A Crash Course In The Long-Lost Art Of Adaptation

One of the biggest lies of my life was this one: if you do your job constantly, if you listen to your folks obediently, nothing bad will happen to you. All you have to do in order to live a happy life is to play by the rules and everyone around you will do the same. If you listen to life, life will listen to you and will reward you back big time.

Well, guess what, it didn’t actually happen like this. I mean, I did my best to be obedient, to follow the rules, to do my job and not to harm anyone else, and yet, out of the blue, I got kicked straight in my ass. And not only once.

I’m sure you’ve been there too. And not only once. You did your job too, minding your own business, fulfilling your roles as a friend, employee or husband and then, kaboom, life hits you right in the groin, not only filling your entire being with unbearable pain, but also leaving you breathless, confused and defeated. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about business, about relationships or friendships or you name it. Sometimes you just get hit. At some point, if you’re a business man, competition will play dirty. Or employees will let you down. In your personal life, the persons you trust (or care for) the most will lie to you or dump you. In your casual circle, a friend will suddenly betray you. It will happen.

For a long time, I thought I didn’t do the right thing… you know, righteously enough. I thought I didn’t follow all the rules, or that I somehow misunderstood something. I thought it was my fault. This is what they teach you, anyways. If what you do doesn’t solve the problem, just use a bigger hammer. So I strived even harder. But surprise. Nothing changed.

As life unfolded, the tiny little crack I was just glimpsed at, became larger and larger. It looked like no matter what I did, the gap between what I expected and what I actually got grew bigger and bigger. It became obvious there wasn’t a direct link, or any causality whatsoever, between my obedience to the rules and the bad things that were happening to me.

To make a long story short, it took me a ginormous amount of time to realize that life really is random. That you can’t control it. That you can’t influence events. They will always happen somewhere outside you.

Oh, my god, stop it right here! Blasphemy!

How can someone who writes about goals, living a better life and improving your skills can come up with such an enormity? You can’t do anything about events? You just have to sit there and endure whatever comes in your face?

Well, not so fast, Jose, not so fast.

I didn’t say anything about what YOU have to do. I said something about events. About things that are happening to you. Those things, believe it or not, you aren’t able to control.

You can’t control the stock market. But you can see how she moves and take advantage of some opportunities.

You can’t control the weather (not unless you can detonate a huge atomic bomb, or generate a volcano eruption, that is). But you can assess the changes, evaluate them and then act on them. Put on lighter clothes if it’s getting warmer or take an umbrella if it’s going to rain.

You can’t control the behavior of your clients, if you run a business, not to mention competition. But you can observe the competition moves, read your customer feedbacks and then do whatever you have to do advance.

Are you with me now?

Truth is we have a very limited sphere of direct influence in this world. If you really look at it, it’s just a tiny bubble around us. You can control your body, your clothes, your moves. You can control your balance and your visual sensors as you walk outside of a building, for instance, but you can’t control a potential brick that may fall right into your head from the top of that building. You can observe it, of course, and avoid it. But the brick will be outside of your control zone.

The Randomness Of Life

We get a lot of “bricks form the top of the building” in our lives. We can spot some of them and timely avoid the impact. But some of them are invisible and we just get hit.

In the beginning, I was shocked by this discovery. The randomness of life seemed frightening. I thought I was helpless. I suddenly went to the other side and started to believe that no matter what I do, a brick will always fall down from the sky and ruin it. Of course it didn’t. So it took me a while to understand the meaning of the term “randomness” and also to adjust my position towards it.

And that’s how I started to study the “long lost art of adaptation”. Of course I don’t know if there is such an art, I just made it up. It made you click on the title, didn’t it?

Anyway, back to our story: art or science, adaptation is not only key to survival (as any serious biologist will confirm it for you) but it’s also important if you want to make the best of what you get. It’s at least a key skill and, as such, I firmly believe that it can be taught.

