 Well, we're now beginning the technical program. And I am so excited about our first speaker. Joe O'Brien is somebody I've wanted to have speak here for a while. He is the founder of Edgecase. He works with the inimitable Jim Wyrick. And they've recently become part of New Context, where he is minister without portfolio. And he's been in the Ruby community since 2005. And he's going to talk to you about people, the missing ingredient. So give him a warm welcome. Have fun. So what do I mean by the missing ingredient? I'm going to talk about people. How do you define success? We're in the Bay Area. We're in technical field. We all work with, most people here work with startups. Success is usually defined by an exit, a raising of money, something like that. Recently, we were acquired back in January. We made the announcement. And we're really excited with where we're going. The interesting thing that happens as a founder is you start getting a lot of people who want to talk to you all of a sudden, who wouldn't give you the time a day before. And they all kind of start off the same in the conversation in a very similar way. Well, now that you're successful, how does it feel, da-da-da-da? Well, now that you're successful business person. Well, now that we can see that you're successful. And it was interesting because, quite frankly, I ended up pissing me off. Because I have a very different benchmark for what it meant to be successful. And I asked myself two questions on a consistent basis. And it says, if I had to get a job today, would I desperately want to work at Edgecase? It's kind of a mirror, mirror on the wall type scenario. The other one is a little bit more controversial, but it's as a consulting owner, you want to make sure that you are providing value as well to the organization. So I've always kind of asked myself these two questions. And I knew I was successful when I could go to Twitter and see things like this. These were just randomly taken one day off of people that were out there that worked for me tweeting away. This, you can't plan for. This is not something that you can ask people to do and have it be more effective. This is success. How do you do that? You also had a person who used to work for me who's now gone and I was sitting in LA getting ready to give one of the first versions of this talk actually. And right beforehand, we were talking and he had this great thing that he says, I always tell people that this is the second best job I've ever had. Referring to us being his favorite job he ever had. That was amazing. Although there's a beach in LA and not in Columbus, Ohio, so we ended up losing him. If you ask anybody, what does it mean to be successful in a technical project? What it means to take something across the finish line and always give you the triangle. People will process technology. It's what it all boils down to, right? We get those three right, we're gonna succeed. So why is it that almost every conference we go to, we talk about two of them? We spend the entire time actually, usually just talking about one, technology. If we're lucky, we'll talk about process. We'll have some arguments about pairing or not to pair, TDD and that kind of thing. But we always spend them on these two things. Whoops. So I called up a friend of mine one time. Glenn Vanderberg is actually in the audience here, he'll be speaking. And I said, you know, I just noticed something. I said, I've been on a lot of projects and I've never seen a project fail for technical reasons. I said, you're a lot more experienced than I am, which is code for your older. Love you, Glenn. But I said, you know, this is a really interesting kind of discovery. I've seen a lot of projects fail. Trust me, I've participated in quite a few of them. Nice flame-outs. And it was never a technical thing. It was never, you know, we chose Mongo instead of SQL. Or, oh my God, we actually chose SQL. Heaven forbid we should do that, right? It's not cool anymore. Or, you know, we chose something that doesn't scale like Apache instead of something like No, that does. But they've all failed for different reasons. And Glenn had a really fascinating comeback which has said, I'll take it a step further and say, I've never seen a project succeed for technical reasons. It's always the people on the project that make or break it. It's always the people above and below the project that make it or break it. So I've been on a mission to make 2012 the year of the people. Coming out, giving this talk, beating the drum, really getting people excited about this and start really, really thinking about this. And I've seen it make a change, it's been fascinating. Getting to do the opening talk to this conference is a perfect example of that. Although I love the part that Josh just said, our technical part of the program is getting ready to start. I'm sorry to disappoint you, that's about another half hour, 45 minutes away. Dave Thomas has a famous thing that we all talk, everybody knows, it says, you should learn a new language every year. And that's great, we go out and we pick off JavaScript, we pick off closure if we don't know it or Erlang or something, and it really helps us expand. It's a great idea. But what I wanna tell you is stop doing that this year. For the next year, I want you to go and learn psychology. If you took it in school, go back and think about it again. You're fresh on it. Go get some of the pop psych books. My sister's getting a PhD in psychology, she would