Michael Lopp's Blog, page 33

8-Bit Star Wars Deaths

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Stimulus Driven Creatures

My favorite VC and I were talking about motivating humans over drinks at Mars Bar. She explained, “Rands, each person needs to hear the same message in a different way. Did you read the language of love piece that stormed around the Internet? It describes the five different ways we might like to receive love: gifts, quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service, and physical touch.”

“Uh, ok, what does…”

“It’s the same basic emotion! And here are five totally different mechanisms that fulfill that emotion. We are stimulus driven creatures, but the way we want to receive the stimulus to satisfy our emotions, our needs, can be totally different.”

The phrase “stimulus driven creatures” immediately lodged itself in my head. One of the many upsides of my job for the past two decades is I am able talk to humans in all of the various emotional states. I’ve seen them up; I’ve seen them down. I’ve watched their boundless enthusiasm about their new job transform into healthy skepticism. I’ve watched them marry and I’ve seen their stated unchangeable worldview be instantly changed by arrival of their children. I’ve heard all their stories a couple of times.

The challenge is these humans are chaotic beautiful snowflakes. Yes, you, good human are a volatile. I know how you tick, but the point my favorite VC makes is there are any number of ways you seek your volatile stimulus.

Hundreds of humans all seeking different types of stimulus multiplied by the fourteen different major projects they work on. Process. Politics. How do you figure out who needs to hear what and in what fashion? The combinations appear infinite and I don’t know where to start, so we’re going to talk about Destiny again.

Still Playing Destiny

I’ve read that game studios employ research and experimental psychologists who are responsible for understanding the gamer mindset. I can see this gig driving two very different outcomes: these psychologists are tasked with making games more addictive or they are responsible for making games more enjoyable. Let’s roll with enjoyable.

As a professional observer of humans, understanding the psychology of video game players would be a fascinating gig. I’m in year two of Destiny and I remain a daily player. There’s this Slack channel with a hundred or so similarly minded humans with whom I regularly romp around the solar system shooting aliens. As I’m apt to do, I’ve begun to notice a handful of archetypes in the game. These humans are motivated by distinct stimulus. Their daily actions are focused on generating more of a specific stimuli because for reasons that are entirely their own, it gives them joy.

They are:

The Collector is motivated by the satisfaction of having all the things. In Destiny, there is a slew of armor, weapons, shaders (the color palette of your outfit), emblems, and countless other trinkets and artifacts. All of this gives the Collector an endless variety of things to collect. Quests and raids grant items or provide currency to purchase them. Some items are crafted from other materials while others are rewards from player versus player competition.

The Collector is searching for a form of completion that is only achieved when all known items of a certain class are acquired. They stare at the completed collection and remember the stories around the acquisition of rare pieces and they revel in telling these stories.

The Collector’s dear cousin is the The Finisher. They are similar in that they both are interested in the act of completion, but where the Collector wants the things, the Finisher wants to discover the end of the story. Games like Destiny or World of Warcraft have a story mode where, via a series of quests, you experience the narrative of the game quest by quest. The Finisher is not satisfied until each and every quest (and optional side quest) is complete.

The Gambler loves the thrill of uncertain outcomes and serendipity. I haven’t played the slot machines in Vegas in decades, but I absolutely know their appeal. Slot machines are pure (dumb) gambling. Insert a coin and maybe… maybe… you’ll win. Sometimes you’ll win big. For the Gambler, the prospect of occasionally surprisingly winning big is a massive motivator.

One controversial aspect of Destiny is its inclusion of mechanics that appeal to the Gambler. Upon completing many of the quests and events in the game, you receive a set of awards.

Sometimes rewards are guaranteed, but for many you’re at the will of the random number generator (or “RNG”). Very simply, at the end of a quest or raid, the game picks a random number and based on that number, you receive a certain award. For a great many of those numbers, your reward is average. For a small set of numbers, your reward is above average. For a very small amount of numbers, your reward is epic.

