My dad, who is no longer with us, had many words of wisdom. Sometimes those took the form of sayings. One of them was “the impossible will not happen.” He would always say that to me any time I seemed worried about something that he thought would not happen. Usually, that’s because he thought that thing would not happen because it was impossible, or very unlikely to take place. If something is not actually going to happen, it isn’t worth worrying about.
In the past few years, I’ve found this saying to be extremely useful despite seeming obvious. It is obvious that impossible things will not happen. What is not obvious to many people is which things are impossible. During most of my career as a software engineer I have found it an essential skill to know what is and is not possible. During my more recent years as a software engineering manager, I have found it an essential skill to know when to NOT say that something is impossible.
Pretend for a moment that you work as a middle manager at a company that does basket weaving. Suppose you work for an executive who thinks that your company should stop doing basket weaving in order to build trans-atlantic airships, using the logic that weaving could be used to make airships somehow special, and because the airship market is expected to grow with a 20%+ CAGR, while the basket weaving market is very mature and boring. So, your executive explains to you that, we need to plan for the next three years to be completely working on airships and be completely done with basket weaving.
Except, over 50% of company revenue comes from basket weaving, all new opportunities that the company is pursuing are basket weaving, absolutely nobody at the company knows how to sell an airship or who to sell an airship to, and all of the attempts at building airships to date have been extremely expensive hot air balloons, rather than luxury liners that could circumnavigate the globe. Airship manufacturing isn’t going to happen at your company.
What do you do? You have two choices:
- “What the fuck? Look Shirley, it’s totally insane for us to try to build airships. There’s no way that we’re going to compete with Luftschiffbau Zeppelin. We should double down on basket weaving because airship building is a dumb idea anyway. Besides, did you see what happened with the Hindenburg? Why the hell would you want to do that? That’s just dumb. Have you been trying meth?”
Then you can go home and perfect your resume, because you’ll soon have plenty of time to do that.
- “That seems really interesting, Shirley. What do we need to do to make that work?”
Then you listen politely, and actually try to make the idea better. You don’t need to fight an idea that will never happen, because it will never happen. You can trust that basket weaving revenue will act like the pull of gravity, and keep the company in orbit around something that actually makes money. You only need to give the idea a nudge here or there if it starts veering off into a place that would cause some sort of harm in the short term.
Gravity is also something one should learn to appreciate. Too many people view it as something to fight against, a sort of obstacle to new altitudes and greatness. If you work with it instead of fighting it, you can still achieve great things, often with less effort.
I don’t know if this makes me a cynic or a realist.