Mark Freedman’s Blog

Archive for the ‘Career’ Category

The most important question is always why. Why do you think that is?

Picture a familiar scenario. Your young child asks one day…

"Why did you marry Mommy?"

"Because we love each other."

"But, why?"

"Because we grew to care for each other."

"Why?"

"We were attracted to each other…"

"Why?"

"…so we started to spend time together."

"But why not somebody else?"

"Because we felt that we were meant for each other."

"Why did you think that?"

"Because."

"Why?"

It may be annoying, but isn’t that how we always learned as kids? Sure, as kids we knew quickly that it bugged adults, but we kept asking for two reasons. 1) It got a rise out of grownups, and 2) we really did learn a lot by asking.

When Did Why Become Taboo?

Why did we stop? Did we start to feel uncomfortable asking the why question? Maybe we felt as though it intruded on the askee. As we matured, did we start to feel it was rude?

In this information age, we are constantly bombarded with more information in a week than our ancestors in their entire lives. We’re drowning in facts and figures, and overwhelmed with the available knowledge. But at the same time, it takes us too long to find the answers we’re looking for. Why is that? Are we not asking the right questions, or are we avoiding the why questions?

Sometimes we’re afraid to answer the why questions, because it may expose our lack of understanding. Once you can ask why , you’re on the path to learning.

"Why would I use a GridView instead of a Repeater?"

Doesn’t it feel safer to just lookup details about the GridView control and the Repeater control and just compare them ourselves? Don’t want to seem stupid for asking why we’d use one over the other, right?

Too Many What Questions

Too many books and tutorials start out with the "do this, then do that" without explaining why. "Why did you take this approach?"

The question that triggers the most thinking is the why question. Whys will make you wiser.

Inquiring Minds Want to Know

If someone fails at something, they ask themselves all kinds of questions. "What did I do? How do I make this different next time?" But the question they’ll get the most out of is, "Why did I choose to do it that way? Why should I do it differently next time?" By asking the why , you learn a lot about the motivating factors that led towards the path of failure to begin with, so you can avoid that same path next time. Maybe your motivations were wrong. Maybe your decisions were based on faulty or incomplete information. Asking what will only lead to identifying what you did wrong. But without understanding the "why", there is no basis for change. You can easily repeat the same mistakes.

If you’re teaching someone, ask yourself why you’re teaching that way. By questioning yourself, you may discover a better way to explain things.

Arrogance — What Without Why

Just stating what to do can come off as arrogant. It’s like your parents telling you when you were younger, "do it because I said so" — like that actually motivated you to do it. It actually motivated you to do the opposite, just to discover the why , yourself. Why do they want you to do it, and what would happen if you didn’t? Why helps you fill in gaps of knowledge.

If you want someone to do something, explaining the why allows them to feel more apt to do it. In the worst case, at least maybe they could suggest a better option if they at least they know your motivation.

The Power of Why

Why is an extremely powerful question with potentially powerful answers. It teaches us to question everything. We live in a society where we take almost everything for granted. That’s because most people are afraid of asking why . The answers may challenge the way we’ve always approached things our whole lives. But at the same time, it opens up a whole new set of opportunities.

Why is the key to self-discovery. It helps you understand yourself better. At the same time, it’s the scariest question you could ask of yourself. It forces you to look into the mirror.

All questions are powerful, but if you start with why, the what, how, and when just fills in the blanks to resolve the why .

The Problems with Most Tests

This is also why multiple choice tests are a very poor learning tool. It tests memorization. They ask the what, not the why. Essay questions are the why questions. It forces us to think. It forces us to analyze, which leads to true learning. Unfortunately, the system encourages the simple (for teachers) multiple choice tests.

Curiosity

Why do you think the Imponderables series of books are so popular? Because most of the questions start out with why . Why is the most interesting question. Their answers satisfy our curiosity. Be aware that some what questions are just why questions in disguise, so don’t take it literally when I say that why questions are the most important. Related why disguises are "What is the reason for that? What is the meaning of that? How can you do that?" (all of them really mean, "Why did you do that?" ), etc.

When someone is reporting bad news, isn’t the first question that comes to mind the why question? "Why would somebody commit that crime? Why was that person in that neighborhood so late?" Why do they want to start a war?" One of the first things investigators look for is the motive for a crime. While the CSIs look for the what to help prove a crime was committed and by whom, when deciding guilt or the level of punishment, it all comes down to the why. He can be guilty if we could find a motivation he may have had. Once we have a motivation, we can tie him to the crime.