RNG is controversial in Destiny because there is often no guaranteed way to get a specific item in the game short of repeatedly completing an activity and praying to the RNG gods. The Gambler doesn’t pray. The Gambler absolutely lives for the moment the randomness reveals itself because the Gambler knows – eventually – he’s going to win big.

The Optimizer looks at the Gambler and giggles a bit because the Optimizer can do math. She knows the precise probability of whether the Gambler is going to win big because the Optimizer derives her joy from understanding both how the system of the game works and, more importantly, the means by which she can optimize the system for maximum benefit.

Whereas the Gambler is in it for the thrill of unexpected (but fabulous) outcomes, the Optimizer finds the thrill in understanding what results in efficiency. While video games have become a hundred billion dollar industry, they are still simply puzzles that are meant to be solved. You can add cities, economies, and a massive amount of players, but you are still working to solve a puzzle that, however incredibly hard, is designed to be eventually achievable.

All of the puzzles in these games are built on top of math. How many hit points does that baddie have? How many of those materials do you need to make that thing? How much damage does that sword do? What attributes of your character affect how much damage you do? It seems endless, but it is often knowable and the Optimizer derives her joy from understanding the inputs and the outputs, so she can solve the game in the most efficient manner.

The average player doesn’t need to be that efficient to succeed in the game because a well-designed game will do its best to move you along no matter how wasteful you are with your time. The Optimizer has no time for average. The Optimizer is asking, “I need these three materials, they have an average drop rate of 10% on Venus and I can do three other quests while I am there. This is the best investment of my time.”

The Optimizer sounds like a know it all, but, well, they do.

The Improver is, like the Optimizer, delighted about the numbers-based foundation that video game worlds are built on because they can look at a number and clearly answer the question, “Did I progress? Am I improving?”

A higher level. More attack power. More damage per second. More gold. The Improver shares many traits with others on this list: the Collector and the Finisher cherish different forms of completion, the Optimizer loves efficiency, but the Improver is laser focused on how they are doing on relative and absolute basis.

The Improver has another name that describes the basic stimulus desired and it’s the Watch Numbers Going Up-er. The Improver also has a cousin and her name is the The Competitor. The Competitor must win. It doesn’t matter what must be collected, measured, or optimized, the Competitor derives her joy from being first.

Top of the leaderboard. Most wins. Most assists. Most points. In a group of fellow players, The Competitor’s first order of business is inspecting her fellow players and making the very measurable assessment, “Are they ahead of or behind me?” If the answer is “ahead”, the next question is, “As quickly as possible, how can I rectify the situation?”

The Storyteller is the human who loves the lore. I’m going on the record right now and declare I mostly don’t care about the story in my game. I understand that the story is an essential part of the world I’m traipsing about, but during my World of Warcraft years, I spent a good portion of my game time blasting through the pages of text that explained why I was looking for that black dragon in that place.

Did I miss something important? Probably. Do I care? Not really. Did I play World of Warcraft for years and years having only a cursory knowledge of what was going down in Kalimdor? Yup. Did I have to look up how to spell Kalimdor? You bet.

The Storyteller cherishes the world. In Destiny, there is a massive backstory which is doled out in a set of virtual cards called Grimoire. The idea being that you read bits and pieces of backstory about how the Traveler arrived at Earth and blah blah blah, when do we get to shoot things?

As a writer and an avid reader, it’s clear to me that it’s the value of this lore that comprises a game. It’s the essential foundation and even though I mostly don’t care, I am sure that if it was absent, the ambiance of the game would be two dimensional and lacking poetry, but, yeah, I mostly want to do battle.

The Smart Dresser I took a long break from World of Warcraft, but one day discovered dear friends at work who also were on break, so, of course, we re-addicted ourselves to the game. One evening during the re-addiction, a friend asked if I’d join in a very old piece of content. A raid released years ago.

Me: “Why would you want to run that raid?”

Him: “There’s a dagger that drops in there that goes great with this outfit.”

Ok.

As we’ll talk about in a moment, video games are an escape. They give us a break from whatever existential hurry we’re in and allow us leave the planet for a bit. In those games, we’re often able to construct the hero we aspire to be, but, you know, some nights we want to play dress-up.

