Musings of AI & Space Enthusiast: Part II
This is a continuation of my Musings of AI & Space Enthusiast series. You can find the first post here. Like the first blog post, this one is also influenced by the “Education for Educated” book written by Anatoly Levenchuk. In this post I’d like to talk about things that help you to realize who the hell are you.
Dreams That Change Our Lives
In the previous blog post there was an important piece focused on the importance of adapting to the ever changing world. You can have dreams but don’t become too attached to them; you might miss the fact the world has changed enough for your dream to become obsolete.
This, however, doesn’t mean that you shall not dream. Back in June 2010 I wrote a blog post (in Russian) in my LiveJournal: “Never Stop Dreaming”. It was written right before the start of my last job at Microsoft, and the only one at Microsoft Research — an HCI Researcher Intern (or simply Intern) in the VIBE team.
Prior to the internship I had a chance to talk to very smart people in the company, read books from the Microsoft Library, participate in the numerous internal forums and discussion groups. The key learning for me was that the world is so big, and there are so many great things in it that we can’t just pass by them. We should learn. Become inspired. And find something that truly excites us. In my case, the dream of the Context-aware Computing long before 2010 transformed from the abstract “Windows Semantic Platform” idea into a UX that would be built on these principles. I wanted to build a Digital Working Environment after learning about this direction from Dr. Mary Czerwinski’s fantastic book “Beyond the Desktop Metaphor” (2008, MIT Press). Somehow I thought that by joining MSR I’d get a chance to work on it.
Yet that MSR internship was a failure for me. A big failure, to think of it. I’ve sticked too hard to that dream of a Digital Working Environment I wanted to work on during internship. Instead of doing what my advisor actually expected from me (Group Calendar Visualization for Geo-Distributed Teams) I was fighting. In a way, it led me to founding Zet Universe a year and half later— that’s how much energy I had in me!
While I’m still very sorry for being so arrogant there is a learning for me from this story: if there’s something in you that inspires you so much that you can’t stop yourself, you should go for it. Especially if you are young as at this age high risks are quite tolerable. Its fine to experiment and fail.
I don’t ask myself “what if” about that internship anymore. But in the retrospect I shouldn’t have go for the internship at all. I should have had enough “hutzpah” to simply found my own venture right in 2010 and work on “Zet Universe” instead of going to the internship, and, after it, to Google. Of course both the internship and Google gave me a lot of lessons, and I’ve made some good money spent on our country house in Russia so I’m thankful for that.
However, again, if you feel very strong about doing something, and it’s a something you can’t stop doing, go for it. Risk. You will most probably fail, but even in that case you’ll get yourself a fantastic adventure and you’ll learn more about who the hell you actually are.
As that’s the most important thing, figuring out who the hell you are.
Sacrifices: The Price of Figuring Out Who The Hell Are You
Yet there is a lot of accompanying pain in this process of self-discovery. That Summer of 2010, well, more than a month later I wrote a yet another blogpost about dreams in my LiveJournal: “Live—Run for a Dream or Run from Destiny?” (again in Russian). In it, one of the eye-opening moments was that if you have a dream that you can’t stop thinking about and doing it, you’ll eventually loose jobs, friends, lovers. This is actually what happened to me. I’ve found many extraordinary people along my way — at Microsoft Russia and at Microsoft Corp, at Google, at Yandex, in several startups, in fantastic local and global communities. But my full devotion to my dream left me without many of these people, and, most importantly, without love and relationships.
Does it mean that you have to go through the same process? That’s questionable, though I believe it is inevitable. In the early days you don’t even realize where is the boundary between you and your mother. Then you start learning about these boundaries and, over the time, you begin to realize that you are responsible for yourself. Starting a life-long relationship in your teenage years is one the least responsible and meaningful things you can do. You most probably don’t know at this age who are you and what you want to do, and who you want to be. Your real road ahead will be bumpy and painful. Figuring out this together with your partner will be more than twice as bumpy and painful because you will both have to also spend time on figuring out what do you want from each other, and not killing each other in the process.
And especially if you want to start your own venture, or travel across the world while following your dream (e.g., doing a PhD in US, or doing research in Greenland etc.), you should start alone.
Success: The Ability to Go from Failure to Failure without Losing Enthusiasm
This quote has been assigned to both Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln. It wasn’t said by either of them as far as the investigators learned in the article mentioned above. However it makes a lot of sense to me. My own career can been seen through the traditional story of ups and downs.
So after you’ve followed your big dream, and learned that dream has to adapt to the ever changing world, that alone won’t guarantee you’d learn who you are.
