Quotes from fiction with my reflections on collaboration, learning, and other things
““Brightness,” the man said as she stepped up to him, “we aren’t what you think we are.”
“No,” Shallan replied. “You aren’t what you think yourselves to be.””
– Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance
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Sometimes we need to be reminded of who we are and what we can do. When we can’t see it ourselves, we need someone who tells us what we are capable of doing, who we are capable of being.
“If you’re mining for coal, you keep a canary in a cage so that if you hit a gas pocket, the bird will die before you do, and you have time to get out. Assuming that you don’t explode. Actually, in modern times the canary has been supplanted by an electrocatalytic sensing electrode, but quite a lot of people still call the unit after its avian predecessor.”
– Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World
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We all need canaries in our lives that will tell us that we are in a bad place before we fall unconscious. We need some way to make sure that we are living a healthy life before we realise that we have not worked out for a year. We need some way to tell us if we are too stressed or work too much. We need some way to check our balance between working and meeting friends and family.
How do you measure if your life is where you want it to be? What is your alarm? What is your canary?
“Why do colors turn brown when they mix? Three beautiful colors put together, and they become the least beautiful color. It makes no sense,””
– Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance
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Painting in school, it always fascinated me what happened when I mixed colors. If you took two colors it usually turned into another color that looked really great, but when you started to mix in more and more colors it ended up brown and boring.
This is a great metaphor for building teams. People with different backgrounds, skills and competencies might complement one another perfectly, or they will clash. The difference between working with colors and working with a clashing team, is that if you keep working with a team they might go from being an ugly brown to a beautiful mix.
“He was just the right man in the right place, and that was so obvious that no one argued about it. He never exactly gave orders or speeches, he just went ahead with the driving and let us get on with our thing–it’s not as if anyone had any doubts what the task was, after all–and when something tricky came up he wandered around Piper 90, from the roof garden to the engine level, and he talked to people.”
– Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World
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If people are completely clear about their organisation’s goal, and their teams’ purpose in it, then they will always be able to work towards it. The leader will not have to give any day-to-day orders. She or he can instead focus on the strategic issues. If something unusual happens, trust in your team to do their jobs, they know what needs to be done better than you: Your job is to to make sure that people are talking to one another and that they have all the information they need.
“You’re really not interested in power, are you?”
It was my turn to shake my head. “Power is fleating, and I like not having the responsibility of people who look up to me and need my guidance. Life is simpler that way.”
– Steve McHugh, With Silent Screams
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If you choose to lead then you also take the responsibility of being the leader. It means having people that look to your for guidance and direction. This responsibility will change from day to day, and from group to group. But it will always be there. Some people fear this responsibility so much that they will do anything to avoid leading; and some people thrive on leading to such an extent that they might forget the responsibility.
You have to check what your colleagues expect of you, and that they know what you expect of them.
“One of the bad parts about being in charge is having to think of every conceivable terrible idea and trying to work out which ones I can actually prevent.”
– Steve McHugh, With Silent Screams
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To be able to create possible scenarios of what could happen is only a useful skill if you also can evaluate their costs.
You simply ignore it if something is probably and the cost to avoid it far exceed the cost of it happening, and you do something about it if the cost to avoid it is low. The hard part comes in estimating probabilities, if something is extremely improbable but the cost of it going wrong is extremely high, how much time and effort should you use to try and avoid it?
“So that’s it? I say sorry, you say sorry and we both move on?” Galahad’s laugh was enough to force him to sit down. “It’s a good thing that we’re almost immortal, or the last thirty years would have felt like a really stupid waste of time.”
– Steve McHugh, With Silent Screams
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We are not immortal, so going around for years being angry with someone is just a huge waste of time. Either decide to do something about it or let it go. This is not always easy, but we need to start focusing on what it is we need to move past the grudge instead of what the other person ‘should’ do.
It is not about who is right and who is wrong. It is about not wasting your time.
“In my mind
In a future five years from now
I’m one hundred and twenty pounds
And I never get hung over
Because I will be the picture of discipline
Never minding what state I’m in
And I will be someone I admire
And it’s funny how I imagined
That I would be that person now
But it does not seem to have happened
Maybe I’ve just forgotten how to see
That I am not exactly the person that I thought I’d be”
– Amanda Palmer, In My Mind
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This song made me remember my 30th birthday. I was attending a conference in Frankfurt. I remember how I woke up in my hotel room and walked in to the bathroom. When I looked in to the mirror my mind, all the expectations I had when I was twenty flooded into my mind. All my dreams and thoughts of how I thought my life would look like when I was thirty. When I was twenty I was certain that I would have everything figured out when I was thirty; I would be married, I would have children and I would have a clear career ahead of me.
This clashed completely with where I was 6 years ago; I had just met my girlfriend, I had no children, and I was halfway through my PhD. I had fulfilled nothing of what I thought I would and for a few seconds I felt panicked. The feeling turned into amusement and contentment when I realised that I was happy with where I was now and what I was doing. I loved doing my PhD, I loved the freedom I had, and I was so excited to have met the woman I have now married.
“Fuck yes! I am exactly the person that I want to be”
– Amanda Palmer, In My Mind
“When I was eighteen, clubbing literally meant hitting someone with a very large club.”
– Steve McHugh, With Silent Screams
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I love reading about words, how they change meaning and where they come from. One of my favorite sites to browse through is EtymOnline. I can spend hours just reading about the meaning of words and their (often latin) roots. It gives me new perspective on what we actually may be saying, feeling and thinking. I don’t care much for the exact definition of words; I like that they develop over time and that we find new ways of using them all the time.
I like the possibilities that exist in a word.
“…water or rivers always seek the easiest path downhill, and that was why the waters often dropped great distances over falls.”
– L. E. Modesitt Jr., Antiagon Fire
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It is so easy to take the path of least resistance, to just follow the path followed by others or the path where we see the least amount of conflict. Life would probably be easier for us if we handled some of the conflicts in our life instead of just avoiding them. And life might be more fun and rewarding if we travelled away from the common path and found our own.
What path are you following at the moment?
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