These quotes set the stage for a really helpful presentation about how we see our jobs, and how we advance using a framework of Do Better, Look Better, Connect Better.
As a kid, Azzarello was into arts, and her mother said to her: “You will go to college. You will get an education. You will support yourself. Don’t expect anyone else to support you.” As a result of this, Azzarello decided to do Electrical Engineering instead of art, where she was one of three women, also achieving a minor in CS. Electrical Engineering wasn’t natural to her, but coding was ideal.
Azzarello’s first job was at Bell Labs, which should have been a dream job, but wasn’t. She wasn’t using enough of her strengths, and was interested in products and business. So she took a job as a Sales Engineer at a Silicon Valley company. She’s held every level of position at a company, didn’t drop into being a CEO – had entry level jobs. And Engineering and tech education was a big part of her success, it taught her about problem solving, and that there is always somewhere to start.
Did Product Marketing at a couple of Silicon Valley startup companies. Azzarello was technically in Marketing, but spent half her time with Engineers. At HP, she had the choice between Marketing Manager and Software Development Manager. She picked Software Development Manager, because she knew she wanted to be a General Manager some day.
The product was a mess. Quality and morale were both low, they were on a two year cycle and running late. After a year, all the problems were fixed, in part because they had moved to a 6-month development cycle. But after all that, Azzarello did not get a raise. When asking why, given that, the answer was “I tried, but nobody knows you”.
This was a huge slap in the face about how the world works. Work is not enough. To have more impact, it’s not just about recognition and raises, you need to be known, respected, and recognised. As a result, you get more opportunities, more money, and more interesting projects. The results have to be seen.
Worst job, was Sales and Marketing for HPs desktop systems, but it gave her more experience to help become a GM. You can’t get a job without experience, but you can get experience without the job. Moved to HP Openview Software business, ran a global org with 5k people. Then became CEO of a startup. Then Chief Marketing Officer at Siebal, but after that was bought by Oracle she was paid off and has been running the Azzarello group for 6 years.
Do Better
Work, or the environment, beats the “I can change the world” out of you”. The key is to focus on your natural strengths, which we often take for granted. When working in our areas of greatest strength, it feels ideal, and we don’t think that it can be impressive. When others are amazed, and it doesn’t feel like a big deal to you… that’s a strength.
We are impressed when others do the things that we think are hard.
Invert that – focus on the strengths. The ROI on strengths is higher than the ROI on stuff we’re not good at. So spending time on things we are naturally good at, has big returns! Hated every minute of working on weaknesses, and never got any better at any of it. Once she stopped worrying about weaknesses, and invested in strengths, business improved and her career soared.
No one person can be good at everything, but a team can.
Tune your job over time to suit your strengths. Know what works for you – you can change your job, without changing your job.
EXERCISE: Think about a time when you were at your best. What was special (extra good!) because you did it?
The energy in the room is tremendous when talking about strengths – I know I feel a boost focusing on a positive experience.
Celebrate natural strengths – figure out what you’re naturally good at. Don’t try to earn your primary living doing something you’re not good at. It’s painful.
Developing a strategy to use strengths and values at work.
Too Busy
To think, to reorganize… “to busy to scale”.
No-one other than you has any motivation to make you less busy. Most successful people didn’t happen to be less busy on the way – they figured out how to get things done in spite of being busy.
If you are overwhelmed by your job, you aren’t ready for promotion. People wish for work that is more important and has more meaning, no-one wants more meaningless crap.
Are you a workhorse? If you are, the reward is – more work. It feels like you’re doing the right thing, but you have to catch and wiggle out of this way of working. It doesn’t get you ahead, it just gets you more work.
There was an inventory crisis at HP. A guy spent time on crisis, but he wasn’t a workhorse, he was strategic and so delivered better results without burning up all of his time personally.
Give yourself time to think – get known for rising above work, solving problems in a more strategic way. You need a system or process for dealing with it in a different way. Move yourself out of workhorse mode. No-one will do it for you.
When you have time tot hunk, consider what the business really values. Think about how to do your job better.
Ruthless Priorities
Too many things on todo list, all of them seem important. Decide, what are the things that you will not put at risk? Ask how bad is it if this fails?
It’s not about saying no, it’s about allowing yourself to finish your ruthless priorities first. Get famous for finishing important things, not for being busy. Talk about what you are doing, not about what you are not doing.
Being a leader is about getting the most important things done when it is hard.
Defend Your Time
Your job is not to do everything and die trying. Not all requests are created equal. Advise your boss, and negotiate. Your boss delegates thinking and judgement, not just the work.
Look Better
This is about credibility. Being invisible doesn’t work – you can’t opt out of communicating. If it’s not a natural strength, develop it as a skill.
If you are not communicating, you are communicating. But, it’s OK to be just OK at it. Azzarello trained herself to be a more convivial listener.
Be visible, but not annoying. You can’t be credible if you are invisible. You are never annoying if you are genuinely adding value, or if you are communicating about important outcomes achieved.
Be more relevant, you need to translate:
Business first.
Don’t educate
No jargon.
Talk their language.
Create “the hook”.
If you have to educate someone about what/why – you are not relevant. What’s relevant is what they wake up in the morning worrying about.
Magic Communication Tool
Business initiative / realities (“hooks”). The only way to know their hooks is to ask. Really understand who your stakeholders are.
Personal Brand
Your brand is how you are perceived by others. Example: Disney has the brand as the happiest place on earth. They have turned waiting in line into an art form, and you never see a security force (but they are there).
Your brand is not what you say, but what everyone else says. Your brand is what people see from you most consistently.
PERFORMING OR PRESENTING
Performing means owning the outcome.
Not just content.
You are being assessed.
Not about having a “big personality”.
Humility is OK… invisible is not.
Don’t be afraid of being judged – seek it out.
Patty told us an embarrassing story of going to a client and having someone say: “why did you bring her? She doesn’t know anything.” She didn’t die. “Fearless” people are afraid, but do it anyway. Just because you are scared, doesn’t mean you are not qualified. Be scared, and do it anyway.
Body language is not just what you show to others, it changes you. Influences your brain chemistry. When you smile, sends stimulus to your brain. It makes you feel more powerful and less afraid. A pen between your teeth achieves the same thing.
Power poses. Wonder women – don’t hunch in on yourself! Wear a sweater (theory is that women sit like this because we are cold).
Be very focused on outcomes and excellence, and just stand your ground. You are stronger when you are yourself – don’t try and turn into someone else.
“The last thing you need is another one of you.”
Connect Better
Get help! Never struggle along. Get mentors, and build your extra team.
The most successful people are those who get the most help.
Types of Mentors
Smart people.
Can’t have too many.
Engage several per year informally.
Personal Career Advocates.
Add one every 1-3 years (informal and formal).
Business Advisors.
Be on the lookout for help at getting better at your business.
Create your personal advisory board.
You can attempt your career by yourself, without mentors, but why would you?
If you have mentors, good for you, get another. If not, get one.
“Mystery mentors”: they are your mentor, but they never know it.
Figure out what job you want, then figure out how to get that experience.
You current job will never give you all the experience you need to get the next one.
Networking Paradox.
Need a network that can help you.
Networking is about giving, not taking.
Give before you need anything.
On balance, always take less than you are giving.
Authentic Networking
Keeping in touch with people you already know.
Meeting new people.
Meet new people based on things that actually interest/inspire you.
Give positive feedback.
Reach out based on something specific.
Offer to be of service.
Recommendations:
30 minutes networking a month.
Send 10 emails a month.
Connect properly with 2 special people.
Summary
Do your job and change your job.
Do Better – impact.
Refuse to burn time on low value work.
THRIVE: redefine your job to add more value; raise the bar.
Look Better – Credibility
Be visible, but not annoying.
Be a translator: be relevant, show your value.
