The world is loaded with stories of people’s successes, either autobiographical or second-hand, and the supply barely keeps pace with demand. People are addicted to hearing success stories and endlessly study them for things they can do to ensure they succeed at some endeavor. Of course, a lot of people only see the easy tricks, and avoid the difficult ones. Hemingway wrote 500 words a day, but he also drank like a fish. The latter is the easier option, though you can quaff all the Papa Dobles you want, it won’t produce A Farewell to Arms unless you sit at the typewriter. Sober.
Technology companies, small and large, do the same thing. It’s easy to keep an eye on the competition and just duplicate the hot new feature, web design technique or monetization strategy that the hot new product on the market is using. “If it worked for them it will work for us” seems to be the line of thought. How many people think the potential costs of implementation through? When you’re chasing the right new feature or monetization technique, it can often become a distraction from the real, core product that people were interested in from the start.
This isn’t to say that there isn’t value in knowing what helped other people to succeed, but so many of the lessons boil down to simple, repeatable axioms: “Write every day,” “Cultivate multiple revenue streams,” “Focus on your key strengths.” These are all fine and dandy, but the key is in how you implement them. Success doesn’t come from just plucking other people’s good ideas out of context and mixing them into some sort of magic elixir that will guarantee you profitability. The piecemeal approach ignores the external factors that were the real reason something succeeded. It’s pure magical thinking to assume that what worked for Ernest Hemingway, or for Facebook will work for you.
It also ignores the countless failures that litter the path around us. There’s plenty more that we can learn from those who came before us, stumbled, and fell. Odds are, you’ll come up against the same problems. Knowing what happened can tell you what not to do, or at least prepare you for the inevitable choices you’ll have to make. Of course, the current environment doesn’t encourage stopping to poke around the corpses lying along the path. When the mantra is growth and profit at all costs, taking the time to figure out the right strategy costs time, and time is money—often someone else’s money in the tech world.
The people out there who are selling the reagents we mix into our magical elixirs of success are often the only ones who come out ahead. Better for us, as a whole, to stop worshipping the cult of emulating other people’s successes, and focus instead on improving the strategies we use to do the things that we want to be successful at. It takes trial and error. There are no shortcuts. It just takes a willingness to commit, be comfortable in the face of the unknown, and the confidence that the right decision will trump the fast decision.
“Nobody ever got hurt falling,” my Dad likes to say. “It's the sudden stop at the end that gets you.”
I recently parted ways with the startup I've been working at for the past year, and not on good terms either. I'll take the blame for a fair share of this, tempering it with the fact that I'd been running into conflicts with a co-worker on the company's direction and focus, and that I'd lost the sense that I was helping to make an awesome tool that helped people do their job better. Now, I've been let go. I'm falling, slowly now, but acceleration is an exponential curve.
This has happened before. Two and a half years, and a lifetime ago, I was unceremoniously fired from a job I didn't like, doing work I didn't like. I fell for a year, working part time, struggling to find work, or build work for myself. I never hit the ground. I was saved by taking a civil service test, and landed a menial job as a welfare clerk. The rest of the story you may know, and that worked out okay.
Until now.
“Up, down, turn around, please don't let me hit the ground.” — New Order – “Temptation”
No matter how many times I fall, I worry about that sudden deceleration trauma at the end. It hasn't happened to me yet. There's always been a safety net somewhere, often multiple ones, in case I'm falling too fast. The problem is that I close my eyes. I'm always so concerned about falling, and that sudden stop at the end that I often forget those nets exist. I also forget that, as I grow older, and as more people become part of my life, those nets have increased.
One day, hopefully a long time from now, those nets will shrink in number. I'll need to be prepared for that day, but until then there's almost always going to be some net to catch me, be it family or friends. That doesn't mean I shouldn't try to keep myself from falling, or to find a safe place to land without those nets. It just means that the nets are there, should things get bad enough. There's too many people who won't let me hit the ground, and they know I'd do the same for them.
Until I land, there's just some uncertainty. I don't need to embrace that uncertainty, but I do have to accept that it's there. Uncertainty is the wind blowing past my head, and echoing in my ears. Try as one might to attach significance to it, it is just wind. Everyone hears it when they fall, and everyone falls at one point or another.
You are directly responsible for what you put into the world. Yet every day designers all over the world work on projects without giving any thought or consideration to the impact that work has on the world around them. This needs to change.