Without further ado, here’s a (crash) course on how to enhance your adaptability skills:

1. If Something Feels Like (Or Really Is) Wrong, Accept It First

Don’t fight evidence. If you get hit by a crisis, please admit that you are hit by a crisis and this is exactly what is happening to you. Don’t treat like an injustice. Don’t even think in terms of luck or bad luck. From a tiny point of view, at the exact moment of that event, it may feel like an injustice, but on a larger scale, it’s just another event in your life. So, instead of whining, crying and complaining about how bad life is treating you, just accept it. It’s another part of your life. It may be painful now, but it’s still your life.

2. Always Assess

After accepting it, start looking around and see what can really happen. Evaluate the harm done (or potential). Try to predict. Try to see what might go wrong. Or good. I can’t really remember any event in my life which was entirely good. Or bad. A wedding can be a good event, but if there’s a divorce 5 years later, well, I don’t know… Losing all your money may seem like a terrible thing to happen, but if you look at how this forced you to change your way of life, it may be something to ponder there…

3. Unfold Plausible Scenarios

After assessing, try to understand what you can do in the newly unfolded circumstances. But don’t limit yourself to just one thing. Don’t try to find the perfect solution. Make a few scenarios. Even better, try to develop a way of thinking in scenarios, whether you’re in a crisis or not. It will make miracles for your morale, believe me. Just try to project as many variables as you can. Don’t let anything out. Don’t believe in “this will never happen to me”. Everything you can imagine, can actually become an event.

4. Act, Don’t React

Accepting the catastrophe, assessing the damage, creating a few plausible scenarios, well, it’s not enough. You gotta act. Acceptance in itself will do nothing. Assessing in itself will do nothing as well. Those possible scenarios, as detailed and complete as they may be, won’t mean nothing. It’s action that changes things. So, just go ahead and make your best pick out of those scenarios. Just play your hand.

5. Rinse And Repeat

Once you acted, you’re already in a new context. Enjoy it. Be there, watch the surroundings and be ready for anything. It may be that the scenario wasn’t as good as you thought it may be. Ok, back to square number one. Try plan B. Or it may be that the plan really worked and now you’re out of the dangerous zone. Just be there and be alert. Enjoy what you have and live the best life you can live.

For it may fall apart again in a split of a second.

7 Things To Do When The Shit Hits The Fan

I know you’ve been through this, we’ve all been. Minding your own business, peacefully, things going on smoothly and then, out of nothing, something incredibly bad happens. The shit hits the fan. Of course, I’m not talking about the physical phenomenon (nor do I advise you to try to replicate that exact setup). I’m talking about “unpredictable” crisis. Situations that turns really bad without any perceivable warning. We’ll see later on that the “unpredictable” factor is not so unpredictable.

Well, since I’ve been through something that may qualify as a shit storm during the last week, I thought it would be useful to share some of my experiences, as well as some of the ways in which I eventually coped with the disaster.

The Story

One of things I really enjoy doing is writing iPhone apps. And lately, writing iPad apps. During the last 3 months I developed an iPad version of one of my iPhone apps, iAdd. I will skip the details about what iAdd does, just follow the link if you want to know more. I will just let you know that iAdd is a universal app, which means you download it only once but it will work on both your iPhone and your iPad (with a different interface, of course).

It was a really slow and daunting process. I think I changed the workflow at least 5 or 6 times. Writing a few days., then realizing it’s not going to work and starting over. Writing user interfaces is kinda difficult, you know. To make a long story short, after countless hours of getting my fingers dirty in the hidden intricacies of Objective C and iPad user interface elements, I finally came up with something I liked.

In this process, the iPhone app had to be touched a few times. A few navigation patterns had to be modified. And  adding a little bit of this here and taking out a little bit of that from there. Fact is that after 100 days of development, the initial app, the one that was currently on sale on AppStore, was completely modified.