hate me if she knows recommending this. But get some of the pop psychology books out there, like Drive, like Blink. Understand how the brain works. If you haven't read the Pragmatic Programmers Thinking and Learning, or Pragmatic Thinking, let me back up, Pragmatic Thinking, Refactoring Your Wetwear, go get it. By Andy Hunt from the Prag Programmers, it gives you a mental model of how the brain works. Describes the brain as a dual core CPU with a shared bus. Most of us know exactly why most of the brain bugs are out there. Oh, wow, we have brain bugs? Yes, we have an errata for the brain. They're called cognitive biases. They've been documented and researched. Oh, so you can know what's gonna happen when you talk to somebody and where breakdowns occur. Yes, you can. Why is it we take apart any computer? We love to mess with things. We get on the insides of things. Well, we've got one sitting on our head and we just don't pay attention to. Let me tell you, the way this thing works is fascinating. Really, really is. So, people patterns. For years, I've wanted to do a talk or writing or something about people for geeks. I didn't know how to do it. I've spent a career as an extrovert, which is a really strange person to be in this community, trust me. I've spent time in sales, but I've noticed that there's things that I've had to learn about interacting with people. There's an assumption that people that label themselves as introverts make that you can't learn how to interact with people. And it's complete and total bullshit. Introversion and extrovert is simply a matter of where you get your energy. The rest of it is stuff we all have to struggle through. I couldn't figure out how to communicate a lot of this stuff that was just kind of empirical knowledge, though. And I was inspired by two books over the same summer. I went back and reread the Pragmatic Programmer. And every time I read that, I have a habit of reading it one chapter at a time, no more than a chapter a week. No more than a chapter a week. It's a very easy read, but realistically, there's so much information, so much density in one chapter that I wanna digest and I wanna think about it. And so I end up getting it in nuggets that they deliver. The other one was Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, an amazing book to read. Written back, what, early 1900s or so, and this thing is as relevant then as it is today. Perfectly relevant. It's amazing. Can't believe I hadn't read it until this past summer. And then this idea of people pattern struck me. It's not a series of problems. It's a series of solutions that can be applied. If you can take just one of them away today, I'll be extremely excited. I got one of the greatest tweets from Jack recently on he had watched my talk and he labeled one thing that he had taken and learned later. This was weeks later, just completely made my week. But that's the idea. So let's kinda go into them. The conversation rolled X. First time I went to give this talk was at Midwest Ruby out in Kansas City. And a friend of mine, she was going to give a talk as well. And she put something out on Twitter that went something very similar to, I'm getting ready to travel to another city to be around 400 strangers. I don't think I'm ever gonna be as lonely as I am here. I thought that is so sad. Because I go to a conference like this with two, three, 400 people that I've probably never met most of them. And I've never been more in a place of comfort. Never been in a place that I can relate to better than these people. I go to Thanksgiving dinner with 12 people. Let me tell ya, that's lonely. There's not a whole lot I can relate to in people that you're supposed to be with. There's a ton of stuff you can relate to with people here. You're all here for common reason. You're all giving up your personal time to come and sit through a conference. And it's obviously not for the party, my God. They actually said breakfast. Everybody cheered like crazy. I said, square party tonight. And everybody's like, yeah, okay. Really? I don't know about you, but standing up here is just an excuse to go to that party. So anyway, we're all here because we love technology. I don't know about you, but I can't not be a programmer. I've tried, it doesn't work. I tried to be a sales guy for a while. My last gig, I was actually spending more time screwing with their website than anything else. I'm like, okay, I just gotta give this up. So we have to do, so we've all got tons in common. So Josh gave you this idea of meeting 20,000 people that you haven't met before. So what do you do? Here's the scenario, it's gonna play out. You're gonna be in a room like lunch or a hallway or something. There's gonna be groups of people standing around, so almost gonna feel like high school to a certain extent. And you're gonna sit there, and you're gonna go, well, I don't know what to say, and you're gonna walk up and you just kind of, okay, hi, right? Start keeping a conversation Rolodex. For those of you that are too young, a Rolodex was this little thing that sound on a desk, it rotated, it was actually had this stuff called paper in it that you could reference, but anyway, keep a series of conversation starters in your head. Walk up to somebody, go who shot first? Most people will smile, right? If they say Han, you can slap them upside the head, say no. Right? Oh, come on, really? Walk up and say who's your favorite doctor? If they start talking about a podiatrist, just kind