Check out my Titan:

The Solo understands the lightweight joy of the Smart Dresser because the stimulus the Solo seeks is also decidedly simple. It’s the absence of complex stimulus.

The Solo is tired from the day and the blissful lack of complications involved in running a quest where his only responsibility is shooting 20 virtual enemies on Mars is all the satisfaction necessary. The Solo is fine running that raid with you, as long as his responsibilities are basic and don’t involve complex decision-making.

Most week day nights, I’m the Solo because on those nights, I’m using games as a mental health break. Don’t mistake my silence for anything except self care.

The Sherpa is an archetype I’ve already discussed and one that I actively seek. For much of the content within a game, you can figure it out alone, but when you venture into multi-player quest and raid content, you need someone who understands what is going on and, more importantly, can carefully and clearly explain it.

After a long day of wrangling the humans, it is not often that I want to take 10 minutes to explain an encounter with a boss, determine the different roles each player will serve, and then stumble through the invariable two to three failed attempts as we work out the kinks.

My initial thought was these are humans who thrive on teaching. They are clear communicators and they are excellent listeners. They encourage others to try that which they’ve never attempted. Their patience is seemingly infinite because they know the work it took to understand this complex puzzle set in another world, they know the joy discovered on solving it, and they want you to experience that joy.

The Sherpa mission is actually bigger than teaching. See, these are humans who want to make the world a better place. They teach because they know that simple act of service will infect and multiply. The human they teach will teach other humans and that’s how you start to improve the world.

Be a Hero

An escape. Our daily lives are full of highs, lows, drudgeries, stresses, successes, and failures and a well designed video game is designed to remove you from that life and allow you to build a fantastic other version of yourself. You can be the guardian risen from the dead to fight for a second golden age of Earth. You can be a Night Elf raised on the island of Kalimdor and dedicated to preventing the second coming of the Burning Legion.

A video game is an understandable and measurable version of life. The reason those psychologists research is to understand basic human motivation so that games can provide that stimulus. The satisfaction, the stimulus, that we’re looking for as humans isn’t that complicated. We want to build, to move forward, to teach, or to win. The challenge is within the real world constructs that we’ve built around ourselves in our companies, teams, and jobs that we ask to provide this satisfaction are terrifically complicated.

A key difference between a video game and your job is that winning at a video game is relatively quite easy. There are legion of designers, engineers, psychologists, and testers who are incentivized to make sure you will succeed. No one is designing your job to be won. In fact, you’re in pretty good shape if once a year someone takes the time to write three paragraphs and spend an hour talking with you about what winning looks like.

Whether you’re a leader or not, be a hero this year. Take a moment to look around and appreciate what you already know. What drives those around you? Brian loves to debate, so debate. Karen thrives when she teaches, so who can she teach on your team? Luke must kill inefficiency, so give him that inefficient process and watch what happens.

Humans thrive when the work gives them satisfaction. It is their optimal state. Video games are designed to be entertainment, but the hours, days, weeks, and months we spend there demonstrate that there are a knowable set of means to provide essential different types of satisfaction.

Take a moment and understand two things. First, how are those around you motivated? What are the small actions you can take every day to fulfill them? Second, take a look at yourself. Sherpa? Collector? Improver? It’s likely a bit of each, but the knowing the stimulus that drives you is a great first step to figuring out what motivates humans1.

Special thanks to the following humans for helping me edit this piece: Justin de Vesine, Michael Ulrich, Matt Farrar, John Hyland, Adam Ochonicki, and my other friends on the Destiny Slack Channel ↩

Shields Down

Resignations happen in a moment, and it’s not when you declare, “I’m resigning.” The moment happened a long time ago when you received a random email from a good friend who asked, “I know you’re really happy with your current gig because you’ve been raving about it for a year, but would you like to come visit Our Company? No commitment. Just coffee.”

Now, everyone involved in this conversation transaction is aware of what is going down. While there is certainly no commitment, there is a definitely an agenda. The reason they want you to visit The Company is because, of course, they want you there in the building because seeing a potential future is far more compelling than describing it.

