ginsudo

Last month, I wrote about why Second Life failed so I didn’t have to write about why Second Life failed. I mean, that post wasn’t about reasons for failure, it was about the fact of failure. My thought was that there are many people who simply assume Second Life failed, and they’re wrong, and there are many who will passionately argue that Second Life has succeeded … and they’re wrong too. Failure can only be judged by the ones who were trying to succeed.

It would be safer for me to say that failure is a matter of perspective, for surely failure passes through the same lens as beauty in the eye of the beholder. I do understand that many SL Residents were on their own journeys, and so of course they are their own best judges of the success of those journeys. But it would be an artful evasion to claim that any of those journeys, or even all of them together, constitute the sum total equation for the success of Second Life. We were trying to do something more – or at least, something else – and we failed. (Of course, I’m talking about the team and the company that I knew, years ago. The team there today is on their own journey, which I know next to nothing about.)

So if I’m willing to be this myopic and insular about judging failure, you can bet I’d be just as parochial in reviewing the reasons. I’ve seen and heard a lot of speculation that I don’t agree with: poor strategy, worse execution; lack of focus, misplaced focus; poor technology, doomed architecture; dumb marketing, uncontrollable PR; niche market, bizarre customers; crazy culture, undisciplined development; bad hiring, bad management; feckless board, dominating board, ignorant board. I’ve heard it all, and while there may be a grain of something like truth here and there, none of these things holds real explanatory power as a reason for why Second Life failed.

We failed as people. We failed as a team. Our failure was intensely personal, particular to each person involved, and ruinous to the overall team.

I’m going to switch now from “we” to “I” but I want to be really clear about why. We Lindens were all in it together, and there is a broad sense in which all credit and blame goes to all of us … but not in this post. Here, I’m talking about maybe half a dozen people, and so it would be too much of a personal attack for me to try to describe the failures of anyone other than myself. I’m willing to attack myself in this forum, but not my former colleagues, all of whom I still respect and a few of whom I love like my own family. But I want you to remember the “we” because otherwise the rest of this post is going to seem incredibly egocentric: there’s a certain kind of self-blame that’s really self-aggrandizement, and though I regard my own failures as critical, even the most deluded version of the story couldn’t claim it was all about me.

So. I failed as a person. I failed the team. I was responsible for many elements of our strategy, execution, culture and management, and those decisions aren’t the ones I regret. What I regret, to the extent that I’m capable of regretting such a rich learning experience for me, is giving up. I don’t mean at the end, when I was tired and disillusioned and looking around at a company I didn’t recognize and a future I didn’t want to live. A lot earlier than that, I gave up on people that we needed, people who were flawed and fragile but necessary. I let people fail, I let people go, I let people hide in their illusions and fears, I let them give up because I’d already given up.

The irony was, when I joined the company, I was supposed to be an experienced hand that would bring some sanity to a crazy world. But I indulged my own worst instincts - throughout the craziest times, when I could’ve done the most good, I just brought more crazy. I was having fun, but I chose my own twisted growth over a higher goal, and at times I was just plain mean or selfish or drunk. I really wasn’t ready for the opportunity that Linden Lab presented to me. I really wasn’t the guy I should’ve been when I got there; I didn’t know what I needed to know until I left.

Too many of the key leaders at the Lab were working through similarly damaging personal limitations. You might ask whether this really points to a failure in culture or hiring or leadership, and that would be a fair question. It’s true that Linden had a way of hiring certain kinds of people and forcing them to confront their own deepest flaws – but I think that’s beautiful, a feature not a bug. What we needed was one or more or all of us to conquer our flaws, to enable the entire team to rise above the limitations of each of us. But none of us defeated our own demons, and so all of us perished.

I’ve been gone from Linden Lab for over two and a half years, and still my failure haunts me. The last day of the year is always a good moment to come to terms with the passage of time, and this New Year’s Eve I’ve decided I should finally accept the fact that I’m never going to let it go. I’ll try to reach peace through the zen realization that peace is unattainable.

The death of Steve Jobs raises and answers the question that haunts the psyches of ambitious entrepreneurs everywhere: “Was it worth it?”

