You're not one of the boys until you're one of the boys
That was said by my college football coach at WPI, Ed Zaloom, on my first day of football camp — and it really stands up there as some of the best advice I’ve ever received.
He was speaking to the entire freshman football class in the stands overlooking the field. Coach Zaloom — aka Zoomer — was trying to tell us that although we were members of the team from day one, we were not one of the boys. It was my first day. I could not bust anyone’s chops. I could not mouth off to seniors. I should not expect to be in on any inside jokes. As of the first minute of the first practice I was a member of the WPI football team, but I was not one of the boys.
Now, anyone from that team will probably be chuckling right now. At the time I didn’t exactly get it. I was the antithesis of this sentiment. Not only was I on the football team, I had been lifting there all summer. With seniors!. I had a leg up. I already had a nickname. I was one of the boys.
Wrong. The coach made us part of the team, but I was not one of the boys. Only the team could make me one of the boys. And within a couple days they let me know it — but that’s for another post.
Becoming ‘one of the boys’ takes some time. But starting out as not one of the boys did not in any way take away from how I was expected to perform and contribute on the team, and I’ve been really amazed at how valuable this lesson has been in other areas of life — especially working in startups.
It’s easy to get cozy real fast in a startup. Everyone is nice and cool and making jokes and fooling around. People might stroll in at 10am, take off at 4:30pm, drop F-bombs all over the place, run out for an hour at lunch to run a couple errands, and so on. It’s a culture that on the outside can appear quite lackadaisical compared to most corporate environments. So if you’re new to it, you might walk in and think “HOLY SHIT! This rocks!” But what you don’t immediately see is that those people are up at 1am Sunday nights, at the office until 9pm on random Wednesdays, pulling all-nighters to hit deadlines, getting up at 4am to make sure some automated thing is doing its job properly, pulling out the iPhone on dates to make sure the system is up and running, getting a bit anxious when they walk into a movie theater because they don’t have cell service in case something goes wrong, and on some nights even losing sleep over the stress of of the job. The list of stuff like this is so long that as I write it I realize it deserves it’s own post.
Being in a startup is hard fucking work. Don’t forget that when you’re new to the game. Don’t get enamored with being cool, fitting it, making jokes. Go to work. Do your job. Kick ass. Do whatever is asked of you to the best of your ability. And slowly, over time, you’ll become one of the boys.
"You're allowed to be frustrated"
A few days ago, Punchbowl launched Profiles. It’s something that has been in the spec pipe for a while, and we finally had the cycles to do it. I built the entire thing over the course of about a week, and on the day of the deploy I was pissed.
A Most startups is are defined as a group of people doing something they have never done before. Can’t really escape that. It’s not to say that the people aren’t qualified, but a startup by it’s very nature is something new. If you’re at a startup doing the exact same thing you did in your last job, you’re doing it wrong (or you’re doing it really well :) ). But the fact of the matter is that most people in early stage startups don’t know what they’re doing. Mistakes are made, inefficiencies abound, and sometimes things just go wrong. Go read this if you don’t believe me.
I am very happy to say that this kind of stuff doesn’t happen too often at Punchbowl. Maybe I’m naive, but I really feel like there is a pretty good system in place. Everyone kinda just knows their role, and we’ve reached a nice groove over the past 6 months.
But that doesn’t mean that mistakes aren’t made. Everyone makes mistakes. So when deploy day comes, and you go check your shiny new feature in IE6, and it looks like shit, and you realize the only way to make it look like not shit is to re-implement the entire fucking thing, you are going to get frustrated. Frustrated with yourself. Frustrated with your coworkers. You might even flip off a stranger on Route 30 over by Shoppers World when you go grab a coffee that afternoon… not that I’ve ever done that….
But it’s going to happen. And it did happen. That exact scenario. So I’m pissed. It’s 11am. I just realized I have to redo this thing that looks PERFECT in all other browsers, but is completely not functional in IE6 and I’m looking for people to blame. Throughout all my bitching to Blake (@skinandbones — my boss), I know exactly what I’m doing. I know that I’m just bitching. So I’m trying to temper things and qualify my statements and be passive aggressive because the entire time I just want to yell “WHY THE FUCK WAS I ASKED TO DO THIS THIS WAY?!”.
And Blake knows this, because Blake knows me. So when I finally stop speaking. He pauses for a second. Looks at me. And says:
“You’re allowed to be frustrated, man.”
That stopped me dead in my tracks. You are allowed to be frustrated.
You are allowed to be frustrated.
Don’t ever think for a moment that you’re a bad person for being frustrated. The only time you should get down on yourself is if you let your frustration get the best of you. That doesn’t mean hide your frustration. It just means dont be a dick about it. The nature of business is competition, and competition requires tension. Tension will inexorably lead to frustration at times.
I think this is one of the best lessons I’ve got so far at Punchbowl (and one of the reasons I love working there so much): the right to be frustrated. If you are not allowed to be frustrated at your current job, get the hell out of there. Workplaces, especially high stress workplaces like venture capital backed startups, need to allow their employees to be frustrated. To blow off steam. To voice legitimate concern.
And then, once the feature has been released or the sale has closed, or the contact has been signed, and the dust has settled, take a step back and analyze why the frustration was there in the first place. Have a chat a couple days later about it. You might not get a definitive answer on how to prevent it in the future, but you’ll get somewhere. You’ll make progress. And along the way you’ll also be fostering an environment where it is ok to be frustrated, and that’s key.
