 So let me tell you about John. I had the good fortune of working with John for 13 months in online advertising, where we used the Fibonacci sequence to make ads go more faster. And those were probably the most formative 13 months of my career or whatever. I also had the good fortune of working with Aaron Patterson, but I don't get to introduce him today, unfortunately. And everything that I know about Ruby was shaped in that year. Everything I know about being a man and my job and all that stuff was also shaped in that year, largely by this guy. And he's been there for me in some ways outside of just teaching me to use a space inside my curly braces, but not inside my princess. And I don't know. John is, I can't say enough good things about him. So if you weren't already drinking, you might want to start during this talk. I've heard that all of John's talks are better while drinking. So is that sufficient, John? So John brought it. This talk will not be fueled by drinking. This talk will be fueled by unprepared terror and sleep deprivation and a really angry red clock. This chair is here in case I get really tired and just collapse right on stage. So I at least have something to grab on to. So I'm unfortunately a terrible, terrible keynote speaker. Because I run out of funny things in like 10 minutes. I have five to 10 minutes of charm on any given day. And I can use it up once, and then it's gone. I have to sleep once before I get any other back. So naturally, Ben and Shane asked me to keynote. Naturally, I said yes immediately, which should be a really good indicator of my mental state right now. It's not good. So we're going to do less jokes today and talk a lot more about some really uplifting topics like stress, and guilt, and limitations, and failure. So you might not collapse on stage and have to get dragged off here in a bit. This is mostly for Rich Kilmer, who's giving a talk later this evening that it's going to be much more happy and uplifting. And so I promised him I'd try and bring everybody down to a really depressed level before they want to reach his dog. So for those of you who don't know me, my name is John. I am absolutely exhausted. I've spent the last three years pouring my heart and soul into a company. And it has come very, very close to killing me. And I'm working very hard right now to figure out a way to fix that, to feel happy about coding again, to feel good about my job, to feel good about where I am, to be able to sleep at night. So I want to talk a little bit about the things that I've been thinking about in the course of trying to do that for some of you that made me in a very similar position. So let's talk about stress a little bit. Stress is an additive thing. It doesn't just come out of nowhere. You don't come back from two weeks in the Hamptons or a month in wine country at your villa and wake up one morning and start screaming at the cat and chewing your fingernails. I mean, unless you're like硬 pot. It doesn't happen all at once. It happens to you over time. It builds up, and it builds up. And it does it very gradually. I think that stress is what happens when you go to bed and you feel like you did less than the best you could have done today. It doesn't have to be a big thing. It can be a little bit of stress that makes you that much more tired or that much more unhappy at the end of your day. And as day after day, over time, it builds up and gets more exhausting. It clouds your mind, which is really, really insidious, because you start to lose your ability to reason clearly about what's happening to you, about the fact that you're actually inside stress, which is not really a good thing for those of us whose brains or our tools that we use every day, in the same way that someone who abuses alcohol or drugs can't really see the downward slope until they get to the very bottom of something extremely, extremely bad has happened to them. It's very, very hard to see how stress has affected your life until you get to just the raw bottom point where your harmony is gone, your balance is gone, and you can't understand why you're not productive anymore. And that's happened to me recently. It's actually very hard for me to talk about what it is that's stressing me out, because I'm so far inside the system, so far inside the problem right now. I've got a few guesses. I think it's mostly because I have been working as hard as I can, but I don't feel like I've succeeded yet. And I think that's a problem with the definition of success. I think that I think I've been obsessed with the really big win in the end, where if I just keep on pounding and pushing and greeting my teeth and pulling the old nighters and so on, I will, at some point, have something magical happen to me that makes everything go away. Now, I can't even actually tell you what that means. I have no idea what it looks like. It's just this big fuzzy thing where all my problems go away. This is not a good thing. Stress leads you to look for these big dramatic solutions to problems, like a sabbatical or a resignation or possibly a good old fashioned meltdown on the stage when you provide a keynote, or anything else that's that big and dramatic. You're trying to solve a problem that happened in tiny, tiny bits over time with one huge bell swoop. And we can't solve the problems like that. We are culturally biased to do this. We are the children of our culture. And our culture has brought us up that's bred us to worship these sort of disrupted events, the opening of a new frontier, or a flash of inspiration, or the new tactic that makes the problem that was killing you completely obsolete. So you don't even have to worry about it anymore. We love these sort of things, fad diets, and stomach stapling, and extreme makeovers, and the lottery, the big rewrites, skimless databases. I have a horrible problem. It's going to take me forever, and a lot of hard thinking, and a lot of small steps to fix this problem. So why don't we see if we can just define that problem out of existence, and not worry about it anymore? This does not work. And stress really is a software thing, too, right? But the big rewrite is generally a stress reaction. We've done a lot of things over