Connect Better – Support
Build a broad network.
All in all, I enjoyed it, and I got things out of it – more so than when I read the book, I think. I was a bit wary at first, because I hate the advice of women with other interest, take less technical roles, but I don’t think it went that way at all, and this advice is relevant whether you’re in a technical role or more of a management one.
I confess, I’ve never seen Star Wars, or Star Trek. The only video games I play are the Lego ones. And so I’ve been seeing people in these amazing costumes, and going to talks where there are these gaming cultural references that I don’t get, and thinking… woah, I’m not geeky enough.
It’s a little amazing how one can do that, right? I mean, in the real world, telling people I’m a software engineer will often stop a conversation.
Looking at other people, it’s easy to say, oh that person is dressed better than I am. That person is smarter than I am. That person is, frankly, just doing better at life than I am.
Looking at ourselves, it’s hard to see what we’re doing well.
Today, we’re going to talk about the flipside of being a superhero – the side you don’t see, that it’s easy to assume doesn’t exist. We’re going to talk about what a superhero is, anyway. And what we want you to walk away with, is the realization that you are already a superhero. We’re going to share some strategies that we use to get things done, and some stories of our own failures, and the successes we’ve built on them.
Redefining What Makes a Superhero
Discussion point: Let’s think about some superheros and qualities we admire about them.
It’s great that we have Fantasy superheros – the Wonder Woman video yesterday was amazing. But, what about real-life superheros? Who do you know that inspires you?
[Introduce each other]
Discussion point: Tell us about one of your real-life superheros.
It’s easy to admire people we don’t really know. We see their successes, but usually we don’t see their struggles.
[Explain how we see eachother’s struggles]
Setting (and Achieving) Superhero Goals
Discussion point: Talk about Big Hairy Audacious Goals you’ve achieved?
Cate: getting a job as a software engineer at Google. I studied really hard, practising coding without an IDE, reading algorithm books. So that when I went to interview, I felt as prepared as I could.
Cate: getting my level 2 ski instructor qualification. Went out with less experience than a lot of people on the course, but I got up early to ski before class, took as short a break as I could for lunch to ski more, and often closed the hill with the ski patrol in the evening – or went to the gym.
Serena: noticing an issue with internal communications within this fast growing company, I took the initiative to approach my managers with the issue and introduce a solution. Took the existing Unicorn accomplishment tool (which was basically one lonely text field) and turned it into a full blown project tracking and achievement tool, to improve communication company-wide. Was featured in Fast Company Magazine this past summer.
If a goal is a really enormous, it becomes “safe” to fail at. If your goal is to be Oprah, well, every other person on the planet isn’t Oprah. If you don’t manage it, who’s to judge? It’s an intimidating place to aim for, and how the hell do you start?
It’s important to set goals that stretch you, but make sure they are realistic. It’s easier to achieve a bigger goal if you break it down into sizable chunks.
Discussion point: What’s one of your goals right now and what steps are you taking to achieve it?
Cate: have a team of my own. I’m starting a new part of the project I work on and I got an intern for the winter. So I want to turn this into something other people can – and want to – work on.
Serena: Empowerment through education and creating more positive female role models are two things I’m really passionate about. I founded a chapter of GDI in my community to teach more women how to code and to get more women involved in the local technical community. Everyone knows about the low number of women in tech, but instead of complaining about the issues, I want to see more being done. We had our first event last month, and had the room packed with people.
There’s a great book by Richard Wiseman called “the Luck Factor”. It’s all about studies that have shown that lucky people do things differently to unlucky people. They are more open to new experiences, notice things that “unlucky” people don’t, and they take a more constructive approach to set-backs.
Failing is the ultimate learning opportunity.
Discussion point: What’s a failure that you learned from?
Cate: I had an idea for something that I wanted to build, so I prototyped it and took it to people who could make that happen. It didn’t go the way I wanted, but as a result of the experience I really knew what kind of thing I wanted to work on and what kind of environment I wanted to be in. And so I moved to a new project where I get those things.
Cate: When I was working at a summer camp, I got passed over for promotion in favor for this guy, who was a complete idiot and had a drinking problem. More than once, he just didn’t show up in the morning because he was passed out from the night before or just hadn’t made it back. So I did his job – and mine – and I thought that would make my manager realize her mistake. It didn’t. He got that job again the following summer, and I learned that it was time I gave myself permission to be a leader – if that was what I wanted. And that he was capable of doing that job, he’d just elected to be drunk instead when I was around to do it for him!
Serena: When I was in University, studying for CS I always thought that getting a job at a big tech corporation was the ultimate dream job. One semester I interviewed for Microsoft, I got through the first round, and they wanted to fly me down to Seattle. I spent 2 weeks preparing and studying. I went through 5 interviews that day, and was completely exhausted after. A few weeks later I got a phone call from them saying I got the job – yay! I should be excited right? But I wasn’t. I realized that this position wasn’t right for me, and it wasn’t the direction I wanted to steer my career to.
Serena: After 4.5 years of studying CS, I had finally graduated and was looking for full time work. I remember updating my resume one afternoon, and realizing “Wow, I really can’t picture myself being a software developer for the rest of my life and being happy.” I realized that software development wasn’t for me and I felt like a failure because I had just spent years and thousands of dollars studying for a degree for a job I didn’t want.
Different Ways To Leave Your Comfort Zone
Do you “nudge” or do you “leap”? Your comfort zone is like, a space and as you leave it, it gets bigger. We both use two main strategies for expanding our comfort zones.
Serena: Nudging. Continually pushes the boundaries of your comfort zone and so it gradually gets bigger. Taking organized steps forward, to move towards a bigger goal.
Cate: Leaping. A couple of times a year I arrange something, or agree to something, that flings me right out of my comfort zone. And then I figure it out and make it work. For example, I agreed to TA in French. I booked myself into a martial arts academy in China for two months. The downside of this is that at the time I quite frequently feel that I’m having a nervous breakdown, but I always, always know that I’m doing something that will expand my comfort zone.
Discussion point: what strategies do you use to expand your comfort zone?
Comparing Yourself To Others
If you’re on a team of people, hopefully the people on it will have different strengths and backgrounds. Maybe someone is great at writing database code, another person’s great at UI. Someone might be really good at design.
It’s easy to compare yourself to everyone, and say, I’m not as good at databases at Alice, and Bob is really great at UI code, and Charlie is much better at design work. Alice isn’t as good as Bob at UI code, and Charlie isn’t as good as Alice at databases. You will have your own strength that they admire in you – stop finding yourself short compared to everyone else in every way.
It’s easy to focus on their strengths, but only see your own weaknesses. It’s okay if you’re not the best in absolutely everything. Nobody is.
Cate: one of the things I worry about is that someone else on my team writes more code than me because I’ve been asked to be the glue between two teams, and that means that I spend some of my time on that whilst he can be very focused. But this guy does not communicate that well, at all. I might want his strength – but I definitely don’t want his weaknesses!
Serena: After I switched careers into design, and began working full-time as a “designer” I felt insecure about my design skills because I never had the formal education that others did. But I quickly realized that my background in CS and visual arts, is highly valued in this field.
Discussion point: what strength do you have that balances out your weakness?
Building Your Superhero Team
It’s really important to have the right people around you – your real-life superheros are your support team.
Your support team provides advice, inspiration (from the cool stuff they are doing), help, and sometimes just someone to listen.
There’s very little that you can meaningfully accomplish alone.
Discussion point: how has your superhero team helped you accomplish something cool?
Cate: The Awesome Foundation in KW consists of 14 people. 12 trustees, who provide the $1200 that we give away, and 2 deans. One to run the pitch night events and one for the other stuff. And then 6-8 people who come and pitch. That’s 20 people or more plus the people who come and watch, all to increase the amount of awesome in our community by a couple of projects.
