Delicious Time

Surprisingly I didn’t trip over my father’s many copies of Stranger in a Strange Land. I discovered Robert Heinlein through a copy of The Notebooks of Lazarus Long sitting on a bookshelf. I was immediately enamoured with the contents. My favorite quote from that book is:

Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks.

I considered it a challenge. Life is short, there are so many great things to do. As a result I’ve often taken on way more than I should. Aside from wearing myself down a bit from time to time—and needing a few days to recover and then dig out—the results have mostly been spectacular.

And although I want to do all the things, I’ve developed the skill of saying “no” to things that would distract me, things that would be a sacrifice. For the most part I’m able to do that, but I do make mistakes and once I have agreed to something it is nearly impossible for me to quit. My emotional reaction to stopping or scaling back is like I’m losing something invaluable. So I’ll double down and fight for it, this of course reinforces the idea that the thing I am fighting for is a tremendous value, and therefore makes the emotional reaction to giving up even stronger.

Through some of my work I’ve long known that I had parts of it that I did not enjoy, but I considered it an important part of the job. And I love my job, so like any other hard thing I’d face these are things I would learn about, improve my skill, and become an expert. And with mastery would come the joy.

Certain aspects of my job required me to invent, fight for and prioritize a wide range of activity and tasks which would be in competition for limited resources. This is known as management. And management is hard, I honestly can’t understand how people are able to do it. I think many engineers and software developers can’t, notice all the dance about getting business requirements and business decisions when they are building things. Because more often than not the business requirements make little sense to them at first so all the processes are built around just taking them as a given and trying to understand how to meet them. And apparently when your job title at the startup is Vice President, management is where you are headed when success hits whether it seems that way or not in the beginning.

Often I couldn’t fully understand all the moving parts of the things I needed to manage, but I thought to be successful that I must understand all of these things. The mind of the engineer needs to understand everything. Additionally the business and my boss would seemingly demand heroics as evidenced in my frustration driven post Disconnect the Batphone written in July last year. And I would oblige using the skills that had served me so well. Analyze and understand all the details and pitch in and work hard. Trade sleep, trade personal time, trade sanity.

And unfortunately it doesn’t fail immediately, as a matter of fact, it can look suspiciously like success. You look like you are on top of everything, until suddenly you can’t work hard enough to keep up. And what I’ve learned about scaling problems is that it’s not only the thing that pushed you past the limit that suffers, it’s everything and it’s all at once, even though it will often take a long time to figure out that all those things are suffering. You develop bad habits for skipping steps or dropping things that are urgent. You start to treat everything like crisis triage regardless of how important you know it is. The fact is you are so set-upon by everything that you don’t actually know it is important, your hierarchy of importance gets over-simplified and you start making some real bone-headed decisions.

There are of course management skills. But they most be learned and practiced and mastered. But for that to happen you need to be interested in actually mastering management.

I’ve always known I didn’t want to be a manager, at least not at a high level. I’ve been successful leading teams, but only ones where I’m in the trenches doing the work as well, and the management is less than 10% of the time. In most cases meta-work I would need to do anyway if I were doing it all alone. But somehow I didn’t know. Again there is the challenge, it goes with the title. You can pep-talk yourself with cool phrases like “stepping up.” And of course there is the money. In most cases management upside in money comes with significantly more money than that of even a team lead. So it’s easy to rationalize to yourself that it’s the best thing for you.

So here I am, VP of Engineering at a company having astounding growth, and I am completely out of control and hate my job. This is success? If we are doing so well, why aren’t I giddy with joy? What the hell is wrong with me? What do I do?

Eventually I tell my boss I can’t be VP, I want to continue working there, but I cannot do the job. I know it is an immediate step but a process of getting someone in place to do the work that I am failing to do, but already I feel tremendous relief.

How did I figure it out? I’m not entirely sure. It’s one of the reasons I’m writing this to explore that. I think I got pushed passed the point where it was obvious to even me when I was too busy to notice much of anything. But I think it was noticing the distinct lack of joy in my work.

I didn’t dread going to work, I don’t think. But I didn’t love it either. In fact for many more days than not, I hated every minute of it. I liked the work that was getting done, but I hated my role in it. It wasn’t clear to me always, and I would grab snatches of enjoyment which helped kept understanding out of my grasp.

So I was guided by a premise of duty to my family, and to achieving wealth, and in doing what was best for my employer, and the job I was doing. When I should have been seeking my happiness all along. There is no conflict of interest. I thought I understood these things before, but I understand them quite a bit better now, or will when I finish reviewing and introspecting how I let things get so difficult for myself. I’m not sure exactly what it was but my boss did say something to me in a conversation that helped me to realize I wasn’t happy.

My favorite book ever written is The Fountainhead and there is a certain quote early in that book that is apt here. The main character Roark is speaking with the Dean of the school of architecture where he was just expelled and says:

“But you see,” said Roark quietly, “I have, let’s say sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I’ve chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I’m only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.”

I know the work that brings me joy, it’s time to get on with it.