Still, seeing it isn’t the moment of resignation. The moment happened the instant you decided, “What the hell? I haven’t seen Don in months and it’d be good to see him.”

Your shields are officially down.

A Potential Future

Your shields drop the moment you let a glimpse of a potential different future into your mind. It seems like a unconsidered off-the-cuff thought sans consequence, but the thought opens you to possibilities that did not exist the moment before the thought existed.

What is incredibly slippery about this moment is the complex, nuanced, and instant mental math performed that precedes the shields-down situation. When you are indirectly asked to lower your shields, you immediately parse, place a value, and aggregate your opinions on the following:

Am I happy with my job?
Do I like my manager? My team?
Is this project I’m working on fulfilling?
Am I learning?
Am I respected?
Am I growing?
Do I feel fairly compensated?
Is this company/team going anywhere?
Do I believe in the vision?
Do I trust the leaders?

Now, each human has a different prioritized subset of this list that they rank and value differently. Growth is paramount for some, truth for others. Whatever unique blend is important, you use that blend and ask yourself one final question as you consider lowering your shields. What has happened recently or in the past that either supports or detracts from what I value?

The answer to that question determines whether your shields stay up or go down.

Humans Never Forget

As a leader of humans, I’ve watched sadly as valued co-workers have resigned. Each time I work to understand two things:

Why are they leaving?
When did their shields go down?

In most cases, the answers to Question #1 are rehearsed and clear. It’s the question they’ve been considering and asking themselves, so their answers are smooth.

I’m looking for a smaller company where I can have more impact.
I’ve been here there years and I’m looking for a change of scenery. It happens.
I want to work somewhere more established where I can dig my teeth into one hard problem.

These answers are fine, but they aren’t the complete reason why they are leaving. It’s the politically correct answer that is designed to easily answer the most obvious question. The real question, the real insight, comes from the answer to Question #2: When did their shields go down?

Their shields drop when, in the moment they are presented with the offer of potential future opportunity, they instantly evaluate their rubric and make an instant call: Is this job meeting my bar?

To find and understand this shields-down moment, I ask, “When did you start looking?” Often the answers are a vague, “It kind’a just happened. I wasn’t really looking. I’m really happy here.”

Bullshit.

If I’m sitting here talking with you it means two things: I don’t want you to leave and, to the best of my knowledge, you didn’t want to leave either but here you are leaving. It didn’t just happen. You chose. Maybe you weren’t looking, but once your shields dropped, you started looking. Happy people don’t leave jobs they love.

The reason this reads cranky is because I, the leader of the humans, screwed up. Something in the construction of the team or the company nudged you are a critical moment. When that mail arrived gently asking you about coffee, you didn’t answer the way you answered the prior five similar mails with a brief, “Really happy here. Let’s get a drink some time!” You think you thought Hmmm… what the hell. It can’t hurt. What you actually thought or realized was:

You know, I have no idea when I’m going to be a tech lead here.
Getting yelled at two days ago still stings.
I don’t believe a single thing senior leadership says.

Often you’ve forgotten this original thought in your subsequent intense job deliberations, but when I ask, when I dig, I usually find a basic values violation that dug in, stuck, and festered. Sometimes it’s a major values violation from months ago. Sometimes it’s a small violation that occurred at the worst possible time. In either case, your expectations of your company and your job were not met and when faced with opportunity elsewhere, you engaged.

It’s Not Just Boredom

I covered a major contributor to shield drops in Bored People Quit. Boredom in its many forms is a major contributor to resignations, but the truth is the list of contributing factors to shield weakening is immense. When you combine this with the near constant increasing demand for talent humans, you’ve got complex leadership situation.

The reason I’m cranky is I’m doing the math. I’m placing a cost on the departure of a wanted human leaving and comparing that cost with whatever usually minor situation existed in the past that led to a shields-down situation. The departure cost is always exponentially higher.

My advice is similarly frustrating. Strategies to prevent shields dropping are as numerous as the reasons shields drop in the first place. I’ve discovered shield drops after the fact with close co-workers whom I met with for a 1:1 every single week where I felt we were covering topics of substance; where I felt I understood what they valued and how they wanted to grow.

