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Don't be afraid

It's amazing how much inspiration you can get just by visiting an event and watching people present their learnings. If there's one special event to inspire people and make them respect their trade, it must be Beyond Tellerrand.

The conference might have been more design-oriented than I anticipated, but if anything, it only served to reignite my love for design. (There's a good recap of the event.) What really triggered me to blog about this, though, was the fact that Josh Brewer sang his entire talk and blogged about how he overcame his fear to do it. Talk about going outside of your comfort zone!

What especially resonates with me is what Josh tells us about the Impostor Syndrome: being afraid we're in the wrong place, pretending to be better than we are. I recognize in myself being afraid of showing my vulnerabilities – by now, I'm supposed to be a skilled senior web developer, capable of knowing and answering all the tricky questions my colleagues or customers might ask me. In reality, my strength lies in wanting to constantly learn new things, apply them to what I already know, and get inspired by the people around me. 

Looking in the past, I recognize it has always been easier for me to be the underdog, because there lies the greatest potential for awe and surprise: when you have less responsibility and there are no great expectations towards you, you feel less constrained, have less pressure, and are even perhaps more likely to ship something cool. I can't help but to think that all this being afraid of letting people see what I can or cannot do is only slowing me down.

I am still a long way from letting fears go, but I think I might have just taken the first step. Thank you Josh, thank you Linda.

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Twentysomething

Has it really been five months since I last blogged? At any rate, I realized I'll turn 30 next Friday and this is my chance to still deliberately write something as a twentysomething. I got thrown a surprise party yesterday – something I thought only happens in movies, and to people other than me. How awesome that was! I'm normally quite shy, but just being around people you like feels so good in retrospective I should do it more often. Maybe something to work for the next ten years. I'll be sure to let you know how it worked out before I turn 40.

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Software is beautiful

I had a fantastic time at ClojuTRE and Tampere Goes Agile over the weekend. What's more, as of late I have been hugely inspired by people and the cool things they do. As a result, when the hungover me decided to update the description on his LinkedIn profile page, things started happening, I got all poetic, and ended up with a mini-essay on the beauty of software craftsmanship. It's now in GitHub, but let me just quote the whole thing in here:

Software has always been to me a source of inspiration and a thing of beauty. It fascinates me how there is always more to learn.

Creating great software is hugely rewarding in itself, but even more important is the journey of getting there. The journey is where you learn new things, discover new approaches and ways of looking at the world, and surround yourself with people that constantly make you want to exceed yourself, try something you've never tried before, and enjoy yourself just being around them.

Software craftsmen and -women (designers as well as developers) are a huge source of inspiration to me. I believe in making good go around – as everything we create is built on the work of those before us, the only way of making the world a better place is to share what we know, and help and inspire others to reach new heights by sharing what we've done. It's really quite that simple.

I for one will do my best to inspire people now and in the future. Giving away as much as I can is none the less for me, but quite the opposite. It will require persistence and the daring to put your person in and occasionally step outside of your comfort zone, but I really can't think of a better thing than to have as thorough an impact on the way people look at the world as they have had on mine.

I consider it a kind of a personal manifesto and a promise to myself not to forget why the world needs me. It serves as self-validation as well as the urge to make people realize how awesome the stuff we do is. Because it is.

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Do, or do not

Do, or do not. There is no try. – Yoda 

Taking the dogs for a walk on a sunny autumn day gives you time to think. Today it helped me realize how many cool (new!) things have happened in my life in the past year since we left Berlin and moved back to Finland.

In the last year, I have:

bought my very first apartment

formed a band with my awesome colleagues and performed to a real audience, three times thus far

started to learn the guitar

got my voice and my music heard on a real radio channel, and made an appearance in a couple of developer videos

helped organize the first Finnish frontend web conference, as well as a local web community meetup

visited my first international web developer conference in Italy, and met a bunch of awesome people

bought a gym membership, and got a new hobby out of it 

read more books than ever before (an excuse good enough to get the new Kindle as soon as it ships worldwide, right?)

The list of things I meant to do but yet haven't done would be at least as long, but it really struck me when I grasped how good things had started to happen when you just took the first steps towards them. Many of these things boils down to boldly stepping outside of your comfort zone and trying new things and going new places, because that's where magic starts to happen.

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Relaxed focus

TL;DR – Stop trying too hard, and chances are you get stuff done.

In elementary school, we would regularly write essays. We were given a subject or a few to choose from, and the rest was up to us. It was practically impossible to finish it during the hour and a half, so I would usually finish it in a flurry of frustration on the evening before the return date.

I hated it. I hated writing by hand, and I hated having to come up with lots of text nobody (including me) would care about. The teacher would rate the essays based on their grammar and content, and some of us would have to read them out loud in the front of the classroom. Usually I did pretty well, although I hated having to show them to anyone, since I felt like I didn't write them voluntarily in the first place. I remember once ending my splendid adventure story with a cliffhanger, just because I didn't bother writing more. Or my imagination ran dry. All in all, the more I tried, the more frustrated I would get.

