thirdbIT

This morning I just rediscovered a year-old post on James Gray’s (of Textmate: Power Editing for the Mac fame) blog, in which he answers the question “How do you get so much done?”

I can’t tell you how often I see people say things like, “I’m not really qualified to do that,” or similar excuses. Oh hell, neither am I, but I wouldn’t let a little thing like that stop me! You learn as you go, you drag in the help you need, or whatever. Passion will conquer so care enough to have some. Be the driving force and the rest will take care of itself.

He fingers both fearlessness and passion as important to getting things done.
Me, I don’t much care for passion. I distrust passion. Except, as I pointed out in August, as regards cheese:

I still think passion is overrated, though. Except where cheese is concerned. I am passionate about cheese. For example, this Vermont Brie is really fantastic. If only someone would make a truly artisan domestic parm…! But I digress…

I like interest, friendship, love, playfulness, curiosity, satisfaction, absorption, and joy. Maybe that’s because passion implies a kind of singlemindedness that I’ve finally accepted that I just don’t have, and don’t want. Maybe it’s because I find that I cannot be passionate and fearless at the same time: passion makes me cautious. My best work, my best ideas, and my best productivity come when I am playing with something that is not excruciatingly important to me. It’s a spirit of fearless play, not passion, that drives what I do.

Not, note, that I am claiming to actually accomplish an awful lot. I’m just pointing out that, to the extent that I accomplish anything, it’s because I don’t take it too seriously. The second I start taking something seriously, I completely freeze up.

For example, this time last year, I’d just had a baby. I hadn’t worked for pay in about three years, and I had no plans for that to change anytime soon. Then Max had a contract end and decided he wanted to learn Ruby on Rails (this was back when he thought he really wanted to be an app developer, before he realized that his sweet spot is all the technical stuff that has to do with app development that isn’t actually about writing application code.) Anyway, so he was having a hard time motivating himself to do the AWDR tutorial. Fine, I said, I’ll do it too, maybe we can motivate each other.

Then I convinced him that we should try to start consulting together, and we started the blog. Hey, I thought, no one is reading this thing, I can write whatever I want. For example, here’s a quote from my very first blog post, in March:

Someday soon we’ll be able to say “yep, we know Ruby on Rails” and we’ll have our fantastic contributions to the open source world to prove it. “Right,” you’ll say, after reading this blog. “We’re looking for someone with five years experience with Ruby on Rails. You have three months.” And we’ll say “That’s the way it goes, suckas. You want to hire people who don’t actually exist. We, on the other hand, exist.” About Ruby. We’d originally decided that Max would pick up Ruby on Rails, and I would freshen up my Java skills with STRUTS, which was just coming out last time I did serious Java coding and which I am, by all rights, long past due for learning. This felt very serious and sensible. Also not fun.

And then, later that day, the key to it all:

How are we able to be so marvelously decisive? We just pretend that everything we’re doing is fake, and therefore of no consequence.

If we’d been really passionate about the whole thing, and utterly convinced that this was our calling in life, that our business absolutely had to succeed, that everything had to be done right, we would never have gotten anywhere. But we started out not caring. We did not know ruby on rails. We did not know any ruby on rails developers. We had no idea where we would find clients. I hadn’t done any programming whatsoever for nigh on three years, having devoted my time instead to recovering from the nervous breakdown I had when I was pregnant with Ari, learning to garden, grinding my own wheat for baking bread, writing a political blog, rediscovering my love of painting, visiting and eventually applying for and receiving visas for permanent New Zealand residency and, finally, being bedridden and anemic and puking during most of my second pregnancy. So hey, why not try something new? Who knows if we’ll like it? Who knows if we’ll be any good at it? Who knows if it’ll work out? Who cares?