You know, I have no idea when I’m going to be a tech lead here. Two months ago, someone told them their project was likely to be canceled. It wasn’t.

You know, I have no idea when I’m going to be a tech lead here. At the end of last month, she heard via the grapevine that she wasn’t going to be promoted. When she got the promotion she deserved, it was too late.

I don’t believe a single thing senior leadership says. At the last All Hands, I blew off a question with a terse answer because I didn’t want to dignify gossip. I forgot there is signal even in gossip.

Every moment as a leader is an opportunity to either strengthen or weaken shields. Ever single moment.

Happy New Year.

Managing Humans v3

Next summer, the third edition of Managing Humans will be published. Like the prior edition, I’ll be nuking some chapters, adding new ones, and editing the current ones. I’m also thinking about going full Catcher in the Rye for the cover. Stay tuned.

Long ago, there was a Glossary that captured the terms I used both in the blog and in the books. This Glossary did not make the transition to the new version of the site until this morning. I’ve done a lightweight editing pass on this current version, but would love your suggestions for additions/edits to the current version which will be published along with v3 of the book.

Happy Merry.

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Why I Slack

Earlier this year, I ran a survey to get ideas about how leaders could mobilize. 1311 of you filled out the survey which mean I’m certain the results are full of good ideas and inspiration. It also means I have to mine them.

An obvious mobilization tactic was a mailing list. Sure, it’s old school, but everyone has email and it’d be a low friction approach to gather both current and aspiration leaders. I spoke at MailChimp a few years back, so I mailed the CEO and asked, “What’s the right way to set-up this mailing list?”

To his credit, Ben immediately responded with, “Why don’t you set-up a Slack?”

Right. Duh.

The New Slack Progression

Slack teams are absolutely free to set-up (brilliant), but this makes them 100% disposable (unfortunate). Friends are currently reporting “advanced Slack proliferation” where’ve they filled their Slack client with various teams. I’m currently active on five different teams, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got accounts on another five where the Slack evaluation lifecycle looked like this:

Invite arrives. Hooray!
First login. Awesome!
Introduction. I’m here!
Day #2. … so what?

For the teams I’m no longer actively participating in, the rule appears to be if I don’t have a personal connection with the team – either I’m running it, it’s full of close friends, or it’s my work – I’ve no compelling reason to return on Day #2, so I don’t.

I’m currently “running” two teams via Slack: Leadership and Destiny. The Leadership team currently has 1123 members with 100 channels. Destiny currently has 130 members and 16 channels. I consider both teams to be a success primarily because it’s been many weeks (or months in the case of the Leadership channel) daily vibrant conversation continues, the user base is still growing, and, well, I like to hang out there.

There were challenges on Day #2, but let’s first talk about Day #1:

Just a Bit of Social Friction

If you want to join one of the Slack teams, you need to send me an email.

This a laborious task, but one that I believe is essential to getting committed humans in the door. Yes, there is a web application that automatically sends an invite to the interested parties, but I want you to send a mail for two reasons.

First, while it is not necessary, I like when folks tell me why they want to join the team in their email. I don’t ask for this reasoning, but folks often send short stories about how they got into leadership and what they want to learn. While I rarely respond to these mails except with an invite, these brief introductions humanize an otherwise anonymous email address.

Second, practically, I don’t want to be a part of a community where I don’t have the time to personally invite every single human to the conversation.

Slack is not about scale. Over at Leadership, of the 1000+ users, we regularly have 200+ people actively writing on a daily basis. Divide those 200 by the 30+ regularly active channels and you’ve got a manageable set of conversations going on regarding 1:1s, hiring and interviews, presentations – heck – there is even a bookclub.

Choosing to send me a mail and having me manually respond adds just a bit of social friction to the first day, but with each new manual addition to the group, I feel I’m personally adding another human to the mix – not another number.

Make It Their Home

Day #2 is tricky because upon return to the team, the enthusiasm of Day #1 has passed and you realize the channel is full of strangers. There is no curated front page that highlights the interesting things that happened since you were last there.

