Life Lessons – The Optimistic Programmer

Follow Through on Commitments

I’m still working on my writing style and how I share content. Part of the purpose of this blog is to present myself as a respectable engineer. But there are times when I shouldn’t sugar-coat my experiences, and instead should seek to share a valuable lesson at the expense of my own vanity. This is one of those times.

Not Who I Thought I Was

Last month I had a rude awakening when I got lambasted (well-deservingly) for failing to follow through on a commitment to a friend. I had actually done two out of the three things I had promised to do for him that Friday, but the one I failed to do was far more important for him. The Saturday morning after my self-imposed deadline, I awoke to read a text message from this friend knocking away my past, present and future:

“…If you don’t keep small commitments, you won’t keep big commitments. If you’re not responsible in one area, you won’t be responsible in other areas…”

Yes, he was completely correct. No arguments there. I needed to take all of my commitments more seriously. There really was no problem in doing the thing today or the following, but I had given my word that it would get done on Friday.

What I didn’t see coming (and shame on me for not recognizing it) was a similar conversation with my girlfriend. After telling her about my blunder and the sternness of my friend’s words, she fell completely silent. And her silence said everything to me. When you’ve been with someone for seven years, there are a lot of opportunities to make commitments, and equally many opportunities to break them. Seven years of failed commitments, large and small, came rushing back to me (and to her as well).

That silence took me on one of those symbolic journeys to the underworld: “Oh no….I’m not the person I thought I was. The people around me don’t take me seriously because my word doesn’t mean anything to them anymore.”

The Receiving End

Almost as if God himself had ordained it, the day after this ego-bruising experience, I found myself on the other side of the commitment problem, the receiving end.

My soccer team was scheduled to play for 3rd place in our Sunday league. Morale was low because of a crushing 5-0 loss in our semifinal game, the week before, we had been favored to win. There was no communication that week and no proper headcount until I kicked things off the night before the game.

Commitment to communicate: Many of my teammates failed to even respond to the call to arms. There is always an implicit commitment that gets extended to us to appropriately respond and communicate with others, especially when one is in a long term relationship or team commitment. We shouldn’t kid ourselves that no response is ever an appropriate response.

Commitment to show up: Of the players that committed to show up via text the night before, four of them didn’t make it. No text, no call, just didn’t show up.

Commitment to play: Because we were lacking numbers approaching game time, the players who showed up weren’t getting ready because they no longer wanted to play.

After scrambling to find some guest players at the field and urging my teammates to get their boots on, we played. And we played well for that first half all things considered, up 2-0 by halftime (coincidentally, the worst score in soccer). The wheels fell off the wagon in the second half and we lost 3-2. Some of our players quite literally stormed off the field without saying a word…or paying their referee fees

Commitment to pay: The players that showed up and played, no longer felt the need to pay referee fees. The very equivalent of shoplifting, my teammates had accepted the services of an organized soccer game and now were going to leave the league manager empty handed.

After being told that this had been all my fault: I handed in my jersey, paid the entirety of the team’s bill, and left the field teamless for the second season in a row. (The first time has a life lesson in and of itself.)

The Cost of Breaking Commitments

My ex-team immediately scheduled a game the following weekend (in a different league naturally). But they didn’t see what I had seen. They didn’t fix the commitment problem.

They didn’t communicate, they didn’t get a head count, they showed up late, they lacked the numbers, and they got burned.

Being an observer in their group-chat, I’ve read painful messages from guys in the last few weeks that showed they had lost all confidence in their teammates. Some players would even text the morning of a game that they were just going to stay in bed because it didn’t seem worth it to go.

Some of us have known each other for ten years, and some more. But it only took a few weeks of broken commitments for the team to completely fall apart.

Commitment Problems Everywhere

When I learn a valuable life lesson, I often share it with my Toastmasters International club. I posed to them a simple question at the beginning of the meeting: “In 30 seconds or less, tell us about a promise that you plan on keeping in your life.”

