One-Point-Oh
I always tell K that if she wants to know anything about people of my ilk, all she has to do is pick up my copy of Microserfs. Douglas Coupland gets it so well.
"That's not the point, Abe."
"What is the point, then?"
"One-Point-Oh," I said.
"What?" replied Abe.
"Being One-Point-Oh. The first to do something cool or new."
My parents sent out a newsletter a while back. God bless their hearts they were so excited to let everyone know about me and K, but they also wrote that they were excited I got to quit my job where I "roamed around the US doing computer training."
I thought about that last clause as a summary of my last 7 years or so - I wasn't feeling that upset about it even though that would be usual; it was more that they didn't get it. They didn't know that the time I spent "roaming around" was a really important stage in my journey to find my One-Point-Oh.
I think that the big difference between 7 years ago and now in my understanding of One-Point-Oh is that having good ideas is really, really hard. I now realize that having a good idea isn't just a fleeting moment when you wake up or sip coffee across the table from a friend, it's work and effort and pushing that makes a good thought into a real idea.
And once you've got this little baby of an idea, you have to keep working it like crazy over a long haul to make anything out of it. The ideas that you scratch onto a notebook and work on for a week are - my painful realization - a waste of time. There are exceptions, of course, but nurturing that little baby of an idea isn't a series of Eurekas, it's a long, hard slog1.
Being One-Point-Oh is like being that writer who, after a brief thought on a train ride, writes during lunch breaks, and later writes in a coffee shop - writing and rewriting in longhand, and at the end of it all she has enough gall after being turned down by a few publishers to persist until her story is told.
It seems like being One-Point-Oh is having the concentration and stamina to focus on a possibility, to keep honing it until it's worth something to other people. A lot of the time, at least in programming, the real work is not so much making something work for yourself, but making it plausible for other people. That's hard.
It makes me admire a lot of people, especially artists, whose real job2 is to have good ideas.
Today I was writing code in an old language and realized that I'd forgotten lots of tidbits about how to make things work. It was a reminder that what I've gotten over the last 7 years isn't really the kind of academic knowledge that gets built into a little castle, but more the maturity and resolve to keep trying, and take failure as a part of life.
I'll always be searching for One-Point-Oh. But it's not the slog that I have to worry about, it's being able to have a good idea in the first place.
"We had to ask ourselves, "Are you One-Point-Oh?" - the answer is what separates Microserfs3 from the Cyberlords...
1Disclaimer continued: these exceptions come to mind - the musician that records an album in a weekend, Lost In Translation, and people who seem to pull things off at a ridiculous pace. But I'm not a musician or Sophia Coppola, and I'm demonstrably unable to have good ideas I follow through on quickly.
2Re:The What Is Art? discussion - this is another generalization. The older I get the more I realize how hard it is to pin down exactly what art is.
3I don't know of any Microserfs who work for Microsoft, by the way. Everyone I'm aware of from that company is razor sharp and pushes the envelope. Of course I only know of the highly visible ones but Don Box, Dare Obasanjo, Raymond Chen et. al., my hat's off to you. The real Microserf is Mort.
10:51:33 PM 
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