When you’re in a canoe by yourself, you control where you go – maybe not that fast- but you can do it all yourself. Add another person and you have someone at the bow and stern (front and back), your power increases two fold. As long as you are going in the same direction. Key to this movement is the stern steers and the bow is power – both can’t steer, both need each other…
Right now we are boiling everything down to fast something can get down and how little effort we need to put in to get it done. We have reached the future that Wall-E predicted. When I used to hire Junior Developers, we knew what we were getting – blank slates with some level of computer knowledge – so how were they evaluated? Their effort. How much time did they put in, how much were they…
You might be working in a dumpster fire, but this doesn’t mean you have to leave it that way. You can make things better starting on Day 1, incremental change can push the ball forward and then have someone else pushing for what’s next. If you can improve someone’s experience by 5% with each action, it’s worth it. Just ask them.
There is only one way to get weeds out of the ground – pull them. You might use chemicals or some other miracle compound, but at some point, you’ll need to pull what is left so it doesn’t take root and grow again. Same with Rocks – the only way to move them is to pick them up and put them somewhere else. You can roll them, use a machine, push them up a hill,…
There are jobs that cannot be made to go faster. They can be optimized, they can be tweaked, they can be upgraded. They can have all of these wonderful things done to them, but at some point, they can only go so far, and then what is left for them to do is the job itself. The grinding work. The back and forth. The inputs and outputs. Many years ago, a colleague of mine took…