer in the healthcare industry working through what cloud computing could mean for their business. This was an opportunity to diversify – as a professional and as a family. Sadie was just old enough to travel and my wife was on maternity leave – off to California we went. I had the luxury of working full time as part of the customer, leveraging my connections into IBM to help drive value. From first day to last it was endless learning about the good, bad and ugly from some very special people. It has irreversibly changed my understanding and insight – a priceless experience. For my family it was an adventure trying out a different land and experiencing the time warp of not being in Eastern Standard Time. Points of view are relative to the perceiver and it helps to be reminded how fragile that “reality” is.

We settled on a great area of Oakland called Rockridge. It reminded us of Brooklyn – strategically located with more diversity in people, food and shopping. It also came with stadium seating of the Occupy Oakland dance and what seemed like daily violence. California in general seems to need to go to driver education. On any given morning a mostly sober population of motoring public gets into no less than half a dozen accidents on the major roadways. I know there are a lot of people etc. but have you seen the size of these roads?! Like anything there are many contributing reasons, but it begs the question as to why a place has such an impact on its people – so is true in the workplace.

If diversity of doing is a desirable element in developing greater talent and creating remarkable teams then there too is a responsibility to create a climate and environment to enable such performance. One without the other is having this amazing thing called a hand, but not knowing its yours.

Consider what you have seen in the social software landscape and ask yourself why the actor is almost always the sense maker. Why is it that there is an explosion of great social islands but a pathetic showing on how to leverage that information to create richer, contextual spaces? Most of the time solution designers attempt to create context employing a nicely designed banner and carefully selected color pallet. Unfortunately, the skin is only but a small element of context and while I believe that people are ultimately required to appreciate the meaning of a given confluence, we could do a better job surfacing interesting information and enabling interaction. One of the fatal flaws with traditional portals is the visual and physical boundary of information. There was a time when products enabled connecting one portlet to another, but failed to resolve that portlets do not inherently know how to collaborate with each other, a design activity outside of the technology. Unfortunately, some of our best examples of dynamic experience modification are also some of the most annoying commercial applications. You have to love the real-time markup of content where hovering over a word opens a thought bubble and video obscuring the content. Given a strong page framework and similar techniques integration could be this fluid and easily less irritating – a very simple example, abused, justly hated and hopefully soon to be abandoned.

Opportunities to do more have been around for years, and yet it feels as if the social technology landscape has just stalled. The best work is not even web bound, but device focused now. There is so much to do; I would think it would inspire people to push a little harder to realize the next revolution of user experience instead of hanging out in the kiddy pool all day.

The last mile of any journey is bittersweet. A lot of energy, expense and time are expended to reach it. Often the last mile is actually thousands of miles, because the vastness of the vision is practically unreachable. The vision is the direction and target, not the plan. Building the plan to mirror the vision ensures the project will never conclude. This seems obvious, but seems to pervade all walks of business. Superficial understanding of the vision creates mediocrity.

Consider the next wave generation with a more progressive attitude towards life and work. Their relationship with the Company is fundamentally different – faithful until they find another. The idea that they would come, go and return is highly probable. Challenges exist in the brain churn as talent moves through and efforts sustain beyond their presence. Travel the last mile with the next wave generation and you will lose your talent while they grow tired of waiting for you to realize that the last mile is less rewarding. Making it even part way toward the light is more engaging and interesting. Success can be experienced and value realized – talk about really being agile!

A leader’s ability to embody a vision and practically plot a course that nurtures talent and delivers value is one of the ultimate performance measures. Avoiding last mile marathons focuses all the attention on the actions and deliverables that bring short and even long term value. An organization might still desire the last mile, but planning for it is next to dreaming. Boats use lighthouses to navigate the waters, not dock their ship.

Understanding what makes great software developers needs to become a top imperative or everyone’s desire to successfully leverage the developing economies of the globe will result in the next decade of disastrous implementation. We will all literally be digging out of the worst collection of computer code the world has ever seen. This is not to say programmers in developing countries are not capable of creating great code – clearly that would be too broad a generalization. What I am saying is that there is a core set of existing developers – waves one through five – that have created the software and network conscious of the world. That experience and knowledge is not easily portable locally or internationally. More needs to be done to consider the ways in which we grow developers. The fact that everyone is quick to move to emerging markets is simply exacerbating the fact that the Western world contains much of the building blocks everyone takes for granted.