Praise follows death like the glowing debris that trails a comet, and the writing in the sky says that Jobs was the greatest CEO ever. A few muted voices remember that he was famously harsh to work with, but this is universally regarded as an entirely justified mania for perfection. Considering his accomplishments, it seems almost irrelevant that he denied the obligations of paternity for one child, and consciously decided that his children should know him through biography rather than time spent with him, even – or especially – in the final stretch towards death, when the remaining time must be remorselessly allotted like oxygen in a sealed room.

This isn’t criticism of a great man. It’s a reminder that many of us would willingly make the same choices, were such greatness within our reach.

We say it’s not so, and try to believe it. We encourage each other to remember family, remember health, remember that a life of striving includes the quest to achieve a full and humane life through our work. But the life of Jobs is the story of his jobs, of his one true job: making a dent in the universe through the creation of products that become a part of our lives. For his success in that, we forgive and excuse his personality defects. We cannot blame a man for failing to uphold principles that we would throw aside ourselves if only we could be assured that the universe was malleable to our touch.

Saying that “you are not your job“ is a comfort; it alleviates the cognitive dissonance between your self-image and the productive economic output you contribute to the world. The lessons of Steve Jobs deny that comfort; his strongest exhortations insist that you are all about the things you make for the world – not for yourself, not for your hobbies or leisure, not even for your family and certainly not your friends if you have any. You have to do great work, never settle, remember that each day could be your last, don’t waste time living someone else’s life.

There is no obligation to community, family or friendship in these words – though strangely, there is an overwhelming commitment to society in the desire to dent the universe, for this is not a universe of cold cosmological phenomena, it’s a universe of people, and his ambition is all about changing how people live. For Jobs, if this ambition involved sacrifices of a more universal personal nature, there is no question that it was worth it. It was worth it for him, and his efforts were certainly worth it for us.

It’s touching to see the determination with which Jobs’ sayings are repeated in the wake of his death. But the message of his most appealing words isn’t quite the message of his life. He told us to follow our hearts, to trust our intuitions, to ask ourselves if our plan for this day is how we’d want to spend our last. But those are not goals, they are only beautiful means to an uncompromising end. The goal of Jobs was to be insanely great in a world-changing way. That’s the hard part of the message to understand. All of us can hope to understand what is in our own hearts, and can hope to have the courage to follow it. Almost no one alive has a realistic ambition to change the world – what many of us think of as world changing is merely interesting, hopefully entertaining, and possibly enriching.

You’re not a writer if you’re not writing something today about that day 10 years ago …

My wife was screaming about something on TV, but I couldn’t get out of bed. My head was heavy with flu, the sounds couldn’t penetrate the haze of mucus and sick. We had moved to San Francisco from New York two and a half years ago. I still missed The City, still missed the feeling of living in the giant beating heart of the world, a heart that pounded with the rhythm of my own. I grew up in a Jersey suburb 45 minutes from the Holland Tunnel. One of the few reliable moments of magic in my youth was the anticipation of a trip to NYC, which peaked the moment the towers came into view around a bend in the turnpike. The towers were monumental, elemental, permanent – I could no more imagine the city without them than the sky without the sun.

But a plane had just crashed into one of them. Surely an accident, I’ll read about it tomorrow when I’m over this flu. My wife is still yelling, and I bury my head deeper into the pillow and ignore the looming reality. And then the second plane into the second tower. Now even my virus-addled mind has enough strength to put together the picture, or maybe, isn’t strong enough to construct an alternate interpretation. It’s not an accident. The towers are coming down, the world is ending. I finally roll out of bed with just enough momentum to come to rest in front of the TV, where I sit slackjawed for the next two days, watching the grim images pile up, the towers falling, bodies falling, people running, debris and dust and ineffable dismay, the pictures and posters of the lost.

A call from the office asks when I’m coming in, gentle but insistent. I don’t know, it doesn’t matter, I’d already decided I couldn’t do this work anymore, before that day. And now, these people, they couldn’t understand, with their happy California sunshine and bleeding optimism. They couldn’t understand what it meant to turn a corner of anticipation and be greeted only by empty sky. I wanted nothing of them. I wanted to go back, back home, back East. Now that trip could seem like a run to a ravaged home rather than a run from a broken promise.

