Onwards!

"Onwards!" was a saying that Nordstrom's former CTO Edmond Mesrobian would use. It seemed pretty forced, but after hearing it enough, it gets kind of catchy.

"Move fast and break things." That is another saying. Not one of Edmond's but one that Mark Zuckerberg used at Facebook. It was kind of the subject of the final paper I just wrote for my first class of my master's program. I used it at Nordstrom and I remember a program manager saying, "Okay, but please don't try and break anything." It wasn't like we were trying to break things. The idea was to push the technology as fast and hard as possible to its breaking point. Then find what changes you can do to push it past that point.

"Move fast and break things," has fallen out of favor recently in the tech. industry. Too many people are too aware of disastrous failures like Theranos. That was so bad that its leaders were charged with felonies and Hulu made a mini-series about it. My paper argues that moving fast can work when teams are led by servant leaders and backed by ethical behavior. The examples of where "Move fast and break things," failed are either because it was tried by hardware companies that cannot recover quickly enough or because of bad ethics that permeated the company (or both).

I fully believe that a software organization that delivers small, incremental changes and is led by ethical servant leaders cannot only deliver quality products faster but can also build good citizens and have a beneficial impact to society as a whole. 

My friend, Josh Maletz, taught me what good servant leadership looks like. Servant leadership helps not just those being led and not just the organization in which it is used, but aims to help society as a whole. Research I read showed that servant leadership aligns with consequentialism, the philosophy that what is moral is that which is good for humanity as a whole. It also showed that the environment created by servant leaders inspires those being led to also become servant leaders and the effect snowballs.

[Note that at this point I realized the time was 11:53 PM MDT. I think I mentioned before that I do a lot of these blog posts within a website 750words.com that kind of gamifies sitting down to write each day. I had written a few hundred words last night and this morning, but hadn't hit the 750 word mark yet. So I switched over to write there. I include it here, misspelled words and all, to give a little insight to what a shitshow my mind can be.]

You know, I keep doing this to myself, trying to bang out my last few hundred words with little time left on the clock. Tonight I have about six minutes left to try and get in another 300 words. I am not even sure that I can type that fast, but I am about to give it a shot. Please forgive the misspellings.

I have another idea for a story. A short story this time based on the 7k I tried to run with my brother a few years back, before Covid. I wanted to get him off to a good start because I knew he wanted to do well in the race. So I started off fast. Too fast. Just about the one mile mark I got a bad charly horse in one of my calves. i tried to massage it out, but had trouble with it all through the race. I had not really trained well enough. Plus it was excrutiatingly hot! I was probably already dehydrated by that first mile.

So at that point I knew that I wasn't going to have the race that I had hoped for. All I could really do was soldier on as best I could. If you've ever run any distance that you are really not in shape for, then you will understand this next part. I began picking out milestones, saying to myself, just make it to that next tree. Just make it to that next signpost. Just make it up this hill and you can walk the rest. It was so hot that some of the milestones I chose were shade beneath the sparse treees along the roue in Fort Collins. I would say, just get to the shadow of that next tr...

[The clock hits midnight.]

e next bit of shade und3er the next tree. There were so many times ... Ugh! I missed getting in my words by like two words because the damn site would not save it. Ah well, Today (Thursday) is another day.

Okay, so here I am going to switch gears. I'll come back to the 7k story later when I write out the short story that I have in mind. For those wondering, I did finish the race. It was brutal. I am not sure that it was worth it, but Rob did well. So I guess that made it worth it. It was hellish for me, to be frank.

I want to get back to "Onwards!" though. So I just finished my first class. I had a 98.8% going into the last paper. I was about halfway done with the paper and thought I had managed my time well and then realized that I really had not done what the question asked. During this class I have had the habit of plowing forward with an assignment before reading all the assignment materials and asking any questions that I should. In the first assignment I had banged out a beautiful 2000 word essay in no time at all and then found that the assignment was for 500-700 words. Now, I don't know how someone could have answered the question being asked in fewer than 700 words, but I did spend half the time on the assignment trying to parse my ideas down to 1200 words. It turns out that I had far too many direct quotes from the sources I was citing. If I would have summarized those instead, I could have gotten down to under 700 words (maybe), but still half my wonderful ideas would have stayed on the cutting room floor. Just a couple lessons I learned from that first class.

So, I know I passed the class. I would have even had I not done the last paper. I want an 'A', though. I read through the paper late last night after putting it together. I was going to have the entire night tonight just to do the citations for it. I read it over and wanted to completely start over. I can't exactly say what was wrong with it. It just wasn't good. There were lots of little things wrong with it: it wasn't researched as well as it could have been, it was too wordy in parts and had no depth in others, and it really didn't answer the question being asked. I spent part of the night tonight re-writing it before working on the citations.

I am not a perfectionist. I understand that we are not all perfect human beings and don't expect myself to be one. I do get horribly disappointed, however, if I feel like I am not doing my very best given the circumstances. I have been feeling that way a lot lately, that I am not living up to the best person I can be. I hate feeling so disappointed in myself. I hate that I can't enjoy any sort of feeling of accomplishment. Michael Jordan once said that his achievements didn't come from his desire to win so badly. They came through his hating to lose. I understand that.

I hate so much the disappointing things that I did in the past. I ruminate on them. I can't shake them. They drive me as well. I want to run further this year. I want to write more this year. I want to stop disappointing people including myself. I want to leave this world having made one little contribution to the betterment of it, no matter how small. However, I feel like it's miserably hot and that I really have not trained for this like I should. I am picking out signposts. Make it to Mardi Gras. Make it to St. Patrick's Day. Make it to Easter. Get to the top of this hill (Christ! This is a big fuckin' hill!), and you can have a little bit of a break. What else can one do? Onwards!