time in very small bits that have gotten us to a place that's hard for us to live in. And we want to fix it by turning the chair over, or turning the table over, and building a beautiful new pavilion. But in the same way that you can't deal with personal stress by cracking, changing your name, and moving to Vancouver, boom. I will let you know in several weeks whether that's actually effective or not. But I'm pretty sure that you can't deal with personal stress that way. And in the same way that we can't deal with personal stress that way, in general, we shouldn't try to deal with stress in our software systems that way either. You have to have the same sort of boring, repetitive, continuous, iterative approach to fixing the problems. Both in software and in life, I've been working to change the way I deal with stress, primarily by fighting every day against the fantasy of the big event that fixes everything, and doing small things every day where, at the end of the process, I do feel like I've accomplished something better. I may not have hit that wonderful liquidity event or a perfect regret of my code or anything like that. But I've made some sort of progress. One of the biggest pieces for me has been learning how to delegate, which I'm horrible at. Take the keyboard away from people who are horrible at. I spent, at the company I'm at now, about two years working by myself, and finally had the chance to hire some really great software engineers. And so I took the pilot money at that point. I found people I liked. I stocked them. I blackmailed them. I threatened them. I got them to work for me. And I promptly started ignoring them because they didn't walk in the door with the perfect knowledge of my entire system, what was in my brain, what we wanted to do next, and everything else. And just like when I was little, and my younger sister would take a coloring book and be doing the world's worst job of coloring inside it, and I would get sick of watching her take the crayon away and show her how to keep it within the terrible arms. I did the same thing with these folks, these great folks that I went through all this effort to go out and find. I brought them in and then said in the back of my head, well, they're not me from the get-go, so I can't do this in a great effect. This is a terrible idea. It's a product of stress, definitely. And it's a product of me not being able to think clearly when this sort of stuff is happening to me. I was very lucky in that the guy I hired first is very smart and very good and a brave man called me on it and kind of socked me in the head and told me that I was wasting his time putting on music. So I'm learning how to delegate more. It's great. I mean, I hired these guys for a reason and now I can actually just offload things on them every time I think of them and wait for them to complain about it and still feel like I've gotten something done, which is spectacular. The moment I was able to do that just to delegate a couple of things, I realized that it doesn't even have to be getting these things done. Just the idea of sharing some of the things that stress you out with someone you work with is tremendously useful. Whether it's personal or professional, even though the person who works next to you is certainly fighting their own battles because everyone is, they're not the exact same battle. We can still get each other's backs. I learned to and I encourage you to share the stress you're experiencing with your coworkers because it has helped save me. This is not, this isn't just a business thing either. This isn't just coworkers. I used to work extremely hard to never ever tell my wife about anything that was going on at work, like good or bad. I just wanted to shield her from it completely. I didn't want her to worry. Those of you who are married probably understand what a fundamentally stupid idea this is because there's just no way to do that. But instead of sharing my problems with her and letting her try and help me, I would bottle them up and then pick a fight about where the TV remote lives, honestly. And when I finally realized this and was able to sit down and talk with her, she very carefully explained to me what I'm more on I was and that beyond the fact that she loved me, she was also contractually obligated to listen to my problems. It's a huge upside marriage in my opinion. Once I realized that it was great, I mean, I could complain to her constantly. She has to tell me shut up. It's so much better. So the same thing applies outside of business. Share your stress with the people who love you. They're probably stressed too. It doesn't matter. They're not stressed about the exact same things. They can still give you some support. Stress, unfortunately, is just sort of the top layer. It's a gateway drug, as it were. It's a very good gateway drug for guilt. And in the same way that stress is something that keeps you up at night and makes you stare at the ceiling. Guilt is that feeling of waking up in the morning and knowing that you've already lost. You haven't gotten done the things that you need to get done today. You may have just woken up 30 seconds ago but you already feel completely behind. And you start punishing yourself immediately for not getting stuff done. When I first had this thought, I made myself sit down with a piece of paper and just stream of consciousness, write out every single thing that came to mind that bothered me a little bit. Everything from, I should really get this car that's three months late for the DMV and to, gee, I'm probably drinking too much, to, gee, it'd be great if I used this treadmill to, does my cat need registration. Didn't matter how important it was or how unimportant. Didn't matter what part of my life it was. But I was stunned to see how many things went down. I'm gonna ask you guys to do just a really quick experiment for me. If you'd all close your eyes and just think for about 15 seconds or so about that sort of minutiae, the stuff that occasionally comes through your mind during the day. Make yourself a little mental list. There will not be a test. You don't have to write this down but just make yourself a little list. And raise your hands if you feel like