But that was a problem; the excuse was too easy and at the same time, insurmountable. I could tell myself that I was going home to help, but no one could look at that smouldering hole in the earth and believe in selfish lies. I wasn’t running to help, I was running away, away from expectations, dissatisfactions, disappointments. The loss of September 11 deserved better than to serve as easy explanation.

Four months later, I had quit the firm but hadn’t left the Bay Area. My life had become unmoored from a certain stable career path, into a meandering decade of exploration and discovery, of triumph and loss and the subtle closeness of the two, of searching for monuments to fill the hole in the sky.

A couple of months ago, a good friend was talking to me about the differences between most people and “entrepreneurs like us.” I had to recoil at the phrase. He’s a real entrepreneur – founded a couple of successful companies, working on a third, constantly driving and innovating and dreaming and creating. At my best I never reached his heights. I’d been a “startup guy” for a dozen years, and proudly wore that badge – as a startup lawyer learning business basics, boardroom battles, and founder secrets; as a venture capitalist investing across sectors and geographies; as a startup manager in multiple different roles and companies. When I finally founded my own company, I felt I could finally accept the label entrepreneur, and it felt great. But it didn’t last very long. I’d accepted a job at a large company not too long before that conversation, so “entrepreneurs like us” couldn’t include me anymore.

I’m not too flexible about the term, unlike those who believe in four types of entrepreneurs. I think an entrepreneur makes a for-profit business that didn’t exist before, without the benefit of existing infrastructure. That rules out what some call social entrepreneurship, because working for nonprofit good is too different than pursuit of viable commercial enterprise. And it rules out corporate entrepreneurship, because starting a new division or business line for an existing company is very different from starting a company from a cocktail napkin.

I said different – I didn’t say harder or more admirable. The numbers probably say that social and corporate efforts are harder, as there seem to be more new companies than there are new social efforts or successful businesses started within large companies.

I’ll differentiate some more: Although I’d include both the fruit stand owner and the tech company titan within my view of entrepreneurs, I don’t think they’re the same in most ways, even at their respective starts. Fruit stands aim for some daily living, selling a well-understood product, within a social infrastructure that understands and supports the concept of buying and eating fruit. The most extreme tech founder dreams of all the money imaginable, with a product that initially seems bizarre, with no apparent revenue model, distribution channel, or plausible customer interest. Although these two kinds of people have something in common, they have a lot more differences. So “entrepreneur” isn’t a binary label – it’s possible for one entrepreneur to be more entrepreneurial than another. Labels are most useful when we use them to distinguish and measure concepts. I don’t like seeing a meaningful word diluted to appease egos or ease conversation.

Because the company I work for now is fairly well known, I should doubly-triply-quadruply emphasize that this is all my opinion, and moreover it’s my opinion about me. I can believe that for many entrepreneurs, coming to Google doesn’t mean that your days as an entrepreneur are over – those entrepreneurs are more entrepreneurial than I ever was, which I’ve admitted isn’t a high bar.

And although I’m still a startup guy at heart, I can believe that Google can in important ways return to its startup roots, even though I’m naturally inclined to disbelieve that a large company can have the “energy, pace and soul of a startup.” But I’d say that you have to measure the energy and pace in the context of the scale of the ambition. People who think that Google is slow or that the competition is anything other than the unknown future are probably underestimating the enormous opportunity remaining in the information economy.

Ah, but that last bit, the “soul” of a startup … what does that even mean? That’s tricky, and probably the topic of another post.

Ah, it’s that time of year, when we make promises to ourselves that we won’t keep.  For virtually every new year since the mid ’90s, I’ve made at least one of the following three resolutions: (1) get a new job, (2) get more exercise, (3) write a book.  Totals over the last fifteen years:  9 jobs, 2 years in which I exercised more than the prior year, 1 book (unpublished).

To be fair, 7 out of the 9 jobs were really a single job to me:  learning how to be an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley.  I’ve learned some good lessons, and although I didn’t achieve the outcomes I aimed for, I’m not sad about the experiences of the last dozen years.  How can I be sad?  After all, everything I’ve learned only gives me fodder for another book . . .