There are classes of programmers that have never written the basic code to connect a web application to a database. They use any number of indirect frameworks to achieve what is a relatively straight forward activity. It may be laborious, but it also results in a development team that understands what is happening at every moment in the system. Delegate to someone else and your risk is that whatever was to be done is performed less well than if you performed the task yourself. There are plenty that will tell you it is a given since it’s the only way to scale yourself as a person. When we are talking about computer code the exposure is as great as the worst written code. Perfection is not required, but ignorance is worse.

I recently got passed the essay Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford and with a little positioning should be the playbook for America’s future – possibly, eventually, the world. Crawford does a delightful job exploring what it means to be engaged in a trade – its scarcity, importance and value.

My recent gap in blog posts reflects that my life got too busy to support the usual post – selling a house, buying a house, moving and building out a studio to compliment the changing lifestyle. I share this because it is likely the first time I took on the challenge of building something by hand that I would usually create with money. There is no shortage of cerebral activity in building and Shop Class as Soulcraft makes this point well. It is easy to liken it to software programming in that you need to understand fundamental principles – logic, algorithms, design patterns etc. This is not much different than a builder understanding material strength, stability and appropriate use. Programmers feel the same pride and satisfaction from code well-built as a trade person elegantly executing their craft. While there is a notion of mentorship and hierarchy the trades have a more structured concept around apprenticeship. This is a critical aspect acknowledging that some of the knowledge to be had is hard if not impossible to distil or consume in traditional forms. Experience efficiently encodes more information that our conscious mind processes, yet our beings embody the knowledge.

There is no shortage of computer programmers in the world, yet there is a dearth of individual and shared development experiences. We can’t expect everyone to live through the trials of personal computers or the Internet, but we do need to bridge the gap or not only will we repeat history, but we won’t have enough people to fix it all when it is broken. No different, Crawford points out that with the dwindling ranks in the trades the individual that understands how to do something with their minds and hands will become the most important person in the village. While I clearly agree for the need to embrace the world’s crafts, I believe we are facing an epidemic that must be reversed. Just as the established markets have created a pile of stinking code, failing to pass knowledge to newer generations, we extend the work to nations that have even less shared knowledge. We must apply the methods of the trades to software development or fail faster before the shared knowledge ceases to exist.

I will wear a blue collar any day since it transcends what use to imply class and embodies a healthier balance of being. Read Shop Class as Soulcraft and figure out how to help fix us before we are broken.

All of the Honda videos are personal, intimate and provoke the question – so, now that you have seen this, what do you plan to do? These people have stories, you should have stories too. Where are you going? How do you plan to get there? Why isn’t the destination something you are not sure of – that escapes current reason – that is beyond current horizon?

Everyone knows that failure is a necessary part of innovation. However, failure often has social consequences that inhibit real innovation. To get to the future, we need to invent it. Along the way we will face trials and learn from those failures. How tolerant are you of failure? How often are you failing? How do you know if you are not failing enough? When rich with success people tend to ride the wave instead of continuing to manage their innovation on the failure line. Managing innovation often means managing culture and that is often at the root of poorly run engine.

Great people believe in impossible visions. If you don’t plan on having your own dream, latch on and believe in someone else’s so that at least you are not a passenger or a piece of furniture. Spend your day doing things that align with your personal values and you will naturally lead or find others that share the same passion.

Watch the videos. Get inspired. Kick out the ladder.

There is a lot to learn from past experience – if there is enough in common context. There are endless factors as to why things happened they way they did. Often the context is radically complicated. My guess is that war historians face this often. The context of a given war is a scope that can be appreciated but only broadly learned from. Specific battles however, can be abstracted as patterns for future engagements. Executives at large companies often play a game of “big boy” chess working agendas in the marketplace that may take five to ten years to deliver. They balance their need for immediate returns with the clever game of creating future business. Watched too closely an employee may think a high level executive is missing both opportunities – it is all about context!

