Introducing: The New Busy

• Thinks 9-5 is a cute idea.
• Puts their pants on two legs at a time. (ORLY?)
• Woke up with a bunch of stamps on their hands. (Sounds like an SNL skit of Post Office Employees Gone Wild.)
• Would be open to taking a class in their sleep. (I’d sleep through that… Oh come on, that was kinda funny.)
• … And a whole bunch of other stuff that makes you go… wtf?

I am not the New Busy

I am the Normal Busy. Here’s how my life went the past couple days:

1. Thursday: Went to bed @ 1:35am. Woke up @ 7:09am. 55-ish minute commute. Worked until 5. Taught yoga 7-8:30pm. Drove to the airport @9. Red-eye flight Seattle-Atlanta 10:55-6am local time. Sleep time: intermitten on the plane for 3 hours.
2. Friday: Checked in hotel at 7:30am. Worked on presentation. Backed up computer. Crashed for a few hours. Went in the office @ 1. Went to the .NET rocks event @ 5. Dinner with team lead till 10pm. Back to hotel. Worked on presentation. Slept @ 2:18pm. Sleep time: 3 hours.
3. Saturday: Woke up @ 7:35am local time. More prepping. ReMix Atlanta all day. Gave talk at 1:30pm. Met up with an old friend at 5:30pm. Went to the speakers’ dinner at 6:30pm. On the road again at 7:45pm. Got to ATL airport at 8:30pm. Flight delayed till 10:30pm. Got back in Seattle at 12:39am local time. Left the airport at 1:19am. Got to bed at 2:26am. Sleep time:5 hours 16 minutes.

(I know the exact details of my sleep and wake time thanks to the iPhone app Sleep Cycle.)

The New Busy Would Have a HeartBurn By Now

I did not put my life’s schedule here to show how “busy” I am. I know I’m not that busy. I know I’ve got *nothing* on a lot of people. I don’t have kids, pets, or plants. I’m not directly responsible for any living, sentient beings. My boyfriend and I see each other 5 times a year (okay, maybe 6). In other words, I live a very selfish life, concerning only with keeping one single thing functioning: me.

And I’m barely keeping up with that.

So, when I was going through the security line at Seatac airport and the Hotmail ads lining the trays smugly told me that “The New Busy would have had their belt off by now”, I was slightly irked, but amused. I’m surprised The New Busy even bother to wear belt, and not elastic waist pants.

When I got back to Seattle from Atlanta late last night, again, the New Busy was in my face. “The New Busy always has a suitcase packed.” That’s because the New Busy never unpacks, I thought, thinking of George Clooney and the movie Up in the Air. The New Busy would have had a divorce by now. How’s that for an ad?

Vienna Waits For You

Years ago when I was an intern at WaMu eCommerce (yup, *that* WaMu), my mentor Keith Willsey told me to read Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. I’ve since read it at least once a year, and it never gets old. Among many of the messages mentioned are: “Vienna waits for you”, taken from Billy Joel’s title song.

Slow down, you’re doing fine
You can’t be everything you want to be
Before your time
Although it’s so romantic on the borderline tonight
Tonight,…
Too bad but it’s the life you lead
you’re so ahead of yourself that you forgot what you need

The Imagination Needs Moodling

Here’s what Brenda Ueland said in If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit:

“I learned…that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.” — Brenda Ueland

I love this book so much that after reading it over several times, I now subject everyone who even so much as breathes only one word about wanting to write to it. “YOU HAVE TO READ THIS BOOK.” I’d insist. So, I gave my book to a coworker at work, and after reading that, he, in turn, gave me another book to read: Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace by Gordon MacKenzie.

What You Don’t See is What You Get

On the flight from Seattle to Atlanta and from Atlanta back to Seattle, I grokked the book. As soon as I return this copy to its rightful owner, I’m getting one of my own so I can highlight and make notes on the margins to my heart’s content.

In the chapter, What You Don’t See is What You Get, Gordon says,

The invisible portion is equivalent to the time the cow spends out in the pasture, seemingly idle, but, in fact, performing the alchemy of transforming grass into milk.

A management obsessed with productivity usually has little patience for the quiet time essential to profound creativity.

…

A healthier alternative is the Orbit of trust that allows time — without immediate, concrete evidence of productivity — for the miracle of creativity to occur.