Here are four Day #2 strategies:

Out of the box, Slack default channels are #general and #random. I’ve added two to the default set-up: #intros and #dailychallenge. The purpose of the first is obvious. Take a moment to introduce yourself – say as little or as much as you like – but, announce yourself to the community. It’s a small bit of ceremony that reminds us that there are humans behind the words.
Slack gives you flexibility in terms of how you configure your team as well as who has access to do said configuration. On both of my teams, I’ve left all of this power in the user’s hands. This has resulted in some brilliant hacks. The Slackbot on the Leadership channel gently corrects poorly used gender pronouns. Over at Destiny, we’ve set-up a bot that looks up Destiny gear for us. By leaving the configuration of Slack mostly up to the denizens of the team, they treat it as they would treat their home.
The first day enthusiasm often spills over into the second day with a simple request, “We should have a channel about X!” My response is a consistent and firm, “Channels are free.” Anyone can create a channel. Yes, this does mean there is a graveyard of channels amongst the 200 channels on the Leadership channel that were actively for 24 hours and died, but it means that there are a handful of well-populated channels that have daily active conversations that would not have existed if channels required approval.
On #dailychallenge on Leadership, we post a daily question on the topic of leadership. The point? Give the humans a daily reason to come and converse. After running #dailychallenge for a few weeks, I handed off the baton to an active participant on the channel. Now, each week, a new Slacker runs the challenge for the week only to nominate someone else for the next. This model of an active engaged leader posting an interesting question each week day, #dailychallenge is guaranteed to have a healthy conversation on any given day with a fresh new voice each week.

The Day 2 strategies are designed to connect the community and to put the power of where it goes squarely in the hands of those who best know where to take it.

Why Slack Now?

Slack is IRC. It’s a fresh coat of paint on an idea that has been around since the late 80s. The question is: why now? Why does an idea that has been around for years gain traction now?

For a set of technologies that has been designed to connect us regardless of where we might be on the planet, the Internet is increasing impersonal and hostile.

The signal to noise ratio emitting from massive communities like Reddit or YouTube is awful. Even with legions of well-intentioned humans dedicated to enforcing basic rules of conduct, it’s still work finding the right signal and even when you do, you’re often wading through some of the most offensive parts of human behavior.

I Slack because I like hanging with my tribe. My tribe is a knowable set of humans who not only have common interests, but also shared values. This combination results in healthy and productive discourse with very little effort. There are hundreds of people on both the Slack channels I tend and we’ve had exactly *zero* incidents resulting in someone being removed from the community. This doesn’t mean there haven’t been flare ups, but when that occurs, it doesn’t escalate – it’s debated. It’s resolved. We learn and we move forward.

We’re ready for Slack because we want to feel connected. We want to make the world full of strange people feel more personal. I’m very happy to report in the months I’ve been Slacking that the group of humans I call friends has – for the first time in years – significantly grown.

Physicists Prove Time Travel Possible by Sending Particles of Light into the Past

Things physicists say that make me irrationally nervous:

“The properties of quantum particles are ‘fuzzy’ or uncertain to start with, so this gives them enough wiggle room to avoid inconsistent time travel situations,” said co-author Professor Timothy Ralph.

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Holy Shit Moments

I showed up late to drones.

A few weeks ago it was my father’s birthday. The reason I am an engineer is because my father is an engineer. (Aside: The reason I am a leader is because I watched all of my mother’s moves as she wrangled my father the engineer.)

For the 4th of July, the engineers in the family like to shoot rockets off the porch. You know, easy to assemble Estes rockets. We’d build them in the morning and then fire them off in the afternoon. After 50 or so rocket launches over the years, I’m proud to report our recovery rate is precisely zero percent. See, we live in the Santa Cruz Mountains and much of these mountains are covered in trees such as Oaks, Redwoods, and Bays. Pro rocket tip: trees eat rockets.

It might seem like a tremendous waste, but the joy is not in finding the rockets. The joy isn’t even in building the rockets. The joy is in firing off the rockets because, of course, they are going to outer space.