In a recent discussion with a colleague, I voiced the opinion that the challenge of creating presentation software is to enable terrible presentations – zooming animations, tiny and unreadable text, endless bullet-points. Helping people create good presentations? That would be easy.
Really, you could do it with some nice, full-screen image viewing software.
He disagreed, arguing that there was no point in having slides at all if there was nothing on them. Mostly, I think, that he wanted to think that he gives good presentations. And he uses slides covered in bullet points.
My main point was that you can give a terrible presentation even with beautiful, minimalist slides. But that people rarely do, and that things about the discipline of minimalist slides, means that more effort goes in, the flow is thought out better, and this typically results in a better presentation.
Between now and then, I saw someone present. And I thought – I need to rethink this view on things, because this guy is giving a good presentation… and he has some of the ugliest slides I’ve ever seen.
But actually, I think this presenter is a good speaker, passionate and knowledgable about their subject, but their presentation itself could use some work. I think that improvements would flow from making more beautiful slides.
Structure. When you pare down your slide deck to the minimum, the structure of your talk is more apparent. If you’re making one main point per slide, then it’s easier to see if it’s balanced – you’re won’t have 10 slides for something relatively unimportant. Somehow, it’s easier for 10 bullet points on one slide to slip past…
Flow. Does your talk tell a compelling story? Similarly to structure, it’s easier to see this when your content is pared down. Something that is off-topic becomes obvious.
Key points. Because my slides are minimal, I think very carefully about any text I put on them. Sometimes it’s helpful. But when you have text-heavy slides already, that really important piece of text gets lost. And, if you read it aloud because it’s so important then it seems like you’ve drifted into reading your terrible slides.
Preparation. You can’t get away with putting chunks of your last paper/blog post/whatever into a deck and presenting it if you go minimalist. You have to spend the time to make a beautiful deck. Starting from scratch like that means you need to know what you want to say. Picking the right images takes time and means you need to know what your point is. I confess that sometimes I use slightly random images in my decks, but what I’ve noticed is that people read into them what they want to (e.g. someone thought the penguins in my ignite deck represented conformity).
Attention. Everyone knows that when there is text on screen, people read it. When they are reading it, they are not listening to you! You make less sense after a few minutes of distraction than if the audiences attention was on you all along.
Tempo. The thing about text on slides, is that the audience can tell when you skip over bits to work with the time available. Presenters even mention that “there are three things here, really, but I’m just going to talk about one”. When each slide is for a main point, rather than a set of bullet points, you have more flexibility in your tempo. I once gave a talk that was scheduled for 45 minutes, but then due to people being late was cut to less than 30. Part way through, they changed it back to 45 (for real, it was chaos). Because each slide was a point or story that I knew well and was passionate to share, it was easier to leave out detail when I thought I had little time, and then add it back in (and more) when the time went back up. Could the audience tell? Probably. But it would have been much harder for me to be flexible and carry this off if everything I planned on saying was right up there on every slide.
Translation. Most people don’t present in multiple languages, although if you do, not having to translate all that text is an excellent reason not to have it. But, this also applies to different audiences. I gave fundamentally the same presentation to high school kids and to adults at completely different venues. Both were well received. I kept the structure and the deck the same, whilst changing my wording, emphasis, and the stories I chose to share. By not publicly committing to what you’re going to say, you have the flexibility to be responsive to the audience.
Ignite is an intimidating format. 5 minutes is not a bad length of time, but the auto-advance format is very unforgiving. I’d had that topic in mind as an Ignite talk for a while, but it took me a long time to have the courage to actually present it. And by have the courage to present it, I mean… be talked into it by Melle.
I should prefix this preparation list with the fact that I like to feel very prepared. I do some amount of public speaking, but I am still a software engineer so it is a long way from what I do all day! I’m not comfortable standing up in front of ~350 people and the only way for me to do it is to feel like I have done everything I can to not screw it up.
Picking a Topic
I think all good talks can be summarized by a sentence, and that sentence should contain the core message. 5 minutes or 45 minutes, that sentence is the string that holds it together coherently. This is particularly true of an Ignite talk. The format is unforgiving if you stumble or lose your place, but even more so if you don’t have a strong message. I’ve seen many Ignite talks that tried to pack in too much, but I don’t think ever one that put in too little.
I actually found my topic playing with a humorous intro for another talk I gave (Art, Life and Programming for Girl Geek Dinners Ottawa). I’ve cut the standard intro of “I’m Cate, I work on X, and I’m going to talk to you about Y” and instead try to weave that into the introduction (I’m pleased with how that worked out in Software Engineering for Superheros). And so I started my talk by telling the story of the guy who didn’t believe I was in CompSci, and used this to illustrate the point that programmers don’t just have an image problem – we have a communication problem. There was enough there, and people laughed enough, that I thought I could make it into an Ignite talk.
My topic in one sentence: Humans and engineers are different, and often the two groups fail to communicate.
Choosing a Title
I think there’s a lot of good advice on writing headlines, all of which applies here. I was terrified to go first, but I was also lucky to – because that is quite possibly the most engaged the audience will be. I’ve noticed at these events that I can’t process the amount of information, so diverse and so fast. At the last Ignite I was extremely jet-lagged and so don’t remember large chunks of it. Your title is the first opportunity you have to wake up the audience and remind them that this talk was one they wanted to listen to. It’s important to remember that the audience comes from every kind of background, and they don’t have the same frame of reference. So keep it accessible.
Deciding What to Say
You can opt to time your talk to your deck, like, the slide with the X means start talking about Y. This might be easier to remember, but is much tighter because you’re working within 15 second exact chunks, rather than the larger 5 minutes. Or, you can have your content and have the slides follow, illustrating your points rather than giving you points to talk to. This is more forgiving, and I think flows better. I’ve noticed that the other way often has an effect of making the timings seem contrived.
So, I opted for the second way. I wrote out what I thought would be in my talk, and then read it aloud. It came to about 3 minutes 30 seconds. I was reading aloud to my boyfriend, so he commented where he thought I should be adding stuff, so I followed his suggestions, read out loud again, and came in at 4 minutes 50-ish.
I think it’s important to have less and add rather than have too much and cut. Two reasons for this – not every topic is right for an Ignite talk. Having too much may be a sign that the topic is too broad. Second, I think you will get better flow by taking your core point and then adding in things that work than by having lots of important points and culling.
I read it aloud again to see that my time was consistent, and then again two more times. My (long suffering boyfriend, who heard this talk more than any person should) put in *’s every 15 seconds (you can see this in the slides and commentary). We went through again to check that that was consistent too.
Preparing the Deck
Then I added images that worked with where I was at each *. I tried to keep them general, and beautiful to look at. When I couldn’t think of what would work, I went looking for pictures of penguins. Someone said afterwards that she thought the penguins represented conformity. Unfortunately, I’m not that deep. I just like penguins! There is an Alec Baldwin meme at Ignite Waterloo, which I have never really got – probably because I missed the first Ignite and don’t really know who he is. It makes everyone laugh, but I wasn’t going to introduce anything into my deck that didn’t fit or make sense. So, I tried to make penguins the new Baldwin.
For one slide (the xkcd tech support one), I put it twice on consecutive slides, because I thought it might take longer than 15 seconds for people to process it, and it fitted what I was talking about for that 30 second bit well.
Then I set the slides up to auto-advance on the computer connected to the TV whilst I read from the text on my laptop. We were checking timings and that the content flowed with the slides. I had to adjust my timing a bit, but once we were happy I sent off my deck.
That was probably when I accepted it was really happening. Eep!
Practise, Practise, Practise
My practise set-up was as follows: slides auto-advancing on the TV, and text in Google Docs on my iPad. I was standing up (something they encouraged us to do in Extreme Blue). I just kept going through it over and over again (with my poor boyfriend watching and looking at the flow). I tried to use my iPad less and less, as a safety net, and eventually put it down and went through without.
