Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

Thomas Edison is frequently quoted as saying, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” He was referring to his search for the material that would be the filament in his lightbulb. There are many lessons to be learned from that story; perseverance, optimism, ingenuity, creativity, etc… But I think the most important lesson is courage – having the courage to start something, the courage to fail, the courage to try again, and the courage to finally ship.

This process sounds obvious and maybe even simple. But if those are both true, then why do so few of us achieve the level of success we believe ourselves to be capable of attaining? It’s because there are a combination of forces aligned against us; some of them external but  most of them insidiously entrenched inside our own lizard brains.

Fortunately for us, Seth Godin and Steven Pressfield have written a quartet of books that provide a blueprint for being successful and making a difference. I’ve coalesced them into what I call the “Godin/Pressfield Algorithm” (What can I say? I’m engineer, which means I love algorithms.).

Start

“What kind of moron doesn’t know that the first step in achieving success is starting?” That’s a fair point, but I’m using the word “start” in a less literal sense. There all kinds of distractions and time-wasting efforts that look like starting, but are really procrastinating. This is where Godin’s “Poke the Box” (affiliate link) comes in handy. It’s a manifesto that clears the fog away from indecision and provides inspiration and advice for overcoming the fear of getting started. But don’t expect a map, because there isn’t one. Godin explains, “Instead of learning to be more compliant, I want to push you to be the one who takes initiative.”

Work

Undertaking any endeavor is scary because you might fail. But even worse, your brain will fight you every step of the way because we’re programmed to pursue immediate, short-term gratification instead of activities aimed at longer term rewards; in other words, “work.” This invisible force that tells us to check our email or Twitter stream instead of authoring a blog post or writing a few more lines of code or making that client phone call is called “The Resistance” in Steven Pressfield’s book, “The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles.” Pressfield pulls the curtain back from this insidious obstacle and offers sound advice for recognizing and overcoming it.

Fail

Failing happens. Failing can even be a good thing. In fact, failure is not an option, it’s a strategy. But the problem is that it can be demoralizing. This is where Pressfield’s newest book, “Do the Work” (affiliate link) comes in very handy. He says, “It’s about getting off your behind and starting something. And Seth Godin writes about this, that once you start, you have to finish; you don’t get off the hook half way through.”

Ship

“Real artists ship.” Thus sayeth Steve Jobs, as quoted by Godin in the final book of our quartet, “Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?” (affiliate link). This book dares you, actually embarrasses you into making yourself indispensable. It serves as the foundation of the Godin/Pressfield algorithm and stresses the importance of shipping. Otherwise, everything else is boasting, procrastinating, bullshitting. Real artists ship.

And now you have an algorithm for shipping. You’re out of excuses. Grab these books and get started.

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Jeff Atwood writes one of the best programming blogs on the Internet, Coding Horror.  His articles are an eclectic mix of good programming practice with oblique connections to current events and societal observations.  That’s why it’s so shocking to learn that he lost his entire web site, backups and all yesterday because they were all stored on a single server at Crystal Tech.

ugh, server failure at CrystalTech. And apparently their normal backup process silently fails at backing up VM images.

Jeff is a pretty smart guy, this was a clear case of incompetence by his hosting provider.  Had they actually been performing the service Atwood was paying for then this would not have been an issue.  It looks like he’s going to be able to recover, but I’m sure it’s not the way he wanted to spend his weekend 13 days before Christmas.

The lesson here for the rest of us mortals is to remember that in the end we are responsible for our own data.  This is incredibly important as more and more of our lives (both personal and professional) migrate to the cloud.  Ronald Reagan’s famous quote about nuclear non-proliferation treaties comes to mind, “Trust but verify.”

Think I’ll be doing some verifying this weekend.

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I’m going to make the case that you can’t afford not to gamble.

Let’s start with some not so simple statistics (I promise this won’t hurt).  Let’s assume we’re playing a game that has 1% chance to win $1,500 and costs $10 to play.  If your budget is $1,000 your chances to win at least once are 73% (sorry, it’s not as simple as 100/100).  Those aren’t great risk/reward options – $365 of upside versus $270 of downside.  But what happens if the cost of the game drops to $1?  Then your odds of winning at least once are 99.9%, so you’re looking at $499 of upside and $1 of downside.  Now let’s add a another wrinkle to this story.  What if I told that if you there was a better than 50% chance you’d lose your $1,000 even if you didn’t play?

Another way to look at this would be to compare the cost of 99.9% success rate.  In the three scenarios above, those costs are $10,000, $1,000, and $10 respectively.  How much of a no-brainer is it to spend $10 with a 99% probability of winning $1,500?

Cost of Failure

The first point I’m driving at here is that as the cost of failure approaches zero and the reward stays constant, at some point it ceases to be gambling and becomes something that simply can’t lose.  I’m writing about this today because I’m reading the book Groundswell and this concept has been bugging me throughout the book.  Since the authors are market researchers, I suppose it’s no surprise that they constantly harp on the need to carefully segment your target social media market (something they call “technographics“) and properly target your strategy accordingly.  They would have you determine, for example, whether your audience is composed predominately of “critics,” “creators,” “joiners,” or various other categories.  Once you’ve determined this, you can then proceed with deciding the best social media strategy and tools to employ.

The only problem with this approach is that it assumes a high cost of failure, which is not necessarily the case with the wide variety of low and no cost platforms available in our Web 2.0 economy.  Having said that, the book went a long way toward redeeming itself near the very end by encouraging companies not focus on the possibility of failure, but the cost of missed opportunities.  ”To do this, companies need to be ready to fail often, fail quickly, and most importantly, fail cheaply.”

Cost of Not Winning

If that argument is not compelling enough, then consider the final wrinkle to my original allegory.  Why not just play it safe?  If you never try, you never win, but you also never lose.  Right?  That’s true as long as your competitors and/or market don’t change the rules of the game on you.  There is a risk to not adapting or innovating that frequently inflicts more damaging, if not lethal consequences.

You need to consider the cost of failure before dismissing particular approaches or needlessly investing in research that, at the end of the day, may cost more than failing.  And just as importantly, consider the potential cost of doing nothing at all.

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