Lately I'm dealing with something I am not used to in my writing: fear of push back. Fear of “getting it wrong.”
Usually I write what I write, and if someone thinks I’m wrong, well, then I learn from it, if there’s something to learn. But lately I'm noticing more anxiety about what I’m saying and how I’m saying it.
As a result, I’m being more cautious. I'm writing a lot more “I think” or “it seems to me” or “maybe,” rather than just saying what I’m thinking and risking being wrong.
I keep imagining that I've said something foolish without realizing it, something I haven't thoroughly examined. That no matter how many times I read and reread what I wrote before I send it, I'm going to miss something big.
Then I imagine finding out from my community of smart readers that I've completely gone off the rails, and now they're upset, maybe judging me for having written what I wrote.
It's a familiar fear.
Dialing in
I remember the first time, as a developer, that I dialed into a customer's production system.
[Oh yeah, I just said "dialed into." I'm not quite old-school enough for any actual dials to have been involved. I'm a few years removed from connecting by physical modem to customer production systems. But we did still refer to it as dialing in, even though most of the time the connection was made over the internet.]
In my first job as a professional programmer, we would sometimes need to connect directly to a customer's production system in order to troubleshoot or to deploy code. And the first time I did this was completely nerve-wracking.
Nothing went wrong, that first time. I was careful. I took things step by step, but whew, I was nervous.
But within a week or two, I had connected to production systems so many times that it just wasn't scary anymore. It was second nature.
Of course, things inevitably go wrong at some point in production, no matter how careful you are.
Like one time when I inadvertently omitted a single character in a code fix. This caused data to be stored temporarily when it should have been stored permanently. As you might imagine, that's bad.
Even worse, by the time the customer noticed that something was wrong, I had left for the day, so my boss fielded the call from the customer. He did the troubleshooting, found the bug I'd introduced, and spent a significant amount of time working with the customer to make everything right when he should have been going home to dinner with his family.
Oops.
And yet: when his boss heard the complaint from the customer and asked him what was going on, he spoke up in my defense. It was the sort of easy mistake that any one of us could make.
Breaking production is part of the job
As I got to be more senior, I used to joke that I was "contractually obligated" to break production at least once per year. Of course you don't want to break production, of course you want to be careful with the live running system that supports real customers using the real product.
But it's bound to happen at some point. So let's take the sting out of it and acknowledge that it happens to us all. Own your mistakes, do what you can to fix them, learn lessons from them, share the lessons with others to try to prevent mistakes from happening in the future.
That's the attitude I need here.
Of course I don't want to say something foolish or poorly thought out in my newsletter. Of course I want to take care with what I write.
But it's bound to happen that I won't consider an important perspective, a miss a key insight, I use a phrase that could have been better, and you will see it before I do. When that happens, I hope you will be forgiving of me for missing the mark. But I also hope that you'll point it out so I can learn.
In the meantime, I'll practice omitting my "I think" and "maybe" hedging to just say what's on my mind. As long as I'm being kind, I'd rather be wrong and learn than try to speak so carefully that I wind up not saying anything at all.
How's the book going?
Every week, there's a section of this newsletter called "How's the book going?"
And every week, I've deleted it. Let's include it this week.
For a minute, I actually had two books (!) that I'm working on. There's what I think of as "the real book." Working title: Beyond Writing Code, the book about lessons learned as a developer. I've decided to go with "hybrid" publishing for that (a middle ground between traditional publishing houses and completely self-published).
I'm slowly building this newsletter as a community to whom I can send drafty content for the book. (So thank you for subscribing!)
Drafty content, like a story about omitting a character and causing a production outage, for example...
Then there's a second book, a book about effective meetings (attending them, hosting them, presenting at them), which I'm thinking of self-publishing quickly. That content just flows easily for me, so I'm thinking of using that as an experiment with self-publishing.
But I'm also concerned that it is a distraction from the "real book." That I'm using it as a procrastination technique.
Jury's still out about it.
Poll: meetings
Thinking about that second book idea: what's your biggest pain point when it comes to meetings?
| What stresses you out most about meetings? |
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Thanks for reading!
And yes, that's not a modem, that's a record player. Unsplash didn't have any photos of modems that I liked.
Bonus links!
Have a Forrest Brazeal video about going to production.
And I just assembled a page of things I recommend.