HALF!!! Half of my club members didn’t answer the question. Half of my club members gave the same evasive response: “I try not to make any promises anymore.”

The members of my Toastmasters club are not 20-something-year-old knuckleheads lacking proper judgment. They are retired accountants, leaders at universities, marketing directors, and well respected individuals in their families and communities. They are also members of Toastmasters International, where every week they voluntarily practice their ability to communicate with others and be leaders.

And HALF of them shared the same emotional response to my very simple question: “I’ve promised things in the past and burned myself too many times. It’s better that I promise nothing to anybody. That way I don’t disappoint anyone.”

Now it is time for my confession. My exact response to my friend Saturday morning upon reading his text was: “You are not the first [person I’ve hurt], and you won’t be the last. Though it’d be nice to think you could be. I just won’t make any more promises.” I have also said the same thing to my girlfriend on more than one occasion in our relationship.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

What are we to do then? Honestly, I think it is actually very practical advice to cut back on what we promise, but only so that we have the resources and capacity to follow through on the promises we do keep.

The gut reaction that my club members and I experienced is a very Cain-like response. It’s one that originates out of resentment. Resentment that our good intentions in making the promise could have landed us in such a bad state. Resentment that the good deeds of our past are meaningless in the presence of this mistake.

Cain, for all his efforts and labors, is not blessed with good fortune by God as his brother Able is. Instead of carrying his burdens with dignity and faith, he kills the ideal that he is called upon to embody.

Cain Slaying Able – Peter Paul Rubens (Public Domain)

We can choose the route of Cain, to live in resentment and kill our ideals. We can never make promises again to our friends and loved ones, thereby stopping the suffering. But it leaves us in a place of stagnation with those around us and with ourselves. It reinforces the story that we are the kind of person that does not follow through on commitments and that people should no longer count on us to help move life forward.

We should instead choose to work daily at how we can keep our promises. It might be a simple case of a needed organizational system, or it could be that we are plagued by escapism that chokes our time away from responsibilities. But the story should always be:

“I am the kind of person that people can count on. I am the kind of person that can bear his responsibilities and those of others. I am the kind of person that can ‘transform chaos into order’ (Jordan Peterson).”

The more we practice this (yes, by making promises and following through on them), the more this story will become our realities.

Blessings Along the Journey

I would even go further to say that every struggle we face is a blessing because of the potential hiding just beyond our triumph over it. The dragon may breathe fire, but it also guards a treasure.

Two months ago, when I set out on my strength training journey, I saw the process entirely from the perspective that progress was synonymous with heavier weights. Lift more, get stronger, end of story. It’s certainly not a bad model for the world, but it is a very simplistic one. Two months of tire-meets-the-road training has reinforced the lesson that progress in a meaningful endeavor is rarely so linear or one-dimensional.

Struggles Along the Journey

The journey will quickly present unforeseen obstacles and challenges for us though. For myself in the gym, I learned that my body isn’t flexible or mobile enough to properly perform certain exercises:

My wrists and lats aren’t flexible enough for me to even get into the front squat position.
My rounded shoulders don’t let me put weight directly overhead for the military press and they feel incredibly uncomfortable in the back squat position.
My ankles and hamstrings both restrict my range of motion while performing a deep squat.

There were also long term body ailments that returned to the forefront of my attention. Some vertebrae in my neck and middle back have always given me trouble. For a while, I had let those problems go unnoticed. Now I’m forced to pay attention to them as I place heavy loads on my body and feel the weaknesses and discomfort first hand.

I wasn’t even prepared for the anxiety that set in each day on my drive to the gym. Apparently going into an unfamiliar place to face my own inadequacies, feel the silent judgment of strangers, and bruise my ego was a journey to the underworld.

Blessings in Disguise

Maybe the fact that there is so much unforeseeable struggle is a blessing in disguise. If we could clearly see the entirety of the hardship awaiting us before we even took our first step, would we still make the choice to step forward? Or would we hesitate and aim our lives elsewhere?

