#i'm quick to close off and i share things about myself to sort of perform vulnerability while never opening up

[aevallare]

.

[anettrolikova]

A day in my life really depends on what's happening. That said, usually I have themes. For instance, I have a priority list, and I have decision logs that chronicle all the things I am trying to figure out.

I end up trying to insert themes into my days. Like today, for instance, I have a meeting with my small team to begin the week; I reserved my afternoon for product reviews—what we call “greenpathing exercises”—where, oddly, I'm trying to discern how everyone is thinking about the main things we're working on. I do this because oftentimes I feel as though I am the connective tissue combining operations, finance, and more formal business functions with the product itself. This connection helps me to make good decisions.

A lot of this is almost automatic by just having a good color coding system, which is really fun

I made two decisions: one, I'm going to try to learn as much about business as possible. But, if business is very different from software architecture, I'm going to be no good no matter what I do. And so, I ran an experiment to treat engineering principles, software architecture, complex system design, and company building as the same thing. Effectively, we looked for the business equivalent of just turning off servers to see if the system has resiliency. For instance, we used to ask people to use their mouse on their non-dominant hand for a day. We introduced these little nudges to ensure that people didn’t become complacent.

I believe that the job we all have in life is to acquire knowledge and wisdom and then share it. I just don’t know what else there is. This is the bedrock of my belief system.

When I get close to any field, I think about how far I want to go. I'm probably further along with programming. I don’t know if I want to get from 90 to 91% in programming when, with the same amount of work, I could figure out the first 60 to 70% of UX or even something like drawing. There’s a recent book about this called Range, which I really like. The book pushes in this direction and explores this topic a bit more than I do. But I just found myself nodding throughout reading it, because it turns out that very often—really, every field has fundamental wisdom that you discover when you're learning and talking to the people who have mastered it. I find that going wide and learning the best lessons from the people who have dedicated their entire lives to a certain pursuit gets you really, really close to mastery.

people show up with a mastery of certain instruments. Someone ends up being the jazz director and the rest of the band follows

I've always gravitated towards competing against myself in most things.

I really love failing. I feel so good when I do something, and it just doesn't work; especially if I get the feedback about why it didn't work. That gives me a project to work at to improve. And so maybe that's sort of interesting regarding losses.

the major reason why video games are valuable is because of this concept of transfer learning. For instance, people who are good at chess understand when it's time to perform tactics, and when it's time to focus on positional development. Not just in chess, but also in life.

I have found it really, really useful to be able to reason about a relationship without getting egos involved too much. I can have a conversation with someone saying, “Hey, you made a commitment to ship this thing, and you did. That's awesome. That's a super big charge on the trust battery, but you’re actually late for every meeting. Even though that's relatively minor—like it decreases 0.1% on your battery—you should fix that.”

It plays a role like that. That said, it's not useful to talk about trust as a binary thing. People are quick to say, “You don't trust me!” And it's actually more, “Well, no, I trust you to a certain level, but you would like more trust; you want trust at a completely different level.”

if your cell phone is 80% charged, you're not worried about finding a charger. But when your phone in your pocket goes into low battery mode, you're thinking about your phone a lot. What people want to do in a company is get to the 80% or 100% level in the area that they run. You gain full autonomy this way. It’s a process that cannot be given to people by title or something like that.

The reason why it was the best thing for me is because it's almost the perfect counterfactual to how you should run a company. I honestly think that, you know, a coin flip has a batting average of 50%. If you just do the perfect opposite of literally everything about that place, you would probably clock in at 60 to 70% of getting everything right, which would mean you would outperform probably 90% of all companies in the world.

Among other things, almost every incentive system was just wrong. For instance, there was no way you would get a promotion or recognition if you weren't dressed in a suit or if you didn’t use slides in a particular way that resembled the legal profession.

It's infantilization because you literally have a policy about how to dress. If you have a policy on how to dress, that means you don't trust people to dress. It was a pretty stark experience.

We are building hopefully amazing software for absolutely amazing people, like people who are unbelievably brave and really adaptable. Society tries to talk people out of this, like no one wants other people to be successful building companies. Silicon Valley might have gotten to a level of enlightenment where company building is actually encouraged, but the rest of the world isn’t like this.

