Finding Clarity in an Ambiguous World
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Negative Flow
A friend of mine started feeling on edge all the time. His nerves frazzled he told his wife that he thought he needed to start drinking some tea before bed to get some sleep. This surprised her since he had never needed something like this before. She also noticed that when he was playing a…
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Leading Under Uncertainty
At a previous company, we brought in an external CEO to help us raise our second round of financing. He came in guns blazing and as the months passed claimed to have found a number of investors interested in our company. He took several fairly expensive trips oversees all in the name of drumming up…
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Teamwork Means Not Getting Your Way
When I started working for Tuscany (a software startup), I was given a task by one of the other engineers. After a few weeks, I had completed the code and sent the code for review to the more senior engineer. He looked at it and said, “Well, that’s not the way I would have done…
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Communication Tug Of War
Is it ever okay to lie to a customer? We’ve all seen it happen. It seems easier to simply commit to the impossible and then slip the schedule later than to say no now and take the hit. Sometimes the customer demands to be lied to. How often have we seen a customer that keeps making…
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Thirteen Wonderful Years
Thirteen years ago today, I made the following proclamation to my wife in front of a large crowd: Today, God has answered my prayers. I recognize that he has blessed me and entrusted to me your life as a free gift that I have not earned. As we stand here before both God and men,…
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Knowing How We Come Across
The other day in a planning meeting, a friend of mine suggested an idea for what we were engineering. I didn’t understand why that was necessary and it seemed like it might make things too complicated. I mostly wanted to understand why he thought it was necessary. He’s a smart, talented engineer and I respect…
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Getting Comfortable With Change
Many years ago, my dad’s shoes were getting old and fairly worn out. It was time to replace them. As we all know, new shoes never quite feel as comfortable as the ones we’ve worn, but som times they still need to be replaced. So he went out shopping and after searching through many shoes that…
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Chopping Down Trees with Chainsaws
A man heads to the forest to carry out his task: cut down a bunch of dead trees in the middle of the forest. Chainsaw in hand, he hikes several miles to the site and starts felling trees. One by one they come down quickly but soon his chainsaw runs out of gas. He hikes…
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Uncanny Valley of Ability
When trying create a 3-d computer-rendered human, we find that as we get increasingly more realistic, it only feels more real up to a point. Suddenly it seems creepy and unreal before finally feeling truly real. Instead of recognizing the rendering as something which is alive, it seems just short of that and so we…
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Getting Even
When I was a teenager, I started being able to challenge my father in games. Often after making some particularly aggressive play against my dad, he would retort: “I don’t get mad; I just get even.” This was something he said from time to time, sometimes when I was just being obnoxious to him. Fortunately…
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