Lose the baggage

It has been 36 hours since I submitted my first CMU assignment, a software business characterization paper on Compuware Corporation. I must say even though I wrote it, it doesn't look like my writing. Not that it's great, but in fact it doesn't look anything like what I can usually manage to put together in my spare time in a week.

Although I don't consider the experience nearly as intense as serial all-nighters in University of Waterloo to crank out a new compiler or an OS, one thing is surely different: Before the assignment I barely had any time, even for my other responsibilities. Once I undertook it, my performance in other areas somehow improved.

I work 40 hours a week, spend 20 hours on the Software Management masters program and about 20 hours with my girlfriend Abby. I take all of those three commitments seriously. Figure in some sleep and commute times, and you're left with a negative balance of hours. In the one week since the orientation and leading up to the assignment, I was very stressed out. I've been watching my productivity fly in the low altitudes at work, and I've been feeling less energetic. When I met with my assignment team in the middle of the week, I was very anxious not to let them down. I was the proverbial cardio patient on a stress test treadmill, watching my own abnormal vitals.

Then I had a dream, right after sending out my paper for peer review and crashing on my bed at 3:30am on Thursday night. I dreamt in code: something that only happens to me after a whole day of prototyping, not a whole day of investigating the business model of a company. Almost in a state of trance, the best solution of a complex design problem at work was standing before my eyes so clearly that I thought I could take notes in my sleep. The anxious thoughts of "I'm not doing anything worthwhile with my spare time" had washed away. Because I was spending my spare time performing in other roles to the best of my ability, my subconscious was no longer competing for my attention on personal growth - I could focus on actual work.

Today I got more done than I have in one day in a long time.

According to First things First by Steven Covey, When you feel stressed out under a lot of responsibilities, most of the time a big part of the problem is that (1) you are not balancing your roles, and (2) you are focusing on the urgent and not the important. In the context of my career, the urgent has been to keep up with today's newest technologies, something that drains a lot of attention and energy. Additionally, I've often neglected my commitments as a friend, a partner, a focused employee and a person, to instead focus on the one role I have felt most passionate about: "entrepreneur". The image that comes to mind when I think about an entrepreneur is the Wright brothers' first functional flying airplane. And one thing stands out about the plane: It sure was flying light.

You can't fly to new heights with a lot of baggage. The roles you have not fulfilled are the baggage hanging from your shoulders. If you feel you need to be somewhere else, go there now. You will come back and do what you're doing a lot better, a lot faster and with a lot more satisfaction.

In my case, I have my 7pm-10pm planned out for me, everyday for the next two years. I'm lucky I'm going through it with 40 other people.

Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley orientation weekend

I spent most of this weekend, starting Friday morning, at NASA Research Park in Mountain View, California, meeting my new classmates, faculty and team in Carnegie Mellon. The collaborative experience of being a part of a team-building process was exciting beyond my expectations.

Abby, my girlfriend, wished me luck as I left home Friday morning for an early drive down to CMU. After a 40 minute drive from San Bruno to Mountain View, I was ready to show the NASA security my passport. They said I only needed a driver's license. Inside, I expected things to look a little more impressive. Besides a gigantic hangar bay, everything else as far as I could see looked like a suburban university campus.

I pulled up at the Building 23 and went inside. About 50 other students had already arrived, sipping on coffee and having breakfast. It felt like a new company info session. The agenda was funny: A few talks here and there, followed by playing with Legos and some catered lunches. I could already sense where some of the pricey tuition was being spent.

A few hours later, something magical had happened. After a few conversations encouraged among the students, there was a very positive air filling the room. We were still slowly discovering our purpose in that room, but we all knew we were going to leave with something more than we came with at the end of that weekend.

Overall, we spent about 24 hours together that weekend. About 30% of the students were remote and had to fly back to their homes and families on Sunday. CMU allows remote collaboration as a way of participating in the program. The Lego game had been a way of discovering our own weaknesses when acting as a part of a team: things slow down, but end well after a few tries.

The events of those 24 hours were way too many for me to talk about in this blog post. Bill Portelli, the CEO of CollabNet gave us a talk. Dr. Martin Griss of CMU had us playing with Legos. We went out to the Castro street of Mountain View for dinner with the faculty. I ended up having a few pints of beer with Dr. Stuart Evans, when our group went to the Tied House Brewery to celebrate the first night. He had just returned from England and I started chatting with him about my brief trip in London and Edinburgh. To my surprise, he was very knowledgeable about Persian culture, even compared to the average Iranian. Just when I was fascinated by his friendliness, charming English accent and exciting background with entrepreneurship and high-tech startups, he started talking about Hassanloo village, an archeologically significant site in Iran. He seemed to know a lot about the food and culture, and a few things about the language as well. I know that my family and most of my friends would describe running into someone that knowledgeable quite a rare experience. At the end of the night, I couldn't be any happier to be looking forward to my first course that he teaches: Elements of Software Management.

