Category: Self-Reflection

A Century Ago

Currently, I’m listening to Ken Follett’s Fall of Giants. I really love historical fiction and in particular Ken Follett’s writing. I read Pillars of the Earth years ago and recently finished listening to World Without End. Fall of Giants takes place during WWI, the best thing about the work is realizing how much the world has changed in the last 100 years. I’ve grown more grateful to be living in a time with so many luxuries and creature comforts.

Our governments might seem incompetent in the moment, we should expect better. But if we compare to the situation of 100-years ago, they were were truly incompetent and in turmoil. In 1914, Europe was largely run by the landed aristocracy, democracy was rare. England had rule over many countries as territories. Universal suffrage was a dream for many countries, even women in England were just getting the right to vote. The aristocracy was cruel and poverty commonplace. Racism and classism was the way of life. The world literally fell into the Great War because of silly chains of bilateral agreements to backstop allies. Our governments today are not without their faults but there’s been objective improvement. The spread of democracy has improved the lives of many but there are cracks showing. There are social riots in the US, but in general the world is relatively geopolitically stable. Nevertheless, it’s the improvement in life brought on by industrialization and technology that stands out for me.

WWI was largely fought with horse and cart to supply front-line troops. This was a war fought largely on the ground, in the trenches, not the air. Solders would charge at machine guns hoping to overwhelm the shooter before they could reload. The Great War was fought by people who didn’t even truly understand the power of the weapons they yielded, many had never been tested in battle.

The understanding of physiology was primitive at best. At this moment, I sit at home healing from minimally invasive foot surgery. I was put under general anesthesia and they used live x-rays during the procedure to guide a power-drill. Such a procedure 100-years ago would have been technologically unfathomable, my procedure took less than an hour!

In today’s age, I watch YouTube on my flat-screen TV, control it with my smart phone, write this blog entry on a laptop. Their only forms of entertainment were theatre, tea time, drink, and sex. Maybe our endless diversions are the things that keep us from going to war.

Today, I often prefer to listen to audiobooks using a wireless headset. It frees up my hands and eyes to work on other things like woodworking with power tools. In 1914, electrical lighting inside home was uncommon except for the most wealthy. Putting on a record or the radio was a great luxury. Today, we expect to stream media and get entertainment on demand. How challenging it would be to pass a pandemic without these advances!

When it gets cold, my smart thermostat knows to turn up the heat. And now I have the equivalent of a printing press in my home the size of a shoe box. When I need goods, I don’t even necessarily need to leave the house, everything is deliverable through my smart phone. The wonders of the modern age are really amazing when we look at how much the world has changed in the last 100-years.

In Canada, we gripe about our slow COVID19 vaccination rollout, in 1918 the Spanish Flu killed 20+ million worldwide (somewhere between 1-5% of the world population, depending on your favourite source), vaccines couldn’t even be developed in the timelines we see now. We should be grateful for the advances we’ve seen in science and technology.

Food was rationed during the Great War, today we suffer from a different problem, over indulgence. During the lead up to the Russian Revolution, Russians were lining up at midnight to buy rationed bread. Today instead of starving, we are more likely to eat ourselves to death.

Sometimes technology seems to take longer than we thought it would, people says it took 20 years for the internet to really take-off. But it took smart-phones less than half that time to become ubiquitous. Today now we have vaccines that can be developed in < 12 months instead of years. It’s possible in the near future, that after a virus is sequenced, we could devise a vaccine within weeks. With advances in computing and biosciences this is not unfathomable.

I turn 40 this month, I hope I can live long enough to see what the next 50 years will bring. It is an exciting time to be alive and grateful.

Calendar is like a hard drive

I recently noticed how my calendar is very similar to a magnetic hard drive.

Back when magnetic hard drives were more commonplace, a drive head read sectors of a magnetic disc as it spun. Sequential reads were performant whereas non-sequential reads were very expensive because it would require the disk to spin around again before the head could to read that sector to retrieve the block. When a file was written to disk, the disk controller would try its best to find a continuous block where it could fit the entire file, if it couldn’t it would need to split the file into multiple sub-blocks, ideally, it would still be in sequence as the disc turns. This type of write strategy leads to file fragmentation over time if contiguous blocks can’t be found to write the files.

Calendars are somewhat like this, but has some characteristics of a ticker tape (things that happen in the past are less important that upcoming events or those in the immediate future).

In order to do effective work, people need contiguous blocks of time. Two hours is generally a lot of time to work on a task and get it to a state of some semblance of coherence that can be shared with others for feedback. If you break two-hours into eight 15-minute blocks chances are the output will be scattered, a lot less voluminous and of low quality.

Sometimes people like breaks in their calendar because they find back-to-back meetings for hours on end to be exhausting. So they leave holes in their calendars. I generally avoid this. I found that if I’m going to do 1:1s, I’d rather be in the 1:1 flow and just do a whole string of them back-to-back. Over the years, my stamina for paying attention has improved and I don’t find it exhausting at all.

To enable sequential reads, I often book off time for concentrated work. Thoughtful work takes focused-time, multi-tasking is an illusion, the cost of context switching is an expensive tax. With computers, we can compute the cost of their context switches, but humans poor machines at quantifying it.

One strategy I often employ at the beginning of the day is the calendar defrag. I look through my calendar, inevitably there’s some random 1:1s or meetings that are smack in the middle of an otherwise potential 2-hr block of free time, in those cases I’ll request to move the event and reserve the 2-hr block for focused work.

Give it a try, I’m sure you’ll find you’ll become less randomized, more focused and produce high-quality work.