I focused on timing, and remembering what I was saying. Normally I don’t memorize talks, I have talking points that I’m passionate about. But I think for short talks you have to memorize (this was a key thing we learned about presenting in Extreme Blue).
The content changed because I wanted it to sound natural, you don’t talk like you write. I had the word “ascertain” in my text, which I never say in conversation. So that sentence changed to use “ask” instead.
Having learned the timing, I was able to adjust my pace, adding pauses or an extra couple of words depending on whether I was on, or under time. I talk quite fast in general, and the pauses wouldn’t coincide with a slide change, so I hoped this would seem natural.
The day off, I was doing a last run through and my boyfriend noticed that I’d cut a sentence. Probably it had happened a while before, but neither of us had noticed until then. I left it out, figuring that often if you don’t remember it, it’s probably because it doesn’t flow.
On the Day
I did a couple of last run-throughs before leaving, and made sure I was happy with my outfit. I picked flat shoes – it’s important to be comfortable on stage and I didn’t want to be fidgeting.
We did not leave early enough! Did not realize how far away the venue was, and ran into roadworks and the car started acting up a bit. I was freaking out! But luckily they started a couple of minutes late and I was just in time, with not too much time to get nervous. I was perched on the edge of a chair, shaking, when my friend comes up behind me and touched me on the back saying, “nervous?”. I jumped and yelped.
I also had not realized that there would be a physical microphone. Thankfully we’d used them last summer and so I remembered. It was weird trying to get it the right distance from my mouth as I started off, but once I had that figured out it was OK, I hope. They called me up, and I hit spacebar and went for it.
After
Physically shaking, I went straight to the bar and said “I need liquor”. They said “what kind” and I said, “liquor!”. Eventually I walked away with a vodka and orange which reduced the physical shaking a little. I am ashamed to admit that I do not remember much of the people who followed me as I was still so strung out.
Then I checked the twitter feed and saw that people were saying nice things about and to me. I tried to reply to everyone who has used my handle thanking them for their nice comments. And I enjoyed the second half, at least! People were really, really kind. The audience is so supportive and they want you to rock it, which really helps.
There wasn’t much food there (food has to be done by the venue for bigger venues, which is annoying) and so we stopped off on the way home and I had some milkshake. Milkshake is pretty much my crisis strategy.
What I didn’t expect: I slept for about 10 hours the night following. Probably the result of being so strung out. I was also very socially exhausted and ended up working from home in the afternoon because I was getting very stressed being around people. I’m not particularly extroverted, so allowing for some anti-social space afterwards was very necessary!
Overall
I spent a lot of time preparing. Most of a Sunday on the slide deck and content, and then probably 6 hours of practise. The format is just as tough as I thought, but following the strategy outlined above made it manageable.
But, three people tweeted they were going to encourage their daughters to be software engineers. Which makes it all worthwhile!
Challenging, but a good challenge. I’m glad I did it.
Commentary (I didn’t have slides) for the talk I gave for UO WISE.
I thought I was going to come and have an informal chat about how interviewing at Google is not that scary, and then I saw Krystal’s tweet.
[blackbirdpie id=”55757050474532864″]
I freaked out a little, to be honest. Like, woah – I need to be inspiring? I don’t feel inspiring!
The thing is, I used to help organize these talks, so I know what I used to look for out of them.
Life advice.
Because I’ve long felt that if I had more information, I could do better at life. We had some great speakers, and I got some very useful advice. But – I do not feel qualified to give anyone life advice. Because honestly, I think that any success I have comes down to working really, really hard, and being lucky.
The thing is, there have been studies of people who consider themselves “lucky” and some interesting observations have came out of it, from an article in the Times:
I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than 2in high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.
Which tells me that lucky people see things that unlucky people don’t. So, I’m going to talk about three things that I think make me luckier.
Get the right people on the bus.
Gaps are opportunities.
Bravery is not always what you think it is.
1. Get The Right People on the Bus
Credit: Aires Dos Santos / http://www.fotopedia.com/users/airessantos
In Good to Great (Amazon), this is identified as something that good companies do, to take them to great. They get the right people on board.
I also think it’s true of yourself. Who’s on your bus? Are they the people you want on there? I think we’ve all been there, whether it’s the drama junkie, or the drunken friend who you carry home every time you go out.
For a while, I was hanging out with the wrong kind of people, and I started changing that. It was amazing how much happier I was, how much more energy I had, and how much more I got done. The drama was hugely affecting me, for all I tried to stay away from it. We’re hugely influenced by the people we interact with. It’s important that they are good people.
2. Gaps are opportunities
Credit: flickr / Darkroom Daze
Wherever there’s a gap, somewhere where you think “that should be happening”, but it isn’t – I think that’s an opportunity. To do something, to create something, to bridge a gap. The most exciting things I’ve done have come out of gaps I’ve seen.
3. Bravery is Not Always What You Think It Is
Credit: xkcd
People said I was brave to move to Canada. The truth was the opposite – I was afraid to join the real world, so I hid from the real world in grad school. Now I live in the real world, I wonder what I was afraid of. Seeing someone else as brave is not the full story, you don’t know what they’re running away from.
There’s that quote, it was in The Princess Diaries (Amazon), but originally by Ambrose Redmoon.
Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.
What this means to me is that being brave doesn’t mean that you’re not freaking out. I freak out all the time. Every time I start a new adventure. Every time I stand in front of a bunch of people to talk about something. Every time I’m somewhere where I know no-one. Every time I hit “post” on something that is non-trivial and honest.
It’s easy to say, X is braver than I am, I could never do that. It’s a cop out – people can be brave in different ways. People think I’m brave because I say “yes” – but I think people who say “no” are brave, they commit to one opportunity when I hedge my bets with many. They are not as terrified of missing out as I am.
Anyway, I don’t think being brave means you have to be sure. I don’t think it means that you don’t get to be really scared. It definitely doesn’t mean that you won’t push yourself. It doesn’t mean being unrealistic about chances of success – or failure. Being brave is seeing all that, and deciding to go ahead and do it anyway. For the hell of it, or for the challenge, or for the adventure. Or, for me, because I’m too afraid to say no.
But these are just my three things, and like I said, I’m completely unqualified to give life advice. So pick and choose what you think is worth considering, and then make up your own list of things that make you lucky.
Christine Alvarado of Harvey Mudd college came to Google last month to gave a talk on how they’d brought female enrollment in Computer Science up to 42%. The talk is called “Three Promising Practices”, and one of those practices was a redesign of the CS1 curriculum (you can watch the video here, it’s over an hour long).
They dived into the feedback about the old curriculum, and what they found was that people who were already into CS loved it. And those that weren’t, their minds weren’t changed after a semester of CS.
Credit: flickr / Caro Wallis
When I TA’d a mandatory CS course for business students, I was so frustrated by what I saw as a missed opportunity. We had these students, who were bright, and tech-savvy by virtue of when they’d grown up and we had this space where we could educate them about what CS is, and why it’s awesome… and it was wasted. This course didn’t just not make the students want to study CS, it make them actively dislike it. They hated it. And honestly, I sympathized with them. So the Harvey Mudd talk was fascinating to me, because I think it shows how big an opportunity we miss by not creating curriculum designed to engage students who hadn’t planned on taking CS already.
And I think this is a huge problem. I actually work for Google now, and I was trying to explain what I do to someone who isn’t really technical and she said, “oh, you work for the internet”. I wasn’t quite sure what to say to that! But what is true is that collectively, computer scientists, software engineers, we’re building this digital future. And I think it’s important that that group of people is as diverse as possible.