Looking for inspiration outside of your specific domain is an excellent way to ensure you are not repeating yourself. My dad always said, if you always do what you have always done, then you will always get what you have always gotten. History is an informing resource not a road map – the context is often too different to offer the play book most people are looking for. By reaching to other domains, you create interdisciplinary connections and innovation.

A few years ago the IT world was drunk with the concept of mashups, where a web hacker type would take the services exposed by more than one application and assemble it in a meaningful way. You will remember this phase because the most profound examples had content plotted on a geographic map. One had to wonder, is the radical new approach the introduction of extendible, shareable map services or the introduction of a new programming paradigm? Mashups permeated popular culture to the point that at the time a hot new show Glee used it as a creative way to create new music for the cast to perform – a music mashup. Mr. Schuester, the Glee club faculty member, would mix two songs together and challenge the students to do the same. The IT world has moved onto other booze, but the Glee Empire found a new way of introducing more related, varied and original content into their production. YouTube is filled with content mash. Similar to the desirability of adopting a mutt at the pound, I quickly take the derivative over the original. Mutts embody diversity. Derivative choices often have the benefit of more information. Let the thousand flowers bloom, pick one and when it dies, pick another – if you are paying attention you will get better. Some people get really good at picking the right ones, but rest assured most are bad. The key is not losing what was at the heart of the original. It is all about context. Ever look at Seurat’s La Grande Jatte up close and in person?

Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte by George-Pierre Seurat

Seek out diversity in both your references and the level at which you examine. Past experience might let you question what you see – objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. In the 1999 block buster The Matrix, Neo speaks to a little boy that apparently knows how to bend spoons.

A screen shot of the bending spoon from The Matrix

Boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead… only try to realize the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Boy: There is no spoon.

Neo: There is no spoon?

Boy: Then you’ll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.

Quote from IMDB.

 

Sometimes you get what you always got because you can’t see you are repeating yourself. Stop acting drunk and disorderly and get yourself a pint of diversity.

People do it all the time and yet complain that they haven’t traveled as far. That is not to say taking breaks from some of the journey is not important – heck required – they are! Your daily life diversity makes you better at everything you do. It is what makes you uniquely qualified to do something remarkable. In the variety of things you do, how far down is the gas pedal?

From the moment of conception, we are dying. Life is not a dress rehearsal, yet we deliberate over most of our waking moments. It is this that makes time so precious. We have plenty of time, but spend it and spread it thin, leaving fragmented leftovers. Time and attention management skills go beyond the workplace helping you more effectively execute your priorities. What are your priorities?

If you know what is important and have the intensity to focus and dedicate time to those things, then your foot is on the gas moving you in all the right directions. When your foot falls asleep make sure you look around and make sure you are where you intended to be. Finding yourself off course is less critical than moving quickly and correcting direction – think of it like Agile development for living.

Microsoft asked “Where do you want to go today?” with the help of Wieden+Kennedy, a bold question in a time where computers were in the infancy of becoming bullet train to station you. Aspire to the grander responsibility of making a better you by spending your time attentively on the activities you love. Along the way help everyone you can do the same. Stop fretting over the destinations and start getting there intently. How we do what we do is as important as the doing and destination. The world is happy to pay you to do less. What is your time worth?

Inspired in part by:

Music by The XX

Attention and Intelligence by Johna Lehrer

Riding my newly acquired 2004 MV Agusta Brutale

The key to fantasy is knowing that you’re in one. So when you start thinking it’s real, things become complicated. Fantasy and reality and never-the-tween shall meet.

-Belle, Season 3, Episode 2, Secret Diary of a Call Girl

People tend not to manage their reality at work as a relationship, especially if they care. Consider the intimate relationships you have had and think of the ways you protected yourself during the moments of turmoil.  Sometimes the protection is creating physical space – breaking up, separation and divorce. Other times it is far more subtle, a reminder that the person you love is upset about something and just needs compassion and support, not for you to feel angry and attacked. Are you managing your romance with work or are you pretending that it is different? How we react to changes in our reality is how we manage our relationships with it. In the workplace this is what distinguishes the best leaders.