I would even go further to say that every struggle we face is a blessing because of the potential hiding just beyond our triumph over it. The dragon may breathe fire, but it also guards a treasure.

A Worthwhile Goal

My perspective on this journey has grown immensely. Instead of strength being simply about muscle size and output, strength now includes structural integrity, joint health, and functional ability. While I used to see stretching as a chore and avoid it entirely, flexibility and mobility exercises are now a part of my daily routine that I look forward to. My mindset changed when I learned that stretching wasn’t just a chore for after a workout, but instead a valuable tool that I could leverage to reach my goals:

front squatting and olympic lifting
a long and enjoyable amateur soccer career
joint health and independence in old age

A worthwhile goal can completely change our perspective of our day-to-day actions.

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
-Friedrich Nietzche

Learn to be Braver

Even though my initial fears of going to the gym turned out to be almost entirely psychological, there is immense truth in these words:

“Taking on your fear as a voluntary challenge does not make you less afraid, it makes you braver.”
Jordan Peterson

I’ve been learning this for years at Toastmasters. Every Tuesday we volunteer to speak in front of our fellow club members. It feels like we become less afraid of speaking each and every week. And one day we find ourselves in a completely different environment on a Saturday, called upon to perform an anxiety provoking task. Our old selves would have run for the hills, but we step forward and voluntarily face the challenge because we’ve practiced being that kind of person.

A Different Story About Yourself

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.”
-James Clear

The first few weeks in the gym were a psychological battle, and now it’s something I look forward to each day I go in. The story I tell myself has begun to shift; I am the kind of person who goes to the gym to improve and maintain his body. And this mindset is spilling over into other areas of my health: the food I eat, my posture at my desk, the time I go to sleep, and yes, even how regularly I floss (thank you Dan John).

More generally and maybe most importantly, I’m training myself to be the kind of person who can follow through on his commitments, have faith in the process, and see long term visions to fulfillment.

That Which We Need the Most

Six years ago, coming out of high school, I was terrified of public speaking, and honestly not the most comfortable conversationalist. What I needed most, was a voice. But the process of acquiring that voice required facing the fear at the root of my problem. There was no way to skip the hurdle or get around the fear.

Tuesday nights have become a symbol of growth for me. Tuesday nights are when I attend Toastmaster International meetings to become a better communicator. Most first-time attendees are invited to participate in Table Topics, an opportunity to speak for two minutes on an impromptu subject. It would be interesting to get the real statistic on how often first timers decline the opportunity. I have a feeling it’s around thirty percent. After having done a single table topics speech though, I don’t think people decline to speak out of fear ever again. Having seen this process over and over, I developed a simple heuristic that I’ve proudly used in some critical moments in life, though not as often as I would have liked: “If an activity gives me anxiety, it probably means I should do it!”

Carl Jung said it better though:

“That which we need the most will be found where we least want to look.’

It’s beautiful, simple, powerful, and exactly what we need to hear. There’s no better angle, no plan B, no waiting it out, and no way around our fears. There’s only moving forward into the darkness^[1].

If I truly adhered to this principle, there’s no telling how much better my life could be. My current plague has been with me since my undergraduate program, the fear to apply for jobs. Writing resumes, outlining my strengths and weaknesses, putting myself out there, reaching out to people, and envisioning what I want out of a career are all activities that have developed monstrous and terrifying characteristics. I tend to keep a safe distance from them.

Is what we fear what defines our actions though? Do we look to our fears and makes Not-To-Do lists each morning? We should probably be asking ourselves what we need out of life. Well a year from now I’ll need a job so that I can support myself and show my girlfriend that she hasn’t wasted the lasted six years of her life. But I don’t just need a job.

What do I need the most? The ability to charter the course of my career. This includes:

Being able to market myself honestly – my value and my experiences.
Searching for teams and projects that align with my skills, principles, and interests.
Reaching out to friends, acquaintances, and strangers to have open and direct conversations about the challenges and needs of a company.
Being okay with rejection.