The learning curve of being a great executive is a lot less like learning the guitar, and a lot more like skydiving. It’s the kind of thing you should not do without an instructor. A coach is probably one of the highest returns on investment anyone can do with their attention. An hour spent with a coach has a 10x, 50x, 100x potential return on time spent.

Our strategy was to hire as many high potential people as we could and have them get to their potential much faster than they actually imagined was possible. Personal growth has no real speed limit. It's more dependent on how often a student is ready, and that often depends on the environment and the norms of a culture around the student. For instance, how often is the teacher appearing when the student is ready? If you can line this up at a fairly high hit rate, then people can go through nearly ten years of career development within a single calendar year. I know the 10x thing is overplayed now, but I have absolutely seen it.

Hey, the reason why you've got this job is not because of everything you know, but because you seem like the kind of person who can figure it out when you need to know something.” That's very basic but also very liberating.

One thing that really makes it work is that we are just extremely different. Almost the only overlap we have is in how much we care about the mission of this company. Outside of that, his skill set is extremely different; his input is extremely different; his life experience is very different. It's very intuitive for us when to go with one of our ideas because this is what a relationship with a 100% trust battery looks like.

I had the source code for Linux, I signed up for the Linux kernel mailing list, and I listened to how they talked about computer architecture. I then spent all my time trying to figure out what these terms meant.

The meaningful thing about this story is that it points at a fallacy. The other important thing is it implies that people in groups end up really cancelling each other's good parts and exposing one another's downsides.

why are technical founders overperforming the market right now? I don't actually think it's because they're technical. I think it's because of a very specific childhood experience that a lot of the people running technology companies have had. Most of us grew up in a world which we knew would change significantly because it was really badly designed given what we knew about the potential coming soon. And this potential coming soon was the march of computers and digitalization. I think that a lot of us, including myself, have leveraged this insight into significant enterprise value.

Norman gave permission to really hate the door instead of hating yourself when you push it instead of pulling it. That is not your fault. No human has ever been at fault for pushing instead of pulling. That has always been the fault of the people who designed the door.

People who learn how to think about how to do things in their environment better, and to understand that the objects in their everyday life have not been designed or created by people who are smarter than they are—they are the people who will become entrepreneurs.

[sapphicscholar]

Adored your post w/head scratching as a fight ender. Could you do a short with this idea for one of your pairings/groupings? Maybe Supercorp (thought I'm not sure what they'd fight about?) Maybe Kara tells Alex it works and she tries it with Director Sanvers on one of her gfs is just like o_O wat are you doing?

Hi, dear, I posted your chapter on AO3 here!

[Refers to this post: https://sapphicscholarwrites.tumblr.com/post/165150100055/catanacomics-times-i-want-you-to-scratch-my]

A/N: Because last time T on AO3 pointed out that I should let my girlfriend’s prompts skip the line (and she admitted that this anonymous prompt was actually hers submitted while I was down in the gym)…you get this fluffy fic faster than usual bc apparently I’m whipped (and may or may not have been promised head scratches in return for a fast turnaround)

So…the promised smutty chapter is coming in just a day or two, but that one required rewatching JDT’s “Pony” dance a few times…for research, obviously for research (very professional and such)

Chapter Text

“Your feet are so cold,” Kara huffed as Alex wriggled her toes under Kara’s legs. The cold didn’t affect her, but she wouldn’t be a good little sister if she didn’t complain.

“Shh, you’re a human furnace. Just warm them up for one minute?”

“Ugh, fine,” Kara relented, stealing back the carton of ice cream from Alex in retaliation. Now that they were caught up on Homeland she could devote all of her attention to finding the brownie bites still left in the carton. “So how are the girlfriends?” she asked between mouthfuls of chewy brownie.

“Good, good. All the performance evaluations at the DEO are due next week, so Lucy’s been a little…snippy recently. But it’s fine; we know it’ll be over soon enough.”

“Oh gosh, you know what is, like, a guaranteed way to end fights with your girlfriend?”

