Complex Problems and Fighting Stances

I’ve lost my strength for the day. I leave the office clutching my stomach, plagued by problems at work. I walk in the front door with a bunch of problems that don’t seem to have answers. I often did, and still do.

When I was working on an architecture overhaul of a large web app I led last spring, I walked in the door with code editor ghosts haunting me. I’d change one thing and problems would pop up all over the place, and I’d run out of time to solve them, and I’d leave work with a high level of frustration that I couldn’t solve them. Sometimes I’d come home, be a little disorganized, and then start working again. The complexity never stopped.

The constant complexity was destroying my life. I couldn’t wake up in the morning, passed out on weekends, habitually ate chocolate-covered sweets, ran forty minutes on the treadmill if I got home late, and slept late after watching Douglas for three hours if I got home even later. Only when my heart rate rose above 180 or I saw something like Park Yeon-jin smashing Sun Myung-oh’s head with a bottle of Royal Salute would I finally turn away from work. Either way, sleep was hard to come by.

I think the reason I was able to stay immersed in my work while my life was being destroyed was because I thought this would eventually end, the product would go from crappy to awesome, and I would grow. The latter was roughly right, but the former was terribly wrong. The problem never ends.** **The problem never ends.

Spring has come and gone, and fall is almost here, and I’m still stuck with a new, huge problem. As your product gets bigger, it introduces a whole new set of headaches to match its scale. You fix a platform, and it’s still not being used as intended. You fix something, something else breaks. Businesses get more complex as they scale.

How do you get better at your job in this dormant state? You just have to “I can do this all day”. You have to solve problems in an endless and sustainable way. I was just reading a book yesterday called The Infinite Game(https://www.yes24.com/Product/Goods/110710700), and the gist of it is that businesses that work for the greater good and play an endless, infinite game instead of focusing on short-term results are the most successful.

No matter how far you’ve come in your journey, you still have a long way to go. Causes are like icebergs. We only see the tip of the iceberg, the things we’ve already accomplished.

There’s still a long way to go. If you think any problem is going to end, you’re looking at the tip of the iceberg.

A coworker once told me, “I’m not a big fan (of doing hard, difficult work).” I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a coworker of mine who said something to the effect of, “I don’t really think about it. This is the true attitude of someone who solves problems sustainably.

It’s not about doing things mindlessly. The problems are endless, so you should dive into them like brushing your teeth in the morning. This reduces your threshold of frustration. When faced with a more difficult problem, you should scratch the back of your head and say, “That’s a little harder than this one, but I’m not eating lunch today,” and then solve it brilliantly.

In season six of Grey’s Anatomy, Derek, a neurosurgeon, has a very difficult spinal cord tumor to operate on draws a picture of a spinal cord tumor on the wall above his bed It’s a complex tumor with extreme blood vessel and nerve distribution that can kill or maim a patient if it’s messed up. Derek and Grey are in each other’s eyes, and they put their heads together underneath the tumor to figure it out, comforting and encouraging each other. It’s a very medical drama type of scene, but it’s also endearing, which makes it strangely charming.

But the real alpha in this scene is Derek’s bravery in putting such a complex problem in the most important place in the house, the master bedroom bed. He brings home such a horrible problem, puts it on his bedside table, raises his kids well, and saves his patient by cracking the problem. If I had a picture of the app architecture I’m struggling with right now taped to my bedside, I’d probably be willing to promise myself total despair and work harder to make my life even worse.

(end)