July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:04
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| Good morning, everybody. | |
| It's Stefan Molyneux. 10 o'clock. | |
| In the AM on the 28th of April 2013. | |
| I hope you're doing magnificently. | |
| I will not be speaking with you until the end of the month. | |
| So, I must assume my happy hooker position, Xavier Hollander. | |
| Oh, my goodness. | |
| Yes, I was around in the 70s. | |
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| So my wife, of course, a huge barrier between me and reality. | |
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| So, that's really it for my intro. | |
| I now must get off my presidential knee pads and assume the listening position. | |
| So, James, if you would like to kick up the first cue, I'm happy to hear. | |
| Alright, first up today we have Robert. | |
| So we start with giving and we go to Rob. | |
| Fantastic. I like the duality. | |
| Please, go ahead, Rob. Hi, Stefan. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | |
| I had a question. I sent you an email before and I was trying to find out how much trouble do you think I might be in. | |
| Should I read you off the letter, perhaps? | |
| Right now, okay, I should probably explain myself. | |
| I do web development, PHP, MySQL, CSS, JavaScript, etc. | |
| Should I read you off the letter? | |
| Would that be helpful? If you could just cut to the core part about the problems, that would be great. | |
| Well, I'm being told that I... Okay, so I got an email saying that... | |
| He's disappointed in the progress of two projects. | |
| And he says, you better get it done by the end of this week. | |
| And I'm just wondering, when you get that kind of letter, does that sort of thing mean that they're considering getting rid of you? | |
| Well, tell me a little bit more about the project. | |
| Is it behind schedule? | |
| Yeah, it is behind schedule. | |
| Well, actually, two projects, unfortunately. | |
| So one project is at least, it's been in progress for about a year or two. | |
| I've not been in charge of it. | |
| I've only been dealing with it for the past eight months. | |
| And he really wanted to have gotten it done months before. | |
| And another one, similar situation. | |
| And one thing he pointed out is that on a live site that a client could see, They could see a major error, something that wasn't updated. | |
| Technically, I'm not responsible. | |
| I don't know if I'm responsible for this or not, but I'm just trying to figure out... | |
| Okay, so we went into detail as to what the issue was and why it's wrong and how these two projects, because they're not being done, they're delaying other projects. | |
| Right. I just thought – I'm just wondering if the tone of the email indicates, you know, are they really – I mean, he sounds like he's angry. | |
| I mean, I'm just wondering how much trouble – No, look. | |
| I'm going to make a guess here. | |
| Now, it's a somewhat educated guess. | |
| As you know, I spent 15 years in entrepreneurial – mostly entrepreneurial software development. | |
| So, it's unlikely. | |
| That he is going to fire you because what happens of course when you're the client is that if you're so embedded in the project, he's either going to drop the project completely or he's going to kind of try to get you finished faster because imagine if he gets rid of you and he hires someone new, how long is it going to take for that person to get up to speed on what's going on? | |
| Right. I mean, it's kind of important because, I mean, I don't plan on being in the USA for a whole lot. | |
| Hang on, sorry. I don't want to get a huge amount of backstory. | |
| I just want to focus on the YouTube. I'm sorry. | |
| No, no, no problem at all. So he's at your mercy. | |
| Because I'm assuming he can't drop the project, right? | |
| He's already got a lot of sunk costs in, right? | |
| So if he's dropped a couple of hundred K in the project, he can't just drop it because then he's left with nothing, right? | |
| Well, minus a huge amount of time, money, energy, and happiness. | |
| So he can't drop the project. | |
| And he can't replace you. | |
| I mean, at least it would be pretty unwise at this point. | |
| If you're fairly close to the end, it would be fairly unwise to replace you. | |
| So he's really helpless, right? | |
| And if you're on the client side of things, helplessness is one of the worst feelings. | |
| I mean, it's one of the worst feelings in the world as a whole to be helpless. | |
| It provokes our fight-or-flight mechanism. | |
| You know, so helpless is, I don't know, you're skin diving, you get your foot caught in some giant clam. | |
