My biggest mistake

The biggest mistake i’ve ever made in my life is not putting people first.

The humble mistake is a powerful chisel.

If wielded correctly, it is the tool that will shape you most.

I call it my biggest mistake but actually it’s not so much it’s amplitude as it’s frequency that makes it so substantial.

I made this mistake every day of my life for years - my chisel was blunt.

Nuance!

Here’s where I think I went wrong.

People are nuanced.

Spend enough time writing code and interacting with machines and it’s easy to develop a severe case of nuance blindness.

A machine always gets enough sleep. It always wakes up on the right side of the bed. It’s never hungry or happy or sad, it didn’t have to sit in an hour of traffic to get to work and it definitely doesn’t have a complicated web of relationships that it grooms daily, any of which could be stressing it out.

The very thing that makes people so amazing - that they aren’t bound by a strict, limited set of rules like machines are - is also the source of so much of my mistakes.

If you ask a machine to calculate 1 + 1 - it will always answer with 2.

A person on the other hand will give you a different answer depending on the day of the week or the colour of their socks that day.

When you lose sight of these complicated human nuances and reduce an entire person down to a set of rules, you do both yourself and the other person a massive disservice and are destined to create friction between you.

I would rather you learn from my mistakes here and embrace the nuance of the person standing in front of you with every response you give or receive.

Filter your judgement through the nuance and respond accordingly.

Process vs Nuance

If you’ve ever worked at a company of a substantial enough size, you’ll know that we often create processes to try and control behaviour.

Follow this process to assign work to a colleague.

Fill in this form to request more supplies.

These processes can be fantastic.

They remove unnecessary nuance and create shared expectations between people. They disambiguate.

A process is a guideline - do not make my mistake of thinking that it removes the person and his/her nuance from the equation.

It doesn’t. It never will.

Have strong opinions held weakly

I love this statement.

It offers so much in so few words - simple. efficient.

I have been stubborn.

I wouldn’t say that I went so far as to be arrogant, but I had a firmer grasp on my opinions than I should have.

In practice this would often manifest subtlely. A dismissive response here. An interrupted conversation there.

Taken in aggregate though - this behaviour painted a picture of a person who held his opinions in higher esteem than those of his peers. In hindsight I can see that I would often feel as if I was being excluded from certain conversations … because I was!

If your opinion is always better, people will stop asking for it.

It’s interesting to reflect on the fact that the exact thing I wanted, to have my opinions heard and valued, was being sabotaged by my attitude.

By not putting people first and allowing the person in front of me to be human instead of machine, I was unknowingly becoming someone that people didn’t want to interact with.

People don’t even understand themselves

… most of the time.

This fascinates me.

How interesting is it that people can behave a certain way and not fully comprehend why?

It’s akin to some sort of internal autopilot.

All of the “beautiful mind” math and economics in the world will fail to explain human behavior in all circumstances.

You owe it to yourself to consider this when deciding how to interact with someone.

Reality

Your next raise will be determined by a person - not your performance.

How long you’re going to have to wait to have that leak in your roof repaired will be determined by a person - not their availability.

The quality of the service at the next restaurant you sit down at will be determined by a person - not the calibre of restaurant or the amount you tip.

You will never get what you want without putting people first. There is no substitute