you've thought of more than three things. Keep your hands up if you've thought of more than five things. Keep your hands up if you've thought of more than 10 things. And that was in 15 seconds. And I'm certain especially you have way more on your mind than me. I know you're not to be trusted. That is amazing. We're trying to do these tremendously complicated things with our brains. Things that we have no evolutionary help to do. Things that only in the last 50 years have we figured out how to think about. Or even have the words to talk about. And that much of your brain in a setting where you're around your people that you're enjoying, where you're not necessarily at work can still throw out how many things that are bothering you that you wanna deal with. I started doing this on a daily basis to see how much of my brain power is being taken up by this. And it turns out I can list 20 or 30 things a day that are bothering me. There's a lot of overlap. It's not constant, but those sort of things always come up for me over and over again. And I feel guilty for not addressing them. I feel guilty for not giving them the time that they probably deserve. I feel guilty because I feel like I haven't managed my time well enough to deal with them. Primarily I feel guilty because it's a big mass of shit I haven't done and I haven't organized it in any way. There's no list for me to check off. There's no feeling of accomplishment if I give one of them done because there's the huge mass of stuff. So I started taking those little lists and organizing them, going over them every day and asking myself whether there was something I could do about them. And if there wasn't, I said, okay, there's literally nothing I can do about this today. I'm not going to worry about it anymore. And that has made a tremendous difference for me. Just the act of writing them down. And I encourage you to try the same thing. Was tremendously, tremendously helpful. In the course of the business work we've done over the last several years, I've felt very guilty about the amount of time I've been able to give to my family, the amount of time I've been able to give to my friends. I've written no significant open source software in years because I've put all of my energy into this company, and I've felt very guilty about that. But I never really thought about it in those terms. I just thought, wow, I feel like I should about where everything is and why is that? But now I can actually say to myself, okay, I would feel much better if I were still contributing to the community. I would feel much better if I were spending a little bit of time today or tomorrow or the next day taking a breath working on something that's not my work. And just being a little more specific about the things that bother me. Stress and guilt tend to go back and forth, obviously, and they magnify and enhance the limitations of the situation that you're in. I've been working at a very, very small, very low-budget company for several years. There's nothing wrong with that. But because I've been so stressed and so tired, I've built it up into a huge monster that's going to keep us from being successful. Oh, there's no way I could do this without money. Oh, there's no way I can run this system without having cash behind me. Oh, there's no way I can get the support I need or the people that I desperately need to support me. And those things aren't true, but because I was spending so much time exhausted and tired and stressed, I made them true. I worried about the limitations far, far more than I should have, and it made me a worse employee. Definitely a worse engineer and pretty much generally worse to be around. All of my friends can tell you this is absolutely true. So here's what I'm doing to fix this. I am sitting down taking a very, very close look at how I spend my time and the things and the ways in which I behave that are unhealthy for me. One of the first steps to do that for me was coming out and telling you guys about it because I think that a lot of us when we go through this sort of thing don't think about the other folks that we know, especially if they're casual, especially if they're professional. As folks, we never will not show any sort of weakness to, but I think that it's very important that we show it when it's there. So I'm exhausted. I'm personally and professionally exhausted. I'm trying very hard to get out of it by refocusing on my life, on the things that are important to me, to focusing on the friends and the mentors who have taught me tremendous amounts about code in the industry, to focusing on my family, to delegating things to my employees who can actually help me out and to coming and hanging out with all of you guys. This simply being able to talk about this on stage is a huge help to me and it's something that I want all of you to make yourselves available for, for everyone else. I'm here for anyone who would like to talk to me and I would like all of you to be able to do the same thing. I'm very grateful that Ben and Shane invited me here when I sat and tried to figure out what I was going to talk about. My mind was completely blank. Now keep in mind this is six weeks. I spent the entire six weeks wondering what I was going to talk about, wondering why I couldn't find a topic, wondering what in the world was wrong with me that I couldn't think of a topic considering how many billions of things there were to talk about and I realized that it was because I was exhausted and because I was stressed and because I was guilty about not spending more time on myself and on the community. So I wanted to come to tell you guys about it. This is a little earlier than Shane had been and I had planned but that's what I have to say to you guys and I appreciate you listening. The problem with the stage is that if any of you would like to talk about it and you know this more because I know that some of you are fighting the very same battles I have. Probably with more charm, definitely with less weight but I know some of you are going through this and I want you to know that whether it's over a drink tonight or outside in all the way 10 minutes from now I would love to talk with you about it. Thank you very much.