Why Does It Seem So Simple?

My blog’s sub-title is “It Seems So Simple”. A good friend gave me feedback that I needed a snappier title. Maybe, but let me explain why I’ve chosen this title.

It started when I first considered blogging at the end of 2012. I was parting ways with my then employer, and starting to think about finding a new job. Some folks were giving me The Advice In Platitudes, such as “You’ll be fine” or “Your skills are in such high demand” and “It’ll be no problem”. Could be true, but I found this advice a bit generic. Finding a job is full of seen and unseen complexities. There are obvious factors such as salary, location, title, benefits and vacation time, but there are many subtle issues around company culture, long-term career growth, travel, work load, stress, and so on. As anyone who’s had to job-hunt knows, what seems a straight-forward process is quite complex.

Those complexities are everywhere. As a parent, as an employee, as a business owner, as a project leader, as a team member. It seems so simple. Often times it’s the perspective change that you need. From the outside, it looks pretty easy. But once you get into it, it’s crazy. This is something that fascinates me.

For example, Danielle, the kids, and I all watch a TV show called Tanked. It’s a show about builders of custom acquariums. Each episode, they build two acquariums, and it’s all packaged up nice and neat in a 47 minute show. The tanks are anywhere from fifty to thousands of gallons. The tanks are always super-impressive, with custom curves to the tanks, colorful coral and amazing fish. They make the process of building and installing these tanks seem pretty easy.

What infuriates me about the show, and frankly most reality TV, is that they never talk about the complexity. For example, when they are building a 1000-gallon tank that has 6 foot sides and a complex curve, how do they mold the curve so that it fits just right? What is it like to maintain such a huge tank with specialized fish? Do they just feed them once a day, or do they need a specialized service to take care of the fish. How do they keep the tank looking clean? Talking about these sorts of things would add depth to the show, and would also give me a bit more respect for the hard work they are really doing.

I recently came across Seth Godin’s article about Yak Shaving. This is the idea that in order to get something done, there are a series of steps, often times so many that you need to shave a Yak as the last step. (Read the blog. It’s explained much better there!) I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started what I think will be a very straight-forward job that I thought would be an hour only to find myself 8 hours later involved in something completely different, that may or may not help me complete the original task. This has happened to me recently at work (trying to programatically create new jobs in Jenkins) and at home (trying to work on my car’s brakes).

Some will say that this is a problem, that if you’re off in the weeds trying to accomplish something you’re Doing It Wrong, and that you Don’t Know What You’re Doing. I’m not sure I agree. I would say that: a) being down in the weeds is another opportunity to learn, b) you begin to understand why the people around you seem to take longer to do things than you would expect, and c) maybe that’s what it takes to get the job done (even for experts!). I regularly don’t know what I’m doing until I learn what to do. I call that challenging myself and growing.

There’s a balance here. When I’m leading a project, I can’t be involved in every decision. I can’t know every technology in play, or every demand on my team’s time. As I’ve mentioned before, I love learning, and so it’s difficult for me not to get involved. What I do strive for, though, is to appreciate the complexities that are hidden by the simple statements. I’m going to assume that it’s more complex, and I’m not going to minimize it, even (especially!) if I’m not directly involved.

I love complexity, exploring it, understanding it. Understand that nothing is simple. Expect the complexity and engage with it.