The "Show That You're Doing Something" Gambit

Many many many years ago - during the DotCom era - I was at a company that unicorn-ed overnight. Mind you, before the craziness, we were a tiny company, a handful of people at that. But then - DotCom bubble, websites, and BOOM!, we were growing like mad. It was pretty awesome, I have to tell ya 🤗

At the time, I was young, full of beans, and pretty certain that the world revolved around me. And the hyper-growth certainly only served to accentuate this - after all, it was obvious that I had something to do with all of our success, right?

Somewhere along the way, we brought in a couple of people who were, well, capable of doing what I was doing. And, what’s worse, they had been doing it for a lot longer, and at a much larger scale, than I was.

Thing is, I knew that I was better, stronger, faster than them, I just needed some way of showing everybody that I was all that and a bag of chips. And I needed to do it right damn now because I didn’t have time - after all, as the Big Dog, I needed to take the new people down immediately, right?

So I winged it, and just started doing stuff. Mind you, I'd always been doing stuff before the hyper-growth, but now I - if anything - accelerated, changing things all over the place because I knew, knew, that it was in the best interest of the company. 

Because, I was good, right? I knew what I was doing, and I could certainly move fast without breaking things (yes, this was well before Facebook. We had invented stupid aphorisms well before the ‘00s). Remember, I had to do it now, so there was certainly no time for planning, for scoping, for doing things the right way. Just Do It, that was the mantra. Which I did.

And so I winged it.

The problem, of course, was that my margin for error had pretty much gone down to zero. OK, it was quite probably negative at that point - I was moving fast, I was in motion, was doing things, I was showing movement, and I was constantly rationalizing everything I was doing to everybody using seven-dimensional-chess-type ex post facto reasoning. And hey, people bought it for a bit - remember, I'd been the Big Dog up to then - right up to the point that stuff really started cratering around me ‘cos, like I said, my margins for error was way down there.

A brief tangent here - a really hard lesson to learn, especially when you’re young, is that experience matters. Seniority is all about having done many many different things, having experienced a lot, and probably most importantly, having screwed up a lot in the past. 

Hell, screwing up is one of the best learning experiences ever because it’s one of the very few ways to get to that “cold-shiver-down-the-spine-lords-I-will-never-make-that-mistake-again” place in your life. To that place where you don’t even remember why it’s not a good idea to eat that particular street food, but something deep inside of you is screaming at you that if you do it you will regret it with every cm of your gastric tract.

However, this is something that comes only with Deep Time. When you’re young, you tend to get ahead through NOT screwing up. And it’s pretty easy to get to a place of fairly significant “seniority” (quotes important) within your org, because, hey, you always delivered and never failed.But, and this is key, you didn’t fail, i.e. you didn’t screw something up! 

Enough with the tangent though - where were we?

Right, I was young, I was winging it, and I was pushing the very limits of what I knew. Which, as it turns out, was more of a “pushing the very limits of what I thought I knew”. Which very much turned out to be stuff that was very very wrong. I was walking on the edge of the knife, but unlike Georgia O’Keefe, I had no idea what the hell I was doing. I was just doing stuff to be doing something, to show progress, to show movement, because, in my mindset at the time, it was far far more important for me to be successful than it was for the company to be successful. I was so caught up in my ego that the idea that the rest of the company was (quite literally, at the time) dependent on what I was doing was something far far beyond my comprehension. In my mind, the logic was backwards - if I failed, the company would fail because the company could only succeed with me, and never without me!

And yeah, as you might imagine, at some point, I fell. Pretty hard. As screw-ups go, it was a righteous one, one that almost took out our fledgling unicorn. As learning experiences go, it was a doozy, one that I’ve played back over and over again in my life with a bit of “never do it again” cold sweat of vicarious embarrassment.

(Incidentally, for closure, the new folks, just by standing still and doing nothing, ended up coming out ahead. Which really didn’t help things, y’know? They ended up "saving the day" by, literally, unwinding quite a bit of what I'd done. But yeah, that was also part of the learning moment right there)

Anyhow, in case the point needs to be belabored, Don’t Be Me (back then). Don’t fall into the Show You’re Doing Something trap. And, for all that’s holy, when somebody points this out (to you), Listen To Them!!!

(Yeah, you won’t. But maybe you’ll remember, much later, that you should have….)