| Then, you know, you're helpless to get back to the surface so you can imagine the surge of adrenaline and cortisol and all that kind of good stuff that starts flooding through your system. | |
| So he is in a vulnerable position and people forget this on the technical side, just how vulnerable the clients are to what it is that we need to get done or what it is that they need for us to finish, right? | |
| So my guess is that because he's experiencing this helplessness, he's also going to experience a surge of aggression, which is what generally accompanies helplessness, right? | |
| And unless he's got a lot of self-knowledge and great communication skills... | |
| He's not going to be able to call you up and say, listen, I feel incredibly helpless. | |
| This project has been dragging on and on. | |
| I don't have an end date. I really need this to go live. | |
| My livelihood depends on it. | |
| I poured huge amounts of money into this and I just, you know, every time I click around, I see errors. | |
| Like I'm just, I'm going mental with frustration and fear. | |
| And anger. And, you know, you could say it's not necessarily your fault or anything like that. | |
| So I would be aware of the vulnerability. | |
| I mean, it's funny, you know, everyone thinks that the bosses are the ones who are always in charge, right? | |
| But bosses are very helpless when it comes to actually getting things done. | |
| Because you don't actually do things as a boss. | |
| You manage people. And yet you're held responsible for the actions of these people. | |
| And so it's a very vulnerable position to be a client, particularly a client of IT, because you can't go in and do it yourself, right? | |
| Right. So, I mean, you know, the closest analogy I can think of is you really need your car to go somewhere and you go to the... | |
| You know, you drop it off to get an oil change and you come back and half the engine's on the floor and they don't know. | |
| They can't tell you when it's going to be fixed, right? | |
| Right. Of course, with that, you have alternatives. | |
| You take a cab, but just imagine that the car is the only thing that, you know, when's it going to be done? | |
| I don't know. We found a problem with the flange Vandelay bolt or something, right? | |
| I mean, the widget is de-widgeted or something, and, you know, we're waiting on some parts, and you're just sitting there, right, waiting and waiting, and you're going to feel like you're the client. | |
| You're going to pay, and imagine if they keep charging you every day and all that. | |
| So that kind of helplessness is probably what's going on. | |
| And the key thing with IT, in my experience and opinion, is... | |
| I mean, if you're a coder, you got in it to do the coding, right? | |
| You want to sit down and code. | |
| I mean, that's what you... Hey, I've got a project. | |
| Great. I'm just going to start typing. | |
| And certainly, if you're anything like me or my impulses in the IT world, it's not so much planning and communication and all that boring kind of... | |
| Gantt charts and all that kind of stuff. | |
| You just want to get in there and start coding, man, because that actually makes things happen. | |
| And you probably spend a lot more time coding than you do communicating with the client, right? | |
| Oh, yes. Yeah. | |
| Well, I mean, if you want to have a relationship with clients and you want to have the independence of the entrepreneurship and you want to have the income that entrepreneurship can grant you, then you need to do more communicating and less coding. | |
| Right. You think that you're going to solve the project problems by coding, right? | |
| Well, in the short term, yes. | |
| Right. And I would argue that you're going to solve the project problems by communicating, not by coding, fundamentally. | |
| Because you have been coding for a year or two, or eight months or whatever, and the project problems aren't solved. | |
| So another day or two of coding, It's not going to solve the problem. | |
| But there's this feeling like if we just keep coding, we'll solve the problem. | |
| But the problem is that the client does not lack code. | |
| He's got years and years of code. | |
| So another day or two of code isn't going to solve his problem. | |
| What he needs is a plan. | |
| What he needs is an overview. | |
| What he needs is some sense of comfort that you have an end goal, that there's a shape to it that he can understand. | |
| So it may be worth it. | |
| I mean, if I were in your shoes, and again, I get the sense, you know, urgency code, you know. | |
| But, you know, if you're lost in the woods, so to speak, you obviously feel like you need to keep walking, right? | |
| But that's not a great idea if you don't know where you're going because you could be walking the wrong way or whatever. | |
