Coping With Reality
I got an email a year ago. A friend of mine was asking what I thought about happiness. He was especially thinking if we should pursue happiness? Or not? I wrote back a lengthy email that covered different revelations that have helped me in pursuing happiness. Or perhaps not pursuing happiness, but coping with reality. What’s my meaning in life? When it comes to happiness (or success), I’ve followed Viktor Frankl’s words Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it His book The Man’s Search for Meaning had profound impact on me several years ago, as I realized what truly matters in my life and organize it according to it. He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how (Nietzsche) Those of you who haven’t read Frankl’s book, the part that resonated the most with me, is where he goes through different types of whys you can have for your life Love Work Dignity in suffering Of these love and work are the ones that provide meaning for me. They give me a reason to wake up every morning. They also give me a reason to overcome whatever challenges I encounter in my life. I love my son and wife, who I provide my physical and mental presence as much as possible. In case of work, my journey to create software development approach of the next century, is a cause greater than myself and which I’m approaching by trying to understand as much as I can on how we (should) develop software. It’s also something where my passion meets the needs of other people and I truly believe I can make a difference. Managing your life according to your meaning(s) The first step years ago was recognizing what provides me a meaning in my life. The second step was to reorganise my life based on those. If my son and wife gives me a reason to live, I can’t spend majority of my time to work or hobbies. I wouldn’t act according to my values. What helped me in reorganizing my life, was a video of big and little rocks. It’s just a demonstration of how you can fill more rocks and sand to a jar by filling first the big rocks to the jar. Regardless of the science behind filling the jar, it was thought-provoking metaphor. I decided to make sure I give enough time to things I value Family Work (not over 40 hours per week) Sleep (minimum of 7 hours per night) Physical exercise (I don’t own a car so I bicycle to work every day around the year, we also have floor ball session once a week at work during the work day - so it doesn’t take time away from my family or sleep) These were the big rocks. After that came small rocks (sand) if it had space to fill in. Sand was for example Reading articles, listening podcasts, watching conference talks Attending conferences that required me to be away from home several days (or evenings) More time consuming physical exercise (for example going to gym or playing badminton with a friend) Watching Netflix I’ve kept this approach several years now and it has felt good. I think there’s a good balance in my life and I dedicate my time to something I truly value. Besides just managing my time, I also changed other habits during the past few years. I wanted to increase the probability of living healthy as long as possible. In order to accomplish that I Quit drinking alcohol completely Increase vegetarian food in my diet Reduce weight (from 90kg to 78kg) & lower cholesterol (from 6.5 to 4.5) Eat everyday walnuts Empathy toward yourself Years ago I didn’t have good ways to handle moments where things didn’t go as I hoped they had. Especially if I thought I had failed, I used to be really hard on myself. This would affect my mood for a long time and in the end it didn’t do any good for anyone. I was fortunate to find someone who helped me in becoming more empathic toward myself. That person was Jerry Weinberg. Through the books, email and face-to-face discussions with Jerry, I’ve been able to stop being too hard to myself. Instead there’s couple sayings that help me over difficult moments There’s no failure, only feedback Accept what is and build on it Whatever happens, only thing that matters, is what you do next. What do you take from the moment of frustration and build on it? How do you use the observations and feedback for becoming a better version of yourself? We all face moments where someone is being hard on us. Let’s not do that by ourselves. There’s no need for that. Empathy toward others Besides being empathic toward myself, I’ve done my best to be empathic toward others also. Here I’ve followed another advice from Jerry No matter how it looks, everyone is trying to be helpful I used to get frustrated on what someone said or did. At some point though I started to, regardless of how sure I was to believe otherwise, assume that people were trying to be helpful. That they were acting the way they did because that’s the only reasonable way to act. Considering what they’ve gone through and what their current situation is. While there certainly can be situations where someone is deliberately trying to hurt you, I also many times got to a point that the other person showed a sign of vulnerability after me being sympathetic. There’s been many email conversations where I’ve got a response that could be interpreted as ill-intentioned. Instead of attacking against that response, I’ve noticed that sympathetic face-to-face conversation or response from my part, has often solved the situation. This has led to much more humane further responses from the other person. I just mentioned communication. That’s a skill that has actually helped a lot in maintaining my empathy toward people generally. Mainly because it’s how I’ve managed to solve those tricky situations where I’ve felt someone is hostile toward me. If I had to highlight few things that stand out from my approach to communicating with others, those would probably be Emphasize your feelings when communicating to others Observations over interpretations Express empathy Solve disagreements as soon as possible Don’t assume you know what other person is thinking