This one time, something funny happened. Our essays were to take part in a writing competition organized in cooperation between the city school board and the local construction workers' guild. The subjects given were somehow related to the our city, our neighborhoods, and the like. I decided I wouldn't care at all how it turned out, and wrote a very sarcastic piece about how AWESOME and SPLENDID my own suburb was. There was water, trees, a grocery store, and lots of grass! Eeexcellent!

What happened, though, was that I placed second in the competition. The first place went to a girl who had actually written a very emotional piece about the meaning of home, whereas I had just written down words the instant they came to my mind.

Fast forward 9 years. I'm studying in the University of Tampere, desperately trying to finish my Bachelor's Thesis. I'm making little progress and getting anxious, until one day I have a conversation at work with my colleague. He tells me how it made all the difference to him when he realized the thesis is only a mandatory stepping stone and whoever reads it through couldn't care less about the actual contents.

This made all difference to me as well. I stopped worrying too much, and my frustration seemed to ease away. My writing became a whole lot easier, and I soon finished the thesis. Not only that, but it turned out surprisingly good.

I find it fascinating that by relaxing my control of something, not only does it get easier to make things happen, but also the end result might get surprising benefits from not trying too hard. This has been my experience with writing, but I'm confident it applies to a number of other things as well.

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Connecting the dots

In Everything Is A Remix, Kirby Ferguson brilliantly shows how all important innovations and seemingly original ideas are always built on existing work by someone else. (If you haven't seen the videos, you should!) Learning to walk before you can run, if you may. He also points out that different people building on the same knowledge might reach the same conclusion independent of each other. Building new stuff is only possible when you've first built old stuff.

When you go deeper into it, you realize it applies to a number of things. In Made to Stick, brothers Heath study the details that make some ideas memorable, while others are easily forgotten. The main problem, they say, is the Curse Of Knowledge:

The person sharing the idea has all sorts of insider information that others don't, so they have already framed the problem and understand its relevance. A single example illustrates the essence of the problem: One study tested a "tapper and listeners" game: They asked a person to tap out the rhythm of a song and have another recognize it - the listener nearly always failed to identify the song. What happened, of course, is that the tapper sings the song in their head and thus thinks he has the right rhythm, but the person hearing the taps cannot hear the song inside the others head and therefore has no idea of what the taps mean. 

We lived for a year in Berlin, Germany. Although I had studied German for a number of years in school, speaking it with the natives was a completely different thing. I sometimes would get frustrated not knowing the most basic of phrases, although I knew for certain this was just the kind of stuff I had repeated for years in my German classes. Back then, I simply didn't have the ground, experiences or motivations to attach the new knowledge onto. Had I had a reason to learn those phrases back then, they would have stood a chance of sticking.

So - whether you're learning or helping others learn, you must first establish a common ground: something to connect the dots between what is already known and what is to be learned. It doesn't matter if the connection seems silly, as long as it's memorable. I vaguely remember a Finnish TV show where the competitor had a week or so to memorize the 200 members of the Finnish Parliament, together with the political party they belong to. She would then associate each of the rooms in her home with a certain political party, and stick the names of politicians on the walls of those rooms. Eventually she would learn to associate the rooms in her house with the political parties and the faces in them. When the moment of truth arrived, she could correctly connect the politicians to their relevant parties and won a family holiday, a nice sum of cash and whatnot.

Any similar experiences, or special techniques that have helped you to learn or discover new stuff? I would love to know.

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I know you shouldn't create nonactionable tasks such as that in GTD, but I wanted to have it in place as a reminder.

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Learning experiences are best shared

This blog post may look short, but I rewrote it ten times over.

That is the very reason I started the blog to begin with. For quite a long time I've felt a desperate need to write down my thoughts, yet it is notoriously difficult to get started. I have always been a bit of a perfectionist, and I can barely finish words before rewriting them. If you would see me writing an email, you would get my point. That needs to change.

It is not only being slow in writing things I'm worried about. I am genuinely interested in learning and self-development, and on top of that I want to be part of all the fantastic stuff going on in the developer world. My problem is, I am too damn afraid of making mistakes. I feel bad about putting out anything less than ultra-high quality, and revealing my flaws to others would make me vulnerable, right? I'm a rather experienced software developer, after all - I can't show them there's something I don't know! A bad case of the Nokia syndrome, if you will: you always want to create the coolest things, so in the end you can't actually ship anything.

To be honest, the kind of content I will be writing remains to be seen. In any case, I believe that learning experiences are best shared, and know that I simply cannot be the only one with the symptoms I just described. This blog will probably be as much about attempting to record things I've found useful or interesting, as a learning experience about myself and what makes me tick. If someone else benefits from what I've written, that's fantastic.

(Phew! Now let me mark the "Write first blog entry" task done in OmniFocus.)