A Christmas Failure

You see, it occurs to me that things are rarely black and white in life, but as humans we constantly strive to make them black and white. One of the hardest things I've ever had to deal with as a consultant and technical guy was people that said maybe. I can handle yes, I can handle no, but "maybe" drives me crazy.

It has to be one way or the other.

And so, when Christmas rolls around I think about all the things I have lost. When I look at the numbers for an app I think of all the bad things about it. And boy! Could I give you a big list of problems my app has!

But in reality, 20 folks dropped by and got some use out of it. And a few of them used it multiple times. In reality, holidays remind us of the things we lose, but they also remind us that life has new things to offer. In reality, it's always a mixed bag. We can choose which to focus on. We must choose which to focus on, or we end up with the default, which is many times negative.

Looking at the logs, here's a guy from an overseas country that stopped by late Christmas Eve night to use the app. Here's another guy from Europe. And look, the guy from Europe came back.

And really, does it even matter anyway? The app was a way to learn Linux, Apache, Mono, and F#. Now that it's released, it will sit around for a year just waiting to help folks. Maybe a thousand people drop by. Maybe nobody else comes by. Does it matter? I learned all that cool stuff, I did something on my own to help people, and already a few people have used it.

Even more importantly, I learned something really fantastic about myself: I am able to take my programming talents and try to help people -- without any desire to make money -- without taking things away from me or my family. In fact, I think it makes me a better person to do so. Receiving.it may never feed thousands of poor children in Africa, but guess what? I've only gotten started. Next year I'm going to write another free app, and another, and another. And I'll go on until I die, each year learning a little more about how to help people. Each year learning a little more about how to give presents.

If you think about it, there's nothing here that could possibly be a failure, yet people (including myself) are very eager to announce things "bad", "good", "success" or "failure" It's the natural way we are.

I am reminded of the lesson I learned early in my startup career: life is like baseball, not like chess. We like to think of it in terms of winning or losing, but it's much more about going up to bat again and again. Sometimes we hit a home run. Sometimes we strike out. If we think about the last time at bat, or think about the score, we're missing the entire point of the game. The game is to be enjoyed, to be attempted with all your heart. If you do that, screw the stats and the score. If you try as hard as you can, how can what you do ever be a failure?

One day a while back, I was waking up after a hard night partying. I had a headache, I was fearfully thirsty, and in general I felt like eating nails and spitting out a barbed wire fence. In that miserable state of mind, I logged on to HackerNews where somebody was asking if we could tell them all the hard lessons we've learned so he could save time in life.

I was lucky if I could put a sentence or two together, but I wanted to help, so I just started giving the guy bullets. I went on and never really thought much about my reply.

A few months later, I got this email

Hello Daniel,

Let me briefly introduce myself and explain why am I emailing you. My name is [REDACTED] . I'm 20 years old and I come from a small country where people are lazy and like to complain I lot. Since my physical surrounding is so inert and lethargic, I often dive into the virtual worlds where I can read about smart men and their deeds, to kinda boost myself out of the nothingness around. One such virtual place is the Hacker News community, which I much appreciate and admire.

Few months ago while lurking I stumbled upon a highly rated comment of yours and stood speechless; at no point in my life had I read a comment so insightful and informative. It blew my mind. Since I was at work, I had to gather my thoughts, cast them into *void and go back to work. Went home, got to bed and went on with my life.

A month later I find myself thinking about that piece of text. But wait, I am not able to recall almost anything about it. A-ha! I power-on my ultra-super-google powers, I dig the original post on HN and boom! .. there it is. The comment is still there, so I read it again. This time I share it with all the people I care about, instruct them to read it even if it is the only thing they ever read on in their lives. Some of them respond and are amazed, some are too lazy to read it. Not that it matters much in this story.

In the months that followed I found myself reading your comment again and again, when finally today I decided it was time to transfer it to the offline world - I'm sticking it on my bedroom's wall. Have in mind that it is the only piece of paper hanging there, I don't do this "sticking-on-the-wall" things almost never.

So there, I said it. I am not completely sure why I wrote you this, I must admit. It's because I wish to praise you perhaps - I don't really know. I just know that I am a huge believer in the butterfly effect and I believe that what seems like a small deed to us can often do a lot for someone. You did that when you wrote this.

I am a guy in my twenties and you changed my road. You flapped your wings and caused a hurricane. I'm back to creating things. You helped me transform into the creative person I once was. You washed away a huge portion of the cynic I had become.

Thank you for that and thank you for taking the time to read this. I am very grateful to you.

I wrote him back and told him there was nothing to thank me for: I write all the time. Most of the time it's like the whisper of leaves in a distant forest: nobody hears and it doesn't matter. But every now and then, it does.

And that's really cool.

Merry Christmas.