Disagree and commit

We live in a world of inter-subjective realities.  Humans created religions, economic models, monetary systems, government, corporations, and moral values.  None of these things exist in nature, they were created from our imagination and we applied human value to them.  

When a person joins a new company, they will often discover that the company has a set of values.  These values were chosen by the leaders of the company because they want these values to guide the company’s actions.  These values are frequently repeated and made highly visible to keep people aligned.  The company’s values might actually differ from an employee’s own personal values, this leads to some degree of cognitive dissonance.  The employee may disagree with some of the values, but the company doesn’t need them to agree but to commit to it.  

Humans are masters of overcoming cognitive dissonance.  When someone converts from one religion to another, seldom do they buy-in 100%.  There are likely beliefs, values, or rituals they don’t agree with or understand, but they still converted to this new religion and go through th rituals because they’ve committed to doing so.  

Imagine someone immigrating to a new country.  This person might immigrate because they like the way of life, the natural landscape, the employment opportunities, the people or the social benefits.  They might not agree with the taxation system and how that money is spent (cognitive dissonance) but the government still expects them to commit to paying their taxes. 

As a leader, it’s important to recognize the difference between personal emotional comfort vs operational need.  We often want people to agree with our values when it is more imperative that we get people to commit and deliver.  

Becoming a leader

Being a leader is a lot different than being a manager.  A manager is an operator, they follow processes and are expected to produce the desired output.  

A leader is not necessarily a manager.  Individual contributors can be great leaders.  Leaders are people who have strong values, exemplify those values, attract a following or inspire others to do the same.  People work for a manager because they are expected to.  People follow a leader because they want to. 

Leaders are inspirational people, have a vision, the will and ability to make it happen.  Of course, they can’t do it alone.  In a casual conversation, Mike Katchen mentioned to his friend that I got a slew of people at the office to start doing HIIT workouts and intermittent fasting.  His friend noted, “you’re like a cult-leader!” I chuckled and replied, “being a CTO is kind-of-like a cult-leader, but it’s also good for them”.  Post, I realized there’s some truth to his statement, people follow because they want to, I didn’t have to force them to.  

We live in an inter-subjective world.  Values are what we as individuals deem to be valuable.  As a leader, we create a narrative around why we value a way of doing things, why something is worth doing, and communicating potential benefits in the far-off distance.  We don’t have all the solutions.  As a leader, we want others to be inspired by our vision, follow us and come up with solutions that aid in achieving our vision.

As a technical leader, we live in a world where there’s endless chaos, no matter where we look there’s the opportunity for things to be better.  The most important aspect of being a strong leader is to acknowledge this chaos, embrace it and provide a vision and plan for how to achieve the end-goal.  I remember a quote from Bruce Lee, “A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.”

Jetlagged

It’s been a few years since I’ve been to Asia.  I’ve never handled jetlag well, when I go to the west coast, I don’t bother switching time zones, I just wake up at 4:30am every day and go to bed at 8pm. 

I recently got back from Hong Kong on a Sunday evening and went to work the next day.  First day back at the office was fine, but the rest of the week was beyond horrible.  I powered through and stayed up till 11pm but I’d wake up at 3am and find myself unable to sleep and eventually giving up hope.  I took short power naps in the office to get through the rest of the day, but also slept through a meeting.

By Friday, I finally had a good night’s rest.  But that night I stayed out late, woke up early the next day.  By 1pm I couldn’t stay awake anymore, so I figured I’d take a short nap but then didn’t wake up till 8pm.  Now I’m re-living my week of jet lag hell all over again.  

How my brain works

My fiancé complains I never remember anything that she tells me, like the friends she’s meeting, where she’s going, important dates, errands I need to run, etc.  Sometimes I honestly don’t even recall ever hearing it, but most of the time I’ve legitimately forgotten.  I can’t remember, not because I don’t care, but because I actually can’t remember.  I never argue; I’m actually a pretty forgetful person.

I can’t remember how many times I’ve misplaced my keys, wallet or even wandered into a room and had no idea why I was there.  I’ve lost countless pairs of gloves, shown up at an airport without my passport, left my wallet on a plane and my Kindle on a train.  I used to get frustrated looking for things, but now I’ve grown more accepting that I’m just forgetful.  As far as I can remember, I’ve always been like this.  My memory sometimes eludes me in the silliest situations, so I rely on routines.

I could never really learn to read Chinese no matter how hard I tried and wanted to.  In fight-or-flight moments, I can force my memory to serve me on exams, but a week later I won’t be able to recall any questions or the material.  I can’t really remember streets or names of people very well either.

I rely a lot on first principles and tend to reason out things.  I rely on my calendar instead of my memory.  I rely on knowing how to find an answer instead of memorizing answers.  The most important or urgent things always rise to top-of-mind and the less important things usually sink lower.  I think my lack of memory actually helps me compartmentalize and prioritize information.    I know that if a task is important and quick, I do it right away otherwise it might never get done.  I’ve learned how my memory works and learned to cope.

I believe this lack of memory has had some really interesting effects on my personality.  I don’t get too attached to ideas, I’m willing to re-evaluate with the new information at hand, sometimes this manifests itself as being right a lot or forces me to be pragmatic instead of stubbornly hard-headed.   Since I know I’m forgetful, I’m also very understanding of others, especially they forget.  It also means I treat things with high urgency if deemed important, otherwise I might forget to do it!   

At this point, I’ve stopped fretting and I’ve grown to look past the problems associated with my forgetfulness and appreciate the positive benefits it’s had on me.  Honestly, I forget if I ever had a good memory, to begin with.