johnmaconline

It doesn’t have to be perfect.

It doesn’t have to be special.

It doesn’t have to be good enough for someone else.

It doesn’t have to be your best, but it better be your best effort at the moment.

But it has to be done. 

It’s not a matter of if. It’s a matter of when.

No matter how much you’ve pre-planned, followed procedures, controlled what you can control, kept up with maintenance, and ensured you’ve thought of everything, at some point, it will melt down. The tank will let loose, or the pipe will burst and fill your basement with excrement. Oh, and it will be 2 am on a Saturday morning.

How will you handle it as the leader?

Step one is to put on your boots, assemble the team, and prioritize. The team will want to spin because we’re humans. Spinning is what we do. You’re job is to focus the spin. Invite all of the relevant fixers into the room and discuss it. Argue it out. 

What’s our first step? Who’s gonna do what right now? 

Not what’s our long-term approach. Not who or what’s to blame, unless that blame directly leads to the solution (ie, “the pipe burst, let’s patch the pipe”). 

What are we going to do in the next hour? 

Determine who should work together and who needs to be left alone to focus. Nobody leaves the room until each of us knows exactly what we’re supposed to be doing when we walk out of it. 

Pure tactics. There will be a time and place for strategy, lessons learned, and blame. But it’s not right now.

Then dive down into the muck. Keep the real-time communication flowing. Adjust the path and directions based on that communication and what you learn. Head off the spin.

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. 

No, we don’t think it is. We can probably say we know that it isn’t. 

But it’s OK — actually scientifically appropriate — to occasionally look out the window and say, “Are we sure the earth isn’t flat? Because it really looks flat.” And then go through the exercise of convincing ourselves that it is indeed still round. 

Occasionally, if infrequently, you should go back and convince yourself that you know what you think you know. The key is understanding when it makes sense to do it. If you do it too often, you spend too much of your time re-establishing all you know to be true at the expense of moving forward. Can you imagine having to wake up each morning and going through all of the data associated with the roundness or flatness of the earth?

Two inflection points that could cause the re-evaluation:

1. Time — we look at it all again every so often just to make sure we really know what we know. Do new tools capabilities exist? Has more or more relevant data been gathered? Once a year. Once a quarter. What’s the time frame that makes sense for your industry?
2. Event — did something just happen that should cause us to re-evaluate what we think we know?

Don’t be afraid of the “Is the earth flat?” questions. Everything we know today says for sure it’s round, but scientific rigor requires that sometimes you should reconvince yourself. 

Willingness is a measure of risk tolerance.

Are you willing to risk money?
Are you willing to risk love?
Are you willing to risk your reputation?
Are you willing to risk comfort?
Are you willing to risk friends?
Are you willing to risk your future?

Most of the time we don’t think much about willingness because the stakes are low. A little money, adjacent friends, an unknown future. 

But every once in a while, we are confronted with an inflection point. Here it is right out on the table. Big risk and maybe big reward or big downside.

Are you willing?

This place has a high cost of living. That place has a low cost of living. Will you get a cost of living raise?

We talk about the cost of living in terms of financials: rent and real estate, milk and eggs, taxes and healthcare, energy and transportation. 

But is the true cost of living some financial measure?

Cost is trade of payment. What are you willing to pay to live the life you want? 

My guess is that it has little to do with money.

Most of us in the western world spend most of our time dancing around the top of Maslow’s Pyramid. 

Let’s face it: a blog like this never exists unless I have the privilege of spending a good chunk of my time bouncing between the top tiers in that pyramid. And that’s definitely privilege. In fact, in the whirling dervish of today’s culture wars, where the term “privilege” has become a slur and call to punitive action, this is one variable on which you can check yourself. 

But sometimes you’ve fallen, or been pushed, down to the bottom of the pyramid. You’re in danger. Actual danger. 

When that happens, all of the highfalutin, I-wonder-what-my-life-means, deep thinking goes right out the window. It gets replaced by, “I gotta get shit done. Now.”

There are no philosophical musings. There is no deep thinking outside of the problem at hand. There is only, “How do I fix this?”

When you find yourself scrapping for the morsels on the floor, take a quick look around and see who’s under the table with you. Who else is bleary-eyed? Who else shared their just-recovered random chocolate chip with you? 

These are your people. These are the one’s you go to war with. These are the ones with whom you share the reward when you get back to the top of the pyramid.

Don’t let them go.

Ask an engineer from the tech industry (software or hardware) what the best moment in their career was, and likely the story will sound like this:

We got the prototypes back from the manufacturer the day after Christmas around lunchtime. We had to ship it on the 2nd. Three of us immediately grabbed the unit and headed into the lab. 

