Jan 14
After running out to the casino for a few hours, drinking gin on an empty stomach while gambling recklessly on both sports and poker, I came home and spent my Friday night watching the movie August. I have written about the movie before. Twice actually. It’s not a very highly rated movie – a mediocre 5.4 on IMDb – but every time I watch it, I find it to be very inspiring. And yesterday I really wanted needed to be inspired.
My Friday was a little bit frustrating. No, it was a good deal more than “a little bit” frustrating, to be honest. I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to go into any real detail about the day’s events though; in fact I may make a few people upset by writing this post at all.
While keeping things vague I will say that I spent a lot of time over the past week modifying my company’s existing systems to build out a custom solution for one of our new clients. We had scheduled a meeting with the client for Friday, and so it seemed like an obvious opportunity to impress this client by racing to finish their large project much sooner than they expected. And so it was that I spent another series of full days and nights pounding away upon my laptop. Thursday in particular was pretty rough, but at 7am Friday morning I finished rolling out my code… only a few brief hours before the scheduled meeting.
And with that, exhausted, I passed out.
I awoke five hours later, my head still groggy, and jumped onto Skype to have a conference call and see how everything had gone.
“It was great. They loved it. You did a really impressive job.”
I was too tired to truly enjoy the compliments, but it still felt nice. All my hard work had paid off and…
“…but I just got off the phone with <CLIENT NAME REDACTED>. They are no longer going to be doing business with us. That’s <REDACTED LARGE NUMBER> dollars of business that we just lost.”
fuck
I am not going to get into the who, what, or why but it basically sorta sucks. Our company isn’t going out of business or anything, but it was definitely not good news. I felt a lot of conflicting emotions. I still do.
* On the one hand I felt proud of what I had done for Client A. On the other hand we just lost Client B.
* On the one hand losing Client B wasn’t my fault at all. On the other hand, I hadn’t done anything to not lose Client B.
* On the one hand I was a little upset with my co-workers since client relations is their job. On the other hand, it actually wasn’t their fault. We all knew Client B, in particular, had a rapidly expiring shelf life. It was inevitable.
The loss of a major client is bad on the surface, but having now digested the situation for a short while, I wonder if it isn’t actually a good thing. And I don’t mean that in the sense of a “look on the bright side” forced optimism. I mean it for a very specific, very personal reason: it has started the countdown on my employment with this company and catalyzed my degree of participation in the company’s operations. Both are critically important, and until Friday morning both were critically absent.
The rebuild of my company began a little over a year ago, and in that time I have defined my participation in a very narrow way. Essentially, my philosophy has been, “I will write the code and handle the technology… you guys can deal with everything else.” I didn’t want to talk to clients. I didn’t want to answer phone calls from customers. I didn’t want to be consulted about revenue, expenses, salaries, investors, or anything else that didn’t live specifically within my databases or code repositories. I never even bothered to make a business card because I didn’t want to talk to anyone who might ask me for one anyways. I really just didn’t care at all about our business as a business, and I regarded our company as an ultimately doomed venture whose only curiosity to me lay in how long the other people I worked with could keep it from going bankrupt.
Yeah, that makes me sound like a huge asshole. I probably am one.
When asked for my opinion about the occasional business decision my answers were always honest but always apathetic. The only times I ever spoke up with any passion were when an idea struck me as egregiously bad. As generally ambivalent and occasionally venomously negative, there were a lot of hurt feelings over the past year. With time I came to realize that my “critiques” were mostly causing problems. Rather than try to be positive and productive, I took the second of two clear options and withdrew my level of participation even farther. If you can’t say anything nice…
To fully understand my ambivalence you should probably go back and read every post I have ever written on this blog. Start in 2004. The answer is too complicated to contain within one post (or probably any number of them). The best way that I can remember having explained it here was in one half of one paragraph of one post from 2008.
As a perhaps unfair analogy, it felt as if I worked at a grocery store. Sure our store made money – maybe because we specialized in organic foods or had stumbled upon a good location – but there is nothing special about selling groceries. If I did my job really well we might be able to sell a lot of groceries, or maybe someday open a bigger store, but at the end of the day – at the end of my career – I would still be selling groceries.
I guess you either understand me from that… or you don’t.
My company is not special. What we do is not special. The way we do it is not special. The people who work there are not special (other than that one of them is me). We could become the most outrageously successful version of our company that the world will ever know, and it still will not be special. I can sell the largest amount of the highest priced, most delicious groceries on earth… but I am still just a grocery store. For most people – from my life-to-date’s acquired understanding of “most people” – selling a shit-ton of groceries would be awesome. For me, I don’t think I could ever be proud of myself for that.
And if the most extravagantly successful version of our company still makes me think, “so what?” then why should I waste my time struggling to accomplish some fraction of that success?
That has been my mindset. At least until the past month. And most specifically, until Friday.
I still don’t give a shit about what my company does or how it does it. We do not make the world better in any way, and that isn’t going to change. I have been thinking a lot about it, however, and am beginning to recognize that there is inherent value in attaining success. And by value I don’t mean money; financial statements are just the scoreboard.
Of all places, this is where I found my epiphany:
Burnt out from my all-nighter and bummed out from my conference call, I spent Friday afternoon playing Skyrim. After 60+ hours of playtime my character is an un-killable badass archmage at this point, with effectively maxed-out stats, spells, and equipment. As I walked into a newly discovered town an NPC ran up to me and told me a story about a demon who had taken over a nearby cave and blah blah blah could I please help? I happily accepted his quest and set off to kill the demon and save the town.
But why do any of that? The town was small, the quest was unrelated to the game’s main story line, the demon could almost certainly not even hurt me (let alone kill me), and there was no item it could drop that would be better than what I already had. There was literally no direct benefit to me killing the demon. And so of course that’s what I spent the next half hour doing.
While crawling the dungeon I wondered to myself why I felt compelled to be doing it. OCD completionism is one easy answer, but there is another.
It felt important to me because success has inherent value. I could try something and accomplish it. And totally regardless of difficulty, effort, or reward the accomplishment of my goal has value to me. You climb the mountain because it’s there. You kill the demon because you can. You make your business a successful business because that’s what businesses are for.
It’s probably dumb to explain a change in my mindset about my company by way of explaining my mindset while playing a videogame, but whatever… maybe that analogy will resonate with somebody.
Yes, we lost Client B on Friday. But I also impressed Client A. Maybe I could have impressed Client B too if I had ever bothered to try. In Skyrim I don’t accept the townspeople’s quest, walk into the cave, and then take my hands off the keyboard and watch my character die. If I am going to accept the quest, I am going to complete the quest. I walk into that cave and start slinging some motherfucking fireballs. It should be the same in real life. If I am going to bother spending part of my life working for this company, I should spend that time doing the best and most I can. It shouldn’t matter that I don’t actually care about the townspeople, the demon’s treasure, or the metaphysical value my company provides to the world at large. I lost a client on Friday, start business school on Tuesday, and between the two I realized that somewhere inside of me is an un-killable badass archmage with a quest that he accepted.
I’m sorry it took me this long to start slinging fireballs.