Why Forces You to Think

Why questions should make you pause to consider your answer, and not just shoot from the hip. "Why did that person cut me off?" should cause you to consider that maybe she just got an emergency phone call, or she’s rushing to the hospital, or she’s late for work, instead of just saying, "she’s a jerk." If nothing else, it could allow you to calm down and consider why someone did something rather than what they just did to you.

Why is the most fascinating question. Don’t fear it. It’s a powerful tool. Wield it.

Update
I’ve updated some of the points below, based on some of the comments I received, including points about when to answer questions, the appropriateness of jokes, and following through after the presentation.

Last night, I attended a terrific Speaker Idol event at the NYC .NET Developer’s Group at the Microsoft office in NYC. It’s one of the formats I mentioned in my post about user group meeting ideas.

This was the first user group meeting I’ve attended since I helped start a couple, and it was really nice to focus more on learning rather than coordinating. I had three main motivations for attending this meeting:

1. I wanted to finally attend a meeting rather than run one.
2. I wanted to see how a Speaker Idol event is run, in order to run one ourselves.
3. I wanted to see what it takes as a speaker, so perhaps I could try it myself one day.

I feel like I met these goals. First of all, attending these in NYC always gives me a rush of energy. I love going to the city, because it’s so amazingly alive and vibrant. It gives me the feeling of being able to accomplish anything. And there’s nothing like a warm summer night in the city that never sleeps.

And the second and third goals were accomplished with flying colors. Although I tried to make this a non-working event, I couldn’t help myself. I spent the entire night taking copious notes. And although this was the first Speaker Idol event I’ve ever attended, and it’s the only one I can base my observations on, I think it came off great. I think it can serve as a model for future events, so I put together a list of guidelines from this experience.

Although I haven’t presented at user groups yet, I’ve had similar experiences. My tips are a combination of those, of comments from last night’s judges, and of my observations from this and other user group meetings.

Great job done by Stephen Forte, Andrew Brust, Peter Laudati, Bill Zach, and all the speakers and judges!

Basic Rules

• Approximately five speakers should present (there were six last night).
• Each speaker gets 10 minutes to do their main presentation.
• There are four judges who are recognized leaders in the community, to give this legitimacy.
• During the presentations, the MC (Stephen Forte, for last night’s event) gives a silent two minute warning signal.
• The MC then gives a cut sign, signaling to the speaker that they have 20 seconds to wrap up.
• Once the presentation is complete, two minutes are alloted for a Q & A session with the audience.
• This is followed by a judge commenting session which lasts from three to five total minutes, rotating through the judges who comment on the presentation style (NOT the content). Sort of like American Idol. For each presenter, the comments are started by the next judge in rotation.
• At the end of the competition, bring all the participants to the front for a final round of applause, and announce the winners.
• There are three winners. At last night’s meeting, first place won an Xbox, second and third place won versions of Windows Vista.

Moderator Tips

A Speaker Idol event is similar to a mini code camp, where you’re pretty much going crazy trying to get equipment set up and tested. It was pretty hectic last night, with people downloading codecs, using borrowed laptops, etc. More about this in the Speaker Tips section, below.

• Have someone else handle the food. You’ll be too busy coordinating everything else with the speakers and judges, so try to get a sponsor to handle that. This was what the group did last night, and all it cost was about 10 minutes of a (deathly dull) sponsor presentation at the start of the session. Once you’ve seen one recruiter presentation, you’ve seen them all. They were sincere, but c’mon recruiters — use a little imagination. I don’t care how many clients and consultants you have. Tell me how you could help my career… anyway, that cries for another post…
• You may need to be the liaison between a speaker and the supplier of a solution if their presentation isn’t working on their own equipment. Set aside some time for this. It was a bit of a scramble last night, so I’d recommend requiring the speakers show up an hour before the session for setup and testing. Things will always get a little crazy, and a bit of luck is always involved, but this will increase the chances of success.
• I’m not sure how the presenter order was decided, but there’s a definite advantage that increases with each speaker. You could either have a random drawing, or use the reverse order of who volunteers to participate. Since most of us are so busy these days, I’d prefer a random selection.
• A quick 20 second intro of each speaker would eliminate the need for them to do more than a ten second "hello" at the beginning of their presentation. Most people are uncomfortable introducing themselves anyway, so it may keep them more at ease to start their presentation if they don’t have to concern themselves with that. They can just display a simple info slide at the start, while they introduce the topic.
• Clarify to the audience and speakers that for these types of presentations, especially with a dedicated Q & A period, almost all questions should be deflected for that period. The only time a question should be addressed during the body of the 10 minute presentation is if it’s critical for the direction of the rest of the presentation.