Feeling under the pressure of making it happen, without proper testing and with an incredible feeling of faith that everything is going to be just fine, I finally submitted the app. Version 1.3, which was supposed to be most glorious one to date. I really like the iPad interface I came up with, seriously.

The review process took about 4-5 days. I finally received the email stating that my app “is in review” and then, about 10 hours later, the email stating that my app is live on the AppStore. I think it was 3:30 AM last Friday. I felt a fantastic relief that my app was finally live and went to sleep as usual. Only half an hour later, I heard another email (I keep my iPhone close when I sleep, to hear the morning alarm, and when I get an email from certain important sources, the iPhone rings). Sleepy but relaxed, I looked at the email.

The next second, my relaxation went away. And also my sleep. It was an email from an unhappy customer, who just bought my app and who was experiencing a crash. A crash means the app is just going away when it isn supposed to. A crash is a bad thing. Scratch that. A crash is the worst thing that may happen to your app. In just a few minutes I received another email from another customer, who was experiencing a similar problem.

In just a few hours I was about to find out that my app was practically unusable.

What happened?

Well, a mix of bad luck, tiredness and just plain strange stuff. The app submitted was simply not working and it took me a few hours to find out why. Some parts were not properly tested, while others were just left away, not included in the latest build, because… Well, I don’t know why. I simply can’t explain how the app was submitted in that form, but that was the blunt reality.

In other words, the shit was on the fan already.

To make things really sad, you gotta know that you can’t fix things in the AppStore the moment you realize something is wrong. It takes days for your app to be reviewed again.

What About Now?

As I already told you, that happened last Friday, in the morning. It’s Wednesday now and for the last 4-5 days, I was under an incredible amount of pressure. As of today, the first fix of iAdd was approved and it’s live on the AppStore, iAdd version 1.3.1. But meanwhile I discovered another round of crashes which are fixed in the next version, namely 1.3.2. Which was just submitted to the AppStore, a couple of hours ago.

Hopefully, iAdd 1.3.2 will be the last version to see crashes. But, based on my recent experience, anything can happen. Seriously, I do hope there won’t be any more crashes starting from 1.3.2.

What follows is an attempt to formalize my experience in fighting an “unpredictable” situation of crisis, just like the one I just left behind.

1. Assess, Don’t Stress

It’s very easy to give in to panic when something goes wrong. Instead, I focused on what exactly happened. And what happened proved to be a little less worrying than I thought. For starters, there were a few additions that were still working, That was a good thing. Next, I already knew how to fix the crashes. Yes, I had a number of unhappy customers. And they were perfectly right.

But as I dived into the analysis process, something very interesting happened. The adrenaline rush was not directed to a “fight or flight” situation anymore. When you’re facing a crisis, your reactions are following only two patterns: fight (or try to prove that my customers were wrong, in my case) or flight (leave things as they were, cutting out the iPhone business for ever from my business stream).

Either way, we’re talking about stress. And stress, as dangerous as it may be, it does have this incredible access to energy. It can literally release (or block) tons of energy. Well, this stress energy, this adrenaline rush was transformed into working energy. In just a few hours I was able to fix the most annoying crashes and do a resubmit. And, luckily for me, it took only 3 days for Apple to approve it.

2. Decide So It Won’t Collide

Moments after I realized what went wrong, I started to plan. What needs to be done ASAP? What can I do now? What is the time frame available? After I gathered all the data, I started to play with decisions. Some of the things I knew I have to fix weren’t so visible (they weren’t producing crashes, anyway). I decided to leave them for the next version and focus on what I could do to fix the crashes.

Our ability to identify and follow up decisions during a crisis is drastically affected. But despite that, it’s vital to step back and choose. Even in a very dangerous situation we have many more options than the “fight or flight”. There is this urge to run away from the place of the crisis, hoping that a change in context will also change the facts. Unless a building is crashing on you, running away is never the best option.