of slowly back away. If they say David Tennant, well now you've got an argument, because they're probably wrong, but hey. There are all things that we can relate to. There are things that we can start talking about. Have those things in your head. Think about it. Conversations ab and flow, okay? They take work on both sides. It's not that they're not interested. Sometimes you can hit an awkward place where the conversation just is dead. Have another question handy, do something else. Ask somebody where they came from. Be interested in that. It's actually kind of cool to find out where people live and what they think about, right? What was it something you saw today that you're really dying to go play with again? Oh my God, did you hear about that latest thing on Twitter of shitnode says? That was hilarious. Right, there's lots that we have in common, but keep these things in your head, because this is not something that just comes, some of us, it comes naturally because we've practiced this. I used to walk into networking events all the time, shy and reserved as hell, didn't know what to say to people. And so eventually, I literally, I was at home writing them down. I didn't go with a piece of paper to look at, but I would keep them in my head because you gotta keep this going, right? And it's fascinating what you get to know about people. Ask questions. On the tail side of this is those voices in your head I hate to tell you they're not gonna go away. My psychiatrist keeps saying with every bit of medication, it's gonna happen, but it doesn't. No, I'm seriously, so you're walking up to this group, you see them in the hallway, you wanna go talk to somebody. What's gonna go through your head? Psychological protection mechanisms. Your brain hates to be hurt. It doesn't like to be rejected. Remember back to high school? It doesn't like it. So what is it gonna do? It's gonna put up barriers to make sure you don't get hurt. So you're gonna start hearing these voices in your head going, they don't really wanna talk to me. Oh look, they're all from that same company, they're probably talking about something else. You know what, I'm just not as cool as them. My GitHub profile kind of sucks compared to that guy. Right? Let me tell you, if you look at GitHub, Aaron Patterson is one of the most intimidating individuals you've ever seen in your life. If you ever talk to him, he's one of the most amazing, easy approachable people I've ever met. Walk up, say hi. Chad's the same way, although don't let your boss see you're talking to him. Walk up to people and start talking because those voices are gonna keep playing. I do this professionally all the time. I go and I meet people, this is my job. I still have those voices play every single time. This person doesn't wanna talk to me, I'm not worthy to talk to this person. Something, right? They're all these negative things. They're simply barriers your brain's trying to put up. I guarantee you once you get past it, the success is gonna be much better. So let's flip coins, let's change positions a little bit. When we were little, we got the advice a lot, walk a mile in somebody else's moccasins, or you've gotta walk in somebody else's shoes, right? And people can recite it back, but very, very few people can actually do it. When I was a senior in high school, I took competitive speech and debate. There was a fascinating class for me because I went in and we had this really in-depth interview of what do you feel about things like abortion and things like the death penalty and all these things. It was this big log interview. I had no idea what I was in for. I was getting set up like you wouldn't believe, but I kinda spilled out my heart and that was great. So the first assignment comes out and you've gotta do a debate on abortion from the other side. So purposely picks what you've said is your opinion and comes at it from a different angle. Holy crap, that's interesting. It's the first time in my life I truly had to put myself in somebody else's shoes. And it's amazing what that perspective looks like. I went to a retreat early in high school and there was this one moment that was really powerful. We're all in this big gym and we've formed a circle around the outside and there's this thing in the middle covered up. It's a real silent moment and he takes the cover off and it's this drum, this Indian drum. It looks at somebody on one side and he's like, what color is that drum? I says green and I look at it and I'm like, is he colorblind? He's like, what about you? It's red. What? Turns out this thing was painted different colors and different sides. It was all in how you were looking at it. It's the same object, different color. There are constantly arguments you're gonna be in where you keep arguing the same point and you don't understand the perspective the other person's coming from. There's a misunderstanding there probably because you're looking at it from two different directions. Arguments and conflicts on projects, arguments and conflicts between managers, these almost always come down to an issue of what do you see? Fast forward that to a different direction. I have a severe case of ADD, not a surprise to anybody that knows me. I get to a place where there's times I can't sit and just concentrate. It drives me crazy. So what do I do? I pull up on my laptop. I do something small to kind of get my brain thinking in one direction and then I can fully concentrate on what's happening. I was in a meeting