Speaker Tips

Do the three "P"s: Prepare, Practice, and Present. I’m sure I’ve heard that phrase before, but I’m not sure who to credit…

Preparation

• Tailor your presentation for 10 minutes (and I’d shoot for 8 to play it safe ).
• Be aware of whether your presentation is more of a discussion topic or a presentation, and prepare the style and flow based upon that. Make sure you structure the presentation to have a strong start, middle, and end. At the start, do the quick hit to get the audience engaged, and tell them what you’ll be talking about. Next, dive in and talk about it. Finally, quickly summarize with a couple of key conclusive points.
• Go for impact from the start, whether it’s through humor or a one liner that clearly sets the stage for the presentation.
• Slides should be minimal, and only used as cue cards for what you’re going to say.
• Since this is a 10 minute presentation, only pick a couple of key points to elaborate on — one positive and one negative, if possible.
• If your presentation calls for a comparison between two or more options, use visuals to compare. In a 10 minute window, you’ll need to get the point across quickly, so visuals work best for this.
• Use a large font size. The obvious reasons go without saying. But less obviously, it turns code into more of a quick-hitting visual.
• Don’t use blue font on a black background. It’s virtually impossible to read without straining. I’d actually recommend sticking with the default white background. A lot of developers seem to favor a black background these days, but although that may work well on your desktop, it doesn’t translate well to the large screen.
• Use very simple demos. If you can get your point across with a single visual, or just a tiny code snippet, then you can succeed in a 10 minute slot. Review your code several times as you prepare, stripping out everything you can, while still making it relevant. This is a common theme for writing, also.
• Plan the Q & A session, anticipating the types of questions you may get. You may need to balance leaving out a point or two in order to open up the possibility of a couple of good questions, but at the same time, don’t leave out critical info during the main presentation which will only leave your audience in a cliffhanger.

Presentation Style

• Project. You don’t want people straining to hear you, especially when you only have 10 minutes to state your case.
• Face the room. If you don’t face the room, your voice will just bounce off the wall behind you, and that ain’t gonna help with projecting.
• Rotate facing each side of the audience. This will help engage the entire audience.
• Don’t read directly from the slides, or repeat them word for word as if memorized. This becomes very robotic.
• Setting the slide show on automatic timer may be a novel way to keep you focused on your flow and time constraints, but it could be a distraction if you have to keep stepping back to a previous slide.
• If you’re natural at it, inject humor, especially at the start. It helps build rapport. Jabs at users are always good for a laugh in front of tech groups. But if it isn’t your normal modus operandi, don’t force it, because it will be obvious that it’s being used as a gimmick.
• Be aware of your audience. As I mentioned above, jokes about users are ok if your audience is a tech group, but don’t joke about topics and subjects that may offend your audience. If you feel any discomfort when about to tell a joke, trust your instinct and play it safe. Very little can take the air completely out of a presentation than a misguided attempt at humor.
• Show enthusiasm for your subject matter. If you can’t show enthusiasm for 10 minutes, you’re speaking on the wrong topic for you.
• When notified of the two minute warning, or 20 second wrap-up, don’t acknowledge it. It ruins the flow, and disengages your audience.
• Avoid silence, but don’t fill it with hemming and hawing ("um"s). Practice in front of mock audiences (or the mirror) is key. If you need to take a few moments to do something on the screen, at least explain what you’re doing while doing it.
• Don’t trail off or mumble when you speak. This is another variation of hemming and hawing, and people begin thinking they may be missing some important info.
• Be energetic. Watch someone like Stephen Forte when he speaks. He can make accounting sound exciting (sorry accountants ). We live in a fast moving, "MTV" world, and it takes a lot of animation to keep our attention.
• Stand in front of the podium. Stepping behind (for reading notes, etc.) only serves to disengage your audience. This is why you need to do the three Ps. You don’t want to sound as if you’re reading from a book. Show us you know your topic. You want to project credibility.
• Make eye contact with the audience. You can pick a handful of people (one from each side of the audience) to feel like you’re speaking one on one. I’ve heard a related recommendation for writing. Imagine that your audience is one person — a friend of yours.
• When things screw up, self deprecation goes a long way. The audience can relate to screw ups.
• Be honest. If you really don’t know the answer to something, say so. Otherwise, you risk the credibility of your entire presentation.