At uOttawa, we had the opportunity to create a curriculum for a four hour workshop that’s run for high school students, at around the time they’re thinking about what to take at university. This build on work that I’d done in my previous curriculum, in terms of visual honesty.
The most interesting aspect that drove the design was just throwing out any expectation at the start that the students had any interest in, or experience of, CS. This was our opportunity to sell them on CS, to smash that stereotype.
Feedback from post-workshop surveys suggests that we’ve had some success with this, despite the short time frame of the workshop. Because the curriculum is open source, we hope that it will be able to be used elsewhere as well.
I’m going to talk about the design decisions we made, and why these were important.
1. Entirely Visual
One of the things that we’ve observed students to get frustrated by is lack of visual honesty in programming. Often in problems we pose to students, it’s a case of inputs in, outputs out. The program is a black box, and when the wrong answer comes out of this black box, students often don’t understand why, or how it’s going wrong.
When we cerate visual programs instead, it’s so much clearer. The line is not where it should be, or the circle is smaller than expected. It becomes a lot clearer what kind of mistake they’re looking for.
2. Activity Based
Credit: xkcd
Don Norman wrote about activity centred design in terms of remote controls (amongst other things). It’s a plea to designers to design for what people want to achieve, rather than how to do it. We’ve taken that approach here. Rather than following the traditional path of thing to learn, followed by contrived example, we present things they may actually want to do, and then explain how to go about doing them.
We’re not expecting students to go away with a thorough grasp of the constructs, so it doesn’t matter if they master if statements but not loops. This means that we’ve made it so that the modules are stand alone as possible. We’re not telling them what to do. We’re asking them what they want to achieve.
3. Open Source
We deliberately chose to make the curriculum as open as possible – in every sense. We use the open source software Processing, which runs on Mac OS, Linux as well as on Windows. The curriculum itself is also licensed under creative commons.
This has the big benefit of reducing as much as possible the barriers to students continuing at home or at school – the software is free, and compatible with whatever operating systems they use.
4. TAs
Credit: flickr / Xpectro
We were extremely selective about hiring TAs. We aimed for a ratio of 4 students to each TA, as being stuck and having to wait for someone to help you is so frustrating to students, and we wanted to keep that as minimal as possible. In hiring TAs, we were looking for strong problem solving and coding skills, and as importantly, excellent communication skills. We were looking for TAs who were fun for the students to interact with, who would be role models. Our TAs are potentially our biggest asset in smashing that stereotype, so it’s really important that they are awesome.
5. Self-Directed
Credit: David Baird, http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/775326
The low ratio of students to TAs allows us to give students the freedom to work at their own pace, on what interests them. Students with prior programming experience will often skip to the more advanced modules, and students who are less comfortable can take a slower pace, or focus on more math-based activities, such as fractals.
6. Inclusive of Interests and Levels
We provide a mix of modules, ranging from complete beginner to more advanced and students are welcome to come up with other things to create, or find more information on the internet. Often students want to make games, so we facilitate that with a pacman-like framework (we’d like to add Brick Breaker soon), but we also have several fractals, for more math-loving or artsy students.
The students are challenged to “make something beautiful”. It’s always interesting to see what they come up with! This open-ended approach means there are always extra challenges – for example, animation! Students have also started to explore Processing’s 3D capabilities.
We take a very open approach, encouraging students to look things up on the internet, and even to share things they create on social networking sites like Facebook.
Overall
We’ve found our experience tremendously rewarding. Curriculum development is a design activity, and approaching it with some different constraints has been interesting. We’re very encouraged by the success of our program, and other curricula designs in attracting different types of students into CS and we hope to continue our work further, by partnering with other universities and organizations to bring the curriculum to them and expand it further.
I’m Cate, I work for Google as a Software Engineer (on mobile Gmail). For fun, I’m a qualified ski instructor and I love to kickbox. I was the Instigator of Awesome at Awesome Ottawa, and I do various things around getting more women into CompSci.
I have a BSc from the University of Edinburgh and some portion of a Masters from the University of Ottawa. I’ve taught programming and developed programming curricula in the UK, US, China and Canada. I was also in IBM’s Extreme Blue program. Coming out this year, I have an academic paper, an educational paper, and an industrial paper.
Credit: xkcd
I got hired by Google because I studied really hard and rocked my interviews. It may be different if you come in not as a new grad, but for me my “personal brand” was negligible in getting the job. Stuff that I’d worked on and written about was a conversation starter for two interviewers (one each round) but that was really the extent of it.
Where it made a difference, is after I started. Perhaps because I’m very open about my research and my interests on my blog, I was connected with someone working on an amazing project when I was training in Mountain View, and my first week in Canada it was suggested I move to that project (which I will do at the end of the month). I also connected with someone at Google whose blog I follow (Jenny Blake – she writes Life After College and has a book of the same name coming out – Amazon) which was great, I just pinged her on Twitter and we had coffee. I think because I’ve been writing about women in tech and posting talks that I give etc on my website, that made it easier for me to get involved in outreach stuff.
And, setting up a team-mate on a date via Twitter certainly piqued the interest of my colleagues! So far it’s going well, although I have no plans to set up an online dating service in my 20% time.
Credit: xkcd
I don’t really like the term “personal branding” – for me, I’m really just myself, only on the internet – which allows me to scale in terms of the volume of interactions. I gave a talk to less than 20 people, but it got posted on Geek Feminism which really increased the reach and that was amazing. Being from the UK and having travelled about a bit, Twitter and my blog help me create, build and maintain more remote relationships.
So, I said that my “personal brand” didn’t help me get the job, although to be fair it has resulted in people pinging me with interview offers, which I haven’t taken up. Actually, I think that depends how you look at it. Does the number of results you get when you search for me help? No. But here’s what did:
Blogging has been tremendously helpful for improving my writing and general communication skills. The guys who started Stack Overflow (Joel on Software/Joel Spolsky and Coding Horror/Jeff Atwood) really think that in order to be a good software engineer you have to be a good writer and I have really come to see their point.
Writing something also serves to improve my own understanding of it. I wrote up interesting pieces of assignments when I was at school, now I try and write up the books I read.
I doubt I would have put myself forward for the Holiday Science Lecture at UO if I hadn’t been blogging, which improved my public speaking no end. Thoughts turn into blog posts which turn into talks, and putting all the talks I give on my blog improves the talk itself (more time thinking about it, feedback), and increases it’s reach.
Doing interesting things makes it easier to have interesting conversations with people. My blog and Twitter have resulted in a number of great experiences. and, having moved to a new city the ease of Twitter for connecting with new people has been really helpful.
Twitter and my RSS reader makes me better informed – I have not found another medium through which I can get such diverse and timely information.
Some advice for getting started on the “virtual” you
Start
Credit: xkcd
This can seem like the hardest part – and I know because I’m trying to start my internal blog right now and I’m completely overwhelmed by what to write. One think I suggest to people thinking of starting up a blog is to try and write 4-8 things and schedule them – that’s your first month’s content.
Keep going
Credit: xkcd
At first Twitter seems like talking to yourself in public. A blog is worse, because the form is longer! I was getting enough out of it that it was worth writing for myself, but now I have a good amount of subscribers and get comments on about half of my posts. I think the thing is to give yourself a realistic schedule and stick to it. I often schedule blog posts in advance, and at the moment I aim for about two posts a week. I also started using Twitter, and eventually had things to say that required more than 140 characters – that’s when I started blogging.
It’s a conversation
Credit: xkcd
I confess – I am a terrible lurker when it comes to blogs. I love Google reader because it’s so fast and I consume massive amounts of content through it – but I don’t click through enough to comment. When it comes to your blog, no-one knows how much you interact with other people’s, but on Twitter the people who are only in it for self-promotion are really, really obvious.