with a client one time and we walked in and I sat there with three of our developers on the other side of the table. Two of them had their laptops open and there were two clients and then one of the developers didn't. He's kind of sitting there. The clients ended up talking to him, the one without the laptop the entire time and you could see the frustration building up. Now I knew exactly what was going on with the other two guys. I knew why they were doing that but what they weren't doing is looking at what somebody else was seeing because what does that tell you? You're not paying attention. You don't care. It's not important. A friend of mine and I were talking last week about the problems you have with your spouse when you're sitting down and your husband comes over to tell you something and you're listening to him and he's like, you're not listening to me? Yes, I am. And then you repeat the line and as soon as you're done repeating you go, oh shit, I shouldn't have done that. Right? As soon as they go, well, what did I say? And you actually tell them what they said? You've lost the argument, trust me. You're just not paying it. You're not seeing what they see. They see a frustration in not being paid attention to and not considering importance. Yes, there's a whole context behind it and I understand the reasoning. It doesn't matter. Understand what other people are seeing at that moment and it's amazing the things that open up. Helps every single time and I always end up on the other side of the stage when it's time to flip. I forgot my remote. The three realities. This goes into the same thing we just talked about. If you start to see what they see, you'll discover a very interesting thing. After 11 years of marriage, my wife and I hit a point where it was really, really difficult to continue. It's a really hard place to be. Life gets in the way, kids get in the way, arguments never get resolved. Those things build up. So we end up in marriage counseling and we're talking to this guy who, to this day, he did amazing work for us but he still was such an annoying prick. Anyway, complete aside. But he had this one statement one day that stuck with me and it's always echoed. It's this idea that he said in every single argument, in every single fight, there are three realities. There's the one you see there's the one he sees and then there's the one that's actual reality. That was interesting. So I'm reading a book and on a lighter kind of funny version of this, I read the book, Confessions of a Public Speaker. Scott Burkoon, I think. He starts off talking about this event where he was getting ready to talk at a really big O'Reilly conference like Web 2.0 or something, a couple thousand people in the audience and he was given a 10 minute slot and he had the same reaction to a 10 minute slot that I would of a 20 or 30 minute talk which is, oh crap, I can't say my name in 15 minutes. So he sits down and he practices, he gets his talk down and he does it and it's like 12 and a half minutes. Crap, what am I gonna do? So he cuts and he does, he practices and practices all of a sudden he gets it down perfectly. Nine minutes, 54 seconds. Perfect, great. He's so excited, does it a couple more times consistently gets the same spot. So he gets the conference and he's sitting out on the side and speakers up there talking, gives them the introduction, turns around, ladies and gentlemen, he walks across stage, he shakes the guy's hand, thank you, this is great, comes across, he applauds, starts to die down, he turns around, his confidence monitor has a timer and it reads nine minutes and 20 seconds. Oh shit, I just lost half a minute. And he's timed this down perfectly. What am I gonna do? So he starts talking really, really quickly and okay, he's getting there, he's getting there and all of a sudden he looks down and he's got three minutes left time and he's almost done. Oh shit, what am I gonna do now? So he slows down a little bit. He starts up and then he starts like throwing in ad-lib stuff and he's just, oh my God, what am I, he just gets really frustrated and then he looks and okay, he finishes on time and he walks off stage, he's like, I can't believe I just did that. That was the worst talk I've ever given. 10 minutes later, he's out in the hallway, somebody comes up and goes, oh my God, thank you, that was the best talk I've ever heard because of da-da-da-da and he starts, you know, explaining why there were certain things that resonated with him and it was just a great talk and it was so well delivered and he's shaking the guy's hand, smiling like, oh that's awesome, you're nuts. And he starts reflecting back on it and he goes, you know, it's interesting because it was probably neither. It was definitely not the worst talk he's ever given. It was not the best talk he's ever given, that's for sure. But it wasn't the best talk ever but it was probably somewhere in between. It was probably a lot better than he thought it was because he's looking at it from a certain angle. The attendee is looking at it from a different angle but in reality it's kind of somewhere in between because we always look with our own set of glasses, we always look with our own set of filters, our cognitive biases, go read the book. You're always gonna approach it from certain ways. So understanding that there are three realities in any situation can help you take that step back if you can without the emotion and start looking at this and understanding what it is that's