Ben Scofield

Yes, yes, I know I’ve been gone for a while. What can I say? I’ve been really busy.

That said, I’m rejiggering priorities, and pretty high on the list was getting this site updated — particularly the Speaking and Upcoming Events pages. If you’re interested in knowing where I’ve been and where I’ll be, take a look! (And expect new content here shortly!)

In light of the impending new year, I thought I’d offer an alternative to the associated flood of well-intentioned but ultimately-doomed resolutions: weekly goals. (And yes, I contributed to the flood myself. Color me somewhat hypocritical.)

I see several problems with annual resolutions, all related to their length. When you’re making year-long goals, it’s extremely difficult to figure out exactly what is possible, so you’re less likely to set appropriately difficult (but still achievable) targets. Even when you succeed in that, however, the size of the goals can be intimidating, so it’s harder to get started. Weekly goals deal with both of these issues – it’s much easier to figure out how much you can do, and it’s simpler to see how to tackle a smaller goal. In addition, the feedback cycle is so much shorter that you can easily adjust your goal-setting from week to week, which means that it’s possible to improve at goal setting in a reasonable timeframe.

What does this mean? Well, take one of the most popular resolutions: losing weight. The first obstacle is moving from a vague “lose weight” to something more concrete, but what’s the appropriate target? It’s all too easy to shoot too high when your primary knowledge about weight loss comes from The Biggest Loser. Even if you figure out a reachable target, having your goal be “lose fifty pounds this year,” can be intimidating all on its own. Larger goals are harder to get your mind around; at times, it can be hard to figure out how best to get going.

Contrast that with the weekly version. If you’re aiming to lose a pound a week, that means you need to burn 3500 calories more than you take in for the week. With a solid target, it’s much easier to plan out how to do it – pass up dessert here and there, eat less calories in snacks, park farther away from the door, and before you know it you’re meeting your goal. At a weekly level, you can also experiment – see just how much better or worse you do by replacing a steak with a salad, etc.

Of course, this points to a useful strategy: you can still make your ill-defined annual resolutions, but back them up with weekly goals to help you make the longer-term goals work. Good luck, and happy new year!

I’m generally a pretty calm guy. We’ve all got pet peeves, though, and one of my occurs all too frequently. I’m talking about people who think their decisions and mistakes while driving are irreversible. You know, people who cut across three lanes of traffic to make a left turn into a mall parking lot, when they could easily make a u-turn at the next light – that sort of thing. In the grand scheme of things it’s clearly trivial, but it never fails to tick me off.

I discovered the Myers-Briggs personality inventory nearly fifteen years ago (I’m an INTP, thanks for asking), and one of the dimensions it evaluates is very much related to the idea that decisions are irreversible. People range from perceiving to judging (I know, they’re pretty awful names for the trait, but go with it) – where perceivers typically put off making a decision, and judgers tend to prefer having things settled.

I mentioned I’m an INTP, where the P stands for perceiver. Given the above brief description, then, you might expect me to be on the side of the irreversible-deciders, but in fact reversibility makes being a perceiver much easier. What better way to decide what to do could there be than actually making a provisional decision and seeing what happens? This has parallels in all sorts of fields: minimum viable products, agile development, tasting while cooking – they’re all predicated on committing to a course of action as little as possible, and being able to adjust (or even reverse) that commitment as necessary.

I think we’d all be a lot happier if we realized that relatively little in life is irreversible – and who knows what you may discover by trying something out without the fear of having committed to the wrong course forever.

I recently read Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters (a collection of essays from his site, conveniently gathered into a single hardbound “book.” Genius!), and several of the pieces resonated with me. Granted, there were also some pieces that I found completely wrong-headed, but oftentimes worthwhile books have those bits as well as the good ones….

One of the essays I found most interesting was “What You Can’t Say,” the main point of which is that we should challenge conventional wisdom, to state unpopular truths. The bulk of the essay is dedicated to determining exactly what those conventional wisdom and unpopular truths are – taboos, things you get in trouble for stating, heresies, etc.

PG’s examples are almost entirely social in nature – pornography filters, hate speech, etc. There’s a clear parallel in the development world, and there are great examples of people who’ve done just that and had great success. We’re seeing people question tradition and make dramatic progress daily now, with things like alternative databases (why should we store every domain relationally?), Seaside (why must web applications be stateless?), and more. Ironically, one of the earliest arguments for Rails was that it valued convention over configuration – and that itself was a questioning of conventional wisdom.

I think that PG is correct in saying that these practices (stating unpopular opinions, etc.) have value. What’s essential, however, is that the people who are questioning conventional wisdom actually do the work to show where their alternatives are better. It’s one thing to point out that relational databases suck for certain domains; it’s another thing entirely to create a database engine that meets the need.

So: go ahead and support the fringe, rail against the mainstream, do something taboo – but do the work, too.

I was listening to a program on NPR recently, and I heard the interviewee say something interesting about discovering the guitar. Paraphrased, it was:

If you were to draw a thick black line through my life, one side would be “before-guitar,” and the other would be “after-guitar.”

It’s interesting to reflect on the thick black line test. I honestly don’t know if there’s a single moment in my own life when everything changed, but I’ve clearly got a few dark gray lines at various points. What about you?