You are the one who will change the world, not the next president 1
It’s easy to get swept into the excitement of the electoral process no matter where you live in the world. In the past couple of months I’ve found myself swept into the excitement for a candidate for the coming US presidential election, who I in reality have very few things to agree with and probably wouldn’t ever vote for anyway. This because he has a certain charisma and a message that says “Lets change this crap!!!”.
However anytime I get deeper into following that process something happens to immediately yank me back to reality and realize that it doesn’t really matter anyway who sits in the White House or who is busy inserting their pork barrel into bills in Congress.
What is important is that we the entrepreneurs, coders and inventors who are actually changing the world keep doing our jobs.
Sometimes it seems unimportant and frivolous for us to be obsessive about the latest standards, rails plugins or variation of a social video startup. However this is how every single great change to the world has happened over the last couple of hundred years.
Let me repeat that:
Every important world change has been made by people like YOU!!!
Also if you don’t think you should have illusions of grandeur remember:
Every large and well known change depends on thousands of other small improvements also made by people like YOU!!!
Note. I say YOU as the people who read this blog tend to be entrepreneurial and/or geek type of people. If you happen to be a politician or bureaucrat I’m sorry, I’m not talking to you.
The obsessive nerd thinking over some small technical detail to move us as a planet ahead or a big mouth entrepreneur who refused to give up and ends up bringing down the last generation of entrepreneurs who had grown fat and complacent.
Why are we well off
Those of us in the west are well off and lead comfortable lives not due to some 19th century president, king or prime minister. We grew to where we are because of nerds like James Watt, innovative bankers like Nathan Rothchild and single minded entrepreneurs like Andrew Carnegie.
Why is the world changing for the better
You are part of the current generation who is bringing this amazing economical and social development to the rest of the world.
The web, mobile phones, YouTube and email are amongst the thousands of new technologies that are breaking age old barriers that kept people poor. People who before were ignored and poor are now all of a sudden taking their voice, demanding change, taking charge and pushing their own economies forward.
This isn’t just happening in the developing world. In the US politician’s are now in a new uncertain world, where people don’t necessarily just accept what’s going on.
More and more people are also finding that the barriers to entry to independence for themselves if getting to a lower and lower level letting more and more people make step off the corporate ladder and start businesses for them selves, thus creating a positive feedback loop for change.
Some of the people occasionally blamed for this development were William Shockley the inventor of the Transistor, Gordon Moore cofounder of Intel, Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
However every one of these famous names built upon the work of thousands of other amazingly smart innovative geeks and entrepreneurs who might not have received the fame, but were equally responsible in bringing about a huge change to this world.
I find it entertaining and to a certain extent cool when someone like Dave Winer devotes so much of his time right now to the Obama campaign, when he has probably done way more to change the world for good than any presidential candidate ever will by inventing the blog and RSS .
Loosers are also world changers
You are also responsible even if your particular startup or technology didn’t take off, as competition with you is what brought the winners ahead. I worked at Alta Vista early on, Google beat them into a pulp but they and others helped build the foundation that Google succeeded on.
What’s the point Pelle
So what exactly is my point on this rant. It’s alright to get all heated up about political campaign, just remember that your real job is improving the world. 6 billion people are depending on it. Keep doing what you do best one line of code at a time, one new blog post at a time and one new idea at a time.
Even if you haven’t got a ground breaking business idea, submitting a patch to a rails plugin that will make it easier for someone who does could be a more important step towards changing the world than who you vote for in November.
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Think like Luke, Frodo and Neo
I just heard a fun inspirational pod cast interview with Elliot McGucken, which is somewhat yet distantly related to my last entry The real world is a projection of your own fears.
I was initially put off by the subject, which in iTunes was shown as “Artistic Entrepreneurship”. But it had nothing todo with selling sculptures of your dog on ebay.
His idea is that entrepreneurs are similar in many ways to artists and their startups are their artwork.
Basically he believes to be really successful you have to have this drive that you only get from serious inspiration that your way is the right way and then go on your heroic journey.
Heroic Journey, you might ask? What is he on? Seriously it makes sense after listening through it. He says that almost all great entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson and Steve Jobs have followed this epic heroes journey that has more in common with Ullyses, Neo and Frodo than Harvard Business School.
I kind of agree with his ideas if not necessarily out of logic, but maybe more that it feels good thinking of your self as a hero.
