My old boss used to say that running the website was like playing a video game.
I agreed with him at the time. I was in my thirties, running marketing for a Jeep parts company, and the comparison fit. There was a screen. There were numbers on the screen. The numbers moved when I did the right things, and I got to find out whether I’d done the right things by watching them move.
He meant it as a compliment to the work. I took it as one.
I’ve thought about that line a lot this year, because something happened to my work that I did not expect at fifty-six, and the first thing I noticed about it was the feeling. Familiar feeling. Same pull. And I had to sit with the question of whether I’d just found a better game, or whether I’d finally gotten out of the arcade.
What actually changed
For most of my career, the distance between an idea and a working thing was measured in money and other people’s calendars.
You’d have the idea in the shower. Then you’d scope it, price it, wait, explain it to a developer, watch it come back not-quite-right, decide it wasn’t worth another round, and let it die. Not dramatically. Ideas don’t die dramatically. They just stop getting mentioned.
Twenty years of that leaves a residue. You start pre-killing ideas before they reach your mouth, because you already know what they’d cost. It’s efficient. It’s also a slow way of getting smaller.
That distance is mostly gone now. I have an idea in the morning and there is a working version of it by dinner. I’ve built more in the last several months than in the previous ten years, and most of it is stuff I’d already thought of and shelved — a Jeep history project I’d wanted to do for a decade, a framework for a community project I couldn’t afford to have built properly.
The web feels like a canvas again. That’s the only way I know how to say it.
The part I want to be careful about
Here is what I keep wanting to tell people, and it’s the whole reason I’m writing this instead of posting a screenshot of something I made.
The tool didn’t make me good at this. It removed the reason my ideas never got built.
Those are different sentences and the difference is everything. Nothing about my thinking improved this year. What improved is that the thinking now has somewhere to go. The tool is a multiplier, and a multiplier doesn’t care about you — it only enlarges what you already brought.
So what did I bring? Not brilliance. Twenty years of watching this specific business closely enough to know which questions matter. Which is a thing you get by staying somewhere a long time and paying attention, and it is available to anyone willing to do that, in any field.
A machinist with thirty years on the floor would out-build me tomorrow, in his own domain, with the same tools I’m using. So would a nurse. So would a guy who’s run a two-truck plumbing company since 1998 and knows exactly which four things his customers always call about. Their knowledge is the scarce part. Mine isn’t special; it’s just mine, and I’ve had it a long time.
If you’ve been doing something real for twenty years and you’ve quietly stopped having new ideas because you got tired of watching them die on cost — I’d rather you read this and go try something tonight than read this and think I’m unusual. I’m not. I just got my hands back.
Which brings me back to the video game
The feeling is real and it deserves to be named honestly, because it’s the same feeling I got watching rankings move in 2007, and that one wasn’t always good for me.
There are two versions of this high, and from the inside they are nearly identical.
One is the slot machine. Rankings, dashboards, the number that moved. Variable reward on a screen. You pull, something flashes, you pull again. It’ll take a whole evening and give you nothing to show anyone. The industry I work in sells this — to clients, and to the people who work in it. That’s part of why I’ve disliked where it’s been going for years. A dashboard that goes up is not the same thing as a business that got better, and a lot of money has been made on people not noticing the difference.
The other is the workshop. At 8pm nothing existed. At 2am something does, and tomorrow somebody can use it. The reward is the object and the person it serves.
They light up the same part of you. The only reliable way I’ve found to tell them apart is to look at the room afterward: is there something in it that wasn’t there before, and is it for somebody?
I don’t ask that question as a productivity trick. I ask it because I know what it costs me to get that answer wrong. I’ve been wrong about it before, about things much more serious than software, and I paid the whole price. That’s not a metaphor and it’s the reason I don’t get to be casual about anything that feels this good.
Same tool. Same chemistry. Different fruit. Watch the fruit.
The guilt
Here’s the part I didn’t plan to admit.
I feel a little guilty about how much I’m getting done alone.
I’m not sure that’s a rational feeling, but I don’t think it’s a wrong one either. Work like this used to feed a team. It used to be four people’s week, and four people’s paychecks, and four people learning something in the process. Now a lot of it fits in one room.
I notice I’ve started saying “we” and “the team” when I talk to clients about work that is currently just me — not to inflate it, but because I intend for it to be true, and I’d rather grow into the word than have to renegotiate it later. Whatever this leverage turns out to be worth, I want it to end up employing people, not replacing them. That’s a decision I have to keep making, not one I get to make once.
I’d rather say that out loud now, while it’s still uncomfortable, than discover in two years that I quietly got used to it.
The direction of the tool
If there’s one thing I’d want someone to take from this, it’s smaller than a philosophy and it’s this:
Which way is the tool pointed?
Pointed at my own capacity, it gives me back the twenty years of ideas I’d stopped bothering to have. The judgment stays mine. The tool just carries.
Pointed the other way — at the platform, at the automated thing that promises to decide for me — it takes the judgment and hands back an average. There’s a whole business argument in that sentence, and it’s the next thing I’m going to write, because it’s costing my clients real money right now.
But personally, at the desk, at night, it comes down to the same question I’ve been circling this whole time: at the end of the session, did I make something, or did I just play?
Glenn was right. It is like a video game.
I’d just spent an awful lot of years playing the wrong one.