| And I don't mean this in terms of finishing the project. | |
| I just mean in terms of communicating with the client. | |
| So, you know, this is the time to, you know, pull out the map, pull out the compass, maybe the GPS, figure out where you are, you know, stop walking and get the big picture overview to make sure that when you continue, you're in the right direction. | |
| So, to me, this would be the time of the project where you, you know, force your hands away from the typing keyboard, the coding keyboard, and just go to the typing keyboard, and the typing keyboard would be I don't know if you have this kind of project document that you share with the client, but here's what still needs to be done. | |
| Here's my time estimate. | |
| Here's 50% more of my time estimate just because that's what always happens in IT. Yeah. | |
| So, I mean, to sort of stop... | |
| The sort of forward careening of coding, which is really just around anxiety management and doesn't help your client to understand when this damn thing is going to be done, right? | |
| If it's already late, he probably doesn't have a due date that he feels comfortable about. | |
| And the problem is when you're coding, you can show some progress, but of course a lot of stuff is under the hood, optimizations and all that kind of stuff. | |
| So I would say, you know, I would call this client up and say, listen... | |
| You know, I've been coding to try and get this thing finished, and I feel good about our progress. | |
| And you can say, like, I want to take a day to write up the progress that has been made, and where things are still deficient, where there are still problems, and give you a sense of time estimate, and also to help you to prioritize what I'm going to be working on, right? Because, I mean, there's stuff that... | |
| He's going to make the website work and then there's stuff that makes it work even better and I guarantee you that at this point he wants it to work and he'll have it work better later, so to speak. | |
| There are also going to be things that are more important and things that are less important in terms of functionality. | |
| I would do this in a face-to-face or at least over Skype and share a document and that kind of stuff so that he gets a sense of the big picture because people freak out when they feel like they don't have Knowledge or control over something that is essential and expensive to them. | |
| And so, I mean, I hope this makes some kind of sense, but I think it would be a time to stop and do the project planning to give this person a sense of where things are, how much more time can be expected. | |
| And, I mean, there are necessary compromises in business. | |
| I mean, it's funny, you know, we all sort of understand this when we go buy a car, you know, it's like, hey, if I want that blind spot computer laser, then I'm going to have to either cough up more cash, get rid of something else, but Okay. | |
| Because tech people sometimes aren't always the best. | |
| In fact, a lot of people go into tech because they prefer computers to people, at least in terms of conflict. | |
| Because if you have conflict with a computer, you can do a workaround. | |
| I remember many years ago, We had a web program that produced reports in Microsoft Access, but unfortunately, on the Windows servers at the time, if you weren't logged in, the Access runtime wouldn't work. | |
| And this was something completely unanticipated. | |
| And the client didn't want, of course, to leave a logged-in server because that was a security risk. | |
| And so we ended up having to create a huge workaround where we basically would figure out the coordinates of the report and reproduce it using RTF. But how could you know? | |
| You can't test everything. | |
| And I swear to God, it seems to me like half the time with me with computers, shit just doesn't work. | |
| It just doesn't work. | |
| I mean, I'm still struggling to record video after four or five years of working. | |
| I've tried so many different programs and they're all great until one of them doesn't work. | |
| Then you freak out about it because it's like, "Well, if it doesn't work, then what am I going to do?" If it doesn't work, I'm down to the point where I'm doing screen recorders of the video. | |
| I'm actually trying to think of how I can simply point a freaking camera. | |
| At the screen and record that, because then at least I know I have something, even if it's not great. | |
| But for my debate with StormCloud's gathering, debate is probably too kind of a word, but for my flyby frown at StormCloud's gathering, he's in Google+. | |