“Wait, are you admitting that you and Lena fight?” Alex gasped. Kara always gave her such shit for how much she and Maggie and Lucy bickered. It was, for the most part, fairly good-natured, their own way of showing each other that they cared without being overly sentimental about it. But next to Kara and Lena, who seemed to play the part of the perfect, well-mannered couple…well, the contrast became a bit obvious.

“I wouldn’t call it fighting…”

“But you just did.”

“Hmm, I’m choosing to remove myself from this narrative.”

Rolling her eyes, Alex figured she might as well forge ahead: “Did you fight about kale? Did you tell her you got her a green juice and then hand her a mint chocolate chip ice cream shake again?”

“That was one time!” Kara huffed. “How was I supposed to know someone would be excited about drinking something made of kale and broccoli and cucumbers?” She shuddered at the memory of being forced to try one. Lena might have been able to get her to enjoy sweet potato fries, but the rest was a step too far.

“Yes, yes, so are you going to tell me about this miracle cure for fighting or will I only learn after three easy payments of $29.99?”

“You’re so funny,” Kara deadpanned. “But since you’re my sister…I guess I can tell you even though you’re rude.”

“You love me.”

“Despite the rudeness.”

“Definitely because of it.”

“This is why you bicker so much with your girlfriends.”

“Eh,” Alex shrugged. “We work.”

“Yes, yes, you’re all very cute together, even with the sarcastic comments and short jokes.”

“Thank you. Now tell me your magic trick.”

“Head scratches.”

“Excuse me? They’re not dogs.”

“I’m not suggesting you scratch their ears, Alex,” Kara huffed. “C’mon, remember when I was first getting used to being close to people and you would tickle my back?”

“Yeah, I’m not saying it’s not nice! I’m just saying, it’s something you do when you’re already all in a good mood together, like if you’re cuddling to watch a movie or go to bed or something.” Alex shook her head at just how far she’d come. If someone asked her a year or two ago where her life might be today, her answer would probably have involved a lot about the DEO, a few references to time spent with Kara, maybe some of Kara’s friends too. But to think that she’d have a girlfriend? That she’d have two girlfriends? That she would have learned to not simply tolerate intimacy but to crave it, even in the most banal of circumstances—a simple touch of hands while walking down the street, an arm looped around her waist while she poured her coffee, two quick kisses before they all headed out each morning for dangerous jobs—well, that would have been simply unthinkable.

“No, I get it, but trust me, it works! It was like a pause button or something. We were sitting next to each other, and she was a bit annoyed because I maybe…well, it doesn’t matter.”

“What’d you do?” Alex asked, narrowing her eyes as she tried to figure out exactly which of Kara’s guilty looks was playing about her face today. It didn’t look like the “I forgot my strength and broke something expensive look,” especially since Lena was rarely mad about things that were replaceable. It was sort of close to her “I ate the last of something delicious and feel bad because someone was mad but not bad enough to regret my choices” look, but something was…off about it.

“Um, I ripped her bra in half…for the third day in a row.”

“Ah,” Alex sighed, rolling her eyes and feeling rather lucky that the only time she’d had to repair any clothing after sex was once when Maggie had overenthusiastically ripped at a silk blouse, popping off half the buttons. “So she was mad but not that mad.”

“Oh…no, she was pretty mad. Did you know she only wears La Perla? And holy cow, Alex, have you seen how much they charge for a pair of underwear? It’s like…like, they better be made of gold or something! Or bulletproof. Or really comfortable…”

“Okay, okay, so moderately mad,” Alex conceded.

“Anyway, we were sitting next to each other on the couch, and she was venting, and I just leaned over and started running my fingers through her hair because I know she likes it. And suddenly…poof, the conversation just stopped! She sort of closed her eyes and relaxed and it was like she couldn’t even remember why she was mad.”

“And you don’t think that’s…bad for your relationship do you?”

“No, I mean, it’s not like with Mon-El, if that’s what you’re asking. Because I still remember why she was mad, and I know to be better going forward. But I didn’t have to hear the lecture, and I made her happy, so win-win!”

“Huh…I don’t know.”

“Trust me!”