I actually schedule some of my Twitter feed because I tend to consume large amounts of information in one go and I don’t want it to go out all at once and drown people’s streams. For me, Twitter is 95% trying to share stuff that’s interesting and/or informative, and if someone has a question or something worth commenting on, I’ll respond to it. The other 5% is sharing my own blogposts and asking questions myself.
Don’t dismiss other forms
Credit: xkcd
I pinged Jon Skeet – fellow Googler, C# Evil Genius, and #1 on Stack Overflow to ask him about how he built his personal brand. In large part he’s used forums and question answering sites like Stack Overflow (which did help him get a book deal, as well as a job at Google). For me, blog and Twitter has worked to build my presence and share what I’m interested in, but depending what you’re interested in it’s not necessarily the best format.
Be human
Credit: xkcd
I think we all have those “friends” on Facebook who are constantly posting long angsty moans about their life. It’s a primary reason why I rarely use Facebook. People write long angsty blog posts as well, and on Twitter some people I know (and like) in person share such detail about their life that I’ve actually started to dislike them. I’m going to say what everyone says – don’t share too much, don’t expect other people to be interested in every minute detail of your life. But, don’t be a robot – be a human. I balance the stuff I share with bits of my day that I hope are amusing, often stuff that my teammates say to me, for example on my tea consumption, “is there any blood left in your anti-oxidant stream?”, or after starting two small toaster fires that I’m measuring success in a commits to fires ratio. It’s the same on my blog – I write about failing, because I learn so much from it. And there’s a balance, because I don’t want to come across as some kind of fembot, but nor do I want to moan. But sharing my human failures, for example when I dropped out of grad school, revealed so much warmth and such great advice from my audience.
Don’t wait for someone to say, “It’s time for you to have a blog. You have something to say” – I mean, I can tell you that right now, but really you have to convince yourself and believe that you can write something worth sharing, first.
I think this applies to everything. Don’t wait for people to tell you what you get to do, go out and make things happen. (And read What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20, which is where this advice comes from)
2. Fail.
Credit: xkcd
You will write things that no-one will comment on. You may even write things that no-one reads. It’s demoralizing. What I did, was that I got enough out of writing for me that kept me going when no-one was reading, and it was a shock when people started commenting, and emailing me, and sharing what I’d written on Twitter.
Stop caring that no-one will read what you have to say and write it anyway. Write something stupid, and learn to make a better argument next time. Stop worrying about failing and go ahead and fail – it’s not as bad as you imagine, I promise. Sometimes you’ll surprise yourself and succeed, and always you can learn something.
Again, this applies to any number of things. One of the things I love about working at Google is that we embrace failure as a learning experience. We set impossible goals, and fail to reach them – but that’s OK because “Achieving 65% of the impossible is better than 100% of the ordinary” (see this post by Don Dodge). I like that, I am always setting myself impossible goals, I don’t think I know how not to do that. And so, I’m always failing. But what that means is that I’m always learning, and making progress little by little on my impossible goals.
3. Don’t Expect to Learn Everything in School.
Credit: xkcd
Unfortunately, most professors aren’t on Twitter and don’t blog. They may not get what you’re doing and they are probably not going to grade you on it. You have to figure it out, mostly by yourself. Find yourself a network of interesting people on Twitter, and find yourself some interesting blogs to read. Interact with the people you find.
Software development moves fast. At the moment, I code mostly in Javascript and do some CSS – neither of these are things I learned in school. To stay current in our field, we have to keep learning and investing time in personal development. You probably won’t learn how to write a great blog in school. But you also probably won’t learn a fraction of what you need to be a great software engineer, either. The best thing you can learn, is how to keep learning, and teaching yourself, and finding resources that help you progress.
My coolest title right now is “Instigator of Awesome” at Awesome Ottawa. So what’s Awesome Ottawa? It’s a group of 10 trustees and a Dean of Awesome, and every month we give away $1000 to enable something awesome. So far, we’ve funded an art-flash-mob, a living-evolving installation, a 350-org climate change event.
When Levannia asked me to give this talk, I thought “how am I going to talk for an hour about starting Awesome Ottawa! It’s not a very interesting story”.
The reality is, that I decided to do it, pitched it to some people, blogged about it, about within two months we were giving out our first award.
See! Boring!
So instead what I’m going to do is talk to you about some things that I learned along the way, that have enabled me to do things like this. I don’t have it all figured out, and it’s not all easy – if you want to do something awesome, you’ll have to learn to fail, and be okay with that. Not everyone will like what you’re doing. Not everyone will like you, period. There’s times, and I’ve definitely had them, where I question why I keep going, why I keep doing what I do – but I persist. I’m going to try and explain why.
1. Give yourself permission.
Credit: flickr / Duru…
There’s a great book by Tina Seelig, it’s called What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 (Amazon). The main point that she makes in the book is that you have to give yourself permission – so succeed, to fail, to do anything of note. I’ve started three things now – Awesome Ottawa, CompSci Woman (a blog written by and for women in computer science), and WISE at uOttawa (that was really more of a resuscitation). Other people were really instrumental in every one of those things – I’ll get to that later – but first let me tell you why I started doing these things.
I worked in a crappy job. The person above me got fired, and my manager promoted this other guy, not me. I was pretty disappointed by this, and then this guy was not capable of this job. He was also kinda a drunk, and guess who picked up the pieces? Me. So I spent the summer proving to myself, and I hoped my manager, that I would be better for this position.
The following year, I had the weirdest “interview” with my manager. She was completely inappropriate, and I was so stunned by this, and so confident that my performance spoke for me being a better fit for this job that I never mentioned the guy’s drinking problem. You can guess what happened. I didn’t get it. Apparently the guy actually did a semi-decent job. I ended up in Shanghai (anther story).
And I decided that I didn’t need to wait around for someone to say, “OK Cate you can do this now”. I realized, that my manager at that company was never going to say that to me – she managed us remotely, and the people who I had actually worked with knew I would rock at it, which is what was important. So I knew that I was capable of it. In short – I gave myself permission to do something. And I did.
2. Say Yes. Then Learn to Say No.
Credit: picassa / eschipul
A friend told me the other day about a survey that had found that the reason why most Canadians don’t volunteer is because no-one asked them to. But opportunities to do things are everywhere – sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit. Take advantage of them.
For me, the more I say yes to things, the more opportunities present themselves. The more I say yes, the more I get a reputation as someone who does things – so when I want to start something, I have people who have noticed me, and people who owe me favours. That’s a good position to be in!
Saying yes has taken me to a bunch of different places, taught me new skills (like presenting in French!) and meant that I have met so many cool people. But at some point, I reach capacity and have to start saying no. I’m moving tomorrow, so things are even more hectic that usual so this week, giving a talk to you guys means that I couldn’t go to a meeting to talk about what WISE achieved whilst I was president. There are tradeoffs, because I’m not superhuman and I can’t do everything.
In a job, you discuss your responsibilities with your manager and that determines your priorities. But as the President and CEO of Cate inc., for what I do outside of work or school, I have to make those calls. Evaluating tradeoffs and saying no is hard when you’re an opportunity junkie. Do I always make the right call? Almost certainly not. But I have to make one.
3. Ideas are cheap, Execution is expensive.
Credit: flickr / dullhunk
Who has an idea for a product, or web service, or piece of software?
As a programmer, I can tell you that there are lots of non-programmers out there who have some “genius idea” that they think a programmer should build, for “equity” – a stake in the eventual, hugely profitable company.
The reality is that the company is rarely profitable, if it even gets off the ground. And programmers have their own ideas, which if they want they could implement. This is why people – especially programmers – get angry about patents, because you can literally patent an idea and the person patenting it doesn’t actually need to know how to implement it. To a programmer, implementation is everything. Ideas are 10 a penny. What does this have to do with starting an organization (or anything)? It means that it doesn’t matter how amazing your idea is, it’s nothing until you actually implement it.
