Resiliency
We want to do innovative things.
In our casual conversations and social media, we excitedly bring up the latest product that another studio just released. It’s their magnum opus, a brilliant convergence of ideas helped along by famous developers and an ingenious design. We may compare it to our loftiest goals with a tinge of vicarious excitement or envy.
We get swept up in this dream as we sit at our desks with creativity and ideas bouncing through our minds.
But then reality strikes. The day quickly fills with obstacles and roadblocks.
I set out to create a beautiful feature, but instead I have to fix this irrelevant bug. I’ll never create!
Oh no, my work is blocking another engineer. Now my day is ruining their day too?
I’m completely distracted by fires I’m putting out all over the project. This will never ship!
There’s also real life.
The electricity went out! Never going to get this bug fixed at this rate.
And I just got a call for a family emergency, need to step out for 3 hours. Forget lunch, I may not get anything done at all.
And then there’s emotions. Self-doubt, imposter syndrome, stress, the list goes on and on.
How will I ever innovate at this rate?
Reconciling Reality
I came to realize this strange disconnect between my hopes and realities was an error in my thinking. I was comparing my average day-to-day with someone else’s best.
I didn’t see their setbacks, their growth they made on fundamentals, dealing with stress, solving barriers in the way, and setting their process up to foster innovation. I envied the outcome, but how did they spend their time and energy to get there?
Innovation doesn’t happen every day, but obstacles do.
Instead of looking for more time in my day to innovate, I needed to focus on better squashing obstacles. By putting my primary focus on skills that softened difficulties I could grow faster and set myself up for creativity.
So what were my weaknesses and how did I work on them? Let’s talk about consistency and resiliency and a formula I used (and continue to use) to improve them.
Being Consistent
I under-rated consistency for a long time, even into my early 30’s. I glorified the hacker, the brilliant idea, and shortcuts. I dismissed repetitive tasks with prejudice.
The truth is consistency in itself is an immense challenge. Admire consistent people.
Real life gets in the way. The people that showed up on time aren’t “early birds”, they worked to be there.
The gym is always jam packed for the first 2 weeks after the new year. Resolutions are hard to keep.
Repetition is a necessity when learning many things. The "try something once and get frustrated" or "complete something once and believe we understand it" mentalities are tremendous de-buffs.
All this is to say, something as simple as doing something on a regular basis is a spectacular trait.
Literally super human.
If I could achieve consistency, I’d already be making progress towards innovating.
The Formula of the Great Engineer
I'm not sure where I heard this originally, but it struck a deep chord in me.
"What differentiates great engineers, or one in any profession really, is the ability to get an assignment, then one week later they've done one of two things.
They've completed it, including the parts that weren't explicitly talked about.
Or they've failed, they reflected on it, understood why they failed, and have learnings they want to tell you about.
And the next week they do the same thing but a little better or bigger by using the learnings they picked up in the last week. And they do that cycle over and over relentlessly until they are great at what they do."
The thing I liked about this was genius, scale, or external success weren’t in the equation. We may start small, we may have setbacks, but we can learn every day.
Resiliency out-scales everything.
My requirements were to show up, reflect on failures, and show up the next week. Consistency feeds into resiliency. The process is beautiful, long term, and self-improving.
When Momentum Matters
The formula was a tool to build momentum, and I needed momentum to overcome my hardest obstacles.
Defining a plan to solve an incredibly broad technical problem
Fixing "impossible" bugs
Applying to hundreds of jobs with no response
Learning Japanese, which simply wouldn't click in my head
Dealing with the unexpected twists and turns of a 10+ year career
I’ve seen the people struggling on these same hills with me, unable to break past what they’d achieved from their initial effort. The struggle isn't simply common, it's nearly universal for those who try.
It was easy to get stuck by holding desperately onto where I was and stagnating. However, when I started capturing my learnings, failing actually added momentum.
When I got stuck on a bug for weeks, I recorded holes in my understanding and retraced my steps from the beginning to fill them.
When a technical problem was well beyond my capabilities, I found the tiniest sub-problem within it that I could research to chip away at its complexity.
When I couldn’t get a response on my resume, I picked the weakest section and re-wrote it. Then I got more feedback. I iterated until I got responses.
When I couldn’t learn 20 new Japanese words a day, I slowed down. I targeted 10. Then 5. Over a long enough time, I came to learn thousands.
Everyone wants to climb the hill once, but many fail to see that the ones who reach it fell to the bottom and came back 20 times, each time moving faster.
Failure Cases
Following the formula has led to a steady growth that has paid off with better opportunities and an increasingly valuable niche of skills. However, I certainly haven't found it easy to follow at all times.
They ways I've gotten stuck have been from:
Giving up as soon as I saw a problem wasn't easy
Throwing away painful failures without learning from them
Being too stubborn to try anything different
An important realization in my life was that I most suffered from not showing up. I'd get stressed out from looming complexity of a problem and skip it. I'd pass up problems to other people or make excuses to not try. I was actually fairly resilient at solving problems if I got sufficiently deep into them, but I avoided starting problems and that removed any opportunity to learn.
This was one of the key realizations I discovered when I started reflecting, and was the first step to fixing that problem. I'm proud to say I show up now.
Successes
Through a long series of challenges, I have built some rare skills.
I can solve hard bugs and unblock projects. By failing and reflecting on many implementations, I can see how technical ideas will play out in possible futures, how risks and shortcomings will affect their trajectories. I can implement really cool features. Most importantly, I can take hard punches and keep going.
I’ve managed to build out solutions that people call impressive, innovative, and unique. However, when I look at my big victories they seem to have a lot more to do with resiliency than innovation. I could paint a picture of a genius idea thought of in a moment, but that would be dishonest.
I think it’s easy to dismiss the formula because it’s straightforward, but straightforward isn’t necessarily easy or common. The path of resiliency seems to be abandoned more than it's followed, and I suspect those successful people I admire walked this path before me. I believe it’s a skill worth building.
The Reward of Resiliency
The fact that resiliency is rare makes it extraordinarily valuable.
Most people like easy and want to live in easy. I like easy too. However, “the land of the easy" is over-populated and barren of resources. Everyone knows how to do what’s easy and is fighting for that territory, desperately grabbing at the few remaining crumbs.
A lot of times we don't have to go much further when there's a scary obstacle in the way. In a world where warning signs are heeded and dangers are avoided, the gold waits behind the next bend for the first taker. There are hurdles that are not all that tall but just tall or frustrating enough to dissuade most from trying.
If you internalize this, you may surprise yourself by being the first to jump at hard problems. The abundance of rewards behind them is intoxicating.