Here’s me a month after we started the blog, in April:

I don’t know where this all is going, exactly. I’m not ready to work full-time right now. I’d rather Max not work full-time either. I want us to find a way to work together, and not all the time. I want everything — the perfect setup! I am not sure how we’ll get to our dream work from where we are right now. Will we find a job to share, or will we be laughed out of any company we tried to convince to hire us for one? Will we do some consulting, or will it turn out that we can’t stand all the self-promotion required to consult? Will blog.thirdbit.net end up going to that great bloggie graveyard in the sky? Will I work for pay again, or spend my days sitting in the park snickering at the bugaboo strollers? Is the final cylon really who we think it is, or was this year’s season finale a red herring?

In May, we got our first clients. In July, I saw a post on the Boston Ruby Group that someone needed a TA for a Ruby on Rails class at Harvard Extension. Hey, I thought, I’ve been a TA at extension before, maybe I could do that. I went to the interview and was like “yeah, I’ve been using RoR since, uh, March.” And John, bless his heart, was like “oh that’s cool, whatever.” He wanted a TA who already knew how very much work it was to grade all those programming projects, and how very little money Harvard thought all that work was worth.

In August I wrote a blog entry about method_missing which somehow got Reddited and then mentioned on Ruby Inside, which resulted in a huge spike in blog traffic.

And I ended up TA’ing this class. And it’s been absolutely a blast, and John hired Max to do some systems consulting work (migrating his company over to a new bug database).

And after John introduced me to Steve Yegge’s blog I started feeling I was just a completely crap developer who knew nothing about anything, and that gave me an idea for a book one night when I was up with Aya who was teething, and wrote up a proposal the next morning, and sent out the proposal, and got a book contract. So now I am writing a book, about which more soon.

And since I was TA’ing the RoR class I made sure to show up to the Boston Ruby Group meetings and eventually everyone got used to me being there and started to know who I was, and I started corresponding a bit with Greg Brown over email so when he came up to speak at the December Ruby Group meetingI was like, what the hell, and invited him to dinner, which was a lot of fun.

And Max and I each got more clients doing exactly the kind of thing we each like most to do right now. ( Obligatory self-promotion: Look here for more info if you might want to hire one or both of us!)

Anyway, it has worked out for us. Not exactly the way we imagined it might, but nothing ever does. And since we weren’t all that invested in what we’d imagined in the first place, it didn’t bother us that much to change it.

I don’t know what will happen next. But I do know that everything great that we’re getting to do, all the good stuff happens when we treat our lives like a game, and play, fearlessly.

So we got some really nice links this week, and with the links, a bunch of click-throughs. And some wonderful comments, all of which we deeply appreciate. And now of course, I’m choking . I have about 20 posts in various states of readiness, from “just an idea” to “nearly done but I suddenly think it sucks and wasn’t a good idea for a post in the first place”, but nothing ready to go.

Oh wait, here’s something to keep you from dumping us off your feedreader (or dumping us faster, who knows?!). A snippet of a column by Cary Tennis, Salon’s advice columnist , responding to someone who can’t decide whether to give up a career opportunity for his girlfriend, whom he loves passionately:

You say one cannot calculate the value of a job or a relationship, but I do not think that is true. I think one must calculate it. Courts are called upon to do so. Moreover, intuitively we do it anyway. For instance, suppose that you and she settle down and have a good relationship and good jobs. Say that one day a supernatural being comes to the door and says that you must give up either the job or the relationship. Which would you choose? Which would you consider expendable? Which would you consider replaceable?

While in science many problems are difficult because they are complex, in life many problems are difficult because they are simple, but we are human and we want everything. While in the conduct of science we would never suspend physical laws to get the result we seek, in life we try that all the time: Can one person be in two places at the same time? Well, people say no, but maybe in this case … I don’t know … if I accumulate enough free miles maybe I could fly from Toronto to Oakland enough times that I could appear to be in two places at once …

I don’t think so.

If you’re reading this blog and wondering why Max and I have this crazy idea that we’ll somehow each work part-time, or consult together, or work out of the house, or do something weird and web-worker-daily-ish, and we don’t want to travel much for work and we don’t want long commutes and we don’t want to be these people, toiling away in the “Silicon Valley salt mines” — that’s why: We’ve got one life to live here, people, and we can’t be in two places at once.