And if someone else gets there before you, the idea was good enough that someone actually did it – so be pleased! And either get on board with them, or come up with something else and move faster. It also means, that it can be hard to sell your idea until you start doing.
We were the first Awesome Foundation outside the US, but we weren’t the first period. The fact that we have a network of people to ask questions to and this model has been proven made it much easier to get going.
4. Fail
Credit: xkcd
Think about how big your comfort zone is. What are you OK with doing? Introducing yourself to a stranger? Going to a foreign country by yourself? Standing up and talking in front of a bunch of people?
Chances are, there is a whole world outside your comfort zone. I really recommend going to explore that, but it can be scary. Stuff outside your comfort zone is stuff you don’t know – and as you go off discovering it there’s a good chance that things won’t go to plan. You’ll fail.
You know in Harry Potter, how the bogart turns into Prof. McGonnagall for Hermione and tells her she failed everything – that’s her biggest fear. It’s no wonder Harry always saves the day, he’s OK with failing, and that makes him more able to take risks. Hermione might seem more successful, there’s no doubt that she is academically, but that’s within her comfort zone. For her to be successful in other ways, she had to learn how to fail.
When we first started WISE, we tried an event and people were really enthused about it… but then no-one turned up. I was mortified, and really questioned what I was doing. We haven’t run that kind of event again, but we run different things that were successful. We’ve learned what our members want, and that’s what we put on for them. It was a setback, but it didn’t stop us from achieving a lot of other things.
In the summer, the Awesome Foundation didn’t get many submissions. Seriously, we’re giving away free money and people weren’t even filling out the application form! That was rough, because you get to this catch-22 – you don’t fund anything, and no-one hears about you. But now, our numbers are up.
There’s this great lecture by Randy Pausch. It’s an hour – go watch it. In it, he talks about how when you hit a wall, have a set back. He says that walls are there to keep out the people who don’t really want it. So when you fail, and I hope you do because I think that a life without failure is a life where you didn’t push yourself – you look at your failure, you evaluate what you can learn from it. And then you keep going.
5. Find Something You Believe In
Credit: flickr / insertnamehere.99999
Making something happen can be hard. That’s why not everyone does it. It takes longer than you imagine it will. Or it’s harder to get people on board with what you’re doing than you expected. You fail in some way.
In these moments of doubt, you need a story to tell yourself that reminds you why you’re doing it. When I moved to Canada, I knew no-one. And I’m in CompSci, so you can imagine how many women I met – not many. I’m sociable, so I met people, but I mostly met guys. Which is fine, but I would get homesick for my Edinburgh apartment and my roommates there, and girly movies and pizza. And so I really felt this lack of community, in terms of women in CompSci – because when there are only a few, it’s hard to meet them. So in times of doubt about what we were doing, and whether we could manage it, and when we didn’t have any funding, I told myself this story. That we needed this community here, and I knew that first-hand.
Now I run CompSci woman, and it’s a similar thing. We ask people to post for us, and it’s going pretty well but sometimes we don’t make the three posts a week that I would like us too. It’s discouraging, but the story I tell myself is that CompSci is changing the world, and we really need a more representative sample of humanity building our digital future. I tell myself that young women need role models, and that’s what we’re trying to do.
You don’t need to succeed right away. But you need a story for those moments of doubt.
6. Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity.
Credit: flickr / Jef Harris
Colin Powell said, “trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity”. Be likable – it’s important – but the reality is, if you want to stand out and do something extraordinary, there are people who will try and tear you down for it. People might not understand that ideas are cheap, and think that you “stole” theirs, because you got their first. If you do things, people might need to attack your success in order to excuse their own inaction – like “oh Cate, she just got lucky”.
I’m not going to lie – it sucks. Who’s had something bad said about them that they knew wasn’t true? Who was hurt by it?
I had this recently. I really thought that I left high-school a long time ago, but apparently I was wrong! I had someone I used to be friends with telling people (people I know!), basically that I was doing I terrible job with Awesome Ottawa. Of course it gets back to me, and of course I was upset by it. The way it all played out was interesting, because I tried to ignore it and just keep running around doing my thing, and in the face of my non-response, this woman managed to make a different story in which I played the villan.
It was difficult, but I did have the support of the board and it’s all worked out for the best now. But at the time? Horrible. And honestly, I could not comprehend why someone would behave like this, when they could have pinged me for a cup of coffee and got everything they wanted. I was talking to one of my mentors, and we talked about whether I could have done more. Of course I could – you can almost always do more to resolve situations, you can always try to reason with someone, no matter how determined they are to dislike you. But in the worst 2 week period of this, I went to New York to pitch to top IBM executives with my team. I interviewed at Google, and filed two patents (within IBM). I got on a plane, and went back to Europe. So the question is not, “could I have done more?” – it’s with these other priorities going on, should I have. I think I made the right call that time.
Haters will hate. I always take the time to consider if they have a reason for it, is there anything I can and should do to resolve it. But – if someone is determined to dislike you, they will find a reason to. Anything you do can, will, be used against you. So at some point, you have to say – No. I’m doing what I’m doing, and I refuse to let you distract me.
I mentioned mentors earlier. Mentors are so important. Connect with people who have a little more experience than you in what you’re interested in, and benefit from their wisdom (and mistakes!). They’ll help you pick yourself up when you get knocked down.
There’s this idea of homophily – there was a study that found that if you hang out with people who are heavier, you’ll gain weight. I think, if you want to do something, you need a circle of people in your life who do things.
I’ve found Twitter to be a great way to connect with people like that – my friend Kelly, our new Dean of Awesome, and I connected on Twitter, but we became friends and work out together and hang out. She’s awesome. And she’s a great person to know, because she’s interesting and she does stuff, and she knows people. So when I’m having a crisis, she knows the story I tell myself and she has others to share with me. Recently, I got this nasty, anonymous comment on my blog. I was shocked by it and wrote a thoughtful response and doubted myself and what I’d written. Kelly called it right away. A couple of hours later, she was proven right. I really find that the more great, interesting, awesome people who do stuff are in my life, the more awesome I can do.
When you’re running something, you need other people to help you. With WISE, I had three really key people and we all have different strengths. Samera was amazing with bureaucracy. She can navigate piles of forms that would make me cry. Rachelle would take care of our communications. I basically live in fear of my inbox. Levannia is great at details, whereas every time I go anywhere and book my hotel and flight separately I’m double, triple checking dates anxious that I’ve messed it up in some way. They are all talented in areas that I am not. I might be more able to stand up in front of a room of people, or at networking, but that’s not enough and I couldn’t have done it without them.
I’m a programmer, and I love to code. This also means I’m practised in looking at a problem and decomposing it into manageable bits. But – this makes me bad at other things. I’m logical, and I don’t deal well will irrational behaviour. Aside from anything else, I find it inefficient. Philosophical arguments are another thing I’m terrible at. I got into a debate at one point with some guy, and he was talking about what the Ancient Greeks thought about something. And I was like, “they thought zero wasn’t a number!” So this guy goes off on one about how zero represents the absence of something and so in some sense doesn’t really exist. But as a programmer, the absence of something is a really important concept best expressed using a numeric datatype.
The point I’m getting at here – think about what you’re good at, and what as a result you’re not good at. The better you know yourself, the better you can pick a project that is a great fit for you – for example, one of the things that appeals to me about the Awesome Foundation is the lack of bureaucracy – and the better you can find a team whose strengths complement yours.
8. Give Up Control – Ask in order to Leverage
Credit: flickr / oedipusphinx — — — — theJWDban
When you start something, you have this vision of what you want it to become. That’s great – and important – you need to have an idea of what you’re working towards. But at some point, you face a choice. You can build a tiny, solid steel, structure, completely controlled by you. Or you can give up some control and plant the seeds for an organization that will grow bigger than you could do alone, do different things you could never have imagined. There’s a risk that it will die. But – that’s another tradeoff you can make, because giving up control allows you to move on to other projects that excite you.
