Lesson Six: Experience is more important than achievement
Do stuff, it pays off
On the day that Facebook IPO’d, my wife and I were sitting in a hotel room in Charleston, South Carolina looking at our internal stock portal. The value of our shares went from $0 to more money than I had made in a year in an instant. I’d like to think that were we not in the middle of the worst time in our relationship, we probably would have been excited but I am not so sure that is true. The truth is, we both grew up in lower middle class families and that having modest means for so much of our life resulted in a weird kind of dread staring at the screen.
We had suffered through an economic winter that resulted in selling our dream home in Elk Grove, CA for less than we paid for it. We were not alone in this, much of the country was hit hard by the recession in 2007 that drove us to move to the Bay Area. We were fortunate to have a nearby escape route.
We learned some terribly hard lessons and found ourselves staring at wealth that neither of us had ever thought we would see. It was truly a shocking moment that I still don’t know how to reconcile in my mind almost a decade later.
After some silence and tempered celebrating, we started to talk about what we should do for the girls, they had suffered through the rough times just as much as we had. Like most people who grew up without a lot of stuff, our first inclination was to think about a present for each of them. After some further talking we hit upon something that pulled a lot of the lessons I should have learned by this point but still didn’t truly grasp: we decided it was better to take them somewhere so they could experience something they hadn’t before.
The idea didn’t come out of the blue, it was rooted in where we were standing at that very moment. The day prior we had spent at Fort Sumter, learning about that site's unique place in American History. I am fairly certain that our eldest daughter, who just wrapped up a double major in History and Anthropology (in 3 years?!?!?!) with a specialization in Archaeology, found her path that day walking around in absolute wonder and reverence on the ground of a Civil War battle site.
Rachel and I agreed that a trip would be fun, but more importantly a trip where the girls would experience something they had not experienced before. It would feel like an accomplishment for Rachel and I to be able to afford to take our girls somewhere we had always wished to see, but more importantly it would be an experience they would never forget. We had plenty of time to figure it out, it would be six months before we could convert any of that equity to cash, but we knew that we wanted our girls to focus less on stuff and more on experiences.
Thinking back on this I realize that the idea of valuing experiences more than accomplishments is really the key that has turned the lock on my Silicon Valley career. As I mentioned in an earlier lesson, interviewing at a Silicon Valley company can be really hard. I went into my interview with Google and tried to bone up on information and come off as if I knew more than I did. My resume was tailored to show all the things I had accomplished and I was geared up to make sure they knew I did great things.
When I interviewed at Yahoo! and, later, Facebook I did very little prep work other than learning about the company. In those interviews, where I successfully landed the gig I was seeking, I spent way more time talking about the mistakes I had seen, been part of making and how I would avoid them in the future. I talked about things like using an NPV to determine if it was better to buy the High Efficiency washing machine, rather than the old school water wasting type. I don’t recall, not once, talking about some overblown accomplishment I had achieved but spent a lot of time talking about team dynamics and how my teammates and I worked together, regardless of role or job title to tackle big things together. I got the job because I talked about experience and ignored individual accomplishment.
Silicon Valley is made up of companies that like to refer to themselves as learning organizations. This is not exactly like college, but it means that the objective for everyone within the company is to fail fast and find the lesson in that failure to push the company forward and find new things to fail at doing. At Facebook, for example, there were t-shirts handed out to people that said “I took down Facebook and all I got was this t-shirt.” Mistakes are not seen as the end of the world as long as the root of the mistake is understood and helps propel the company forward.
A similar environment existed at Square. The first office I worked in when I joined Square was the old San Francisco Chronicle building on the corner of 5th and Mission. The bottom floor was an extensive library so that we had access to materials to help us grow whenever we desired to take a minute and grow. We continued this concept of having books to read at work when we moved a few blocks away to a much larger space and a portion of the office was dedicated to a purpose built library. Reading and learning about everything from Computer Science, coding manuals to legendary San Francisco 49ers Coach Bill Walsh’s leadership style was not only facilitated, but encouraged by having books readily available for anyone to read at any time.
