The Harajuku Moment

March 15, 2011

A few years ago, sitting in the July heat on a wall in the Harajuku district of Tokyo, I came to a conclusion: I had let myself be a loser. At least, I had let myself become a partial loser. I was fat and unhappy. My skin looked grey. I was slowly killing myself. I was obese. I made excuses to myself and others. I used my success in other areas as a justification: I just wasn’t a fitness guy.

It was bullshit.

Me (on the right) and Michael Foord

These days I’m still not an elite athlete, but I’ve turned things around. I’ve lost nearly 100 pounds, gone from a max ability to run 45 seconds at a time to running a half marathon, and lost 10 inches around my waist.

Me after losing 70 pounds (photo by Duncan Davidson)

Before, I was incomplete. I allowed myself to believe in a partial picture of myself. Now, I’m closer to the real me. I’m still a smart, creative guy. But I can also do more pushups in a row than the average American male, and can run longer and faster than most guys my age. And I feel great. I feel noticeably better almost all the time.

I’m often asked by other obese and overweight people how I did it. People see me at conferences and other venues and literally don’t recognize me. How did I make such an incredible transformation?

If you’ve asked me this question, this post is for you.

It’s a long story. But I’m going to give you the very very short version: it was easy.

I could tell you exactly which system I devised and exactly what worked for me. But that would be missing the major point. The most important element of making a change like this is that it is easy.

If you could trade your body for one that is 50-100% better in a year, what would you give? If you had asked me in early 2008, I wouldn’t have even believed it possible. I would have given a lot. What about 6 months? Obese or overweight people, what if I told you that in 6 months you could be in almost unrecognizably better shape? Would you jump on whatever I was selling?

The secret? I’m not selling anything. It’s just true. Choose any non-bullshit system and actually stick with it for 6 months and you can and will experience life-changing results. You can extend your life span significantly.

If you’re reading this and you want to change, here’s what I want you to do:

1. Recognize how deep in denial you’ve been
2. Measure yourself now. If it’s weight that’s your issue, get on the scale immediately. Stand on it and cry. You probably haven’t been measuring it, and it’s probably worse than you think. Embrace how far you’ve gone in the wrong direction. This is the end of that long, drawn out series of lies you’ve been telling yourself.
3. Find any program that doesn’t look like snake oil and try it for 20 days. Measure your progress. If you don’t know what to try, start with 45 minute light cardiovascular exercise sessions 4 times per week (find a TV series to watch on a treadmill…a one hour show without commercials is about 42 minutes), forcing yourself to eat a protein-heavy breakfast within 30 minutes of waking, cutting out empty calories and sugars (coke, sugar-heavy “coffee” drinks, beer, etc.), and eating 5 small meals per day.
4. After 20 days, you’re almost 1/6 of the way through a major transformation. You have probably gone down one clothing size or are close to it. How far do you want to go? Pick something you didn’t previously think you were capable of and commit to it. Maybe it’s a bike race or a triathlon or doing Cross Fit.

The funny thing about huge change is that making it happen isn’t usually as huge an effort as we think. We just get stuck. All you have to do to go ALL of the way is to go SOME of the way.

Note: I wrote a more detailed account of my weight loss story in Tim Ferriss’s best selling book, The Four Hour Body. I have no financial interest in the book, but having re-read my own chapter when Tim sent me a copy of the book last December, I was inspired enough to double down on my efforts to go from OK to awesome. I’ve lost 20 more pounds since January 1. Tim’s advice for weight loss is solid, and (if I do say so myself) my chapter alone is worth the cost of the book.

Be Careful Of Who You Work With

February 24, 2011

You instinctively know that who you associate with matters a lot. Our parents bring us up steering away and toward others who influence us.

But most of us don’t realize just how much those around us influence us.

As I recall in the introduction to The Passionate Programmer, there was one specific event that turned the tide for me. I had been chugging along in my slightly-above-average corporate job and experiencing what I considered to be the height of success. Then I had an intense period during which, for a few months, I had the opportunity to collaborate with a whole new level of software developers. It all came to a head when I went to the eXtreme Programming Immersion that Object Mentor taught. After a week surrounded by brilliant developers and leaders in the field, I knew I had to do something different.