Mike Monteiro, fellow Philly boy, crystallizes some thoughts and concerns that have been going through my own mind lately. Though I’m not a designer by trade, all of us who have skills and talents should be thinking to ourselves about the impact of what we do on the world around us. The Internet has this incredible ability to puncture our bubbles and connect us with people. We can no longer afford, as a species, to think only of ourselves or our “business plan.”
Take forty minutes and listen to Mike. He is a wise man.
Could it be that you need me
To keep you out, to run you faster
Promise me you’ll let me be
The one, the worst of all your enemies
Pretending you’re a friend to me
Say that we’ll be nemeses
In business, it helps to have competition. Having someone to challenge you, who will do things you don’t, gives you incentive to step up your game and improve what you do. However, it’s easy to fall into a trap of viewing your competition as unworthy of inspiring you to do your best work, only as something that must be destroyed. Your competition can become your enemy, and that is when things will turn. You focus, instead on what you can do to stop your competitor instead of making your thing better.
Which is why I’ve been thinking of the song I quoted above. The idea of the nemesis as someone who pushes you to new heights just to keep up, like Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes, or Batman and The Joker. Sure, the actual meaning of “nemesis” is a little different, but the principle of the nemesis as foil has merit enough to be common in the folklore. Without your nemesis, what do you have to drive you? What happens to the all-consuming desire to be the best at something, when you have no more competition?
You need someone to keep you out and run you faster. Find them, and keep them close. Closer than your enemies.
We’ve all grown rather impatient in the Internet age. Apple, who released “revolutionary” products in 2007 and 2010 with the iPhone and iPad, respectively, have been endlessly criticized for not putting out another revolutionary product in 2008, 2009, 2011, 2012, and 2013. People are screaming at the developers of iOS apps to release a new version with an iOS 7 style user interface and icon. [1] We gush over Samsung putting out a smart watch before Apple, and only just temper our gushing when the product comes out half-baked, at best. Everything needs to be done and ready yesterday. Web app add new features, then bang at them to get them mostly working if they’re not distracted by the next shiny object.
This may be a function of the instant feedback we get from our technology. If you’re not sure if an idea to improve a product comes to us, you can quickly hack up some basic functionality, and test it out on audiences. A/B testing of copy, button placement, and even prices is common among startups and established companies alike. Leveraging the instant feedback and data collection we have access to improve a product or maximize revenue is not a bad thing, but it gets fiddly, and can be a distraction from making the actual product as good as it can be. When you rush something out the door with fundamental flaws that you might not even know about until it’s being hammered by real people, no amount of A/B testing will fix the underlying issue.
On a recent episode of CMD+Space, Chase Reeves described how he takes a few days when creating a new design or product to just let himself go crazy before finding the right place to focus. It reminded me of On Writing, Stephen King’s memoir and guide to the craft of writing. There, King suggests putting a completed draft in a drawer for six weeks, so that when you go back to edit, you see it with fresh eyes. In technology, you often don’t have that luxury, but if we can squeeze in a little time for reflection before adding a new feature, implementing a new pricing strategy, or even changing the focus and priority, the perspective of distance can often change how we see something compared to when we’re in the heat of the moment. It’s easy to get caught up in what “everyone else” is doing, or whatever may be the hot trends out there to catch up on. They’re easy answers to hard and complicated problems, and easy answers are rarely the best.
This is why there’s something to be said for taking your time and getting what you want to put out into the world right, over getting it out fast. Apple is the king of this. They release products on an (usually) annual cycle of incremental revisions, but only create new product categories when the first thing they can put out is up to their standards and done “right” in their eyes. We had touch screen smartphones and tablets years before the iPhone and iPad, but those two products, because of their long and careful gestation, got right what those previous ones got so wrong. In both their wakes, competitors products tried to glue the things the iPhone got right to their products to make them competitive, missing out that what made the iPhone and iPad “right” was the holistic combination of hardware and software, not just adding features for the sake of having them.
So, what makes something “right”? This is a subjective thing, but the best way to be sure your choices are actually right is to be true to a promise and a goal. Are you trying to create a tool for developers to collaborate on code? A forum that allows people to ask others developers for help with their project might be a great additional feature. It drives growth and engagement, and keeps everyone under one roof. However, it comes with costs—you have to have people administer the forum, deal with spam and trolls, and spend time integrating it with your existing infrastructure. Are the benefits of this new feature going to be worth the distraction from the core product? Think about it. And take your time.
And then screaming again when that developer makes it a paid upgrade/new app to offset the cost of all the work they put into the new version. ↩