Presentation Content

• Make your intro of yourself and your company extremely short (if needed at all — see moderator tips, above). You can show a simple intro slide while you introduce the topic, in case people really want to know. Don’t be offended that we came here for the topic, and not necessarily for you.
• Explain why you’re presenting the topic, and what business reasons there are for it.
• Asking for a show of hands initiates interaction with the audience, but don’t leave it at that. Otherwise it just seems gimmicky.
• Use personal insight when discussing examples and experiences. This helps the audience identify with you and the topic you’re trying to convey. Otherwise, you may as well be reading facts out of a textbook.
• Never make comments or state opinions without following up with "why". "Why" is really the most important type of question you can answer. And the specific "what" and "how" always follow the "why".
• Have the demos open and ready BEFORE starting the presentation. Nothing leads to those empty spaces more than waiting for Visual Studio or PowerPoint and associated project files to open. You only have 10 minutes, and time always seems to run away quicker while waiting for these to open.
• Get to code as soon as possible. For a technical audience, getting to the meat is key for keeping us engaged.
• Switch to full screen mode when showing code (SHIFT-ALT-ENTER). Popping panels are a major distraction.
• Display your resources slide during your 20 second wrap-up and into the Q & A. The judges mentioned to leave it up there after speaking to it, but I wouldn’t even recommend speaking to it. It wastes valuable time, and your audience expects to see this at the end anyway, so it’s obvious.
• Use the regions feature in your code examples to make it easier to focus on small snippets.
• When discussing unknown technologies, give quick, one-line intros. It may help to show an analogy to technology your audience is familiar with. For example, EJB to .NET Enterprise Services. It may not be exact (like my example?), but it’ll give us the proper context.

After the Presentation

Many people attend these presentation for the educational value, in order to keep up with what’s happening in their field, and they make a significant time commitment to attend your presentation. Whatever your motivation for speaking, the reputation you earn is based upon more than your session. How you follow through also counts in a big way.

• For speakers of any type of presentation: please try to make yourself available, at least through email, for any follow-up questions attendees may have. Due to the nature of presentations, there are almost always outstanding questions that cannot necessarily be answered or even anticipated during the presentation, so you should always expect questions after the event.
• It’s also a good idea to provide the organizers of these events with presentation material and supplements to post on the organization’s website, to help with the follow-on.

I anticipated such an event to be a lot of fun, and it exceeded my expectations. I’m sure it was nerve wracking for the speakers and the moderators, but like my experience with the code camp, I’m sure it was well worth it. I’ll use this post as a guideline for when my group runs a similar event, and hopefully others will find this useful, even though I’m basing it upon limited personal experience. If you have anything to add or suggest, please comment.

I’ve been sick on and off for the past few weeks. It reached a pinnacle last week when I inevitably came down with the flu. I hadn’t been this sick in a few years, and like many of us who’s experienced this, not being able to do anything towards my goals was driving me absolutely insane.

Ok, so I thought I’d take advantage of this externally (perhaps, self-) imposed restriction to slow myself down, get the rest I’ve been lacking, and help myself re-focus (a common theme). But just trying to take naps had been next to impossible. Even through my dehydration-causing semi-delirium, my mind had never raced so much with all the things I wanted to be doing, needed to be doing, wished I was doing. Maybe it’s time to learn some meditation techniques?

I consider myself an underachieving overachiever. I think in the past couple of decades there has been an explosion of people like me (sounds messy), who not only began to understand their potential for the first time, but also became aware of the opportunities never before available to the human race for actualizing this potential. This has created a culture obsessed with achievement. But it has also created a lot more disillusionment, not only with society, but with ourselves.

We’re wondering why we haven’t achieved everything we expect ourselves to achieve. Why does one person do one thing to change the world in obvious ways, while the next, just as capable person, can barely change the department he works in?

And we have so many potentially life-changing projects going on at the same time. We want to do everything before we’re gone. In this world, we’re more aware than any previous generation of how relatively short our time is in this life, and we’re always in a rush to make things happen.

We don’t even give ourselves time to get sick, or recover when we do.

We read self-help books, blogs, go to seminars, listen to tapes, and even practice all the best practices, and still it feels like it’s all a race.

And it is. You know why? Because we’re racing against ourselves. We have so many things we’re trying to achieve at the same time that we give everything, and I mean EVERYTHING the short end of the stick. Nothing gets our complete attention. Because we’re afraid.

We’re afraid of choosing the wrong thing to focus on. We’re afraid of taking the wrong turn. We’re afraid that several years down the line we’ll look back and realize that we chose the wrong things to focus on, and we’re now just that many years closer to the end. We’ll look at the other paths with regret, and we’ll notice who succeeded down those paths. So now we try to cover all our bases, and head down five paths at once, trying to grab our piece of each, hoping we’ll make our mark in at least one or two before it’s too late.

Sound familiar?