I had to be as much like them as I could.

In The Passionate Programmer, I quote Pat Metheny’s advice to young musicians: always be the worst musician in every band you’re in. As a musician and as a programmer, I’ve tried Pat’s advice. You play with a group of people better than you, and you’ll almost always play better.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jazzuality/3613370192/

That’s good anecdotal advice. If you don’t trust Pat, how about Nicholas Christakis? Nicholas is a social scientist at Harvard University. Together with James Fowler of UC San Diego, his research focuses on how behavior and then even EMOTION spread through social networks. Can behavior be epidemic?

Here are some things their research has shown to spread through social networks ilke disease: Obesity), Smoking, Alcohol Consumption, and….HAPPINESS! Yes, emotional state is contagious.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/saintbob/165829023/

These aren’t insignificant numbers, either. For example, obesity chances increase 57% if you have a friend who is or becomes obese. And, more disturbing than that, this is an effect that is conducted through more than one node in the social graph. If your friends’ friends’ friends are obese, you are 10% more likely to be obese

If behavior spreads through social networks, then working in a toxic or slow-moving corporate environment is really really bad for you. If you’re a consultant, you MUST fire the clients that bring you down a notch and seek out clients that pull you up. If you’re a teacher, go where the students care about what they’re learning.

Automation and Outsourcing

February 18, 2011

What’s the difference between automation and outsourcing?

I don’t know if it’s the same everywhere, but here in the USA we’re deluged with fear-driven “news” reporting, decrying the theft or export of our jobs to low cost, less skilled, offshore labor. Or even onshore “illegal” labor. It might be Mexico. Or China. Or India. In the 80s it was the Japanese. And it was robots and computers.

I’m not going to argue whether any of this is true or worth being upset about here. I’ve done it elsewhere. What I’m interested in here is the question: what if, as individuals, instead of fearing outsourcing, offshoring, and automation, we decided to use it to our advantage?

The standard argument against offshore outsourcing goes like this: Offshore people don’t understand the work, or the culture, or don’t care about quality or just aren’t as good. They might be cheaper by the hour, but they’re more expensive in the long run.

OK. That’s a hard one to disprove. It’s also kind of hard to prove. Regardless, hold that thought

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dancoulter/21042744/

In this day and age, we’ve collectively gotten over the fear that computers will replace us all. We’re used to the idea that certain tasks can and should be automated. For the younger readers, did you know that there was such thing as a spreadsheet before computer existed? That’s right. It was roughly the same except a person had to calculate each value! And if any numbers changed, guess what happened? Someone had to recalculate them!

Anybody want that job? I didn’t think so.

So that’s automation. If you think really hard about what you do every day, I bet you can come up with a few things that could be automated so you wouldn’t have to do them anymore. You wouldn’t feel bad about those things. You’d be saving yourself time and saving your employers money if you could automate them. Software developers spend their careers doing this for others.

Anything that could be done by a computer or a robot (roughly) just as well as it could be done by a human should be automated. That frees the people up to think. That’s what we want, ya? Hurray!

Some tasks are almost automate-able. But they just need that little extra push. For example, human language is hard to parse. It’s not exact enough to write reliable programs (usually) to read and act on. So what do you do with those tasks that seem mundane enough to automate but can’t actually be done without a human?

Outsource!

Outsourcing might mean giving the task to a more junior person you already work with. It might mean hiring someone on another continent who costs a fraction per hour than you do and can be trained to do the mundane work you do. It might mean taking on an apprentice and teaching them as they handle the “easy” stuff.

But, the fact of the matter is, in the work that most of us do every day there are things we could have someone less experienced do for us. And if that person is happy to do it, benefits from it in some way, costs less than we do, or is just willing when we are not, it’s not a bad thing to try.

If you continually do things that are “below your pay grade”, you’re wasting precious time or money.

At the end of the day today, think about what you did today. Given a little time, how much of it could have been automated?

Given a little time to document what needed to be done, how much of it could have been done just as well by someone else who is maybe less skilled or less expensive than you?

I Don't Know

January 15, 2011

I had the pleasure of watching Scott Chacon keynote at CodeMash this week. He spoke about how Github “manages” its development team and product development. I enjoyed the talk, and encourage you to download his slides if you weren’t at the conference.

