A theme helps you steer as you move along the road of your life. You don’t steer all at once – steering is a series of little adjustments that you make as you go down the road. A theme serves the same purpose. As you live your year, think about your theme from time to time and steer accordingly.

Here are some guidelines to help you:

• Have only one theme at a time. Maybe you set a theme for a year, or a season, but it is always one at a time.
• A theme is not a goal. You can fail at a goal. You can’t fail at a theme. “Lose 50 pounds” is not a theme.
• Keep your theme a little open-ended. It shouldn’t be too specific. “Fewer calories in” might be a good theme if that’s all you really care about this year, but it’s probably too specific. “Quality over quantity” might be a better theme and might be more broadly applicable to your life.
• Avoid overused idioms. “Watch what you eat” might not be particularly useful. If it sounds tired when you say it in January, think of how tired it is going to sound in September.
• A theme isn’t there to get you excited. It’s there to help you think. You may find that the luster quickly wears off of an exciting theme.
• Avoid pithy sayings. You don’t want a theme like “You can do it!”. On the other hand, “Go for it!” might be a good theme for someone who is trying to break out of their shell and try new things. Only you know what makes sense for you.
• Don’t force it. If you’re not satisfied with your theme, pick another one. You need your theme to stick with you all year long.
• There is no wrong theme if it helps steer you where you want to go.

Themes are just one tool in the toolbox. I’ve had various levels of success with themes over the years. Some years they make more sense than others.

The first year I tried setting a theme, I went with “Commitment and Completion”. It made sense for that year. I knew I was getting married and starting a family. But I also knew I was having a hard time showing up places and completing things I’d set out to do. That theme reflected not only the change in my life but also an ongoing struggle to finish what I started. That year ended up being the best year of my life. Not only did the planned things happen, some wonderful unplanned things happened too, largely because I was showing up and following through more.

The next year I just couldn’t figure out a theme for myself. I tried to force it and eventually gave up. That’s just how it is. Some years I just can’t think of a theme that ties enough threads of my life together to be helpful. What’s great about a theme is that it either serves you or it doesn’t. It’s not a thing you fail at. And if you find one theme that serves you well one year, who is to say you can’t use that same theme again?

This year the theme I’m trying is “Capability”. What’s yours?

P.S. – Was this useful? If so, I have a product coming later this year focused on getting more out of yourself. Interested? Add your email here:

So there I was, riding the crest of the bubble, with dreams of startups dancing in my head, when a private list of angel investors fell into my lap. What did I do?

I didn’t have a lot of ethical options. The biggest quasi-ethical play I could have made would have been to cold-call these people and solicit them for investments. Investments in what, I didn’t know. I had nothing concrete to invest in. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do and had no partners. In short, I had nothing to offer and was months if not years away from even thinking about funding of any kind.

There are other people in this world who can just fire up the bullshit machine and start spewing until dollars start flowing. They work out the details later. I get the sense that many dotcoms were started that way, in fact. For better or worse, that just isn’t my style. Even if that was my style, that list wasn’t mine to use. What felt very exhilarating at first just seemed depressing after a few moments of thought. Yes, I had found a valuable hidden gem, but it wasn’t mine to keep.

So what did I do? I did exactly what @AdamD said in his comment on my previous post: I sent the author an email telling him about the problem. I explained how I found it and what he should do to fix it. I almost didn’t send that email though… I was worried that the author might claim that I had hacked his site or trespassed in some way. That isn’t as far fetched as you might think: I hear that eBay will claim a form of trespass if you scrape their website for data instead of using their API. And while legal matters are pretty murky on the Internet today, they were far murkier 9 years ago. So I waited for a response, unsure of what – if anything – would come back.

A few days later I got a reply from the author, who was happy I told him about the problem, but he wasn’t nearly as worried about it as I thought he might be. After all, having an angel list isn’t nearly as valuable as having actual relationships with those angels.

As a thank-you he sent me a t-shirt from his company which I wore often while playing hockey for many years after that.

That was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I spent a month playing roller hockey and shooting hoops in the breezy Northern California fall. When I wasn’t doing that I was plotting my next move, which I thought might be a startup.

During one of my frequent visits to the bookstore I found a book by a well known Silicon Valley marketing guru slash venture capitalist. This was one of those business books that is light on details but somehow manages to inspire and stimulate through anecdote and analogy. I enjoyed it quite a bit and read it quickly.

At the end of each chapter the book had exercises for the reader. One of the exercises was to do research on people by using the internet. The author suggested starting off by researching him. So that’s exactly what I did.

After a few minutes of “googling my yahoo” I discovered an oddball, partially completed area of the author’s website. The full url was kind of strange, as if the page was buried in an app, but the page I was seeing clearly wasn’t part of an app. If you build web apps long enough this kind of goofiness starts to catch your eye. Feeling a little nosy, I altered the url a bit to try to figure out what kind of app was supposed to be there. That’s when I found an ugly little page with only a few links. This was clearly not part of the main site. It looked to be part of an oddball personal organizer app which had been shoehorned into the website. The kind of thing that you don’t expect to see because you’re not supposed to see it without a password. Except there was no password! This was wide open to the world, but only if you knew exactly where to look. I am not a hacker. I just played with the URL a bit. (Also: I’m not a player. I just crush a lot.)

One of the links on this page said “Angels list”.

