About Passion, II

People who love what they do—for work or pleasure—are a joy to be around. Sure, if you're a landlubber with no interest in boats and you have to spend hours on end with someone who constantly talks about boating, eventually you'd want to run screaming from the room. But the hit you get from a conversation with someone who's totally jazzed is pretty darned wonderful.

One of the things I love about my job is how passionate the people I work with are, from the people at the highest levels of the company to the production editors I argue about commas with, the designers who fuss if something is one point (that's 1/72nd of an inch) out of alignment on a layout, and the sys admins who take care of problems of all sizes and all urgencies, every day.

The people I work with care. They care about punctuation and customer service and sales figures and marketing copy and book bindings and the food we serve at conferences and the new products we develop. I'd wager that there's nothing we do that someone in the company isn't passionate about, one way or another—someone who sees it as their mission to ensure that we do that piece of our business properly and well. (In fact, some of us are rather relentless about it, although I'd like to think that I've mellowed a bit over the years.)

Without that level of engagement, working at O'Reilly would be like working the assembly line at a cannery, all of us passively waiting for the conveyor belt to bring us the next item and the next and the one after that, rarely looking up to see what's coming toward us and never trying to get further upstream, where the decisions are made.

Instead, even after 30 years, the company still feels like a startup in many ways. From my perspective, it's all about passion. And that's what keeps me here.

Clarity

I have an on-again, off-again relationship with clarity: I aim for it in most things, but there are times when too much clarity makes me feel claustrophobic, as it forces me to eliminate options that I am not quite ready to discard.

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Many years ago, O’Reilly Media founder and CEO Tim O’Reilly wrote a memo to the company’s managers about our role. One of things he wanted was for managers to “tolerate ambiguity, resolve ambiguity, and create ambiguity.” We all laughed when we read it, but in many ways it has been a key element in the continued success of the company. As the company has matured, we’ve managed to strike a manageable balance between encouraging a certain amount of ambiguity even as we continually strive for something that passes for clarity. It is not always easy to make the necessary choices.

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There are people who would like to eradicate ambiguity entirely; they want to make a list, nail things down, get closure and be done with it. That’s a good way to approach cleaning one’s house: finally decide what to do with that old side table of Aunt Tillie’s that you’ve been tripping over in the basement for years. But it’s not a viable approach for the world that lies beyond your direct control, i.e., most of life.

I have a colleague at O’Reilly who is quite determined in her quest to resolve ambiguity, whether it’s getting clear about roles, goals, or marketing messages. But the thing that makes her unusual—and quite effective—is that her driving desire for clarity doesn’t override her willingness and ability to change course quickly when the situation changes. She doesn’t hang onto what was and try to force the situation back into that state; she lets go and begins from where things are now. And that makes her an excellent problem-solver, because she is always solving the problem as it is now, not as it was a week ago, a day ago, or, far too often, just a few hours ago.

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Ambiguity is a deal-breaker for most horses—they either look to their rider for leadership or they figure they’re on their own. To them, clarity is leadership. It lets them know what’s expected and what’s permissible in any given situation, and makes them feel safe. If you watch horses interact with each other out in the paddock, you see that they have very distinct ways of establishing hierarchies and setting boundaries. This is what “horse whisperers” have learned, and it is how they work what seems to be magic.

I try to be as clear and consistent as I can with Wolfie. Any indecision on my part leads to indecision (and an open door for unwanted behavior) on his. Sometimes it's hard to do. One has to let go of self-doubt and strive for consistency. I can't think: "I must be doing something wrong, since he's not doing what I am asking him to do." The truth is that if I always use the same cues and have the same expectations of him, every time, eventually we'll come to understand each other. Or at least he'll come to understand me.