The experiences of this weekend were too overwhelming for me to reflect on in just a few paragraphs. But the big observation I made when it comes to your personal growth is that no matter what the cost is in time and money, just do it. You live only once!

Company size matters

A quick thought occurred to me this morning as I was taking the elevator up to the second floor to my desk at Adify: I feel a part of the family.

Today it's been exactly one month since I started here. Already most faces look at least familiar, if not friendly. I've had the chance to interview a few new hires and have an impact on the future membership in this family. And I know exactly my role, that is, what part of the product I'm engineering.

I read half of the book "Leadership and self-deception: Getting out of the box" by The Arbinger Institute last night. So far it's a great book and I highly recommend it. It's written mostly in a dialogue format and illustrates how little we get to know the people around us in our quest to advance in our careers. It argues that ironically, the key to career advancement is in getting to know people around us and treating them as equals on a very personal level, rather than as parts of our self-elevation machine that just happen to be made of people.

I liked people I worked with at Microsoft equally well. I still remember their faces and their kindnesses. The exact charismatic facial expressions of a few of them come to my mind when I read case studies of leadership in this book. But there was a fundamental difference: At Microsoft, the sense of unity I feel now didn't exist.

I'm going to have to resort to analogies to explain this better. A team is like a tribe: with its own culture, role structure and survival goals. When a small tribe is unleashed into the wilderness, their primary evolutionary purpose becomes tribe-, not individual-, survival. The resources in the nature are infinite, and so are the survival risks. Performing your duties in the tribe is not a zero-sum game. If you perform in such a way that you increase the productivity of the tribe, you and everyone else will feast more often. If you don't know how to handle your tools, it's in everyone's best interest to teach you voluntarily, knowing that when the roles are reversed, you will do the same for the common good.

As the tribe grows into a gigantic size, it faces new natural constraints. The resources, once virtually infinite, are now only as vast as the size of the tribe itself. While ingenuity will always lead to more production despite limited resources, the natural and physical constraints on resources put more pressure on individuals to be creative. Any lapse in the stream of visions for new ways of maintaining and increasing production will put more demand on exploiting the existing resources. The culture of co-operation, facing scarcity of resources, turns into the culture of zero-sum games. Gains are finite, and therefore scheduled. The tribe cannot grow faster than the nature will allow it to, similar to how the company cannot grow larger than the market itself. The scope of success is therefore reduced from the good of the collective to the good of the smaller groups inside the collective who compete with each other for scarce resources.

This is what breaks apart empires. This is why powerful kingdoms and unions have to deal with separatist revolutionary groups. When scarcity for all becomes the norm, minorities will spontaneously try to tip the balance of survival.

Let's get back into reality. When a company dominates the market, you see people hiding away in their offices, trying their best to outperform each other. It looks competitive and brilliant. It looks impressive, until you lift up your head and realize you have become one of them. You get to work a certain time of the day and you leave work exhausted after 10 or 12 hours to manage the other broken roles you have to play at home, as a friend, a spouse, a parent or otherwise as a balanced human being. You give it all, compete, get stacked, ranked, allowed to survive just to do it all over again next year. The culture of doing important things for the common good is replaced with the culture of doing unimportant but urgent things while hitting yourself against the walls of nature and waiting for something good to happen out of the blue.

One thing I really enjoyed about my life in Washington before I moved to Silicon Valley was the huge, tall and lush trees. I often felt lost in nature driving down Bellevue or up the Cascades. It's an amazing feeling, as if one is lost in the Fangorn forest of a Tolkien epic story. And in the end, I observe that as a human-being, I feel healthier when I'm a small part of an infinite nature. It's the chase we're all in love with, not the domination. In our evolution, we have always faced infinite resources. Our minds have developed into machines that cooperate with each other to build new tools to survive.

When our tribe population dominates the forest, when the cottages become town-houses and the duplexes become skyscrapers, we may need to move out to less explored lands; just to find a neighbor who wants to invite us in for a cup of coffee instead of going over the maintenance schedule. Our ultimate goal is to be happy, and our happiness is tied to a sense of being fit for survival, together as a group. Maybe it's time to jump back into the wilderness.