No More Excuses: Trading Blame for Action. Practical Steps Towards Ownership Instead of Whining.
No More Excuses: Trading Blame for Action. Practical Steps Towards Ownership Instead of Whining.
I'll admit a lack of patience for people who prefer to make excuses when they're given advice. It's easier to make excuses rather than do the hard work.
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers, and specific leadership advice.
I’m someone who spends a lot of their time giving advice to others. I obviously write articles, but I’ve done a lot of one-on-one coaching, respond to people’s emails, and I even occasionally make the mistake of replying to Reddit threads.
It’s interesting and gratifying when someone disagrees with me, with a thoughtful explanation of why they disagree.
For example, I wrote an article once which explained that managers sometimes needed to scare their employees.
I’m convinced that I’m right. But that article also got a decent amount of pushback from intelligent people. The general theme of their arguments was: “You can provide feedback to employees without causing them emotional pain.”
I think that hard messages might cause emotional pain regardless of how you communicate it. But right or wrong, I appreciate it when people approach disagreements with intelligence and reasoning.
What I don’t appreciate is when people prefer to complain about problems, instead of looking for solutions.
Them: “My manager assigns all our work tasks, the micromanagement drives me crazy!”
Me: “Have you tried asking your manager if you could please self-assign some tasks? Maybe pick a specific unassigned task and see if they minded if you worked on it next?”
Them: “That would never work! Managers never listen.”
Welcome to those of you new to Scarlet Ink! Each week I send an article to all subscribers. Free members can read approximately half of each article, while paid members can read the full article.
For some, half of each article is plenty! But if you'd like to read more, I'd love you to consider becoming a paid member!
Why is it difficult to convince people to take ownership of their problems?
Because it’s easier to claim that the cause of the problem is someone else. That means you can sit back, and complain. Complaining is great.
It’s emotionally gratifying to blame someone else. You can feel anger at them ruining things for you.
It’s emotionally painful to blame yourself. That creates feelings of shame, stress, and hurts your ego.
It’s easy to blame someone else. Let’s look at politicians. It’s easy to say that they’re doing immigration wrong, the budget wrong, and they’re wrong on the funding of healthcare. You can say all those things within a single visit to a pub, while drinking a beer. No need to research or make hard decisions.
It’s incredibly difficult to need to solve things yourself. Can you imagine trying to come up with an actual solution to immigration, or the national budget? Absolutely impossible. You’ll never make even 50% of the country happy, and there are downsides to literally every decision.
Everything is better about blaming others. Except for one big thing.
If you blame others, you’re not trying to solve problems. You’re saying, “The solution to this problem lies with those other people.”
“Why don’t we have good healthcare?” “That politician over there!”
Now with the government, I’ll admit that it’s awfully difficult to influence policy. Fair enough.
But what about your career? Your family? Your finances?
You must own solutions to your personal issues.
If you choose to complain about others, I would like you to interpret your whining as saying, “I don’t want to try anymore! I don’t want to fix this!”
Problems in our life are complex. They almost always involve multiple people, and many variables. This is true of you not getting a promotion, not having enough money saved for retirement, your kid not studying for a test, not being able to find a job, and more.
If you prefer, you can always find someone to blame for every problem. “I didn’t invest for my retirement because my mom/teacher/financial advisor/school never told me to do it!”
When you boil problems down to a single variable (not in your control) it certainly makes you feel better. It’s no longer your emotional problem, and you don’t need to solve it. Which, as I pointed out, means you’ve given up.
I don’t like to give up. I want better outcomes. I want to own fixing my own problems, rather than shrug and blame someone else. I’d like you to join the party.
Your agency is priceless. It’s your almost unlimited ability to influence your own life. When something doesn’t work out, I want you to say, “Hrm, bummer, what can I do next?”
I remember reading a quote once from a relationship book which said essentially, “You’re responsible for 100% of your 50% of any relationship.”
What does that mean? It means that you’re in 100% control of your actions. Don’t stress over what other people do, because you can’t control them. You have one set of levers in your life - it’s the things you do, not what others do.
“Why doesn’t my manager…”
“Why doesn’t my kid…”
“Why doesn’t my spouse…”
“Why doesn’t my product manager…”
Forget that nonsense. That’s helpless talk. That’s handing the responsibility of fixing things to someone else. Worry about what you can do.
Examples and the rest of this article.
Like with the article I linked above, I regularly get these types of helpless responses to my articles.
“But I couldn’t say that, because my manager would never listen.”
“But if I gave that type of feedback, I’d totally get fired.”
“But no tech company has good work-life balance, so I have no good career options.”
When someone wrote one of those helpless responses to me, I wrote back. They said something like, “Ouch. That was some harsh but fair feedback.” You know why it was harsh? Because I didn’t say, “You’re right, you’re helpless in this really bad situation.” Instead, I explained why they had plenty of actions they hadn’t taken yet to fix things.
There is only one useful thing about being helpless. It makes you feel better. Booooo. I want you to have better results. If at first you don’t succeed, you try again. You try in a different way. You try in a third way. You try in a fourth way which you totally didn’t expect to work, but you’re really grasping at straws here. At no point will you be more successful by blaming others, so you don’t waste your mental energy doing it.
So I’m going to walk through 6 problems (excuses) I’ve heard recently, and some of my feedback.
“I’m not learning anything in this job.”
“My job isn’t using cool technologies.”
“We’re only using in-house tools, so I’m never going to be able to leave.”
“I’m stuck doing boring small tasks that my manager gives me.”
“We’re just doing operations and fixing small bugs, nothing interesting.”
It’s absolutely true that being dropped into a cool job is easier than needing to make your job cool. But in almost all situations, you can make your job more interesting.
At least with tech jobs. I mean, if you’re in a non-technical tedious job (I now hesitate to name a sample boring job because some reader will be offended), like a night security job, perhaps your best option is to get into audiobooks.
But if you’re a tech worker, you can almost always make your job more interesting (and learn a ton in the process).
Doing routine operations work? Is it possible at all to automate some of that ops work? Automation is almost always more interesting.
Fixing small bugs? How fast are you fixing them? Is there any benefit in visibility to fixing them faster? Can you re-engineer the code to be less of a bug factory?
Your manager is assigning you boring work? Can you voluntarily take interesting projects before your manager assigns things? I’ve repeatedly seen people sit there waiting to be assigned work, while there was interesting unassigned work available.
Few quick facts.
My best employees were never assigned work. They were always too busy with important (and interesting) work to be assigned work.
I once had a few SDE-2’s (level 5) say that a team had no complex work. A principal engineer (level 7) later joined, and was extremely busy doing the work the level 5 engineers scoffed at.
I’ve seen 6+ months pass where an entire team was on on-call continually, fixing emergencies with no end in sight with a fragile (but critical) system. Then a single engineer joined with no patience for on-call work, so they started getting the other engineers to re-architect and design the software. The on-call load dropped precipitously.
I’ve hired engineers from companies with an incredibly boring tech stack. They learned modern technology as side projects, imported some tech into their company, and generally bootstrapped themselves to be a valuable big-tech hire.