Avoidance won’t work either. It takes a while to turn your face to the fan and take all the shit upfront. But it’s the only viable solution. Only if you identify the direction you can start to prepare the escape. If you don’t stay there, if you don’t face the crisis and its causes, you won’t be able to stop it. You may get away for a while if you run away, but each time you’ll get back to that place, there may be a different day, but you’ll be facing the same old shit.

3. Communicate

Nothing is happening just by itself. And there isn’t such a thing like a “black box” of our life events, something completely unaccessible. Information is there, reach to it. Each time you face a crisis, try to communicate. The moment I got the first emails from my unhappy customers, I started to answer. Acknowledging the situation, apologizing, but… at the same time trying to get as much intel as I could.

As I following up to the angry emails I realized something very interesting. Yes, the app was behaving badly. Yes, there were a lot of frustration. But at the same time I realized that… my customers were actually relaying on my app for their daily activity (iAdd is time and task planner, to put it mildly). So, my app was important. Not to mention that my immediate answers were gaining big time on the “support” size of the whole experience. People were actually appreciating the fact that I was answering instantly and that was somehow lowering their frustration. Or so they said to me .

Every crisis can reveal something about you (or the others) that you weren’t aware of. As long as you stay on track and communicate. Don’t isolate in a “I know better” pattern. If there are other persons involved in your crisis, try to understand their point of view too.

4. Rebuild Carefully

After I finished the first 3 steps, I started to write code. This time, in a completely different manner than before. The worse had already happened. So why worry now? I just sat carefully, testing each feature 3-4 times with different data, until somehow, the whole app started to get a different consistence.

The emphasis here is on “carefully” not so much on “rebuild”. You gotta rebuild anyway, but just do it very carefully. It’s very important to realize that you did as much harm as you could already. No need to augment on that. Just pay close attention to what you’re doing and things will start to straighten up.

Again, when we’re under pressure, we have this huge urge to speed up. Well, speed up, if you have to, but do it carefully. You don’t want to make another mistake and then another one and then another one. Accept the current disaster and focus on avoiding the next potential one.

5. Leverage

After I realized I’m facing a real customer crisis, I started to look around. I started to manage the process. And I’m not talking about assessing, deciding and writing code. I also started to write blog posts on the iAdd official blog, explaining what’s going on. It wasn’t only about fixing some bugs. It was also about informing other people.

After I wrote the blog posts, the number of messages decreased. People were visiting the blog, were reading the posts and apparently they were getting the answers they were looking for. They were not into bullying me, the author, they were just trying to understand what’s going on.

Using as many tools as you can get a hold of is incredibly useful in time of crisis. If a wheel on the car explodes, try to stay on track with the remaining three, don’t stop. Leveraging means reaching out to whatever you have, own or can use in order to smooth the crisis. And that stands true for any type of crisis.

6. Keep Your Fingers Crossed

I bet you didn’t see that coming. Well, neither do I. But after I did everything that was to be done, after I submitted the app, responded to customers and wrote blog posts, I realized that’s it. I did all I could do. Everything more would have been a waste of energy.

So I just sat back and tried to relax. And kept my fingers crossed. Fact is you never know if something is going to work or not. You can only hope. Keeping your fingers crossed is a way of “giving yourself in”. I did everything, now let’s see what happens.

In any crisis, there is so much you can do. Anything over that level simply won’t matter.

7.  Learn

Write down what happened. Well, not necessarily in the form of 7 items list blog post, like I did, but do write it down. See where was the glitch. And then repeat it. Rewind in your mind all the phases of this unfortunate crisis. That’s how you can prevent it later on. That’s where the “unpredictable” I was talking about in the beginning of this post is turning into “obvious”.

We learn from mistakes, not from successes. We remember the dangerous and hurtful events much better than the happy events. I guess it’s wired into our survivals patterns. We do this in order to avoid a similarly dangerous situation.

Or at least that’s how you can cope better with it next time the shit hits the fan again.

