Most of my effort goes into making sure I know what I need for work, and what’s happening in school or with the kids. That’s the stuff that really matters. Honestly, if there’s an area where I feel I should probably know more, it’s school/kids.
I’ve discovered that most news articles, TV, and so on are farming by exploiting our productive emotions, primarily fear and anger. I stopped watching TV years ago, and no longer pay for a cable. My news consumption is likely under 2-3 minutes per day, mostly checking if we should hide in a bunker already or not. So far, the news meet the long established pattern:
You should be afraid, very, very afraid because…
Here are two, three, or five things that are unfair, corrupt, or awful…
Somebody just died in a car crash…
Here’s an extreme, factually questionable opinion…
Yesterday, I saw the Jetpack app on my phone and it felt like I’ve not turned that on in awhile. It made me think about how easily we let things slip. We do something regularly, then skip it once, then a few more times… and eventually, we just stop. Even if we made a clear commitment to keep it up.
Other examples:
Use that frontendmasters subscription, because I made a commitment to learn SVG animations but never did
A 10-year-old dashboard, from a past role, visiting which used to be second nature for me
Vacuuming the car
Checking up on an old friend who’s always happy to chat but never calls
Watering the plant in the other room
Reading a few pages of that book that’s boring but useful and I want to finish
I was greatly embarrassed and checked all 10-year-old dashboards, the trash in the car (uh, forgot one thing that just stays in the trunk), messaged a few friends, and watered the plant.
The frontendmasters sub is gone, I have to admit I’m not learning SVG animations any time soon.
Talking about values and virtue signaling is easy. But sacrifice is hard and often unobserved. We don’t get as much credit from others for living up to our values, as we do for merely proclaiming them on social media or t-shirts.
Scott Berkun is an inspirational writer. He worked on the Internet Explorer team between versions 1 and 5. He also lead a team at Automattic, an experience he documented in the book The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work.
I keep writing about kindness and using every opportunity to treat people well. His post resonated a lot with me because it challenges a thing I value highly. Kindness usually costs little, requires no sacrifice, and can be visible. Scott Berkun says this is not a real value. Even worse, promoting kindness as a public statement could be like wearing a patriotic t-shirt.
This is not a new idea but a new point of view that hasn’t crossed my mind before. The Bible has lots of quotes that give a definition of good, and the lack of publicity is a common requirement.
But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret.
— Matthew 6:3
For example, is it a good thing when you hand free iPhones to strangers for views on YouTube? It costs something so it checks the first requirement but is done in public so it doesn’t check the second. Same with pretty much any act of kindness that’s done for views or shared on social media.
I’m currently reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. I’m less than halfway through, but it already feels like this book deserves more than one post. So far, it doesn’t paint Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg as supervillains, and I’m getting a glimpse into Facebook’s early culture.
One of the big ideas from Facebook’s early years was Move Fast and Break Things. This mantra has been both confirmed working and disproved many times – often by engineers like me, who’ve lived through its successes and catastrophic failures. .
Moving Fast and Breaking Things Works
It works because the software industry can be like a gator-infested pool. When a new idea drops like a piece of meat in the pool, everyone jumps on it. The biggest reward goes to the fastest gator that ships first and markets well. There’s often no time to make things well.
Facebook won the social network race in large parts of the world. Twitter and a few others got the leftovers. But this principle applies beyond tech giants – down to much smaller scales. It’s a form of the Pareto principle: 80% of the outcomes stem from 20% of the causes. If you can roughly identify the 20% and validate an idea quickly, you’ve already won even if it doesn’t work. You saved the effort for something that may work.
On an individual level, it also feels like it works. You get a task, you ship something quickly – it shows up in your weekly update, your team’s update, maybe even the leadership sees it. You’re productive, visible, and valuable.
But It Also Doesn’t Work
Once an idea is validated, it gains users, traction, and revenue. A bug that shows up once in 1000 runs might never happen with 10 users/day. Once you have a million users, it happens 1000 times a day. Also, one broken user profile may be easily fixable but a million? Not so much.