Framed by this critical message, “That which we fear the most will be found where we least want to look”, there seems to only be two options for me:

Waste another year of my life waiting for the fear to go away, only to be faced with the exact same dilemma.
“Do the thing [to] have the power.”^[1]

I think I know what I’m doing this weekend.

References

Dr. Jordan Peterson: Knights of the Round Table
Ralph Waldo Emerson

For All Our Lives

An excerpt from “The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway:

“Do you remember when [Dick Sisler] used to come to the terrace? I wanted to take him fishing but I was too timid to ask him. Then I asked you to ask him and you were too timid. I know. It was a great mistake. He might have gone with us. Then we would have that for all of our lives.’

I can’t count the times I let fear and timidity get the best of me. This hits all too close to heart.

This passage sprang to mind while writing an email to a friend. I did not need anything from him. I had only wanted to write to him and thank him for all that he gave me while working on a project together: hope, a new attitude, curiosity, and a stronger work ethic. I let the thought of writing to him linger for far too long…three months really. Only after finishing the email did I recognize what I could have lost had I not written to him.

While attempting to relive moments of my life through this message, all the missed opportunities were quick to surface. And it’s certainly a powerful lesson to learn in one’s youth, but focusing only on the missed opportunities doesn’t seem to do myself, or the message, justice.

I’m simply grateful that I get to have this conversation with myself each morning:

“Do you remember the days when we’d get to Chemistry lecture early and enter through the back hallway so we could get a seat in the front? There was always that girl I wanted to get to know, but I was too timid to say hello to her. Then I asked you to approach her and you did. I know. It was the greatest thing we ever did. She was amazing. And now, we have each other for all of our lives.’

Manifesting change with pen and paper

An important reason why I started this blog was to present myself to future employers as a responsible authority. I fear part of this post could serve to cast doubt on my character and abilities. Regardless of perception, I would rather share a genuine experience of progress than portray a false identity.

A few weeks ago, I realized I was neglecting some of my responsibilities. Long term projects weren’t being chipped away at, and small tasks were slipping through the cracks. My mind was a terrible reminder system, and the weight of my failure to act loomed large in my psyche. I returned to David Allen’s book, “Getting Things Done“, and started practicing a simplified version for myself.

I dumped every responsibility, large and small, out of my head and spewed them onto a Word document. This was as cathartic as a solid six-mile run. The pressure in my head was relieved and I could breathe again.

In the process of creating my Next-Action List out of the items in my In-Basket, I found myself seriously doubting that some items were ever going to get done. These weren’t large daunting projects either. They were simple tasks that my mind grew to associate with pain and friction. The fact that I had repressed them for so long, made them all the more difficult to perform moving forward.

Less than a week of practicing this system though, writing down my tasks and dedicating time to them each day, I began completing the very tasks that had seemed unrealizable just a few days prior.

My epiphany: whatever I write down on paper, I can accomplish. Given enough time and effort, I have the capacity to manifest any change in the world I seek to make.

This is a lesson I should have learned many years ago. It’s also an idea several thousand years in the making:

For assuredly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says. Therefore, I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them.
(Mark 11:23-24, New King James Version)

After more than a year of avoiding my blog, I wrote down that I would turn this experience into a shareable message. I completed it within three days.

Enhancing the Game for Everyone

A teammate of mine left our team to start his own team after the first season together in our town’s new adult soccer league. I don’t think there were any hard feelings between Cruz and anyone else on our team to cause or as a result of his departure. If he had left to join the team that beat us in the championship game, that would have been a different story; for there is something inherently dissolute about leaving to join the best team instead of working to improve the team one is with.

Quite the opposite can be said about Cruz though. Even though our team was well poised to have another great season and have another chance at a championship, he left to start his own team with some close friends of his. He jokingly admitted that we would be able to beat his team easily. On the pitch, most of us wouldn’t hesitate to say that winning is everything, and I’ll be conservative with my estimate of myself when I say that it’s only been in the last couple of years that I’ve begun to see “winning” from more than just the scoreboard. So, for a really competitive soccer player, like Cruz, to start his own team, fully anticipating to do worse in the standings, is fairly counter-intuitive at first glance.