Square took it one step further and we had a unique program where we trained high school girls to code applications. I was a mentor for a young lady, and what that really meant was I attended coding classes with her in the conference room that we repurposed to be a classroom. I had to fail right beside her, I hadn’t coded in years and the language I used in college was obsolete anyway. I can’t tell you what we accomplished but I remember the experience and the feeling of camaraderie in the room as everyone worked hard to improve.
It is not unique to be a business person who searches for sports metaphors when trying to add emphasis to a point. I grew up in a family that had many very good athletes and as a result I spent the summers of my youth playing baseball morning, noon and night with my brother and whichever cousin happened to be handy. When I reach for the cliche of a sports analogy to illustrate a point it is almost always about baseball.
But rather than a trite talking point like “swing for the fences” or “you can’t steal second with your foot on first base,” I am gonna to talk to you about my cousin Joey. Or more accurately, Joey’s college, and eventually professional, baseball career.
At the time Joey was playing baseball for Stanford University, 2006-2009, I was an active baseball blogger for a site called Athletics Nation, covering my favorite baseball team the Oakland Athletics for my fellow fans. In 2006, my family was still living in Elk Grove full time and I was staying in San Jose 3 nights a week. I had nothing better to do than go and watch Joey’s games. But as an amateur reporter, I would watch his baseball games, many of which were in the Bay Area as there are several Division 1 baseball programs in the area, with a different lens.
His team was loaded with future professional baseball players and they were good enough to play in the College World Series in 2008. I would get to the game early and watch as the players prepared for the evening. I grew up playing baseball and had seen many outstanding athletes who had the ability to play at a high level but there was something different about the players on my cousins team and I was interested in understanding how people made the most of their gifts.
Batting practice was a real treat, watching these future professional players hit massive Home Runs with aluminum bats but also work on bunting and hitting behind the runner. Joey’s teammates were focused on their craft and they had a process that everyone followed. I saw players get more angry at themselves for a bunt ending up too far away from the foul line than they did for a fly ball running out of juice on the warning track. It was clear that the process of preparing was something they all took as seriously as they did each at bat they took in the game.
Joey eventually was drafted by the New York Mets and spent a few seasons in their minor league chain before realizing he didn’t like long bus rides and was ready to start a life with the love of his life. He retired from baseball and we all celebrated his wedding in Salem, Oregon not long after.
Many of the young men I watched play at such a high level were there but one of the players, Michael Taylor, had recently been traded to the Athletics. Not long before, Joey had facilitated an interview for me and it occurred to me that Michael was really one of the few that had played on those talented teams to make it to the Major Leagues. Thinking back on those batting practice sessions I would watch, I realized how hard it is to get to the pinnacle of any profession, and I wondered what was different about Michael.
In my interview with him, I got a glimpse and I believe it really aligns well with the idea that experience is more important than achievement.
JA: You stole A LOT of bases for a big guy last year and were successful 80% of the time. Do you feel like you could one day be a 30/30 guy? Is that a kind of goal you set for yourself or do you focus more on process goals like taking 1,000 swings a day?
MT: Well, honestly my goals are more focused on the process and preparation it takes to have success day in and day out in this game. I try not to set numbers goals because I don't want to sell myself short. What if I get to 30/30 with two weeks left in the season? I do not want to take a mental day off because I reached some preset goal; and vice versa, if I am going to fall short of an arbitrary number I do not want to become discouraged.
When I heard this answer, the profundity didn’t immediately register. I was really just trying to understand his process and in awe looking at past statistics. I was amazed by his accomplishment. In hindsight, I see this as Michael outlining the value of experience and really, disregarding achievement based goals in favor of focusing on building experience.
In summary, achievement is nice. Trophies are great. Having money to spend on things and stuff is pleasurable. But the way to get those things is not to focus on them as much as it is to build yourself a map and focus on building the skills that are required to get there. The way you build the skills it takes to get there is to fail at things you don’t know how to do until you know how to do them and then find something new to be terrible at.
Silicon Valley isn’t very forgiving of people who fake it til they make it, so to speak. The only way to not fake it is to roll up your sleeves, dig in to the work and get it horribly wrong. You have to learn to love to celebrate failure much more than you love to hoist trophies. You have to be focused on building a career based on experience more than making a great looking, achievement filled resume if you want to build something that is worthy of Silicon Valley.