Remembering Jerry Weinberg
I learned today that Gerald “Jerry” Weinberg passed away yesterday. Despite being deeply sad by the news, I still wanted to use this moment for remembering what Jerry meant for me. It took me quite a while to learn who Jerry Weinberg is. I think it was such late as 2012. Eventually I ended up reading - like many others - The Secrets of Consulting and Are Your Lights On?. And I rarely read books. There was just something on how those books were written. My thoughts were provoked and I wanted to learn more. Not just what Jerry had written, but who is Jerry Weinberg? The Past Besides Jerry’s Wikipedia page, one of the first steps on learning about Jerry’s past was to listen This Week in Software Testing podcast that had Jerry as a guest. It was recorded on 2010 by Matt Heuser and Michael Larsen if my memory serves me right. On that episode I learned how Jerry had been involved with Project Mercury late 1950’s Because of the complexity and worldwide nature of the system. I (Jerry) decided that we need to have a group of people dedicated to quality, including testing of the system. We created such a group, which is as far as I know, had never been done before. They lived through the whole project, unlike a lot of testing groups today. They were involved right from the very beginning. So, for example they could comment on whether the software we were building, was in fact testable, by then. Which wasn’t sure at all to just automatically happen. Because this was, not only first human life system, but it was the first worldwide online system, ever build, and presented many unique problems in testing. That’s how we got into this. It was after that that other people began to realize they needed separate testing groups. But it became different. Our testing group was composed of experienced and talented software developers. Later on, managers began to see testing groups as a way to hire cheaper people and put them in testing, because they didn’t have to know how to develop software. I’m thinking a lot of managers thought all they needed to do is sit in there on terminal and bang on keys, like monkeys. Of course that’s simply not true, but it’s taken us a long time, for many people in industry to realize, that testing is as professional, a job, as we realized it back, literally half a century ago. And many managers today still don’t understand that. I ended up writing a blog post later about Project Mercury and Death of Testing as I felt we were coming back to where we started from with current modern testing teams. Not to forget development practices which Jerry discussed on Iterative and Incremental Development: A Brief History. I was fascinated about the history of our craft what role Jerry had played in it. Thanks to Twitter, I was other times fortunate to ask where for example test cases came from But the more I searched information on Jerry, the more I also faced PSL (Problem Solving Leadership) course being mentioned. I especially remember Let’s Test 2013 conference where Griffin Jones told me that I have to go there. Years passed and I read more Jerry’s books, but that comment from Griffin never went away. Fast forward to 2015 when I decided it’s now or never. Because I was changing the company I worked for, I wasn’t able to get my employer (well I didn’t felt it was right thing to do) to pay the course, even though they promised to pay it before I announced I’m leaving the company. I decided though to pay the course myself, despite it costing me 5000 euros. It was an investment to myself. If you’re interested of Jerry’s past, there’s absolutely brilliant series of articles by Danny Faught. First post can be found from his blog by the name of First Interactions. From there on you can find the others. There’s at least 7 of them. PSL 2016 In March 2016 I flew to Albuquerque in New Mexico, US. Those 6 days in Albuquerque were full of learning and I still carry those with me this day. But that’s not I wanted to cherish today. It was the moments I had opportunity to learn to know Jerry as a person. Like playing Scrabble (with interesting rules, to say the least) Or when we visited Jerry’s home and saw his wife Dani and their dogs Many who come to PSL usually probably look answers that are related to our professions. Naturally that was one of the main reasons for me to come there also. But in the end I noticed that almost all our discussions were related to something else. And that something else was mainly Jerry’s relationship with Dani. I wanted to understand how Jerry has been able to develop such a loving relationship with his wife. Through our discussions I found wisdom that has helped me on my own marriage and I feel great gratitude to this day. It also reminds me of the intolerable sadness that Dani must feel at the moment. I just hope she finds a way to carry that grief with her. While it doesn’t probably help, at least there’s many of us around the globe that are thinking of you Dani. Maybe someone is also wondering what I learned from Jerry related having a healthy marriage? There were many things I learned and the first one wasn’t a secret at all as it was communication. Courage to communicate feelings. Simple and such a hard thing in the heat of the moment. Other thing I took from those discussions was the understanding on how we don’t know what state people are in. Not even our loved ones. Pax Et Bonum Jerry’s influence on me is right there after my loved ones. I can’t emphasize enough his impact on me as a person. How much I’ve gained empathy toward myself and those around me. How much I’ve developed my ability to observe. The list goes on and on. I’ll keep reading his books and sharing his wisdom. In that sense Jerry will continue to live for decades if not centuries. When we visited Jerry’s home, there was a sign above his front door. It said Pax Et Bonum, which basically translates to “Peace and the Goodness be with you” - I’m wishing that to Jerry and especially to Dani