Thoughts about changing, life, and whatever comes to mind.
Whatever the reason to hate or be angry, there is no sound reason to let hatred influence your day.
If all you care about is happiness and freedom then every negative emotion goes against this and all the time you devote to hate is time you steal to the best part of you.
Live happily, fight yourself to get out of the negative
These days I was so focused and busy that I almost forgot to do my usual monthly recap of the posts in this blog.
While october is starting pretty bad (already lost a couple of days of writing) and even though september wasn’t a perfect month there are still a few things that made it worthwhile.
The first thing about september is that I listened a podcast of Tim ferris with Brene Brown, this reminded me of the beautiful things I learned about vulnerability.
I talked about sleep because I left it behind during september, I slept less because I’ve got many things to complete.
Now that the month is over I cannot emphasize enough how important sleep is.
one of the longest post -ever- was about focus and productivity.
Also, checking back what I wrote I feel a bit of serendipity seeing that here I talk about “letting others show off” and here (october) I quote that leaders should deflect success.
It’s amazing when you coincidentally link things without intention.
While recently listening to “Daily Rituals” (a book about… guess what? The rituals of great minds), I started to think about what we do.
In these days I’m trying to help a group of friends stick to their goals and move forward.
It’s hard, not only because everyone is different but also because we tend to procrastinate.
I already talked about procrastination and how it’s not a bad thing but when you can’t break-up an habit, it’s hard not to procrastinate.
If you have always left the work that might change your life for last, how can you expect to change something if you don’t break up some of your old rules?
This has got me thinking, is there a perfect time for doing things?
My answer is yes, and that time is “Morning”.
Why morning?
A few points
This has led me to the conclusion that not only morning is the perfect time for habits, but also the perfect time for the best things we could do.
some quick actions to help you decide what to do
Yesterday I wrote about a quote on leadership and that quote reminded me of a nice story about work, disasters and responsibility.
Before that I want to ask a question.
Who’s to blame when there’s human error?
If some colleague on the project you work on screw up, who’s to blame?
If a db gets destroyed accidentally by a colleague, who’s to blame?
In a work environment, where we are judged by the things we do and don’t do, it’s easy to search for someone to blame.
We do it both for defend ourself and to find someone who’s responsible for this.
Now let me tell you a story I read on the internet many years ago.
There was this guy, a junior developer, who got a job in a company that was having a pretty big business in online games.
They had big following and they were making lots of money.
It was a great time.
Their growth was unexpected and I suspect unstructured.
They grew big but didn’t evolve their internal system to a more controlled / secure system, instead they kept playing it easy on the same technology, with some agileness added thanks to the fact that there wasn’t a real structure.
All the developers had access to production data and it was fine because it helped them quick fix things.
The junior developer got the job, but one day he accidentally deleted an entire table. A key table with millions of rows.
Disaster.
He got the blame and was fired in a month.
While reading this, you might think “Oh well, he deserved it”.
It was his fault, yes. But I personally don’t think it was his responsibility.
He wasn’t the one to blame.
If you put that much power (the ability to destroy your business) into a newcomer, that’s your problem, not his/her.
Blame should always be taken from the upper roles, the business man, the manager, and so on not because I don’t want the lower roles to be blamed but because they are responsible for them.
They are responsible for their work, and therefore when they screw up it was their job to avoid it.
To allow them to work at their best without risk the project.
If they did otherwise then they risked, and if you risk and fail, it’s not the fault of the error, you knew it.
It’s like when you bet.
You know that you can lose money, and if you lose it you’re the one to blame.
The same applies to companies.
Aside from this, I think blame is not effective in helping diagnose problem since it puts focus on people instead of processes and collaboration.
When people screw up they rarely do it intentionally, they usually do it accidentally.
Nobody will delete your database because they want it.
So instead of asking who’s to blame, ask “What could be done do avoid this in the first place?”
or again ask “What part of the process/communication failed?”
To add even more spice onto this thought remember to not add complexity, not too much at least.
What usually happens in this cases is that we tend to over control and add unnecessary control structures to the process.
We want people to be trackable and we add a requirement that doesn’t help them do the work.
The job of a leader is to let people do their best work, lessen the screw ups, and handle the disaster.
It’s not the job of the leader to feel safe.
Come on, give me the chills 