6 Degrees Of Integration

Where does your created value goes? Who’s the real beneficiary of your work? Ever wonder how this world is carrying your value to the final destination? It’s more and more obvious that the traditional way of spreading value is outdated. More and more people are losing jobs, more and more companies are going bankrupt, more and more standards are challenged. A worldwide crisis is starting to unveil a reality that we’re not yet ready to accept.

Lost In Translation

The huge structure created for spreading value – and that would be what we call “the economy” – is starting to decay. All those elaborated structures like “business”, “banks” or “stock markets” are breaking one after another under a huge pressure. The world economy is crashing. Somewhere, somehow, there is a deep crack in the model.

And the main problem with this outdated model is that your value does not reach the final beneficiary anymore. Before reaching out, your value is translated into money, stock options or shares. Between you and the beneficiary is a long line of frozen structures which are filtering away everything, except profit. Those structures are limiting your value. You might be an honest individual, a skilled person or a talented worker, but somehow, the mechanism in which you are performing is broken, and the object of your work is not reaching out the way it should be. Your value is lost in translation.

A Web Of Opportunities

The actual economical structures are imbalanced, that’s obvious. This is a linear model: a business, with a set of products / services, sold to potential clients and maintained by a hierarchical structure. If you look carefully will see that the most threatened organizations by the crisis are also the most hierarchically frozen: banks, stock markets. Every falling organization has a fixed structure. But the problem is the world is not on a fixed structure anymore. Things are going too fast and in such an unpredictable manner that a linear model cannot describe it anymore.

If we could take the hierarchy out of the model and instead of focusing on positions would focus on genuine delivered value, maybe the things will change. Maybe if we could create a model of interposed webs of relationships,  instead of a fixed business chart, our value will reach the beneficiary faster and untampered. Maybe if we could focus on value and not on hierarchy, on actual needs and not on profit the economy will change for good. For our good, of course.

6 Degrees Of Integration

You know the axiom of 6 degrees of separation? It says that on this planet, between you and the most distant person you can imagine are only 6 links. You could reach to anybody on Planet Earth just by making 6 connections, no more. If this is true, why not create a paradigm of 6 degrees of integration? A blueprint for delivering results in only 6 steps? A model in which you will deliver value totally different than before, in only 6 connections?

How would a paradigm like this will look?

1. You

The center of your value creation process should be you. You should do things that are empowering you, things that are making you happy and joyful. No guilt, no fear, no scarcity. Build different skills, get healthier, enjoy your life. Don’t compromise your true values for your boss or for your job. Start with you, because only when you’re complete and balanced you can start helping others.

2. Family

By family I understand your close relationship, as in a couple and/or your kids. The next step after you’ve balanced yourself is to reach to your closest ones and support. Or even enhance: train them, help them, give advice. Make them the second beneficiaries of your created value. They are the closest layer of social interaction to you, make that interaction valuable.

3. Friends

Have you ever tried to really support your friends, not just ask stuff for them? If not, try it once, it will turn out it’s a fulfilling experience. Spread your talents, your knowledge and experience in your circle of friends. Let them enjoy the benefits of having you around. Create the best value you can and share it freely with your friends.

4. Professional Community

You can have a series of skills that can make you part of a bigger community. Go there and share. You’re a programmer, a teacher, a healer; whatever you are, go spread your skills in your community first. Let them know you’re there and you’re available. Soon, the value you carry will be recognized and you’ll be associated with it. It’s a process called personal branding.

5. Clients

If you sell your value directly to the clients, that’s the layer in which you are making the actual exchange. That’s the layer in which you provide your product and you receive the associated value. This is the place where you are prepared to start a mutually profitable exchange. You don’t really need a business as a structure, but you need somebody who needs your service: your clients.

