Getting Fired — Part 2
Resetting and rebuilding yourself after failure
In Part 1 I talked about the factors that led to me not being able to perform at work. But after ARM I was able to do well in my career. There were many factors that went into my struggling at work, and I feel there were many things that came together to change how I performed. This is my attempt to catalog what went right so someone in a similar position to me can leverage my experience and hopefully it will help them.
Urgent Vs Important
I hope we’ve all seen this urgent vs important matrix before. Apparently based on a quote by Dwight D. Eisenhower but most of us may have seen it as the 3rd habit out of Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People”. I wanted to start off by reminding you of this matrix because it is a good way to talk about many of the changes that happened within me. The circumstances changed that allowed me to direct my energies more to what is important than to what is not important.
The key to this matrix is things that are urgent are more likely to happen. The things that are important are what need to happen. If something is urgent and important, you’ll most likely do it. But the things that are important frequently lose out against things that are urgent and not important because there is an immediate need even though the outcome is not very relevant. Alternatively, important things require more work to accomplish and we end up many times filling our time with other activities that are not urgent and not important because they require less effort.
To counter this you need to make the important urgent. Create deadlines for intermediate milestones. Similarly, it’s an interesting thing about scrum that it has a daily standup. Many organizations gain a lot of value from just implementing daily stand-ups and not doing anything else agile. This is because in effect the daily stand-up takes a problem that is important but not urgent. Something that may take months to complete, and turns it into an urgent problem on what has to be done today. It also offers an opportunity to refocus on what is important so you keep your eyes on the prize.
Proximity To Customer
Every organization I’ve worked with has had some form of customer focus as a value. As new engineers we used to joke about it, not understanding how our immediate stakeholders are our customers and how the work we do impacts our customers. Going from a product company to a services company changed that. All of a sudden the problem I was trying to solve was the problem that the direct customer cared about. Effectively something that was important but not urgent because it impacted some distant entity changed to important and urgent. Making it easier to keep our eyes on the prize.
So while I had a transformation happen for me because I changed from a product company to a services company. It is possible to change the way you work to gain a similar impact. In a way it makes your stakeholder and their expectations more visible.
The Whole Person
In Part 1 of this series I mentioned that I was going through some personal issues at the time. And I mentioned that it made it harder to concentrate and continuously distracted me. I think the Urgent-Important matrix provides a good model for understanding what happened there. Things in the Not Urgent-Important box are hard. They may require mental or physical effort, having to face your fears and emotions, long bursts of concentration. And there are other things in the world that are easier. Watching TV, playing video games, etc. Which is why many of us choose to procrastinate in the “Dark Playground”.
Now many of us are horrible procrastinators and understand procrastination. But I believe it becomes even more important when things are not going well. Willpower is a finite source. And when my personal life was a mess it was depleting from my willpower reserves. I both had less willpower and I was using more of it on dealing with things outside work. And so when it came to having the executive function to switch from doing the Not Urgent-Not Important to Not Urgent-Important I did not have any willpower left to expend on that in my professional life becuase of my troubles in my personal life. And so I was failing and spent more time on the Not Urgent-Not Important even though I knew what I was doing was hurting me. But at the time I could not stop.
Fortunately the problems I was facing ended up getting resolved and things started to get better. For others, I would advise don’t be so hard on yourself (taking hits to self-confidence will also reduce your willpower reservoir). Recognize you’re not at a 100%. Get the things that you can under control including diet, sleep, and exercise. Put attention to the personal problems you need resolved. And most importantly get help, whether it is from your existing network, joining new communities, or getting professional help. Scratch that, do all three.
Love What You’re Doing
I already mentioned how it is mentally and emotionally easier to not do the important things. One of the keys to make it easier to focus your attention on what is important is to reduce the burden of working on something that is important. For me what made the difference was the high level of learning. I went from computer hardware to software. We didn’t have a focus in the beginning. There was cloud, big data, web app development, mobile. Everything was a new challenge. Everyday was something new and exciting. It was my drug. And I loved it. I mentioned in my previous post about how I was not able to throw myself into my work to forget about my personal struggles. At Flux7 I was able to exactly do that because I was learning so much.
What’s more interesting is I was able to maintain this interest over many years. In many ways the learnings slowed from the earliest days. But there was still a steady stream of learning and growth because the organization was growing so fast. Every year the organization was a new organization with new challenges. But there was another thing that I wouldn’t have known about at the time. Partly because of the stories I had told myself about wanting to be a computer architect, to be a performance architect. A few years ago Aater and I after a lot of soul searching, trying to understand our “Unique Value Proposition”, our vision, our mission stumbled upon our personal career mission (which fortunately happened to be the same otherwise).
Save human beings from mundanity and unlock their creativity
Neither of us knew this about ourselves. But with hindsight it feels like how we lived our entire professional career. Even before Flux7, when one of my colleagues told me about git, I started doing shadow experiments by developing on git. Got really annoyed at having to wait on smoke tests and wish we could just make it fire and forget. Because I would, well, fire and forget to check the result and so never actually checkin my code. Why I started working on all the DevOps-like things with automated tests, code reviews, during Flux7’s initial experiments into making something productizable even though I didn’t know what DevOps is at the time. It was why we finally settled on DevOps as the goal of Flux7. Because in terms of the impact we wanted to have, this was it.
So I went from bored and struggling to apply myself to excited and a creative problem-solver. Which is why it is extremely important to figure out what makes you happy and search for that.
Don’t Forget, You’re Awesome
Academic success especially in Math and science was always a large part of my identity. When I started college it translated into being a good engineer. And so I was shaken from failing at my job because it was such a large part of my identity. One thing I had to do was rebuild my confidence. I had started to wonder if I had peaked in undergrad. But when I started rapidly learning, getting my creative juices flowing I realized that the spark that I was always proud of was still there. I was just not letting it burn as bright as it can. And it happens in a slump. We forget just how awesome we are. I’ve had multiple people confide similar concerns to me, “I don’t think I have creative ideas anymore”, “I don’t think I have what it takes anymore”. You are just as awesome as you always were. Find the right environment that lets you shine and you’ll rediscover it all
In the end, it was probably the hardest time in my life. Full of uncertainty, full of distress. Full of small wins and setbacks. With hindsight I can look back and say things in a far more encouraging way. I can pretend that I understood what was happening. But the truth is I did not. I was taking life each day at a time. Celebrating the things that were going well and focusing on doing what I loved. And using these to get through the ugly things both internal and external. In hindsight it looks like the story of a phoenix reborn through the ashes of their former self. But maybe we give the phoenix too much credit. Because it knows what lies on the other side of its fiery demise. When we are walking this path of renewal we don’t. So please be kind to yourself. Take it one day at a time. And please don’t lose hope. No one knows what the future will hold for you. But I can say that if you look hard enough both within and outside of yourself you can find path to happiness and success as defined by you.
You can check out the Part 1 of this article here:
