Fear always arrives in a disguise

'I've written before about fear, and I've spent time thinking about it thanks to some wonderful books - in particular Linchpin and The War of Art.

There's something particularly important I think I've learned about fear though - and that is that it seems to me fear never actually shows up as fear.  With the exception of genuine terror I suppose, it seems to always show up disguised as something else.

Fear arrives in the form of anger even when we aren't mad at anyone, but are instead worried about something related to our work - and so we lose our temper.

Fear shows up as insecurity when it comes to our lovers, not because we're actually jealous of any particular person, but simply because we're afraid of losing someone we love.

Fear arrives as worry when we know can't control the outcome of something. Instead of recognizing the thing we're afraid of and moving on, we remove the joy from the present by worrying about the future we can't control.

When we get a big break fear shows up as anxiety, because few things are as scary as success.

When we're afraid to show the world our creations, fear shows up as perfection, because it knows that if we don't ship it until it's perfect......we'll never ship it.

The most important thing I've learned about fear, is that fear is a coward. Afraid to show up as itself, it always arrives in a disguise.

It seems to me the only way to fight fear is to unmask it, call it out for what it is, recognize it's presence, and then observe how little power it actually has.

Fear isn't all that scary, but it's disguises are terrifying.

Game Changing

One year ago Derek Hopper joined Ideal Project Group as our Lead Engineer/Hacker.  

Adding Derek to our small team changed our company and our products for the better, and it's difficult to think about what the company would be like without him.

I always try to let the people that I work with know how important they are, but as with most things we can always do better.

When I heard Derek left the startup he was working with, I think about 12 minutes passed before I asked him if he wanted to work on a small project with us. About a month later he became a full time employee when he accepted my job offer.

The day he accepted, I came home and told my wife Maile how excited I was. 'You don't understand', I explained, 'Derek joining our team is completely game changing.'

Tula software had just launched, but there was a still a lot of work to do and much of it was pretty complicated. We had also landed some new clients and I needed someone I could trust completely to work with us.

I'm not right about everything, but I pretty much nailed the game changing part.

I suppose I could go on and on, but I'll just say that I try hard to give our people as much as they give the larger team, and I hope that always shows.

Thanks for such a great year Derek, we wouldn't be the same without you.

You can meet all the requirements and still fail

Let's say I have something valuable that I'd like to keep secure. As a result, I give you two requirements:

1. Lock the box to keep the contents inside secure
2. Put the keys to the lock somewhere they won't get lost.

Of course, there's an implicit 3rd requirement that went unspoken which is that I'd like to also be able to retrieve the contents at some point.

I find this box so interesting because this kind of thing can happen on software teams too.

It's easy to get hung up on meeting requirements when making software, but they are always only part of the story.

There is always a bigger picture that needs to be understood by everyone. It's this understanding, and the ability to anticipate unspoken requirements, that separate good software teams from great software teams.'

A microcosm of fear

The condo building in I live in started installing security cameras today.  After six years without a single violent crime, and after years of debate on the matter, those in favor of digitally video recording everyone as they enter into and leave from the building we call our home finally won the battle.

Even though there is no evidence that video cameras do anything to deter crime, and there are studies that show them not to be cost effective, none of these facts matter when people making important decisions do so based on fear.

Fear of crime, fear of getting sued (a building our size is expected to have cameras, we could get sued if something happened!) and a fear of looking weak.

The problem with making decisions based on fear of course is that most of the time they're not rational. We spend time, money, mental energy, and resources on things that create the illusion of security, when instead we could be building communities.\r\n\r\nThe thing is, as it is with security cameras, so too it is with drones, wars, and patriot acts.\r\n\r\nMy condo building is just a microcosm of fear.

Not all users are your customer

Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Square, for whom I have much respect, wrote an article the other day titled "Let's reconsider our users. In it, he argues that application developers should stop calling the people that use their products 'users', and instead recommends calling everyone a 'customer'.

The word “customer” is a much more active and bolder word. It’s honest and direct. It immediately suggests a relationship we must deliver on. And our customers think of their customers in the same way.

This article got a TON of coverage in the tech community. Many people properly pointed out, myself included, that with applications such as Twitter and Facebook, the users are not the customer, they're the product.  Writing about this reaction, John Gruber had this to say:  

I’m saying they should treat users as customers, too — customers paying not with dollars but with their precious and limited attention.

This is false.  A stranger walking down the street could hit me in the face and they would have my precious and limited attention.  That would not make me their customer.

It's true we pay for things with our attention and I've written about this before. But only when someone pays you with money are they your customer.  You cannot, and will not, keep the lights of your business on with attention. You must have revenue. The place that revenue comes from, that is who your customer is.

Twitter's problem isn't that they're not 'treating' their users like the customer.  It's that they're not *making* the users their customer.  And in fact, the needs of Twitter's customer are often in direct opposition to the desires of the users.  By it's very nature, Twitter cannot treat their users like the customer without ignoring their real customers - the advertisers.

In Dorsey's noble effort to humanize the word 'user', he muddies up the even more important notion of understanding of who your customer is.

Very rarely is every user of a web application the customer.

Our most popular product is a software for yoga studios and we have multiple kinds of users.  Instructors, students, desk people, and studio owners.

Of all these users, the only one that is our customer is the studio owner.  No one else.

I've discussed with my team many times the importance of understanding this, and it drives every one of our decisions.  Tradeoffs rarely come in the form of strict black and white decisions, they're made in small degrees.  And if you don't have a clear understanding of who your customer is, over time, you forget who you should be focusing on and who you should try to please.

Our main competitor is now so big that rumor is they make more money processing credit cards than they make on their software.  Guess what?  This is the kind of thing that gives our product an opening.

Because when every major product decision has to be made with the backdrop that a significant portion of your revenue comes from processing credit cards, it has an impact on who your customer really is, and what challenges you're going to tackle.

I'm all for having a more humanizing word for our users, but it would be a tragedy if we lost sight of who our customers are in the process.