Order The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas to Non-technical Decision Makers at Amazon.com for the low price of $12.95. For a limited time, my blog readers can receive it at a special discount. Go to this site, Wizard and enter the code 7PBGMXNC. The book is an excellent gift for anyone who needs to persuade others.
I spent this afternoon deriving the Riemannian curvature tensor. I started with the notion of parallel transport and applied the covariant-derivative around a small closed path.
Hold on! Don’t hit the mouse button! You don’t have to comprehend General Relativity to appreciate what comes next. It can change your life.
It goes like this …
Observe technologists, like myself, like yourself. They spend hours scribbling mathematical minutiae. They exhaust nights checking C++ code. They take weeks isolating a pathogen, months formulating one milligram of antigen. If there’s a needle in the science haystack, they will chew and spit out every straw.
Technologist are born and bred to ferret details.
But, ask those same technologists to make a single phone call. Request a report be filed. Have them fill out paperwork for a delivery, or heaven forbid, require attendance at a managerial meeting. Then, you will hear weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. You will see grown men and women cry, that is, those who have not rolled over to play dead. You will be rewarded with procrastination personified. The one thing you will not receive is action.
So, there you have the issue. If the details are technical, however so great, technologists will exhaust a career solving them. It the details are managerial, however so slight, they will spend a lifetime avoiding them.
Well, so what. Everyone has this problem. Hamlet was no better.
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprise of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
Had the great bard been a technologist instead of a playwright, he would likely have written,
As a technologist, the first step toward resolving this problem, and it must be resolved if you are ever to be happy and successful, is to realize that those other details are also part of your job. A very important part. I tell college graduates that the best they can hope for is to find a job in which 60% of the job is something they love to do. The other 40% is to ensure that they keep the part of the job they love. I tell them that if the ratio ever becomes 40/60, then look for another job. But, the important part is this. No one, absolutely no one, gets to spend their entire day doing only things they like to do. Not the CEO, not the president, not anyone.
The people around you are important. As a technologist, it is not just about you. Customers are important. The managers are important. The salespersons are important. The janitors are important. People are important and you must interact with them and appreciate their importance. Whether peers, managers, suppliers, investors, or customers, that interaction will take about 40% of your time.
Most technologists hate that 40%. They hate it. So, here’s what you do. Start the day out by completing those things you do not like to do. Make the reports, attend the meetings, talk to the customers, make the phone calls to suppliers, whatever. As much as possible, do all those dreadful things first. That leaves the rest of the day to do the things you enjoy. And you will enjoy them because the part you hate will be out of the way. If you do it the other way around, you will never get to the 40% and it will metastasize like a cancer. You will find yourself more and more uncomfortable with the job and its requirements. Do not let yourself get to that point.
What was the reason you couldn’t eat your dessert first? What was it mom said? “It will spoil your appetite,” she said.
Trust me. No one can chase a bowl of cherry cobbler with spinach.
Your work is the same way. If you do the fun things, first, it will destroy your appetite for doing anything else. Get the problems out of the way, first, and then spend the rest of the day with things you enjoy. If you do that, you’ll find that procrastination disappears, management is happy, and you will actually have more time for the fun stuff.
You must practice exorcism, daily. That Devil, he is in the details.