Small Struggles, Small Victories.
This week I flipped the rear wheel of my bike over to the fixed hub. I’m now officially riding “fixie” for the first time. To many of you, this may seem like a pretty minor event, as I’m wickedly behind the curve on this trend. But whatever. For me, it was a “why not” kind of decision - I’m not overly concerned with the style aspects of it, it was just something that - as a devoted cyclist - I’ve wanted to try for a long time.
Appropriately, the first ride I took was to my little hipster coffee shop in Echo Park, the den of fixed geardom in Los Angeles. Needless to say, the ride was eye opening, and at times - descending my steep hill, attempting track stands that I was able to do with ease on my normal setup - it felt like I was riding a bike for the first time. With bikes, I’m pretty used to being at the top of the food chain, competency wise, and lately I’ve been feeling like an absolute novice while kids half my age open my eyes to all of the stylistic quirks of fixed gear riding.
And frankly it’s been a struggle. I’ve set a goal to get better at it, to learn some of these techniques, but ultimately I’ve just been getting frustrated when I have to put my foot down at a light when I haven’t had to do that in years. Yet I’m determined to keep it up, at least until I have enough small victories that I can declare that I’ve “won” before thinking about going back to my free wheel.
And this struggle reminds of of why I love building products or companies, designing things, or writing code. Every day, in the course of my work, I feel like I’m in at least 2 or 3 similar situations. Maybe one day that’s having to learn some new software API that I need to accomplish a task, or spending 3 hours learning about fonts in order to best decide which one might work best for a design I’ve been fighting with. In each of these situations, I feel like I’m pushing myself to learn something new in order to move forward, and I find these experiences incredibly rewarding.
It’s true that there is a fine line between this kind of incremental knowledge accumulation and a version of dilettantism. And it’s true that at some point, being an expert in one thing and delegating tasks to other experts is by far a better bet. Certainly this piece about Mark Zuckerberg struggling with a task that his expert engineers could have completed in minutes is an argument towards this kind of workflow.*
But I like to think that in the course of that 2 hour span that Zuck was working on the bug his engineers could have fixed in minutes, he was also waging & winning a number of small - likely unproductive in the grand scheme of Facebook - battles that allowed him to learn some new stuff about the way his product is working, and help foster that same spirit of learning amongst his team.
I feel lucky that I spend a lot time struggling. I think it’s pretty easy to latch onto your thing and keep doing it. It probably makes you more employable, or able to add “Senior” to your job title or charge ludicrous consulting rates. Maybe I’m just doing a bit of self justification here, but I think it’s awesome to learn small new things, every day or every week, even if it means feeling frustrated a lot of the time.
In the end, you end up with a pretty amazing quiver of skills you can bring to whatever you’re building, or whatever idea might be percolating in your head. Here’s Foursquare engineer Harry Heymann talking about how Dennis built Foursquare.
He didn’t really know what he was doing but he sat down, taught himself enough to crank out a prototype, and figured it out from there. Anyone can do this sort of thing with enough hard work.
I think about that quote in a lot of different ways throughout the course of my day. Building Foursquare is not the same thing as doing a track stand, but in both cases you’re never going to get anywhere (or with a track stand, not get anywhere) unless you embrace frustration, failure, and almost certain embarrassment.
(ps, another great example of this kind of thing is Julian’s photography of skater girls… check it out here).