The New Chill-out (Chillaxin’?) Manifesto

So, I hereby would like to write The Normal Busy Manifesto, and I’d love it if you add to it as you see fit.

• I’m going to resist the urge to get busy for busy’s sakes.
• I’m going to put my pants on one leg at a time.
• I’m going to look at the food I’m eating.
• I’m going to sit on my cushion everyday.
• I’m going to, as the Boss said, “I want to know if love is wild. I want to know if love is real”

Hatin' on the New Busy ads

His five things:

1. We need to ask more questions.
2. We confuse tech progress with social and personal progress.
3. Integrity is the proximity of your beliefs to your actions, and we need more integrity.
4. There is a downward spiral of empty consumption.
5. This is the greatest time in history for creatives.

My favorite excerpt is from #2

Social progress, more freedom, less cruelty, personal enlightenment, lifetime fulfillment, and more, all depend less on technologies than self-awareness and will. The U.S. Constitution was written on quill pens. The Civil rights movement was fueled by marches and speeches. Buddha, Jesus and Socrates did all their deeds without even the dream of electricity. The Internet, the iPad or whatever comes next are unlikely to be the prime mover in (social) progress as history demonstrates tech is rarely the missing link: our self-awareness and commitment to change often are. Tech can certainly help, but the heavily lifting is always on us.

Thanks Scott.

Looking back, I smile at my younger self.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s fantastic to work with smart people at a great company. And I still tell people what I studied in college to set background and context. More than that though, now, if given the chance, I tell people my motivation to work. Since becoming a yoga teacher and seeing first hand what it is like to directly make a difference in someone’s day, or life, I’m enormously motivated to help people uncover their potential. And I’m pretty sure you feel the same too.

Now, I’m aware of how cheesy that may sound. Yeah, yeah, let’s hear the jokes. Anthony Robbins better move over, Nikki Chau is rolling in.

I’m aware that these things almost always sound incredibly cheesy and sound-bitey through certain mediums, like, uh, the Internet. Oh well. I’m certain I’m not the first or the last to let their guard down ’round here, so I’ll put this out there anyway.

Tonight I was searching for a research study I read about a range of salary where it makes virtually no difference to the quality of life and the level of happiness of the wage earner. I didn’t find it, but instead I found this nice slide show that I’m digging a lot: Goodness And Happiness – Why Generosity Is The Future Of Marketing Strategy

One of the slides had the Hughtrain manifesto, which was quite inspiring for me to read.

We are here to find meaning. We are here to help other people do the same. Everything else is secondary.

We humans want to believe in our own species. And we want people, companies and products in our lives that make it easier to do so. That is human nature.

Product benefit doesn’t excite us. Belief in humanity and human potential excites us.

Think less about what your product does, and think more about human potential.

…

People are not just getting more demanding as consumers, they are getting more demanding as spiritual entities. Branding is a spiritual exercise. These are The New Realities, this is the Spiritual Republic we now live in.

The soul cannot be outsourced. Either get with the program or hire a consultant in Extinction Management. No vision, no business. Your life from now on pivots squarely on your vision of human potential.

Um, yeah. A few big and fuzzy feely touchy words there, eh? Like, Spiritual? I mean, come on, talk about overused and abused word, right? An easy word people use to sell you crap, right? Yup, let’s take a moment to roll our eyes and shake our heads here.

Okay, let’s all turn off our snarky skeptical selves for another moment, just a short moment, and consider things like the spirit and the soul in the least commercialized meaning and on the deepest most personal level. Think about the time when you went camping far away from the city and you looked up and saw the whole entire constellation twinkling above, and you just got really quiet and stared up at the sky with a certain sense of wonder, and you didn’t even feel the need to tweet or update your facebook status about it.

Or, think of the time when you were just so moved and inspired by someone, when you hear about the story of a human who’s overcome something so awful and achieved something great, like the last time you watched “Rudy”, or read about an Olympics athlete who have failed and failed and failed so hard so many times before earning their medal.

For me, the last three times I felt this way were:

• Watching Hannah Kearney win Gold in Vancouver after her stumble in Turin
• Watching Roger Ebert’s interview on Oprah.
• The story of actress Carey Mulligan, recently nominated for an Oscar’s, who was rejected by not one, but three drama schools and was working as a barmaid before she became an actress.