I’m going to title this book The Age of Illusions.  If I can do this properly, I’ll be working on three intertwining themes:

Illusions of youth.  In your 20s and 30s, you’re at the peak of your powers, or at least in the prime of your unrestrained ambitions.  You’re out of childhood, with the energy of youth and none of the detritus of age. Maybe I’m taking turning 40 too seriously, but I mean this as a celebration, not as resignation:  If you haven’t crashed into a wall by the time you’re 40, you’re doing it wrong.  If you haven’t learned your limitations the hard way, you wasted the resilience of youth.

Illusions of enterprise.  My core work experience of the last decade was at a startup that could be considered the most successful failure of the Internet age.  Changing the world is hard, and most of the people who say they’re doing it aren’t even really trying.  At Linden Lab, we weren’t just trying to change the world, we were trying to recreate it in a better image.  We didn’t get where we wanted to be.  Some say that failure is a badge of honor, but I can only agree with that sentiment where the goal was so great that even trying is reasonably regarded as lunacy.

Illusions of empire.  The first decade of this millenium was a rollicking cascade of unreal events.  The background of all of our tales of this decade may be the end of the American empire.  It’s a story too large for me to tell with my limited skills, but somehow I have to acknowledge that I’m fingerpainting on the canvas of epochal history.

Folks, don’t hold your breath:  I estimate that it’ll take me almost six years to write this book.  I think I’ll only average around a page per week, and I’m aiming for at least 300 pages.  Ah well – it’s nice to have a slot filled for those annual resolutions all the way through 2016.

Happy New Year!

The final lesson in the four-for-forty series is the hoariest, hippyest, horriblest of them all.  ”Love yourself” is the basic rule of all personal development, so there’s no shortage of Internet advice on how to love yourself.  To me, the advice has always come across as self-indulgent babble that may be good for crackhead pop and comic treatment, but it’s succored a generation of wimps who can’t hold down a job.

The first hundred times or so I heard “You gotta love yourself,” I thought:  ”No I don’t.  You don’t tell me what I gotta do.”  Then I began to ask “Why?” and I finally heard a reason that made some sense to me.

Loving yourself requires accepting your faults, and accepting your faults gives you more options for how to react in any situation. That’s a quantifiable rationale, testable both in theory and in practice – and as a bonus the measurement also gives guidance on whether you’ve taken self-love too far.  Here’s a simplified example:

Let’s say you receive a bad outcome that is at least partially based on something you did.  Here is a count of your options for how to react -

• Self-hate: Since you will blame yourself to the exclusion of other factors, you only have two choices: (1) rigorously apply yourself to skills improvement, even though it’s likely that no amount of improvement would have given a different result, or (2) drink enough to obliterate your self-hating identity.
• Self-love, of the over-indulgent kind: Certainly the outcome wasn’t your fault, so your choices are (1) smugly wait for the next chance for the world the properly join you in your love of you, or (1) ignore any possible evidence that your actions contributed to failure.  Yes, those are numbered the same because they are the same.
• Goldilocks self-love, the kind where you love yourself just right: You can be clear-eyed about what really happened.  You can apply yourself to change, you can recognize the factors that were out of your control, you can put the outcome out of your mind in good humor and good health.  You can do all of these things and you probably will.

Basically, loving yourself just right gives you all of the options of the other two conditions, with the additional optionality that comes from not being ideologically compelled to react in a way that is harmful or indulgent.  You gotta love yourself just right, because the alternatives are suboptimal.  Sure, that’s a particularly dry and uninspiring way to put it, but what can I tell ya, I love this way because it’s mine.

I’m not against self-affirmation on principle.  Many people benefit from empowering messages that remind them of their intrinsic worth.  However, that isn’t the sort of bromide that works with my particular chemistry. I want to understand what to do, not how to feel.  Even though I might enjoy hearing that I’m good enough, smart enough, and doggone it, people like me, that news doesn’t give me tactical guidance on how to live my life.

So when I tell you that “We are all authors of our own lives” – I don’t mean to trumpet the primacy of your own role in shaping your destiny, even though that’s a useful bit of affirmation.  I mean for you to think about the process of authorship, the task of writing a story from both facts and fantasy over many years.