| I don't know how to record Google +, so I did a screen recording, and it came out one frame a second, even though I asked it for 25 frames a second. | |
| It came out, and why? I don't know. | |
| Right, so stuff, I mean, I'm seriously considering doing a Mac. | |
| You can do a GoPro. Yeah. | |
| I'm sorry? You could use a GoPro camera. | |
| That would work. What's that? | |
| Oh, a GoPro. They record independently of the computer itself, but you could use it as a secondary camera, that sort of thing. | |
| Oh, okay. Thanks, Tom. I can order that. | |
| Literally, half the day, it feels to me like half the day is just things don't work. | |
| And this is just IT. I mean, a lot of stuff does work, and with a certain amount of muscle and ingenuity, you can make things work. | |
| I had my first three-way with Girl Writes What and Dr. | |
| Warren Farrell the other day. And I used Uvu, which records to FLV. I've used it before, never had any problems. | |
| And Mike recorded on his end too. | |
| But then his internet crapped out when he came back in. | |
| Uvu said it was recording, but then it wasn't. | |
| So we got the first 20 minutes of that. | |
| I got the whole thing, but then when I asked it to convert from its internal format to FLV, It got to 49% and then said, error occurred, which is spectacularly not helpful. | |
| And so I got a company, I uploaded it to their site, and they did fix it. | |
| They got me the whole video. | |
| It took about a week and lots of back and forth. | |
| But that's just the kind of stuff that happens all the time, and it makes you incredibly frustrated. | |
| Tech just doesn't work. | |
| It works, you know, for the majority of people, web browsing, email, word processing, and so on, it works fairly well. | |
| But unfortunately, for a lot of the stuff that you want to do that's claimed, it just doesn't work. | |
| I've probably tried now five different video recorders. | |
| And all of them have problems. | |
| All of them have problems. | |
| Pamela records just a quarter of the screen. | |
| I use one called VaudeBurner that stops recording sometimes after about half an hour. | |
| And I've used one called Ivera, which sometimes the audio and video goes out of sync, no matter how fast the computer you're using. | |
| I mean, it just is... | |
| Sorry, I don't mean to get into my issues, but in tech, there's just a lot of stuff that hugely doesn't work and is just annoying. | |
| It's distracting because I just want to do an interview and publish a video. | |
| It shouldn't really be that hard. I'm running it on an i7. | |
| It should have the power to save some video. | |
| The point is that from a customer standpoint, which is who you're facing, It's really frustrating and what you want is the big picture stuff and I mean, I personally, I just give up, you know, because I'm going to spend $100 on a program and it doesn't work. | |
| What am I going to do? Get them to build me a new version that does? | |
| I mean, I guess I can wait for the next version. | |
| But half the time, a new version causes more problems, right? | |
| I use a program called Super Tintin, which used to work with Pamela, okay? | |
| Because I want a separate audio recording from a video recording because audio recording is in WAV form. | |
| It has two channels. And it used to give you a warning saying, well, I'm working with Pamela, therefore... | |
| And so I upgraded to a new version because... | |
| Sometimes Super Tintin wouldn't stop recording. | |
| It wouldn't stop recording when you hung up and you couldn't stop it by clicking on anything and so you'd have to reboot but then it wouldn't close the Video file with all the correct information, so then you've got to upload it to someone, spend $100 to get them to process the video for you, and then it always comes back slightly too fast or too slow. | |
| Anyway, so these are just problems that tech has that... | |
| Sometimes it's almost worse than just not having a solution because you spend a lot of money and time and energy just trying to get something fairly simple to work and then it just doesn't work and then you're like, okay, so if it doesn't work one out of ten times, do I just throw out one out of ten interviews? | |
| Anyway, again, so the point is that it is unknowable in some ways to get tech to work. | |
| But I think spending a lot more time communicating the project as a whole is probably the best way to go to ensure. | |
| And so sit down with the person and say, okay, here's what we've gotten done. | |
| Because a lot of times people forget about that, right? | |
| So here's what we've gotten done. Here's what we haven't gotten done. | |
| What are your priorities? | |
| You know, what is it that's the most important thing? | |