Melt down with as few people as possible. Try to pick people you have a close and safe relationship with. If you don’t have any like that, then do it on your own, but do it nonetheless. If you care about your work, the melt down is unavoidable – it is literally the relationship having been malnourished. In business, the chances that it is getting fed all the time are unlikely. The key is to manage it separately from the prevailing brand you present as a professional. People have enough challenges dealing with their own reality, so when yours bleeds into theirs there is a level of dissonance that if not received with care tends to irritate. Regardless, taking the time to heal the complications of treating work like life is vital to keeping your mojo flowing.

Caring about what you do is powerful. It parts the tribe in two and those that care have the upper hand. It comes with additional responsibility to yourself, which is to manage your work (fantasy) as you would you life (reality). People tend to blend them and engage in the resulting complication. When you find yourself unable to distinguish, remind yourself that these two are really never meant to meet. That you introduced them to each other was a gift to you and others. If you see others going through challenging times where the emotional component is as high as business at hand, then receive it with care – it builds meaningful relationships between people that transcend the workplace. Some would say this makes for a messy world view, but I would argue it was messy when we started caring.

There is no shortage of ideas. This is one of those statements most do not agree with. Maybe we do not all come wired with this confidence, but I know it to be true. Being free with your ideas is the simplest way to enable the best thinking to flow into innovation. It also makes it irrelevant who owns which ideas – there are so many more it really does not matter. Secrets are the same way. There is no shortage of secrets to learn and sharing them does no harm.

Almost always, a protégé needs to have a certain level of experience to understand and make use of relevant secrets.  It takes some time to make sense of the words you use or the situations you share. As a mentor you likely cannot practically compress everything for easy digestion. In fact, the simplest of lessons is often distilled to the point that it needs dilution. In the end, more often than not, the protégé is the gas pedal. When that pedal gets stuck, it will be your own inability to communicate at high enough bandwidth – help these folks get strapped to the fastest rocket ship you know.

People think that if they share what they know they will lose their power. This is the absolute wrong way to think about things. Creating a legion of individuals everywhere that grow to be giants is the ultimate in success and likely power. It transcends the walls of your organization and is the right thing to do for humanity. We need to take better care of each other.

Consider the time and dedication that a college graduate has invested in the hopes there is employment that will align with their studies. Of those people, consider how many of them actually end up in a job that leverages their specific concentration. Many graduates end up appreciating the journey but not loving the content of their travels. Some refer to it as rounding out ones intellect – essentially proposing that it is not important what you study as long as you study something. What if our college bound youth actually had help figuring out what it is they love to do, instead of worrying about which electives they should take to get into a college? What if the measure of entry to higher education was a clear affinity or passion for any domain? Certainly, one could argue that college is a time for finding this out – an excellent plan to increase the participation in master and doctorate degree programs.

Figure out what you love and do it. It is a kindness you do for those around you. No one likes the person suffering and the banter they create trying to find like minded suffering. If you know what you love then all the decisions you need to make are done in that context, simplifying all the angst of trying to do the right thing. Do what you love, do it the best you can and enjoy all the time you have doing it.

Corporate types have some of the worst afflictions of not loving what they do. They get stuck in the cycle of getting to keep busy even if they are unengaged. In exchange for a certain lifestyle people turn their day job into a side job, focusing on whatever they are passionate about in their off hours. Who has free time? Those that make it and many do.

Sophisticated corporations spend an enormous amount of time and money on career development. This keeps the cattle moving along the grazing pasture – regardless of who actually eats the grass. Of the employees that know what they want to do, they have considerable resources to develop skills and leadership. For those struggling to find their passion they are often found in the herd oscillating between getting broad experiences and writhing in the pain of no direction. Those that are unengaged are simply part of the pack grazing and stomping on the grass.

Help someone else figure out what they love and build a better world for everyone. There will always be people looking to collect a paycheck, ignore them. They are the agents of average doing and are important to getting it all done, but are the wrong people to trust in leadership positions. The passionless are directionless and dangerous to everything and everyone around them. There is room for everyone, just not in leadership positions.

To riff on the airplane safety message – secure what you love to do first and then help those around you to find theirs. We need to help those than want it to create happiness – for a better life and better world. It is not always easy to figure out what you want to do, which is why we all need the help of others. Read, share and reflect. Help comes in the shapes of books, audio, video and people. If everyone invests in doing what they love people will live longer, be more productive and enjoy happier lives.