No really. But they could, right?

As this was a significant birthday for my father, I thought hard about what kind of rockets we should get. Multi-stage? Camera attachmet? Wait a tick, what about a drone?

The Drone Situation

I’ve been watching the drone situation for years. My brother-in-law has been buying cheap drones which tend to show up at Christmas. These lightweight contraptions are borderline disposable, but they demonstrated to me that the quad-copter design combined with increasingly long (and compact) battery life could be affordable and fun. However, while it was clear the nerd frenzy regarding drones has been increasing, I had not yet partaken until I stumbled on the thought for my father’s birthday.

Deciding not to mess around, I purchased the DJI Phantom 3 Standard after a brief consultation with Twitter. My research showed the Phantom 3 was the correct drone for someone who wanted to pay extra for a drone that would do it’s best to not crash into a tree directly out of the box.

After arriving, the unpacking experience was very Apple-like. The Phantom 3 is well designed. It’s weight has purpose. The minimal, but helpful directions give you barely a hint of what will happen at first launch. See, when I first launched the drone, I had a Holy Shit moment.

A Drastic Change of Perspective

I’ve written about this topic before, but as it’s been a few years since I’ve experienced a Holy Shit, it bears repeating. A Holy Shit moment is when you first discover a new idea that drastically and forever changes your perspective. You know when you’re having these moments because you stop, you stare at the new idea or thought with your mouth half open, and you say – out loud – “Holy shit.” Here are three from my life to help you calibrate:

Telnet Sitting in the computer lab at UCSC as Frank explained, “Type telnet 81.201.83.45. Ok, now enter this user name and password. Great, you are now logged into a computer in Germany.” Pause. I’m what? Pause. Holy shit, the whole world is eventually going to be connected.

Doom Playing Doom on the primarily on the promise of Castle Wolfenstein 3D. I distinctly remember walking around a corner in the game and having an Imp leap out at me. I jumped out of my chair, Holy shit, the computer will eventually be able to render the world as I see it and I’ll be able to walk around.

iPhone Writing my first email of significance where it wasn’t an absolute mobile chore to do what I did effortless on my desktop. Wait. Holy shit, a computer is not just a bulky something that sits on my desk. Computers are going to disappear by being everywhere.

You are unable to un-see a Holy Shit moment. It is burned in your brain because the world as you knew is now forever different. This brings us back to drones.

A New Dimension

Do you remember your first plane trip when you had a window? Do you remember taking off? We’re moving. We’re moving fast. We’re rising. Look at the world, it’s made of… little toy houses and cars. There’s a moment around a couple hundred of vertical feet where the world you knew suddenly becomes small and you realize there is an entire dimension of space right above you that you have not experienced.

There are two Holy Shits around my first drone experience. The first and smaller of the two involves the technology used to build the Phantom 3. Like each and every one of my ill-fated rocket launches, my only initial concern with the Phantom 3 was losing it. I could’ve bought a much cheaper drone to practice with, but I was told the Phantom 3 was a great place to start.

It is. Once the Phantom 3 takes off – thanks to GPS – the drone just sits there in space. Little wind? No problem, it compensates and just sits there. I was fully prepared to be wrangling a cranky drone that desperately wanted to join it’s rocket companions in a nearby Redwood, but, no, the Phantom 3… just merrily sits there.

Manipulating the drone in 3D space is a little tricky. You’ve got to retrain your brain to not just think in terms of left/right and forward/backward, but also in terms of up and down. Since the drone just sits there wherever you parked it, this is a trivial process. Just nudge it a bit and see what happens.

To date, I’ve got 30+ flights on my drone and other than a really stupid excursion into the middle of redwood forest where I disabled GPS because I thought it’d be a good idea to measure the height of a redwood, the Phantom 3 has never felt remotely out of control. When you combine this eerie ability to stably hover in the sky with the iPhone app which serves as handy dashboard and video display for the drone, you will say “Holy shit.”

And that’s the smaller of the two.