Nothing worked. We were screwed. When we first powered it up, one of the power caps blew right off the board. So we looked at the schematics, found the problem (reversed power and ground on that cap), and fired up the soldering iron to fix a few of the boards. Crisis averted.

Then, we couldn’t get the software loaded. Totally dead. But we dug in.  

At dinner time, we hit a local pizza joint. Over slices we argued, called each other unprintable names, created new ideas, abandoned others, and the juices flowed. By midnight of that first day, we had made some progress. We were confident that we had found and fixed all of the hardware issues and had made enough progress on the software that we were encouraged. It still wasn’t working, not by any stretch, but progress was made. 

And that continued day after day. Eight in the morning till after midnight. The week between Christmas and New Years. We shipped those prototypes on time and they worked. 

It was awesome. Three of us committed. Three of us feeding off each other’s energy. Three people acting as a single mind-melded entity. Three better than one.

Collaborative energy is real. When you capture it, don’t let it go. 

“Yo, wait! How did you do that? What was that command?”

It was sometime in the early-90’s at Lockheed. I was looking over my colleague Jim’s shoulder as he whirled his way around the command line on his Sun Workstation. He was showing me how to run nuclear survivability simulations on the spacecraft.

Then he did something — used some esoteric UNIX command — that dumped a sorted version of the file to the screen. It was exactly what we needed to see in the format we needed to see it.

 I stopped him, and asked him what the hell that command was because I needed to know that one.

“Oh, it was this…”

And he brought it back up on the command line. Then he said,

“You need to add this to your Book of Magic Commands.”

I just blinked at him.

“Uh, what?”

He reached down, opened a desk drawer, and pulled out a composition notebook. On the front was a piece of tape with the words “Magic Commands” written in Sharpie.

“Yeah, every time I come across an important command that does something I need, or something I don’t understand, but works, I write it down in this notebook. My Book of Magic Commands. If I ever lose this, I’m done for.”

And I started my Book of Magic Commands that very day. It wasn’t actually a notebook but a file folder full of papers on which I wrote down the esoteric incantations of the world in which I have spent the rest of my career. In that early era of the computer age, this knowledge was power. Those that knew the magic commands held a special pedestal in the hierarchy of organizational usefulness. The knowledge was centralized. 

With the internet and ChatGPT, we software developers and computer power users no longer need to keep a notebook or file folder full of hand-written “magic commands.” The knowledge has been distributed. Anybody can ask for it and receive it. That’s generally a good thing, but there’s some nostalgia wrapped up in the pages of the “Magic Commands” notebooks tucked away in thousands of aging software developers desk drawers. I wonder what we’d learn about the authors if we collated all of that particular knowledge. Certainly something more than “here is the list of commands I used but didn’t really understand.”

I was looking through my filing cabinet for some old tax stuff and I ran across mine today. Here is that very first paper that started my Book of Magic Commands.

I’m not a master marketer.

I make the things. But what I know about marketing is that the magic comes down to: 

Is your idea worth sharing?

You can develop the perfect strategy. You can build out an amazing library of content. You can hire influencers and celebrities. You can show up to the right events and gain the spotlight.

Marketing can make all the difference. Some great ideas have never seen the light of the day because they were hindered by poor or no marketing. Marketing tells the story around your thing, and stories create the arcs of how we move through this life.

But, at the end of the day, if what you’ve created isn’t worth sharing, then it won’t last very long. The best marketing taps into the network effect. 

For many people — people like me — sharing an idea with your network encounters great friction. For reasons I don’t even understand myself, I sometimes hesitate to share. What if they don’t like what I like? What if they have a different experience? What if the things that matter to me don’t matter to them? Maybe I’m worried about my integrity. Or maybe it’s simpler than that and I’m just worried about what somebody else thinks of me.

Regardless, if you find me sharing your idea with my people, you’ve mastered the art. 

Go create something worth sharing.  

“It’s better to be in the arena, getting stomped by the bull, than to be up in the stands or out in the parking lot.”

– Steven Pressfield, The War pf Art

Observing versus participating.

There is little risk in observing. 

You can make a difference by observing, but only if, by observing, you’ve engaged others in the process through your observations. You’ve helped somebody see a new perspective, feel something they hadn’t previously, or find a new creative arc. You’ve moved the state of the art forward through engaged observation.

All the risk is in participating. 

If you’re in the ring, you’re participating. And if you’re participating, you incur risk. We reward risk. I don’t know if that’s a feature or a bug of the world we live in. I just know it’s true.

Also, if you’re in the arena, you’ll get my respect. I may not agree with you, and I may think you’re doing it all wrong, but I’ll certainly respect that you’re out there making a go of it. We’ll argue till we come to some mutual understanding, even if that understanding is “yeah, we’re not gonna come together on this.”

If you’re on my team, you’re in the arena, and I’m there too. I’m willing to get stomped by the bull. Are you?