The Year Without Pants Quotes

“The bottleneck is never code or creativity; it's lack of clarity.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Fear of this uncertainty motivates people to spin their wheels for days considering all the possible outcomes, calculating them in a spreadsheet using utility cost analysis or some other fancy method that even the guy who invented it doesn't use. But all that analysis just keeps you on the sidelines. Often you're better off flipping a coin and moving in any clear direction. Once you start moving, you get new data regardless of where you're trying to go. And the new data makes the next decision and the next better than staying on the sidelines desperately trying to predict the future without that time machine.”
― Berkun, Scott, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Self-motivated people thrive when granted independence.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Laughter paves the way for many things. It's one way to build intimacy between”
― Berkun, Scott, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“The inability to scale is one of the stupidest arguments against a possibly great idea: greatness rarely scales, and that's part of what made it great in the first place.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“No technique, no matter how good, can turn stupid coworkers into smart ones. And no method can magically make employees trust each other or their boss if they have good reason not to.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“The most dangerous tradition we hold about work is that it must be serious and meaningless. We believe that we're paid money to compensate us for work not worthwhile on its own. People who are paid the most are often the most confused, for they know in their hearts how little meaning there is in what they do, for others and for themselves. While money provides status, status doesn't guarantee meaning. They're paid well because of how poorly work compensates their souls. Some people don't have souls, of course, but they're beyond the scope of this book. Among those with souls and high-paying but empty jobs, there's a denial of how what they seek is hard to get in the way they're trying to get it.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Laughter paves the way for many things. It's one way to build intimacy between people, something every healthy team needs. Humor has always been a primary part of how I lead. If I can get someone to laugh, they're at ease. If they see me laugh at things, they're at ease. It creates emotional space, a kind of trust, to use in a relationship. Sharing laughter also creates a bank account of positive energy you can withdraw from, or borrow against, when dealing with tough issues at work. It's a relationship cushion.”
― Berkun, Scott, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Designing is best done first on paper. It's cheap and fast, making it easy to try many ideas well before anyone's ego is invested.”
― Berkun, Scott, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“the only reason anything good ships is because of the programmers. They are everything. They are not factory employees; they are craftspeople, craftspeople who are the fundamental creative engine of making software.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Much of what bad managers do is assume their job is simply to find new things to jam and new places to jam them into, without ever believing they need to understand how the system—the system of people known as culture—works.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“With no universal measure for meaning to compare with the seemingly solid accounting for income, we fall into the data trap. Our larger culture, and our pesky parents, push us toward decisions that seem to score well but are blind to the most important elements of healthy careers and meaningful lives.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“The mystery for why some people you know succeed or fail in life is how courageous they are in pulling people aside and how effective they are in those private conversations we never see.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“in the scramble to survive, founders often hire to solve immediate needs and simultaneously create long-term problems. This mistake is common enough that Bob Sutton wrote a book, The No-Asshole Rule, to help executives recognize the damage these hires cause to culture.5 No matter how many golden lectures a leader gives imploring people to “Be collaborative” or “Work as a team,” if the people hired have destructive habits, the lecture will lose.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Defensive management is blind to recognizing how obsessing about preventing bad things also prevents good things from happening or sometimes even prevents anything from happening at all.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Making great things requires both intuition and logic, not a dominance of one over the other.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“What good is something that scales well if it sucks? Why is size the ultimate goal or even a goal at all?”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Most people doubt online meetings can work, but they somehow overlook that most in-person meetings don't work either.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“This is one big problem with working remotely: no one believes you have a job at all.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“The problem with problem-solving methods, which all business methodologies are, is that they are abstractions, but the world is not abstract. Real work contains hard parts that no method can dictate for you. No method can capture how and when to abandon the method or tweak it; only a team and its leader can do that. And for a team to do that successfully, they need to trust each other.”
― Berkun, Scott, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“If removing a restriction improves performance or has no impact on performance but improves morale, everyone wins.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“I want to do this job and I'll give it my heart and soul.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Hire Self-Sufficient, Passionate People”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“It's not a new, radical idea for work to have meaning and for workers to have both great freedom and pride in the work itself. Instead those ideas are rooted in the origins of work; we've just lost our way.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“The burden of deciding when to launch something is on the maker, not a marketer. If something is launched or a bug is fixed, data is instantly collected about how it's used, which serves as the basis to make quick revisions. There are no big schedules, few big plans, and no enforced mechanisms for coordination. It sounds like chaos, and it is. But if everyone understood chaos and perhaps liked the uncertainty, they would find freedom and opportunity.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“An amazing thing about our digital age is that the person next to you at Starbucks might just be hacking into a Swiss bank or launching multiwarhead nuclear missiles continents away.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“To start big projects, you must have the capacity for delusion. All the rational people, despite their brilliance, are too reasonable to start crazy things. And working against us in this sense was that we'd spent the day walking in the footsteps of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, spurring us all to believe in our grandest dreams.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Like the decision about Highlander and IntenseDebate, there is no perfect answer. After years of leading projects, the best thing I've learned is that I have to periodically shift between thinking small (bazaar) and thinking long term (cathedral). Asking my team, “If we do these three features in a row, how do they build together into something better than the sum of the parts?” I don't want them fixated on thinking that far ahead, but I do want them to raise their heads and look to the horizon periodically, because that glance improves how they'll evaluate whatever they're building today.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“I realized the two weeks might return nothing but a scouting report, but it would show me two things at once, which I liked. The first would be a good look at the code itself. It would push Beau, with fresh eyes from Peatling and Adams, to evaluate things differently. He wouldn't be working alone, and that changed everything. The second thing we'd learn was how Team Social worked on an unpopular, fuzzy, possibly wicked problem. Learning about this second perspective was critical to my role. It helped me answer these questions: What was our team like under pressure? Who could I count on? Who got frustrated first? Which programmer would set the pace? We were too young as a team for me to know.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“What was the vision for our team? What big goals would we sign up for? I wanted to decide this in Athens, as a team with Matt in person. I wanted us to make big bets and show the company we could have visions of cathedrals and build them with bazaar methods. What I didn't want was to spend days riffing on yet more ideas, only to return home was as much ambiguity as when we'd arrived. The bottleneck is never code or creativity; it's lack of clarity.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work