The new buzzword these days is passion. You must have passion in your corporation. Microsoft has built a whole brand around the slogan, "
Your potential. Our passion."
Passion is good, but you need to have the right kind. You don't want the bad kind of pseudo-passion, that Rory Blyth
describes, where passion is faked simply for the sake of having passion. Rory says:
"It reminds me of a twelve year old smoking. If you’ve never watched an extremely young person smoking, then you should try it. They clearly don’t understand that smoking is about being addicted to something that smells awful and makes your breath smell like a rotting pig intestine. They very stiffly raise the cigarette, and then, with no soul or style, drag off of it, pretend to savor the flavor (since that’s what the cig ads tell us to do (which is like savoring having someone shit in your mouth)), and then exhale in the traditional fashion.
Understanding the process doesn’t count for anything if that’s the only reason you’re doing something."
I can't dispute the idea that passion is a good thing. I am all in favour of having passion. I used to have an assload of passion. In fact, on our old performance review system I used to grade myself as having too much passion.
A wise man, let's call him "Eric", once drew a picture for me. It was a triangle that looked like this:
At the top of the triangle are the people we were to be passionate about. The patients. Next were the physicians. These two were the reason we were in business. Next was the hospital, since they were paying the bills. Next was the company. Without any of the people at the top of the triangle, the company wouldn't even be here. Finally, the shareholders. The basic idea was that if we cared enough about the people that mattered, and made good software, everything else would sort itself out. The company and the shareholders (and the rest of us) would all do well.
Eric said that if we ever stopped caring about the people that mattered, if the company ever sold out, the triangle would flip, and look like this:
You can feel the passion melting. It's pretty hard to get all fired up about focusing on your core competency, or increasing shareholder value, or cost cutting. For me, at least, passion in software development comes from doing cool things. From helping people.
If triangles aren't your favourite shape, let's try another one - a sphere. In fact, there are two spheres - your sphere of influence and your sphere of concern. They look like this, where the sphere of influence is the red circle, and the sphere of concern is the green circle.
In an ideal world, the spheres are the same size. You are the master of your destiny. If you're living in an ideal world, you might as well stop reading now. In the real world, however, your sphere of concern is much larger than your sphere of influence. This is not good for maintaining passion.
There are two ways to fix this. You can shrink your sphere of concern, or grow your sphere of influence. Obviously, it's much easier to shrink your sphere of concern. In fact, the key to being happy is to care less. It's like a lobotomy, only cheaper. The recovery time is much shorter, and you don't have to ruin a good haircut.
You could turn to my friend Al. You might know him, Mr. Al Cohol? The thing is, I can't drink much more than I am now without hurting my liver permanently, and I don't really want to do that. And I just can't stop drinking - it means too much to me to give it up. It's become a hobby.
So the only thing to do is care less. Say with me, "Must. Care. Less." And exhale. Ahhhhh... I feel better already.