I believe “HOLY SHIT!” was the precise phrase that came out of my mouth. You know I clicked that link, right? And sure enough, there was a big old list of names and phone numbers. I had stumbled onto the Rolodex of a well-connected VC during the Bubble. That does not happen every day.

So what did I do? Well, I’ll tell you in my next post. In the meantime, let me ask you: What would you have done?

So. Would you like to know the single most important thing there is to know about developing software?

Are you ready?

Can you handle it??? Here it is, BAM!!!:

Manage Expectations

[Matt drops mic and walks off the stage.]

Um… that’s it. That is the whole thing, right there.

If you’re disappointed right now it is probably because I didn’t manage your expectations very well.

It’s true though. Managing expectations is more important in software than gathering requirements, analyzing problems, writing gleaming code, or shipping a high quality piece of software out the door. Those are all very important things. They just aren’t THE most important thing.

For years I’ve said that given the right circumstances I could succeed as a programmer without ever writing a single line of code, just by managing expectations. A couple of years ago I saw a programmer prove this, albeit in a rather unfortunate way. This guy was on the job for three months and hadn’t written a single line of code. And then he got fired. But he wasn’t fired for his code. He was fired due to office politics and teamwork problems. In fact, it was only discovered that he hadn’t written any code the day after he left! The best part is that before he was fired, he was being considered for a promotion to team lead!!!

Did you see the video making the rounds last week about Susan Boyle, the frumpy 47 year old lady that blew away Simon Cowell with her singing? If you haven’t seen the video, Go take a look. (Ordinarily I would embed the video but the fine folks at Youtube and/or BBC have disabled embedding on this one.)

Yes, Susan sings well. Hardly the point though. The real point is that the producers are smart! They have totally and completely managed expectations. Think about the entire set up: The first thing you see is a middle aged frump shoving a snack into her mouth. Then she talks and every word is in a charming but distracting brrrrrogue. And then mix in some well-timed editing: Simon’s unamused reaction when she walks up. The extreme-eye-rolling girl in the audience. Raised eyebrows everywhere. Finally, toss on some ham from the lady herself and you have a perfect recipe for a managed expectation. No one is going to watch all of those social cues and genuinely expect the lady to be able to sing a note. So when she can sing and sing well, POW, they got you. TV producers FTW.

You may think all I am describing is manipulation. That is not the case. Managing expectations is about empathy as much as it is about control. If you promise a feature in a new release of software and it isn’t there, that is going to be very disappointing for your stakeholders. And if you promise to ship a new version in a month and it takes you six months, that might put your stakeholders out of business if the project is critical enough. On the other hand, if you promise something in six months and it takes you four, you’ve got a couple of months to catch any problems you may have missed and you can ship early.

It is far, far better to manage expectations – including your own – and produce average results, than it is to try to produce outstanding results without managing anyone’s expectations. And many times – when you manage expectations well – your “average results” turn out to be quite above average.

Photo courtesy of Sea Turtle

Several years ago I finally got tired of this. I wanted to figure out how to be someone who could be on time. The answer I found isn’t glamorous or fun, and it may seem obvious to some people. It wasn’t obvious to me though, which is why I’m bothering to write about it.

Have you heard of the Powell Doctrine? If you look it up you’ll find a bunch of boring statesman-speak with bullet points, but the best and most concise summary of the Powell Doctrine that I have heard is this:

You go to war with overwhelming force.

This turns out to be the approach I took. I decided that I would be ridiculously early for appointments. If the doctor expected me at 10 o’clock I would be in his lobby at 8:30 or 9. I’d bring a book and wait it out. My overwhelming force was time.

This has worked remarkably well for job interviews. I don’t necessarily show up for the actual interview an hour early (which might seem desperate or at least odd), but I am not averse to sitting in the company’s parking lot for 45 minutes beforehand. If the meeting or interview is important enough the time is totally worth it.

A lot of common advice about punctuality talks about being 15 minutes early for your appointments. That shit just doesn’t work. Most people are smart enough to do the math and say “oh, I have 15 extra minutes so I can stop at Starbucks”. Then they stress out when it takes 12 minutes to get their coffee instead of the 5 minutes that they’d convinced themselves it would take. Since they were already running 10 minutes behind, big surprise, they’re late.

To make this work you need to stick with the term “overwhelming force”. If an hour isn’t early enough, try three. Seriously. If the appointment is that important, why not? Bring a book or your iPod or your laptop. Or convince a friend to come along and keep you company. Do whatever it takes to create that overwhelming force. Absolutely nothing short of death, serious injury, or a kidnapping will prevent you from being on time for an appointment if you leave for the appointment hours before any sane person would.

This isn’t just idle talk. I did this recently when meeting a prospective client. I was meeting someone in a new part of town that I wasn’t too familiar with and I was taking public transit. I planned my trip so that I would be in the area an hour early. All sorts of things went wrong that morning: I got out of the house late, I missed my bus and had to walk a mile down to the light rail station. Then I missed the first train and had to wait for another. Finally I was on the right train, heading in the right direction but incredibly late! The train was taking far longer than I expected. I finally got off the train and walked the rest of the way to the meeting, where I was about two minutes early. I felt like a total failure, but I was on time. If I had planned on being 15 minutes early I would have blown the meeting and probably missed out on a new client.

I should say that I don’t do this all the time. Just like a nation shouldn’t always be at war. But when force is required, you want to go all the way. I’m not always on time for every appointment in my life. But I know how to be on time when it counts.