And so, you know, corn and cheese and snark aside, I *do* believe that we want to do good, fun, meaningful, purposeful work. Not preachy, holier-than-thou, d0-gooders-are-better kind of work. No, we don’t all have to drop everything and run off and join the Peace Corps. At the core, I believe that we all yearn to do work that lets us express ourselves and means something to someone’s soul and spirit.

Okay, thanks for playing. We can put our hard-knock-life jade shell back on now.

I’ve noticed that there are two broad strategies companies use for hiring, and I have given myself the liberty to use them as predictors of how those companies or organizations view Growth and Innovation–yes, that I word that we all vie for. (I recognize I’m generalizing here, but humor me just for this post.)

Method I: Hire Someone Who’s Done the Job Before

This is the easiest way for a company to hire. Does your resume show that you’ve done this? Check. A lot? Check. And successfully? Check. And you’re not wanted by the FBI or the the State Psycho Ward? Check? Great. Chances of you being hired? Pretty high at this point.

I’d say this method is ideal for employers who has limited resources, in both time and person, and just needs things done, fast. The employer knows exactly what needs to be done, now. This is ideal for the job seeker who’s perhaps a contractor, someone that knows exactly how to do the job in their sleep. Someone to just press Go, basically.

Pros: Minimal training, in and out, execute and run.

Cons: Eventually the employee is bored of doing the same thing and wants to learn something new.

In chapter 7 of the book 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts, Richard Sheridan advised, “Add Talents, Not Skills, to Your Team.”

I realized we had stopped investing in our employees’ growth. We weren’t looking for fresh, new talent. We were looking for very specific, already refined, skills. Now, I tell people that if they see an employer hiring for an exact skill match, what that employer is really saying is, “We don’t plan to invest in you.”

My advice to anyone seeking to build a strong team is to hire for talents, not for skills. What talents do I look for when hiring technologists for my agile development teams? Good kindergarten skills.

Method II: Hire Someone Who Can Grow Into the Job

There’s another method of hiring, which may seem riskier at first, but with risk may come rewards, and that is to hire someone who has what it takes to grow into the job and take your company, or project, further.

So how do you know if someone has what it takes?

Randy Nelson, the Dean of Pixar University said, the problem with resume-based hiring is a lot of the jobs out there fall in the category of Doing Innovating Things for Innovating Companies, which means doing things you’ve never done before. So, what does Pixar do?

Depth-Based Search

Everyone is looking for someone who’s really good at something. We often see this advertised as, “HOT_SKILL Rock Star needed!” (Never mind the fact that rock stars come with some other issues, but we’ll ignore that for now.) However, what if that Something To Be Good at has never been done? What if that Something calls for a lot of creativity and innovation?

According to Mr. Nelson, Pixar looks for someone who has truly mastered something in their lives. Why? Mastery of anything requires a level of commitment and self-determination. It’s proof that this person has a certain amount of ability to recover from errors and succeed, because to master anything means that you necessarily failed in that arena at some point. And, if someone has learned to master something, chances are they know what it takes to learn to master something else.

Breadth-Based Search

Another thing to look for in a candidate? Someone who is interested, someone who’s interested in a wide range of things, and who’s interested in learning to communicate in the languages of those things. Because communication is the root of collaboration. As Randy Nelson said, “We certainly don’t want any one-trick pony.”

I remember reading something about ninjas once (don’t laugh), and that they were always encouraged, well on top of staying in shape and all that, to study a wide variety of things, like poetry and the arts. Makes sense, if you’re gonna be a ninja, you might as well know how to write a haiku, right?

Collaboration

Having done Improv, Mr. Nelson’s messages hit home for me. Two core principles from Improv:

1) Accept the offer: if someone says, “Wow, you changed your hair!”, you should say, “Yes, I thought I’d go green like everyone else.”, not, “No I didn’t.”

2) Make your partner look good: If you’ve ever been on stage with bright light shining in your face and you know out there in the dark are 20, or 200 people wanting you to make them laugh, wanting you to make their Saturday night date go well, you know the anxiety can be high. The last thing you want to have is a partner, a team member, basically, who isn’t helping your game.

So, Depth, Breadth, and Collaboration, that’s how Pixar does it. And it seems to be working out well for them.

The core skills of innovator is error-recovery, not error avoidance.

The video below goes into more details of The Pixar Way, and it’s a good watch.