6. World

After the clients, world can be your playground. World is another word here for “everybody else”. And I mean it: after your value has reached the intended beneficiaries, you can actually interact with everybody else on this planet, and share your value. 20 years ago interacting with anybody on the planet would have been called a utopian scenario (and I’m aware that this 6 degrees of integration post is a somehow utopian scenario today) but after the Internet explosion you can actually interact with basically anybody.

Asking For More

Such a model could not exist if there is no demand for it. If there’s one rule that would survive any economical crisis this is the offer and demand rule. In order to start a new economical model you must start acting in a certain way. You must starting make a demand for that. Act like you need things in a certain way and you will see the web of relationships reorganizing to meet your demands.

1. You

If you will receive more from yourself, be ready to receive it. Want more. Ask more. Expect more from yourself. Challenge yourself and enjoy the results. Modesty is a healthy reaction but it can become a very boring lifestyle. Be proud of yourself and set higher standards. Every day.

2. Family

Ask things from those close to you. Interact and ask for things. They cannot start to deliver value to you if there’s no demand for it. Create that demand and make them understand they are able to give that value to you. They are the ones, not somebody else.

3. Friends

Expect that your friends will provide you stuff and appreciate them for that. Make them not only feel important for the services they are providing to you, but treat them as reliable persons. Expect that they can rely on you and that you can rely on them. Build stronger expectations.

4. Professional Community

Ask for advice. Reach out, promote yourself, let the others know that you are there. Share your experience and create a need for other doing the same thing. Involve and get involved, keep that community shaped and ready to respond to your needs. And be ready to respond in kind.

5. Clients

Reach out and look for clients. Don’t wait for fixed structures to grow between you and your potential clients. Let them know you’re there and you can provide. Be present, be available. Start identifying your clients and start meeting their needs. It’s not that complicated.

6. World

Participate in social networks. Make new friends. See new places and search for new experiences. Travel and look for opportunities. Don’t stay in a fixed place, let yourself flowing and trust your flow. Interact with new persons and let them know you exist. Be there.

***

Those 6 degrees of integration may change the way we deliver value to the world. A model based on that will be at least centered on humans and not on profits. And there’s no need for a full replacement of the actual value propagation model. I’m pretty sure they can coexist on the same universe for the beginning, only on parallel vibrations.

Imagine now what would be like to lose your job in a model like this. You can’t imagine, of course, because there is no job. But there is value, there is interaction and there is growth. There will be no structures to fall down and no walls between you and the ones who need your value. A dynamic web of relationships will always be more flexible than any linear and fixed model.

The only thing we need in order to start something like this is just a little more awareness. A little bit of honesty and courage. And trust in the others and in ourselves. Considering that the alternative would be to look at the macabre show of our falling economic structures, I think it’s better to start something new.

It’s up to us.

Handling Financial Pressure

Now, more than ever, a lot of people are faced with financial pressure. This is what a crisis should be about, anyway. Companies are cutting jobs, people are losing houses and the global economy seems to be falling down. I’m not going to talk about the reasons for this crisis, as I will try to better focus a little about the immediate reality and how I faced similar situations.

Being an entrepreneur is something that, among other interesting stuff, is giving you a lot of financial pressure. Getting from a monthly pay check (in exchange of some time spent in an office) to a complete reverse of the situation, when you have to take your money from the clients (if you do your job well and on time), huh, that’s quite a roller-coaster. It’s a serious comfort shake and it requires a lot of extra energy spent on the financial side. And it is not only your money that’s on the plate, you’ll need money for office rent, for utilities like electricity, internet access, for advertising and promotion and so on. Not to mention your employees or partners. You will have to manage a whole new level of cashing and spending. And believe me, this is a tremendous financial pressure.

When I started my own business, 10 years ago, I faced this like a train hitting a wall. Although I managed to do pretty well, in the first three years I barely knew where my pockets were. They were most of the time empty. Money didn’t have a chance to settle there. Even if I managed to do a decent living per month, there were increasing expenses that I had to face the next month. It was really tough. That was a time when I really had to learn a lot about handling financial pressure. (more…)