Scott is a very energetic speaker and talks really fast, so he ended his keynote with a lot of time to spare (something I wish I would do more often). So he took questions from the audience.

A lot of the questions were about trying to fit Github’s process into companies of very different profiles. So, for example, “Would this work in blah blah blah environment that is totally different from Github?” Scott’s answer was excellent in these several cases:

“I don’t know.”

He didn’t blow the questions off. He then discussed possibilities. But it was incredibly refreshing to hear “I don’t know” from a speaker being questioned in front of an audience of almost 1000 people.

I wrote in The Passionate Programmer about the difficulty and importance of learning to say “no”. I think “I don’t know” is scarier and harder and maybe more important.

When someone regularly says “I don’t know”, you trust them more when they say they DO know.

Dead-End Jobs: Are You Suffering From Stockholm Syndrome?

December 30, 2010

Have you heard of Stockholm Syndrome? It’s a name given to the condition wherein hostages develop positive feelings toward their captors despite being held in negative, unfavorable and even life-threatening conditions. Victims of Stockholm Syndrome will even inexplicably stay with their captors even when given the chance at freedom.

Hopefully nobody reading this is literally being held hostage right now. If you are, good luck!

For the rest of you, why might I suggest that you are suffering from Stockholm Syndrome? Because employment relationships can manifest themselves in this very way.

In the article, Love and Stockholm Syndrome: The Mystery of Loving an Abuser, Dr. Joseph Carver says that the following four situations serve as a foundation for the development of Stockholm Syndrome:

<quote>

• The presence of a perceived threat to one’s physical or psychological survival and the belief that the abuser would carry out the threat.
• The presence of a perceived small kindness from the abuser to the victim
• Isolation from perspectives other than those of the abuser
• The perceived inability to escape the situation

</quote>

Looking back at my own career (specifically some of the extremely intelligent people I’ve met who are stagnating in oppressive companies or positions) I have recognized that many of these people (and sometimes myself) have felt “stuck” for no obvious reason. Some people seem just plain crazy when you look at their skill sets, ability, and the low quality of work or environment they’re willing to put up with.

So I contacted Joseph Carver to ask his opinion. Could this be Stockholm Syndrome? He agreed. In email, he said “SS is most likely to develop when the employee feels trapped, perhaps by a high salary, fear of losing a career, or fear of humiliation.” So let’s look at his four conditions:

Perceived threat:

Getting fired, being humiliated, not being a “top 20%” employee, not getting a raise. Employers wield a lot of perceived power over employees, especially for those in very traditional corporate jobs. The employer must be willing to carry out the threat. Every business is under the right conditions. It’s how businesses work.

Small kindness

Got a Christmas bonus once when you really needed it? Make a competitive salary? Great benefits? Get to work on a technology you don’t think you’d be able to work on elsewhere? There ya go.

Isolation from other perspectives

Again, a big corporate environment is ripe for this kind of isolation. If you work for BigCo, you learn to do things The BigCo way. The company’s organizational structure becomes a blueprint for your career progression. You start to lose sight of what industry pay and incentives look like since you have a homogeneous population to compare with. Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen even the best run companies create this kind of isolation of perspective and group-think. Charismatic leaders are particularly capable of creating a culture vacuum around a cult of personality.

Perceived inability to escape

According to the Bureau of Labor statistics, American adults spend by far more time working than any other activity. That’s a lot of your waking time being trapped in a routine. In a Stockholm Syndrome situation, the captor chips away at the self-esteem of the captive. So for most of our waking hours, those of us trapped in dead end jobs like these are exposed to environments which systematically destroy our self-confidence. Not only that, a persistent fear and feeling of failure makes it harder to actually explore the options for leaving the bad situation. The instinctive self-preservation reaction in this kind of situation is to work harder to try to avoid the perceived threat coming to fruition.

So, what if this describes your job? You owe it to yourself to find a way out. Hopefully recognizing the signs will show you that the real situation is far less grim than you might believe and that you have control over how you choose to spend the majority of your adult life.

I’m writing this for the many people I’ve met (and the countless I haven’t) that are senselessly stuck in bad job situations. Please stop wasting your precious time.