Whether you agree with him or not is of course all up to you, but its definitely an entertaining hours worth of interview. You can also read more about Elliott at his site Artstic Entrepreneurship
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The real world is a projection of your own fears 1
David has a great little sarcastic post Who wants to live in the Real World?, which made me laugh.
David who is the ultimate “it’s my way or the highway” kind of guy has no doubt like me heard countless times about this mythical real world and that he should join it.
For us people who tend to do things a bit different (like emigrate, startup on our own, use new fangled technology etc.) this is something that can be extremely annoying, as what people really do when they talk about the real world is that you are wrong, but they can’t quite explain why.
I have always had a problem with authority (just ask my long suffering school teachers and principals over time). In particular just being told to accept something without an explanation is frustrating. However over the years to allow myself to actually function in the “real world” I have developed a coping strategy, which is based on what I think is a pretty accurate analysis of the people who use such terms. I find once I understand the motivations of people I can pretty much cope as opposed to being angry, regardless if I agree with them or not.
One of the keys to understanding this was realizing that we all do this to some extent. Basically when you start talking about the “real world” you are really projecting your own fears and insecurities about yourself onto the person you are arguing against.
For example some one arguing that in the real world you have to develop all production web applications in J2EE and deploy them onto multiple Windows servers running Websphere. Is pretty much insecure and fearful about his position in the industry, company and job market.
On the other hand someone arguing that you are stupid and not living in the real world if you aren’t doing all your web applications work in Ruby on Rails and deploying them on Linux servers, is pretty much also insecure and fearful about his position in the industry, blogosphere and job market.
I wont even get into talking about politics, where there are thousands of different real worlds, pretty much for the same reason as above.
The key to this is that we are all living in our own real world. Our own real world is filled not with objective facts, but our own subjective feelings about us, the world and our place in it.
A visionary is someone who projects your own vision and dreams for the future onto the world and others, however there is a thin line between doing that and projecting your fears onto others.
However if you realise that is how things work, it is pretty easy to take a deep breath and think to yourself, he’s just projecting his fears. In this case if you aren’t in agreement with his fears it is your job to project your visions and hope back.
However please don’t try and fight fear with fear, that is pointless for everyone. This is how endless flame wars, platform wars (Amiga rules!!!), corporate politics and other stupidity starts. These kinds of infinite loop style arguments only make all parties even more ingrained in their beliefs (read more fearful).
Thus if someone else’s fears awake your own fears and make you feel angry it’s probably better to shut up, if you can’t project your before mentioned visions and hopes back.
Oh, man I’ve gone all hippie and spirit like. Peace, love and Macintosh. But seriously if you disagree with me you just aren’t living in the real world!!!
The Speed of Innovation
Frederik Andersen of Goodmorning Technology in Denmark gave a great talk last night at Innovation Center Denmark in Palo Alto on the speed of innovation.
His design firm is working on all kinds of interesting projects using a method which I found very reminiscent to what we do as agile web application developers.
Firstly Frederik said his clients always want them to provide a straight path to a successful product design. He says that this is pretty much impossible due to what he calls the dual speeds of innovation going on in everything.
What this means is that designers (and developers) have traditionally focused on features. Features are basically lead by the designers or developers of the project, thus the speed of feature innovation is pretty much up to the designers. However as he says there is another slower path of innovation which is much more evolutional, which in particular involve peoples habits and cultural changes as a whole.
This is a lot harder to control and while new features can help nudge things in a direction, it can’t control where you’re going.
His recommendation is to not go straight for the end goal, but rather realize from the beginning that your current goal is but a point in a probably unpredictable future path.
An example of this was the whole Virtual Reality craze of the 90’s. The technology was there (VRML) but the cultural changes weren’t quite there yet. Now Second Life has taken off in many peoples imagination, although he as well as I think it’s probably not anywhere near the final point along a very wiggly path.
So what can you take along from this? Basically you need to keep innovating and keep testing. Smaller less obvious paths, might be better rather than trying to change the world in one go. This is of course what agile development is all about as well. See if features work, if they help the culture or the market to evolve.
This is pretty much what we are doing with Agree2 as well. It is now very different from what I envisioned a year ago. I’m sure in a year once we have real users using it will have evolved some where I haven’t planned. That said we do know what direction we want to head more or less and in particular where we don’t want to head. The path though is not entirely up to us.
Extra Action Marching Band at RailsConf 1
Extra Action a San Francisco (where else?) marching band attacked RailsConf 2007 in Portland.
There are no doubt other videos and photos of them, but check them out.
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