Zuckerberg himself cited this kind of thinking when Facebook moved away from the motto around 2014. You can’t keep patching the same issues over and over at scale. Stability becomes a requirement.
From an individual contributor point of view, it looks that profitable ideas attract many layers of heavily invested people – technical, marketing, finance, data, legal, executive, investors. And when something breaks, you’re not just dealing with bugs. You’re affecting dashboards, KPIs, morale, and your own job security. Blame becomes easier to assign. 10 of these people will know how things work and won’t blame you but the eleventh may have a bad day and push the button.
How to make a difference?
In early-stage product development or during moments of intense change, moving fast and breaking things can be the right move. But in mature projects, where uptime matters and stakeholders are many, the priority shifts. It’s more about stability, reliability, and trust.
Ultimately, Mark Zuckerberg hung that motto on Facebook’s wall – and eventually took it down. He may put it back up if he recognizes a need for it. Recognizing the moment is a key part of leadership.
Wars, inflation, health, aging, deadlines, death, AI, work woes – the adult life has no shortage of triggers for anxiety. These worries appear to stick around for a long time with sudden spikes that make them worse. Yet, anxiety rarely feels useful – we are not changing the course of history by worrying about it. How can we tone it down without solving world’s hunger?
I’ve tried a variety of tactics and each has its own place. I never miss the chance to include the subject of thinking errors. They are a major source of anxiety and self-fulfilling prophecies. However, today I’d like to share about the Five Whys, a method of using your non-intuitive slow thinking. The whole reason why I wrote my previous long post about intuition was so I can write this one without explaining what’s a slow brain and why intuition can work against us.
What Are the Five Whys?
When faced with a problem, you ask “why?” at least five times, using the answer from the previous question as the basis for the next. Originally developed by Toyota as a problem-solving tool in manufacturing, it seems to work well for self-discovery. It forces us to goo several layers deeper than the shallow obvious reason for a problem. Here’s a current made-up example.
“I’m worried that the USA import tariffs may trigger a global crisis” – “Why does that bother you?”
“I’m worried it might affect my job” – “Okay, it may or may not, Why does that bother you?”
“I’m worried I may lose income” – “This doesn’t sound great but still, why are you worried about it?“
“Because I may be unable to provide and my family may suffer” – “Family is there for good and bad. Why does a loss of income, even for a longer term, worry you?”
“Because I tie my self-worth to how others (or family) perceives me”
And we find something deeper than just “Oh no, Trump”. We’ve reached a core fear that’s fueling the anxiety.
The Core Fears
Asking the five whys for fears appears to bring us down to the same one or two true fears and these seem to be similar for most people. For example (absolutely not a complete or scientific list):
Fear of failure
Fear of judgment
Fear of rejection
Fear of being alone
Fear of being a burden
The process of tying one or more of these (or a similar core fear) to some uncertainty-inducing current event can make us panic essentially for nothing. No, Trump won’t make your significant other stop loving you, neither can a potential risk coming to life take away your past experiences. Other things can do that, like being mean, or not listening, but not Trump.
Have I recently shared that we should always be kind? The past acts of kindness, for example, cannot be taken away if you get run over by a car, get sick, encounter dangerous people, communists, experience inflation, or a are attacked by a foreign army.
Why it helps
Anxiety thrives in ambiguity.
Bringing light to the true fears can take away some of their power. The news will never stop blasting the horrors of the day and they will always be awful because this is what makes us watch news. But our deepest fears can be nearly constant for decades, like old friends we don’t really like or want. Nothing is ever going to be perfect.
Brene Brown wrote a book called “The Gifts of Imperfection” where she describes the loss of self, direction, purpose, meaning, safety, certainty, and future. She asks us to seek for our internal self-worth. We are worthy and should accept that, should find reasons for it, and should also not undermine it too much. There is always a need to improve but never a need to be perfect, risk-free, or error-free.
I summarized that book in 2019 with the following text:
If you’re a mess and vulnerable, you are not alone. We are all together in this.
So, to tie it all together, The Five Whys is a method to get anxiety to a point where the level is within Brene Brown’s “This is fine”.
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