I stepped down from WISE and Levannia took over. I know that things are going to change as a result but I’m OK with that – I trust her to do a good job, I mentor her and encourage her. But ultimately, she’ll have her own vision – and that’s a good thing. I don’t want to stay in grad school forever, running the same thing!
With the Awesome Foundation, we have a very flat structure. As Instigator of Awesome I go around getting excited about things, and do a little more organization stuff but every trustee puts in $100 and every trustee gets a vote. I can say “I think we should do this”, but if I’m outvoted, I’m outvoted. My role here is not really a leader, more of a facilitator. There’s an important distinction.
If you want other people to help you, you’ll probably have to ask them! Asking for things is hard. Asking someone to join the board of the Awesome Foundation was terrifying for me at first – “hey! How about you give $100 every month to some crazy idea that may or may not work?” – I’ve got better at it with practise (and I don’t say that!). But you need to learn to ask for things, for starters you’ll need to ask for help.
Early this year I read this great book, Women Don’t Ask (Amazon). I highly recommend it. And I started asking for things, for instance the other day I asked for a t-shirt.
I know, random. But at Grace Hopper the Yahoo! people had these awesome t-shirts that said “I code like a girl and I’m PROUD of it”, and I wanted one really badly! It happens that I know a guy who works for Yahoo!, in fact before he moved I would take care of his cat. So I asked him if he could get me one of these t-shirts and he did.
When uOttawa asked me to create a programming curriculum for a workshop we run for high-school students, I thought it sounded like a cool idea. But – I’d already created a proprietary curriculum and wasn’t really interested to do another proprietary one. So I asked if we could open source it. They agreed to my terms, and now anyone can use the materials I’ve created.
I’m still afraid to ask. But I’m getting better at it. So try it.
And, pro-tip, start being more attuned to people’s implicit asks. When someone you think is awesome talks about this new project they are starting, introduce the topic of how you can help them before they have to. And then follow through.
Because – the real secret I’ve found in asking, is that it’s easier to ask when people want to help you because they’ve seen you paying it forward already. Or – even better – they are also attuned to implicit asks, and you don’t need to.
9. Share and Engage
Credit: flickr / sofakingevil
Share what you are doing. It doesn’t matter if you’re still working things out – share. If you fail – share what you learned. When you succeed – share who and what helped you.
Document your path so others can follow. I use a related posts plug-in on my blog, so sometimes I write something and something I forgot I’d written pops up – past me giving advice to future me. Maybe I’m feeling discouraged, and I find a post I wrote another time I was discouraged and think about how I got through that. Maybe I read something that reminds me just how far I’ve come.
Even if you blog and no-one is reading, it can be useful. But most likely they will, and they you’ll have this new way of connecting with people and following their projects, successes, and failures, too.
Twitter is another good tool for connecting with people on the internet. 140 characters or less is way less intimidating than an email. Say hi! Chances are whoever you’re interested in will be happy to hear from you.
Check out my mentor Sacha’s blog – Living an Awesome Life – she has a lot of good posts on sharing and why it’s important.
10. Don’t Believe the Hype
Credit: flickr / Hot Meteor
There are so many people who come home from work at 5 and spend the evening watching TV, that if you do anything, people will start telling you how awesome you are.
Appreciate that, but take it as a thank-you. Every moment you spend believing it is a moment that someone else is overtaking you.
Someone tweeted something recently, and it was completely ridiculous. I won’t repeat the whole thing here for anonymity, but suffice to say the words “I’m so awesome” were used. I have no clue what this person does, but now I have zero interest in finding out. A couple of other people I know saw it and we laughed about it – her credibility was damaged by this gratuitously self-aggrandizing tweet.
The most impressive people don’t seem to need to talk about how gosh-darn impressive they are. They’re too busy getting on with things. Kelly and I were talking about this recently. At work, you need to document your achievements and put them forward to your manager for promotion. In the outside world, especially on the internet, if you’re awesome, people notice. Maybe not as fast as you’d like, but they do.
At my leaving party, this guy showed up and said that he’d wanted to meet me before I left. That was really cool, it totally made my day. That kind of moment is worth more than a million people agreeing when I say how awesome I am. I’m taking it as a thank-you, and encouragement to keep going. But I don’t believe that I did anything special, which is perhaps key to doing things at all. If you only believe that someone extraordinary can start something, you’ve set the bar way higher than it needs to be. Anyone can do it. Honestly. I did. You can too.
Someone said something really obnoxious to a friend of mine recently, and a group of us were talking about it and another girl nodded sagely and said, “low self-esteem”. I think she’s right. I could have stood up here and made the boring story last long enough, but I’m okay enough with how I’m doing to share the myriad ways in which I’ve failed. Because it’s more interesting, and because, I hope, more useful.
Apparently, Edison said about the invention of the lightbulb, “I have not failed 10,000 times. I have successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work”.
Every time we think we “fail” we can learn something important. These are just my 10, but don’t take my word for it – go and learn your own.
You can distill a 15 week project to a 4 minute pitch. In fact, you can probably distill anything to 4 minutes if you truly understand it – the trick is learning what to leave out.
Images are trickier than you think. For instance, our project involved a university and we wanted to have a picture of a university in our slide deck. The thing is, people’s images of universities are highly localized. Some – big, famous – schools are recognized by everyone, but particularly second or third tier universities are influenced by where a person grew up, and what university they attended themselves. You would not believe how much time we spent thinking about this.
Start with the conclusion. Cate who’s been trapped in grad school for two years wants to start with the justification and work up to the conclusion. She is wrong. You have credibility as a speaker and you can speak pyramid style – people will ask questions later.
Leave stuff out. There was a question we kept getting to the point that we contemplated including the answer to it in our presentation. We didn’t, theorizing that it would get people to come to our booth to speak to us. It worked! Also, can you imagine anything more depressing than having nothing left to say after you present? Save it for the conversations that follow, and blog posts.
No amount of practice makes perfect. Towards the end, our team got to the point where we’d been through so many iterations that we were struggling to remember what we had to say. We had some minor tweaks that we’d have liked to make, but it was time to stop and get what we had right.
Presenting as a team is different. Really, really different. For a number of reasons, but here are the big 3 – you have to have a consistent style across everyone, you have to trust your teammates, and you have to consider body language when not speaking – i.e. you want to redirect people’s focus to your co-presenter who is speaking. This is harder than you think, especially when you’ve heard their section approximately 34,576,295 times.
The right level of trust is important. Some teams spent a lot of time arguing about phrasing, semantics, details. Others took feedback constructively and debated, but not for longer than necessary. The first approach didn’t predict a better presentation, only late nights and weekends working.
You need to be passionate about your topic. Some time around the midpoint, where my section of the pitch had changed at least every week, and sometimes more… I lost my passion for it. I was bored of what I was saying, and tired of it changing. People noticed. A session with an amazing presentation guru changed my perspective and inspired me to be passionate about what I was saying. It changed everything.
Be clear about what you want when asking for feedback. We would pitch to people often, but came to find they didn’t always comprehend how short a time 4 minutes is. Towards the end, I realized that saying – we are right on 4 minutes, so adding something means we need to take something out would help focus suggestions. There is always more stuff to add. You only want add the things that are part of your key message.
Most people do not present well. After all the training, and all the pitching, and the constant feedback I’ve started to notice things. Like, presenters who fidget, or don’t make eye-contact, who ramble and/or repeat themselves. Hand gestures are incredibly hard to master. It’s hard to stand up in front of people and talk – kudos to those who do it – but it had taught me that a little more consideration to what you’re doing will make you stand out.
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