—

And Alex figured it wouldn’t hurt to try Kara’s advice. After all, this was hardly a fight worth having. Lucy was just in a bad mood because several departments were late about turning in their performance reviews, so she’d been stuck at the office far too long after skipping her lunch break for a meeting, and she’d taken it out on her girlfriends, snapping at them for being distracting when she needed to work from home because there “aren’t enough hours in the day, and you two don’t have to be so loud when you make out!”

So Alex slipped in behind Lucy at her desk and apologized in a soft whisper, careful not to disturb her anymore. But while Lucy continued ranting about incompetence and no one letting her get any work done in the office or at home, Alex leaned forward and ran her fingers through Lucy’s hair, scratching lightly the way she knew Lucy liked when she curled up on the couch, her head in Alex’s lap and her hands resting on Maggie’s thighs.

“What the fuck?” Lucy asked, admittedly getting sufficiently distracted to stop muttering about how loud her girlfriends were.

“Um…is this not helping?”

“Helping what? You’re just messing up my hair.”

“Oh, I, uh, I thought it would help you relax…”

“Why would that be?”

“Ooh do mine instead!” Maggie yelled from across the apartment, bouncing slightly on their bed as she grinned at Alex. “If she doesn’t appreciate it, she shouldn’t get to enjoy your magic hands.”

“I didn’t say I don’t enjoy Alex’s hands,” Lucy huffed, “but they were a surprise.”

“Yeah, right, sorry,” Alex mumbled, quickly extracting her hands and going back over to the bedroom where Maggie had now sprawled across the bed face-down, her shirt hiked up so that Alex could tickle her back. “One sec, okay?” Alex whispered to Maggie, pulling out her phone and sending a quick text to Kara: “Your trick does NOT work!”

She was too frustrated to reply when Kara sent back: “Works like a charm whenever Lena is mad. I’m sticking by it. Maybe you did it wrong?”

—

The following Sunday, after the performance reviews had finally all been submitted and Lucy had gotten to sleep in late two days in a row, things felt like they were finally back to normal—at least close enough to normal that Alex was looking forward to having Kara and Lena over for brunch, rather than dreading how much time Lucy would lose with it.

But, of course, she should have suspected that things were going too well. And she absolutely should have recognized the mischievous glint in Lena’s eyes when she turned to look at the Danvers sisters sitting side-by-side on one side of the table. “So,” she began, a smirk playing about her lips, “I hear you two have some trick for soothing your girlfriends. Care to share with the class?”

“What’s this, Danvers?” Maggie asked, not even bothering to hide her grin.

“I don’t have any tricks,” Alex huffed. “Kara does.”

“Way to throw me under the bus!” Kara pouted.

“It’d hurt the bus more than it’d hurt you,” Alex countered.

“So what is it the great Kara Danvers does to put Lena in a good mood?” Maggie asked, looking at the blushing blonde.

“I mean, I think we all know the answer to that one…” Lucy trailed off, figuring she would stay on her best manners and not point out the obvious today.

“It’s not that! No, I just…first of all, how do you know?” Kara asked, turning to look at Lena.

“You literally texted Alex about a magic trick that you do whenever I’m angry.”

“Oh.” Kara fidgeted, playing with her glasses and trying to look innocent. “It’s nothing really…it’s just, you know, when you’re mad, sometimes it helps if I scratch your head.”

“Oh my god, is that what you were doing?” Lucy asked with a laugh, thinking back to how startled Alex had been when she called her out on it.

“Maybe…”

“Ooh, try it on me next!” Maggie called out, raising her hand up and volunteering.

“You’re not mad?” Alex checked. She’d worried a bit that it might sound deceitful. “Any of you?” She turned to look at Lena.

“No,” Lena assured her. “It’s part of being in a relationship. You figure out the little, easy ways to put your partner in a better mood, and they end up being the easiest ways to end the fights that don’t matter as much.”

“Wait…what do you do for me?” Kara asked suddenly looking curious.

Lena just laughed and shook her head. “A good magician never reveals her tricks.”

While they were cleaning up, though, Maggie sidled up to Lena at the sink. “It’s food, right?”

“Duh.”