The second still involves the technology. The Phantom 3 Standard comes with a built in 720P HD camera built on gimbal stabilization technology that gives you incredibly stable and smooth video. You can see this video straight from the camera streamed to your phone which is conveniently attaches to the remote control for the drone.

I’m guessing everyone does a similar first move with their drone. Once they understand a tree is not going to eat it, they place it directly overhead, turn on the video recording, and blast straight up.

Holy Shit.

I’ve lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains my entire life, but in the past few weeks I’ve actually seen the Santa Cruz Mountains. The shocking perspective the drone gives is one of understanding that you don’t really understand where you’re standing. There’s an entire world very nearby you and the view is spectacular.

Light-based computers?

Via Quartz:

“The phase speed is infinite—much larger, infinitely larger than the speed of light,” Mazur tells Quartz.

This doesn’t mean light itself is traveling faster than the speed of light, which would violate the laws of relativity. “Phase velocity” refers to the speed of the crest of waves that ripple out when light strikes a material. The Harvard scientists created a material that allows these wave crests to move infinitely fast. This is a strange thought to wrap your head around, and means the crests of the waves are oscillating through time, but not space. Under these peculiar conditions, the Harvard scientists found that it’s easy to manipulate the photons, squeezing them down to the microscopic scale and turning them around. In other words, we can treat photons in the same way we currently manipulate electrons.

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A Destiny Public Service Announcement

Slack is fully integrated into my life. Over the course of the last six months, it’s become a rarefied default application for me. It’s still early in the day and the coffee hasn’t kicked, but I can’t think of the last application that became default. Probably Twitter?

The communication gap that Slack is filling is real time communication. AOL Instant Messenger used to fulfill this purpose, but it was slowly replaced by a deadly combination of lack of innovation and the emergence of the phone as a dominate platform.

I’ve got four “teams” as part of my current Slack set-up. Work fully adopted Slack over the last few months. I have two small private groups where small collections of dear friends around the planet that would otherwise be receiving infrequent emails. Finally, I created the Rands Leadership Slack and the channel is 700+ strong and exceeding every single one of my expectations in terms of usage and quality discourse. If you’re in (or aspire to be in) the leadership biz, I highly recommend dropping me a note – you won’t be disappointed.

What is impressing me about all of these groups is the civility of the conversation. After years of watching discourse on the Internet turn increasing divisive where humans treat their misinformed opinions as fact, I’ve been delighted to find small corners of the Internet where we can debate, disagree, learn, and move on.

And I want more.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I do have a Destiny problem. I play on the PS4 and while the PS4 has a good interface, the tools to manage and interact with a community are atrocious. Because I’ve got Slack on the brain, I’ve created a Destiny Slack channel to both organize the clan I play with, but also to gather other civil like-minded humans who are interested in briefly escaping our Earthly bonds. Interested, send me a note.

A Small Grey Leaf

At the bottom of an individual post on this site, you might notice there is a small grey leaf.

No one has ever commented about this leaf. No one has ever asked about its significance. It’s a pleasant quiet ending to a post.

There was a time when this version of the site was being designed that the leaf was a set of dice. The original design had the leaf, but it was a placeholder and I wanted something relevant… something that told a story. The designer responded with a set of dice. Hard eight – a pair of fours. The designer asked me, “Bonus points if you can figure out why I used double 4s for the dice.”

I had no idea.

“The date of your first post.”

“Brilliant,” is what I said to the designer. A story. Relevance. I stared at the pair of fours for a few hours and I told the designer, “Yeah, after sitting on it for a few hours, I don’t like it… Let’s stick with your single leaf.”

That was it. We never talked about the leaf again. We worked on the design of the site for several more weeks. One night in early November 2013, I sat in a hotel bar in Tyson’s Corner and the designer sat in his office as we launched the current site. I texted a picture of my gin and tonic to the designer when we hit publish. He sent me a picture of his cocktail.

It is with great joy that I tell you the designer of this site is my friend, Alex King. It is with great sadness that I tell you that Alex passed away in late September. I do not understand how to write this post other than to tell that the world is full of brilliant people who are unfailingly kind and generous with their time. Each moment that you aren’t spending with these people is a moment wasted.