coming down. What do you do to help do this? How do you accomplish this? The most simple thing is listening without agenda. So one of the versions of this talk I gave was a three hour workshop and I did it with a good friend of mine, Jesse Sternschruis, who runs The Improv Effect. It's an amazing place that does improv training which seems weird. I always thought improv was this thing that you did once you were damn good at theater, right? No, it turns out that improv is something that everybody can do and there's a ton you can learn about interacting with people on your team immediately. Awesome. So there's this one exercise that she has us do that's just great. You stand up and you turn to the person next to you and you tell a story about a time you were hurt really badly. Like you're riding your bike as a kid and you're trying to jump this car right in the windshield and oh my God, right? You went down on a skateboard on a downhill, something like that. So you both tell this story, right? And at the end you're like, oh, that was great. Now, the story you heard, turn to another person and tell it like it's your own. Everybody gets this white face like, oh, crap. Because what happened? You were smiling and nodding as they were telling their story and you were thinking about what they were gonna say, what you were gonna say. You were thinking about your story. Oh, look, they embellished that one. Ooh, maybe mine wasn't good enough. Maybe I should choose this one over here. Well, you know what? Actually, this kind of sucks. I guess this one would be okay. Well, no, I don't want to reveal that because I was really stupid then. Well, I was really drunk then so I don't want to tell that story. Well, maybe I'll tell this. Right, and they're talking to you the whole time and you're brain's just over here going. Because you have an agenda. I am the world's worst person with this one. Because I will sit and somebody will start talking and they'll tell something that relates to a story that I think is fun that I've run into. And unfortunately, I immediately start tuning out and I start thinking about wanting to tell the story. And I catch myself and I have to pull myself back in. Because I realize I'm gonna miss the information that's coming next. The rest of it does not come through. You're just being polite and accepting it but it's kind of, you know, in one ear out the other. So understand when you're doing this, listen to take in the information, not just to make the other person feel better. So bad news. Bad news is a really interesting thing. It's an acid that sits on your brain. You have some bad news to tell somebody. You told your project manager this was gonna be done this week and you just discovered you completely forgot a particular part that needs to be implemented and this is actually gonna go to three weeks. Not a couple days. Oh, shit. You lost your, well, lost your job's probably a little extreme. You have some bad news to tell somebody else about something. What do you do? Well, we usually sit and think about it. We digest it. We think of how we're gonna present this. We try to figure out how to fix it. We try to fix it. But we never think about the corollary, which is get it out there. Bad news is this really fascinating thing, especially with geeks because we've been the ones that people come to to fix problems all the time. We were the ones in school with the answers to most of what was going on, right? People came to us for this. So when you run into something that you can't fix, it hits a certain part of your ego that you're very unfamiliar with. I tell you, the rest of the world, they're very familiar with this. We're kinda not, right? It's uncomfortable, very uncomfortable. But let me tell you a secret. Your bosses did not hire you because you have the answer to every problem. The sole reason your bosses hired you is you can figure out the problems and get past them. You can work through them. You won't let them stop you. Most of us don't understand that. So what happens? We have a problem. We go back. We sit down, we try to fix it. Crap, it's still not working. Well, maybe if I do this, we pull in all nighter. Well, then the next day our work really suffers because my God, we were up all night and Red Bull only is gonna take you so far. And so you keep going through it. There's a little secret in here, which is if you get the bad news out there, first of all, the acid stops eating at you. You will lose sleep. You won't be able to eat. It'll drive you absolutely insane because it's there. It's weighing on you. If you get the bad news out there, the reactions will be much less than you think they are. The bad reactions to bad news are usually because you've waited so long. You have to tell your boss something negative, something bad that's about to happen. And you don't. And you try to go tackle it yourself and then you go back a week later and he says, you know, she says, when did this happen? Well, last week, she kind of looks at you with this look like, what do you mean last week? What have you just told her? I don't trust that you understand this. I'm smarter than you. I know this better than you do, right? You've never given her this indication that I need your, you know, I have a problem and I'm working through it. Here's what it is. Pick up the phone, walk into the office, get into email, something. Here's a problem I've run into. Here's the next three steps I'm thinking about taking. Here's the things I've ruled