Whether you realize it or not, you carry around a story in your head about who you are.  You draft, write and rewrite your internal explanation of the kind of person you are, the character you have, the things you will and will not do.  This work of self-conception is the greatest novel ever written, or at least it should be for you.

Early on, very little of your story is constrained by actual events, since you’re too young to have been in all of the situations you anticipate that you’ll experience.  You have the freedom of your imagination, and you write your story based on what you’ve seen in your family, friends and others in life and fiction.  You’ll imagine, for example, that you’re just like your dad, or not at all like your mom, or a bit like Al Pacino in Scarface, or a lot like Lindsey Lohan on Twitter.  Then as you grow older, your story becomes a lot more personalized to you, based more on your experiences and less on your aspirations.

You have years, maybe decades, to write your beautiful story of who you are, and then something happens. It may be one traumatic event, or a series of little events that are only clearly related in retrospect – but it’s something that happens that doesn’t fit into the story you’ve been spending your whole life on to that point. You thought you were a good guy, but then you did something that was undeniably bad.  You thought you were an honest woman, but you then you’re confronted with your repeated pattern of little lies.

You race back to your story, flipping madly through the pages of the Book of You.  Who is this person in this story?  Who is this stranger living this life, holding this tattered book in shaky hands?  Can these possibly be the same person?  Faced with this disconnect between your life’s work as an author, and the actual facts of your life, you have two choices:  You can rewrite your story to fit the facts, or you can rewrite the facts to fit your story.

Perhaps this is the point where I’m supposed to say that the facts are sacrosanct, and your job as an author is to fit the story to the facts.  But no:  I said you were an author, I didn’t say you were a journalist, and I can’t presume to tell you what kind of story you’re writing. You have to make the choice that satisfies your art as the author of your own life.

Maybe you’ll just choose straightforward reporting, because you do want to match the story exactly to the facts.  Or you might be like Mark Twain, writing fiction truer than fact; or Jack Kerouac, making facts into truthful fiction.  I wouldn’t advise going full-on into fantasy, with complete disregard for any events from reality.  Not because it’s wrong, but because all of the best fantasies are rooted in something real.  As an author, you’re an artist, and art without truth is trivial, and you don’t want your life to be trivial.

Finally, be aware that we are all engaged in these acts of authorship.  You can get very far in understanding other people if you think about the story they’ve written in their own heads, and observe what they do with facts that don’t match the story.

There are many simple ways of saying things pretty similar to what I’m saying here, such as:

• To each his own.
• One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
• It’s apples and oranges.
• It’s all good.

But I don’t like these easy sayings, because it’s not all good – what I’m trying to get across is hard to understand and hard to live, and has little relation to the soft-headed permissiveness implied in those easy clichés.

This happens to be the only life lesson that I actually learned in a classroom as the direct subject of a lecture, and this lecture justified a year of college tuition all on its own.  ”Incommensurability” is a simple enough concept – it just means that there are things that do not share a common standard of measurement, like the proverbial apples and oranges.

Apples aren’t oranges, could anything be simpler?  But it struck me as a thunderbolt to understand how this affects the search for the good life.  I’d always thought that the task of living a good life was largely about understanding the difference between good and bad.  Maybe I’ve got a moral compass that doesn’t have a reliable fix on true north, but that difference hasn’t always been obvious to me.

As life goes on, it has become easier to tell the difference between good and bad – or rather, it’s become harder to delude myself into believing that that there isn’t a difference or that I can’t see it.  Now I can see that choosing between good and bad was simply the entry-level exam for the good life.  The hard task of living a good life is to choose among things that are good that can’t be compared with one another.

Choosing among incommensurable goods is sad because you are by definition choosing not to do things that are good.  You know that the choices you make will sacrifice things that you would also like to have.  The good things you choose may be vastly outnumbered by the good things that you gave up.  And yet, your choices are a triumph that isn’t second-best to any other set of choices.

One of the great things about understanding this is that you won’t be limited, as many people are, to only having friends who have generally made the same moral choices that you have.  You’ll be able to see that others chose among the same set of incommensurable goods that you did, and even if they made different choices, they are still people who share a common sense of good with you.