The thing is that at some point you’ll figure out that you are no longer a “young nervy energic man that goes from failure to failure”. You’ve understood a few things about yourself. You know that you can achieve some success in some directions while you’re not that good in others. Some of these directions will help you to make money while others will leave you without it.
As much as the journey to your dream is great as much it is a journey full of lessons. By the time I’ve turned 30 I’ve understood that I’m not a good business man. I do get the idea of Lean Canvas and so on but I’m not passionate about this stuff at all. But I like building things that are related to intelligent systems and more on the management side than on software development side. Not because I don’t like coding (my Zet Universe was mostly written by me, and it was a beast in terms of the complexity) but because it’s almost impossible to be a one-man-army in the today’s ever changing world. I can’t grasp absolutely everything I need to succeed nor I actually want to. It’s simply impractical. To build things quickly you need other people, and investments. You also need to understand what your people do, and be able to control the quality of their work. You should be able to dig deep enough to figure out what’s wrong, but you shall not do all the job for your people. Your job is not to do their job but to make sure they can do theirs.
Here I’d highly recommend you to read the book “Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager” by Michael Lopp. Excellent and thought-provoking read!
Anyways, the purpose of this blogpost is to not only reflect on what happened in my relatively long and rather bumpy career but also to figure out whether there are any tools that could help you to learn who are you faster and probably with less pain.
The lesson I’ve learned from the “Education for Educated” is that there is a systemic method to better figure out who you are and what you’re good at.
The idea is to see yourself through the lenses of roles.
Roles, Roles, Roles
Now, what’s the deal with the roles? If you’ve ever tried to run your own business, working in a small team, or being a manager, you have probably heard the term “wearing multiple hats” and felt like it was about you. In a way those “hats” are “roles”. But what the role means?
The most obvious connection is with the theaters and cinemas. In it, being an artist you are playing different roles in different plays, yet after that you return home and you are back to who you are.
Eric Berne, a famous psychologist, was one of those who popularized the concept of roles in our personal lives. I recall reading it as I was struggling through my first relationship more than a decade ago, desperately trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with it and with us. Per Berne, there are three roles we can play in the relationship: Parent, Adult, and Child. Mind you I’ve read the book in Russian so I might be using a bit different words in back-translation but I hope the concepts are still understandable. Anyways, the thing is in the healthy relationship you both should be Adults though it won’t hurt to be a Parent and a Child as long as both partners realize that these are the roles not themselves.
Now with these ideas we can come back to a deeper idea of what the role means. At work and at home we play different roles (wear different hats); the key however is that professionally we can have multiple roles, and because of that these roles can be in the personal lives as well. Say I’m cooking in the kitchen so I’m in the role of a cook. Then I’m fixing our 1Gbps network — I’m a technician. Then I’m accepting goods from a delivery company — I’m a goods recipient. And so on and so forth. You’ve got the idea.
The same happens at work. During my thoughtful conversation with an old friend of mine, Kirill Pimenov (CTO at Parity Technologies in Berlin), we worked through my workload and learned that at DeepPavlov.ai (where my job title is CPO), I play 14 roles (!). Here’s a list of them:
As you can notice, these roles belong to different categories. According to Anatoly Levenchuk, there are 4 categories:
The funny thing is, while some of these roles might look like a job title, neither of them is called “CPO”. This is not a coincidence. There are people, there are roles, and there are job titles. Usually one person plays different roles but has one job title at work. Interestingly, while you can loose your job title (e.g. after moving to a different team) you can continue maintaining one of your older roles. Of course, some job titles can directly reflect your main role, but the higher you are in the management chain the more roles you will play, and the more generic your role will sound. In my case, I was thinking a lot about my next job title, and it probably will be more or less a something like “General Manager”, as I’m responsible not only for products at DeepPavlov but many other things as well (as it can be seen in the roles list above). This btw doesn’t mean a change in my responsibilities, it will just better reflect the roles I have.
Now another thing that is worth mentioning is that if you do have an idea of how many roles you have, you should figure out which roles you like and are good at, and which you don’t and aren’t good at. Ofc there’s always a room for roles which you like but aren’t good at, and roles which you’re good at but don’t like. Anyways the thing is simple: figure out the roles that help you to bring the most of yourself to your organization and to your own career to increase the outcome of your contributions. If you can, hire people to do the jobs for roles you are not good at but are important for the organization (D — Delegation). Learn more about things that can help you to become better in your best roles.
The key thing is to be more aware of who you are and what you do to better do what you do, or to change yourself.
So, that’s it for the time being. Oh, and you can find the “Education for Educated” book on Amazon as well! It’s still in Russian but it’s here available for your favorite Kindle app or device.
Enjoy it, and enjoy learning more about who are and how you can make this world a little bit better by applying systemic approach.