out. Do you have any ideas? Open it up, right? Get it out there. Every time, you know, I work in a consulting company. We have these things run into all the time and I pick up the phone with a customer. I'm always lamenting what's gonna happen. I'm always surprised at how well they take it. This is why things like agile development exist. So we have the feedback loops. We can catch these early. If you've made a mistake, step up and own it. It's amazing how much better this works than you think it does. Now Josh, right beforehand, gave me this interesting corollary to this which is revealing bad news quickly. He talked about this idea of closing the loop. So I very quickly added this slide. Sorry, it looks like hell. But it's a really interesting idea is if you're doing something well or you've accomplished something, tell somebody you're done. Tell somebody you did it. Be very quick and honest with it, but just close that loop. A lot of frustrations in management and people come from this idea of they don't know where you are on something. They keep asking you, you think they're pestering, but look at what they see. Have you actually given them that information to tell them it's there and it's done and you've moved on? So interesting idea. And I'm gonna have to start working really fast because I'm late. Consistent, uncompromising honesty. Always make sure that you're consistent and completely honest with people. Now, does that mean you have to tell them their hair looks like shit that day if they didn't ask you? No. Understand there's a barrier to this, but when it comes to things, don't ever lie. Don't ever do this. There's no reason to be dishonest. I gave people slack in high school because there was a maturity issue. There's no reason as adults we should ever think dishonestly. They will catch up to you. And how that makes you look and how that makes the other person feel is absolutely terrible and there's no reason for it. Listen between the lines. We all read this great book in high school about this whale and this fishing story and it was really great until your teacher started talking about it and you realize it was this big metaphor for life and then it just really went to hell. There were so many messages in between each paragraph you didn't know. Just like Moby Dick, there's a lot of things in life that happen this way. I had a customer talking to him one day. How's it going? How are we doing? And he's telling me and finally towards the end of the call he's like, so, how do you think George is doing? I stopped. I'm like, I could give you the answer on how I think he's doing, but just by asking that there's obviously something else going on. What is that? Understand that there's messages that go in between things because other people don't know how to deal with people well and as you're trying to improve you're gonna start seeing these things come through, give them the space and security to do it and it's amazing the things that come out. Positivity moves forward. One of the other ideas from improv. What are the two magic words of improv? Yes and. And you need both of them. Imagine being up on a stage and somebody goes, oh my God, I can't believe you made it to the moon. The other person walks up and goes, I'm on the moon. Well crap, now what do you say? Or, I can't believe we made it to the moon. The other person walks up and goes, yep. Okay, what do you say next? When you're in a meeting there's certain things that people will shout out. Ideas about something. If you very quickly nail them down they're gonna stop having those ideas. Your brain works the same way. It has ideas, if you don't let them out of your head your brain will stop producing them. You have somebody younger on the team, they haven't been through the same stuff you have. They come out, well what if we tried this? Oh God, you roll your eyes. No, that's not gonna work, right? Understand that things can be moved forward. Understand that people can have ideas that you can go with and run with that might be something different than you would have done. And then at the end, always assume the positive. Be an optimist. As geeks this goes against every bit of fiber in our bodies, right? We can see a lot of things down. Oh my God, this could be terrible. Why is pessimism there? It's a defense mechanism. It's trying to protect you, because if you assumed it was gonna be terrible and it was, well I was right. If you assumed it was gonna be terrible and it wasn't, well that's a cool surprise. But it's gonna be terrible next time. Those people suck to be around. I'm sorry, but they're just hard to be around, right? Assume there's gonna be a positive result of something. Now I guarantee you you're gonna get burned. You're gonna trust somebody and they're not gonna return it. That percentage of the time is very, very low. And when it happens, consider it a naivety tax. Consider it a tax you're paying so that you can enjoy all the other relationships. If you assume people are coming to you for positive reasons, if you assume in a business transaction people have the same positive direction they wanna go, things move forward much, much easier. They're easier on everybody. If you go into a business transaction assuming everybody's terrible, it's awful. It sends terrible signals. It puts you off on the wrong foot. Think about this hard as you're dealing with people. So, I really appreciate it. Thank you for coming. Enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you.