But all of those are half-hearted efforts. And none will truly succeed. If we put 20% of our efforts into 5 different paths, we’ll make maybe 15% of our goal in each of those paths at best. But if we put 80% of our efforts into 1 path, and split the other 20% into another 1 or 2 paths, our success rates would go way up, and when we notice we took a wrong turn (after bypassing the Dip), we can then refocus the 80% on one of the other paths.

I don’t have many answers yet. Like so many others, I’m still struggling with this, so I’m just thinking out loud here.

I don’t normally write general posts referring to other blogs, but for a while I’ve wanted to give a shout out to Penelope Trunk over at her Brazen Careerist blog.

Anyone who’s familiar with her writing is likely aware of how strongly people react to her posts (mostly negative, it seems, especially at her former Yahoo! Finance column, from which she was recently fired). She definitely brings out the vocal worst in certain (mainly conservative) readers, which is a shame. She appears to be wildly (un?)popular, because no matter how many people deride her posts, they’ll continue to read her.

I believe it’s because, despite what they say, she is hitting a chord of truth with them — even though they publicly claim to completely disagree with her. I think a lot of people are afraid to admit that they often agree with her, but it’s the “popular” opinion to disagree with her. Some of the comments are so downright mean, it’s almost as if they’re in complete denial of their true feelings. You’ll see a good sample of such comments from that recently fired article.

This may be the most controversial post I’ve written to date, simply because I’m here to publicly state that I do agree with most of what she writes. Not everything, but enough to make it worth my while to read all of her posts. There are some things she writes about or refers to that make me completely blush, but it’s part of what makes her so refreshing.

She has a hell of a lot of guts to put herself out there on a limb and state exactly what she believes about any topic, and she doesn’t seem to give a damn what people think. In a way, I live vicariously through her.

I often wonder how much of her attitude stems from her traumatic personal 9/11 experience, but I’m willing to bet it put her over the top for her “critics be damned” attitude. Many of us have some sort of connection to that day (I worked in those buildings for a couple of years in the 80’s, so I related to it at that level, although I knew no victims personally). But her experience was extremely intense.

I’m currently reading her book, also named Brazen Careerist, which of course, like the rest of her writing, is totally brazen. I definitely recommend it, despite the mixed (unsurprisingly) reviews it’s received. Overall, though, it’s averaged 4 stars.

If you want a good sample of a post that may outrage you (and make you think), check out her article about workplace practices that should be eliminated.

Last night at the Fairfield / Westchester .NET User Group in Stamford, CT, Microsoft’s Peter Laudati brought uncommon clarity to his presentation of Microsoft’s AJAX framework. Peter is a top-notch presenter, and he proved why he’s a Developer Evangelist for the NY / NJ area.

Although I’ve seen many solid presentations at user groups and code camps, it’s too easy to get lost in the details rather early, because speakers try to squeeze in more than should be attempted within an hour or two, and they rush through some important steps. Since the examples usually build upon each other as they demo increasing complexity, much of the session becomes a blur. You may get an inkling that the technology is cool and can help you, but often you just end up with just a sense of how to use it, and still have to start from scratch when digging into it on your own.

But Peter did one of the best jobs of taking the time to very clearly explain not only what each feature was, but also why you would use one option over the other, and showing why each piece of code was needed. He didn’t assume that you knew everything beforehand, so he explained things in a way where even experienced AJAX developers could gain new insights. He also used a very good mix of slides, demos, and code. Very refreshing. It’s rare that anyone takes the time to answer the “whys”, instead of just the “whats” — even when writing a book, when you’d assume that they had all the time in the world. That’s definitely a topic for a future blog post…

I have played around with the Microsoft AJAX framework and the add-on Control Toolkit, but Peter’s presentation opened my eyes to how to take advantage of writing your own hooks or controls. He also showed us how to use a couple of cool free IE add-ons (and mentioned one for Firefox), that makes it a lot easier to develop dynamic web pages. Much of the discussion was about AJAX in general (see, Microsoft does acknowledge the rest of the world), and he showed us some exciting new features coming soon. He also gave a quick intro to JSON, which is natively supported by JavaScript, and a lot lighter and more portable than XML for both client and server processing in an AJAX app.

A lot was covered, and the material from his presentation will be on our user group website shortly, so I won’t go into detail here.

If you get the chance to catch a presentation by Peter, or some of the other top speakers in the field, and if you are planning on presenting a technical topic, I recommend experiencing these sessions from a different perspective — recognize that you don’t have to completely exhaust a topic in a single session. Take the time to focus on specific core aspects of your topic, and make an extra effort to explain why you use the tools in the ways you have chosen. By taking home a solid foundation, we can dig deeper on our own.