| Because the priority for the technical person tends to be a combination of that which you're good at and that which is interesting and challenging. | |
| And that may not match the business objectives of the person who's paying you. | |
| And so I would really sit down and say, here's the things that still need to be done. | |
| Here's my time estimates. What do you think? | |
| You know, what would be working on? What has the greatest business value for you, right? | |
| Because the purpose of technology is... | |
| It's productivity. It's efficiency. | |
| It's profit, fundamentally. | |
| Now, the guy is not making any money out of paying a whole bunch of people for a website that he can't send clients to. | |
| That's a huge net loss, right? | |
| Yeah. Try and figure out what gives him the best drivers for his profit and try to view the project through the lens of your customer's profit and then I don't think you can particularly go wrong. | |
| Does that make any sense? Alright, so just go over what has been done, what is yet to do, and also explain what value is provided by what has so far been done. | |
| Well, yeah. I mean, I think you really want to understand the business purpose and the profit driver of the website, and that will help you drive what you're working on. | |
| So, if he can get 80% of his profit from working on the next three things, then you need to know that because then the other stuff you can probably get done and he can pay you from the profit he's making from his website. | |
| But if he's mortgaged his house to pay you for a website that isn't coming, I mean, I trust you, he's going to go mental. | |
| Again, I can understand it, of course, right? | |
| Really try and focus on, and you can ask him the basic question, what is going to get you the most money? | |
| What is going to make you the most profit? | |
| What is going to help you pay for this thing the quickest? | |
| Really focus, of course, on that stuff. | |
| Okay. I guess that makes sense. | |
| You sound entirely skeptical. | |
| Well, I definitely want to address the things that he wanted, you know, the specific fixes, and afterwards, I mean, I guess we could discuss what he would, you know, would be overall the most beneficial. | |
| I guess we could discuss afterwards what would be the most beneficial to the, you know, I guess for revenue generation, as you put it, as long as I'm just trying to make sure I understand you correctly. | |
| Well, yeah, I mean, look, there's I mean, the order button makes you money, right? | |
| Yeah. So if the order button doesn't work, it's a huge loss, right? | |
| Right. The about button doesn't make you a lot of money, right? | |
| Correct. And again, I'm not saying you would, but if you're working on the about button rather than the order button, then... | |
| Or if you're saying, well, I'm not going to have the order. | |
| The order button can't work yet because if somebody's running Firefox 3 on a Newton, then there's a problem. | |
| And he may say, I have like three customers out of 10,000 who have that configuration, so please get me the order button working. | |
| And we'll fix the rest later or we'll just tell them they need to upgrade to a Newton 2 or something like that. | |
| And I say this from experience in that when I was working on a program, the most obscure errors might come up. | |
| I was like, well, I got to fix those because they're errors and QA has sent them back as errors. | |
| But then shaking my head from the business standpoint saying, well, wait a sec, this is going to happen like once every six months. | |
| Let's get this thing out, trap the errors and send the people back and say, this is not a feature that's available, that kind of stuff. | |
| Just get it working. I would really, really focus on that kind of stuff. | |
| To look for heaven is to live here in hell, right? | |
| To aim for perfection is to live in a state of perpetual discontent and deferment of profitability. | |
| I remember once, another job I had once said that the perfect is the enemy of the possible. | |
| I remember once hearing that one. | |
| I don't know if you've heard of that. Yeah, I've heard the perfect is the enemy of the good. | |
| And so, yeah, again, computers are a tool that should be driven towards profitability. | |
| Profitability is the driver of technology, not coding. | |
| Coding is a means to the end and the end is profitability. | |
| Now, there's profitability for you and there's profitability for your clients. | |
| I would argue that if you're focusing on profitability for you without driving that Through the lens of profitability for your client, then you won't succeed for long as an entrepreneur. | |
| Again, I'm not sort of saying you. | |
