A thousand new directions
Yesterday was my 44th birthday, so I trust you’ll forgive me waxing a little philosophical. Another trip around the sun does that to me.
A lot of what I write is strategy on how to have a bigger impact, keep your investment working for you longer, and generally do tech experiences better. Today’s not going to be about that, because I’m getting to the age where I want it all to mean something.
Of course, work isn’t all or arguably even most of what makes it all worth it. Ideally, work funds our lives where we get to connect with the people we love and that’s more real and impactful than most of what happens 8-5. I’ve written about that a lot, and I’ll probably write about it again, but today is not that post, either.
If I’m going to spend a good share of my waking hours investing gobs and gobs of energy into something, I need to feel that it has a purpose in itself. And I’ve concluded that it does, but not in the way that my 25 year-old self expected.
As a budding technologist, I wanted to be THE ONE who solved important things. I think this hubris can be explained in part by the fact that I wasn’t mature enough to appreciate that there was any deeper layer to it. That seemed like it was about all there was, and by golly, if there was something to be achieved, I’d better do it if I wanted to be good enough.
But time has a way of rounding off the edges of things, and I’ve long since come to terms with the fact that no matter what you do, it won’t last forever. If you do a really great job, it lasts a little longer, but even the loftiest records are eventually broken (sorry, Pete Maravich). Even the geniuses fall. The greatest buildings and monuments will eventually crumble. Many of Da Vinci’s works crumbled to dust within a few years of their painting due to the instability of the tempera paints he liked to use. No one wants an iPod anymore.
If you’re lucky, your irrelevance happens after you’re dead and in the ground, but in the tech industry we often aren’t afforded the dignity of that ego protection. I’ve already witnessed the coolest stuff from the first few years of this business fading into pixelated irrelevance. The window during which any one team’s work matters can be short.
And yet. AND YET. There IS something there. Because what we do is possible because of the work of those who went before us. There are the giants, of course, whom everyone remembers: Ada Lovelace figured out logical operators to form algorithms, Robert Noyce developed the silicon chip, David Heinemeier Hansson had an idea for a better kind of programming language and created Ruby on Rails, and Jordan Walke figured out how to get javascript threads to spawn native iOS components and built ReactNative. But amongst those fabled names, there are thousands of other diligent humans who became weirdly fascinated with some problem and spent an inordinate amount of time working on it in late nights and long weekends, probably irritating their partners, eventually to push back from a desk piled with papers and discarded coffee cups and declare with a satisfied stretch to absolutely no one, “I’ve got it!”
In some cases, these breakthroughs provide literal solutions that are used for a while. But in many cases, what they do is expand the horizon of the possible. One person’s hard-fought triumph is another person’s inspiration. Some other quietly toiling tinkerer who cares about the same problem will see that and tuck it away in their toolbox, to be combined with other insights, and eventually expand the art of the possible yet again. Nearly all of the breakthroughs I’ve had have come because I saw something that rocked my worldview a little - a tiny corner of someone else’s thinking, cracked open for the world to see, and to spawn a thousand new directions.
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