I would argue though that Cruz’s act of starting a team was an enormous win for everyone in the league.

First, Cruz gave ten plus guys a new reason to get out of bed on a Sunday morning. That’s ten more individuals who are healthier, stronger, and happier with themselves from having played a game of soccer. For most of us, whom aged out of organized sports after high school, the world is a much brighter place with the adventure, competitiveness, and camaraderie that comes with playing sports.

Second, Cruz brought people back into our lives that we hadn’t seen in a long time. Old teammates and rivals resurfaced with the creation of his team. Not only was it great to reconnect with individuals from our past, but it was surreal to relive the experiences together that once meant so much to us.

And lastly, Cruz was obviously being very modest when he said we could beat his team easily. His team came out with some real intensity and tied our team 3-3. For everyone there on that rainy Sunday morning, they witnessed a majestic display of athleticism, skill, and perseverance. The league is now more competitive. Yes, it is now more difficult to win a championship, but it has never been more convenient to play amongst and learn from high caliber soccer players.

Instead of settling for the status quo, Cruz took a risk and enhanced the game for everyone.

Lay The Brick Anyway

Having recently started my first “big boy” job in the last few months, I have gotten into an obnoxious habit of complaining that I never have enough time for myself. I just got off the phone with my girlfriend, the amazing person who tolerates all of my complaining, and she was very excited for me that I had five whole hours on a Friday evening to myself. My initial, sack-of-potatoes-like response was, “Yea…but it will be over before I can get anything done.”

I do not know when I developed the mentality that a small piece of quality work could not be achieved in a short period of time, but it is definitely a great excuse for never starting things. Part of me had been interpreting the phrase, “Rome wasn’t built in a day” as, “I won’t be able to build Rome today, so why bother starting.”

For me, Rome represents developing software projects, building this blog, strengthening my body, and growing my relationships. I should realize that these ventures cannot all be achieved in a single day, and should instead seek to lay a single brick in the right place. Hell, any place would be good to start.

Even though there are a million obstacles between me and Rome, I am going to lay the brick anyway.

Taking Ownership of this Blog

As easy as it was to logistically set up this blog, I have procrastinated on actually posting any content for a variety of reasons. One important reason was the mindset I had of this not being the right time in my life to start a blog. With trying to find a job and apply to graduate school, the long-term return on investment of starting a blog seemed so impractical. Just another example of my sensible practicality gone astray.

A more difficult reason to grasp and especially overcome would be the feeling of unworthiness that I associate with putting myself out there. For who am I to voice my opinion, start a blog, apply for that job, or want to get into that master’s program?

A shift in mindset

I really enjoy listening to clips from Joe Rogan’s podcast. Not only does he have some truly insightful conversations with people, but he has some very inspiring personality traits. Maybe that should be saved for a separate blog post though.

There is a particular clip from his interview of the director Guy Ritchie that spoke volumes to me. In the interview, Guy Ritchie demonstrates that the “essence of all narratives” is the battle of identifying who we are as individuals. “There are two worlds”, Ritchie describes, the external and the internal, each of which are “trying to tell you who you are”. The conflict boils down to having the confidence to remove your crutches, stand as the person you are, and accept that “you are enough”.

The shift in mindset for me came after naming the dilemma and realizing that this battle was going to take place whether I wanted it to or not. Better then, for my sake, to take ownership of the situation and go on the offensive.

This is where I put my ‘X’

I have high expectations for this blog. This is my corner of the world and I’m going to own it. Just like Guy Ritchie says about suits, “I don’t mean by paying for it”. I’m going to own it by being the master of this kingdom. This blog provides me opportunities to develop discipline and creativity, as well as grow as a person. I intend to build this blog into something I can be proud of.

And yes, I am enough.