Take Action! Now!

This topic has been working it’s way through my brain for some time now. I’ve been going through an introspective thought process on myself to figure out what stops me from taking action. I’m referring to taking action in very broad terms. It can be doing something in your personal, professional or educational life, or maybe something for your family or someone else meaningful to you.

I’d like to introduce myself as an IT professional with about 16 years of experience in the field. I bounce around quite a bit and like to keep a broad range of experience rather than going too deep in any one discipline. I’ve been a serial perfectionist since I can remember. If something is worth doing, it’s not only worth doing right, it’s worth doing perfectly. This personality type is drawn to the IT field because we can do things perfectly. Most everything evaluates down to a 0 or a 1, true or false.

Slanted towards IT professionals, I’d like to present my first reason that we don’t do anything. Most of us are perfectionists. Anyone who has spent any time in IT has seen the results of a bad decision. It can be a software development decision or a system design decision. We’ve likely had to suffer with the bad decision, hoping one day we can do something about it. Stakeholders generally don’t understand that the situation can be better or that a bad decision was made in the first place. These experiences have left us with the idea that any bad decision will have long reaching consequences. We worry about it so much that we’ve made up a term for it - Technical Debt. The consequences of action can be so detrimental that it’s safer to take no action at all. We’re paralyzed by indecision about the best course of action.

The second and third reasons are worth combining because they are related - fear and lack of confidence. Change is scary. What are the consequences of taking the wrong action? What if we put ourselves out there and are rejected? We’ve learned by experience that we’re generally not good at something the first time we try it. No one likes to be not very good at something.

The next reason is that IT professionals are generally lazy. That’s actually a good thing. Most of us are generally trying to make our own lives easier most of the time. That has the secondary effect of improving efficiency wherever we work. Improving efficiency is also what keeps us entertained and passionate about what we do. However, it can become problematic if the laziness is taken to an extreme.

The last reason I have is that many of us don’t know what we want. I’ve been “grown up” for a while and I still don’t really know what I want to be when I grow up. I was listening to a speech today and the speaker mentioned Alice in Wonderland and her experience with the Cheshire Cat. Alice came to a fork in the road and didn’t know which way to go. The cat reminded her that if she didn’t know where she wanted to go, it really didn’t matter which way she went.

I’d like to suggest some ideas to combat inaction. I’ll try to correlate them with my reasons for inaction. IT professionals need to become comfortable with the idea of a best fit solution instead of a perfect solution. Oftentimes something is better than nothing. Evaluate your choice between what you need, what you can afford and move forward.

As an aside, I’d like to present a word of warning with this, though. If you have a new company, you’re going to be defining business rules on the fly for some time until you have an established way of dealing with each situation you might encounter. It’s likely that your management software is going to grow organically during this time and at some point you may be unhappy with it. Resist the urge to rewrite until your business rules are established no matter how painful it is to use your current solution. When your rules are established, go great guns.

Regarding fear, I’d like to recommend doing one thing on a regular basis that scares you. This might be every day, this might be once a week. Record your thoughts about it on paper or share them with someone close to you. Some people may ridicule you for stepping outside of your comfort zone. It may actually scare them because they know things are going to change. Personally, I have much more respect for the person that puts themselves out there than the person who sits back and laughs.

I don’t think I can help Alice all that much. She knows she wants to get out, but doesn’t know enough about her surroundings to take the correct steps. However, we can set some specific goals for ourselves. A company I used to work for liked to use the phrase BHAG, standing for Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal. I loved the word and I still think about it often. I’d like everyone to consider having one. One BHAG, and then make smaller goals out of all the steps to get you there.

Everyone, this is my first post on LinkedIn. I’m going to continue moving forward and taking action for what I want. I encourage each of you to start doing now what you’ve been putting off and to become the person you want to be. Please feel free to comment to see if I’m keeping my commitment to myself and to share your successes!