| I mean, in particular, just as a general principle, if you're not making money for your client, but you're making money for yourself, then clearly that's a win-lose. | |
| I'm not saying that you're trying to do anything negative. | |
| Please understand that. I mean, it's just that... | |
| You have to view yourself as a means to an end, right? | |
| So way back in the day, this would be sort of very early in the podcast stream. | |
| You know, I used to record two podcasts a day in my car. | |
| And one time I went through the podcast and it was about a 45-minute podcast. | |
| This took about two hours. | |
| I went through... And I took out all of the errs and the ums and one or two tangents and the breaths and I, you know, really just cleaned it up so that it went really more smoothly and I put it out there just as an experiment and nobody noticed anything at all. | |
| And that was sort of instructive for me because, of course, if I had spent, you know, I had a full-time executive-level time-consuming job at the time, and if I had spent two hours per podcast, which would be an additional four hours of work a day cleaning up the podcast, my guess is that they would be 5% or 10% more enjoyable to listen to, but I wouldn't have had any time with my wife. | |
| You know, since part of what philosophy is to help improve the quality of your relationships, that would seem to be counter-philosophical. | |
| And so anyway, so the point is that if you look for perfection, then you can very often end up with paralysis and the purpose was of course to get the podcast out there rather than to edit them down to a state of potential perfection but also the other thing too is that when you edit what you say like when you edit a podcast you're also editing your thinking process and so it may actually be counterproductive to try and aim for perfection from a concision standpoint Because even the pauses can be pregnant, | |
| so to speak. So anyway, I would really, really focus and say, look, I get this must be driving you crazy. | |
| Try and put yourself in the other person's shoes. | |
| And really try and figure out, if you don't know as yet, you can make your assumptions and then confirm them, which is probably the best thing to do, but really try to understand... | |
| What is the button that needs to be working that's going to make him the most money or the page or whatever the database reads and displays? | |
| And really, really focus on getting him profit as soon as humanly possible. | |
| All right. Yes. | |
| Yeah, that would definitely make sense. | |
| All right. Well, yeah, do drop me a line. | |
| Let me know how it goes. And, you know, be aware of some flack just because it is going to be a – if he's already in the state of frustration, then it's going to be, you know, it's going to happen, right? | |
| So I just sort of point out that it's okay if he's frustrated. | |
| It's not going to kill anyone, but it's certainly understandable from what he's invested. | |
| Anything else you wanted to ask? | |
| Yeah, one thing I know, well, just to be clear, this guy, he's not really the... | |
| I don't know if I'd call him a client. | |
| He's more like the guy who's above me. | |
| I'm salaried, and this guy is a, I guess, I don't know, business development or whatever. | |
| I'm not... Okay, but he has his profit which is called his paycheck, right? | |
| Okay. So it's pretty much the same thing. | |
| Yeah, yeah. Which is that he's in charge of this and he's going up to the big boardrooms and all the big boardroom people are saying, what the hell is going on with this project? | |
| And he's saying, what is he saying? | |
| He's saying, it's not done yet. | |
| And they're saying, well, why isn't it done yet? | |
| And he's saying, because there are problems. | |
| He's like, well, were these problems foreseeable? | |
| I don't know. Like, at some point, he's, you know, why not just talk to you? | |
| He's either going to understand what's going on, Or he's going to look kind of extraneous, right? | |
| Sure. So he needs more information. | |
| He needs to say... | |
| If he can go up and say, look, I've had a talk with the developer. | |
| We've figured out here's the profit goals that we're trying to achieve and here's how long the time is going to be and all that. | |
| Then he's doing something. | |
| He's actually... Got something of value and he can check with them about whether it's the right stuff or not and whether he's doing the right thing. | |
| So I think all of that stuff is important. | |
| Give him something of utility. | |
| Sure thing. All right? | |
| All right. All right. | |
| Well, thanks very much and best of luck with it. | |
| I hope it works out well. | |
| Well, thank you very much. You're very welcome. |
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