Just to make sure that this isn’t interpreted with a mushy morality that I actually despise:  This doesn’t mean that everything and everyone is all good, it doesn’t mean that any set of choices is as good as any other, it doesn’t mean that you can be friends with anyone, it doesn’t mean that there’s no difference between good and bad.  It just means that many goods are incommensurable, and you should think carefully about what that means as you make your choices for a good life.

Being smart is a good thing, as any smart person will tell you more times than you care to hear.  And being really smart is like some kind of weird superpower.  If you’ve ever been at the head of your class, or the smartest person in the room, or even just the subject matter expert in conversation with the uninitiated, you know what it feels like to not only have every answer but anticipate every question – it almost seems like being able to bend space, time and reality to your will.

Now, maybe you’ve never had that superpower smartness – that’s also a good thing.  Because that means you may have had a chance to observe really smart people at the height of their powers, glorying in their intelligence and in love with their knowledge of the world.  And you may have achieved a striking insight that is beyond the understanding of many smart people, a special insight that seems to routinely escape the most massive intellect.  This insight is painfully obvious to everyone else:  Smart people suck.

Intelligence is a largely genetic trait that is also substantially influenced by environment and circumstance.  In this way, it’s a lot like height.  So before we talk more about smart people, let’s talk about tall people for a bit.  Tall people get some pretty nice prizes from winning the genetic lottery.  Tall people make more money and find more attractive mates.  Height provides some advantage in many sports, and is a virtual requirement for success in some.  So being tall is overall a good thing.

And here’s the point:  Tall people know they’re lucky.  They know that they have an advantage in life that others don’t have, and they know that they did very little to secure this advantage.  They also know that to maximize their advantage, they have to add their own efforts – if they want to make the team, get the job, get the girl or guy – they have to eat right, work out, study hard, take care of their skin, hair and personality.

Not so with smart people.  Even though smart people are generally aware of the genetic, environmental and circumstantial contributions to their intelligence, they rarely think of these as luck.  Instead, smart people tend to think they’re better than other people because they’re smart, not because they’re lucky.  And smart people often think that the world owes them something merely for being smart, as opposed to being diligent, sincere or personable.  Smart people think that being smart should be enough, where tall people know that being tall is just a start.

The problem with intelligence is that it does, to some extent, make up for the absence of other admirable qualities.  Smart people can get the same or better results as others even when they work less, care less and cooperate less.  Intelligence is a crutch. And a smart person who leans on that crutch to the detriment of other important traits can become a monstrously malformed person.  Intelligence is used worst when it’s used as a crutch to escape the hard work of being human.

I’m four days from my fortieth birthday, and thinking hard about what I’ve learned over the past four decades.  Over the next four days, I’m going to write about the four lessons that were hardest for me to learn – these are not necessarily the most important, or the most valuable, or the most insightful.  They were just goddamn hard to learn, and in fact I’m still struggling to get them right.

People who give advice usually believe that some particular experience has given them an authority that others might want to regard seriously.  That isn’t the case with me:  although I’ve had many instructive experiences, I don’t think my historical record is what makes me qualified to give advice, and I don’t think everyone should take my advice seriously.  Instead, what makes me qualified to give advice is that I am spectacularly bad at taking it.

I’ve had the great good fortune of having many wise people tell me many wise things, and my usual practice is to squander that good fortune by refusing to take even the best advice at face value.  Instead, I question, I doubt, I criticize, I experiment, I delve down dark alleyways of impulse and instinct – and in the end I painfully find that I should have listened to the wisdom of my betters.

The problem with wise advice is that you have to have wisdom to appreciate it beforehand.  And if you had the requisite wisdom in the first place, you wouldn’t need the advice so badly.  I never understand good advice until I’ve had the opportunity to fail to follow it.  Only by living the bad consequences first-hand can I understand the underpinning that upholds solid wisdom.

Let’s hope that my misfortune is your bounty in these next four posts.

1. Intelligence is a crutch.
2. Many goods are incommensurable.
3. We are all authors of our own lives.
4. You gotta love yourself.