Theme: Next, 3 Footer: PagerDuty slidenumbers: true
^ Hello, I'm Reg Braithwaite.
^ Today I'd like to talk about courage. The dictionary tells me that "courage" is the choice and willingness to confront agony, pain, danger, uncertainty, or intimidation.
^ (https://www.flickr.com/photos/joevahling/9153370287)
[.slidenumbers: false]
the choice and willingness to confront agony, pain, danger, uncertainty, or intimidation.
^ Courage helps us change and grow. Change is uncertain.
^ Courage helps us do difficult things, painful things.
^ Courage helps us escape from environments that try to intimidate us into being less than who we are.
^ (https://www.flickr.com/photos/joevahling/9153370287)
^ "Courage" is a really big word. When we say "courage," we think of things like standing up against injustice, or speaking truth to power.
^ One of the problems with the word "courage," is that it sounds too big, too intimidating.
^ Too hard.
^ (https://www.flickr.com/photos/taedc/4863004688)
^ How do we make the leap all the way from being our ordinary selves, to becoming courageous?
^ It seems like we need a tremendous amount of courage, just to become courageous!
^ That's hard.
^ There is a way: We can do small things, one at a time.
^ Every day, we have dozens of opportunities to commit tiny acts of courage.
^ Each tiny act of courage is like a pebble. It's small, but it's still a rock.
^ It's still courage.
^ (https://www.flickr.com/photos/peterpearson/3090070386)
^ Now:
^ If we listen to motivational speakers, to society, we're told that the value of tiny acts is that they can be put together into a big act, like pebbles piled into a tower.
^ This is unnecessary, and wrong.
^ (https://www.flickr.com/photos/bladeflyer/6996525239)
^ Or perhaps we are told that courage is a habit, and by practising it daily, we'll build up our courage into an irresistible force, and that is the goal.
^ This is also unnecessary, and it is also wrong.
^ (https://www.flickr.com/photos/andreanna/2837855969)
^ A pebble is a pebble.
^ A pebble does not have to be stacked.
^ A pebble does not have to be part of a beach.
^ We do not have to place a pebble every day.
^ We do not have to grow strong to place bigger pebbles.
^ A pebble is a pebble.
^ (https://www.flickr.com/photos/matt_gibson/504309625)
^ Stacks of stone are useful.
^ Habits we practice, make us strong.
^ A pasture of grass nourishes life.
^ But a tiny act of courage, like grass in a crack, is an act of courage, and it is its own reward.
^ (https://www.flickr.com/photos/pyogenes_gruffer/39969678731)
^ Ok! This is great, it's inspirational.
^ But we still need to eat. We need to go about our everyday lives. We need to ship.
^ How, specifically, can we commit these tiny acts of courage?
^ I have a suggestion.
^ Consider this:
^ (https://www.flickr.com/photos/usfwsmtnprairie/35203521620)
^ We often refer to customer wishes as "faster horses."
^ The principle is to look beyond what people want, and to build what they need.
^ But it takes courage to build something that people don't know they want yet.
^ For example:
^ (https://www.flickr.com/photos/roolewis/15931212035)
^ In 2002, I attended a one-day programming language conference organized by Paul Graham.
^ The morning keynote was by Joe Armstrong, who introduced the Erlang programming language.
^ Few people had heard of Erlang.
^ (https://www.flickr.com/photos/dan4th/167330621)
^ Erlang was "functional," which was weird, and didn't have curly braces, also weird.
^ But it did concurrency at scale really, really well.
^ Erlang gave people what they needed, and it grew into a modest success.
^ Later, someone made it familiar, that's Elixir, and we use it at PagerDuty today.
^ (https://www.flickr.com/photos/criminalintent/3879361532/)
^ See what I just did? I described "courage" as inventing a programming language!
^ That's not a pebble. A pebble might be trying a new language.
^ Or just asking politely, "Why are we using Ruby to build something concurrent, at scale?"
^ (https://www.flickr.com/photos/ksayer/5614813544)
^ So one thing we can do whenever we see an act of courage that looks big and daunting and intimidating, is scale it down.
^ We can ask ourselves, "What is the smallest act of courage that could possibly make a difference?"
^ (https://www.flickr.com/photos/50253654@N06/5241846534)
^ Questions are fantastic pebbles.
^ And as pebbles, they don't need to be big or important or serious.
^ It is not necessary to ask a question that changes everything.
^ Just take courage, and ask a question!
^ (https://www.flickr.com/photos/skhan/3483855239)
^ Questions aren't the only kind of courage.
^ Another is listening, being receptive, being open to change.
^ We can cultivate "Strong opinions, weakly held."
^ That is a kind of courage.
^ (https://www.flickr.com/photos/runran/2875808584)
^ We can also be defensive when others questions us personally.
^ Questions feel like criticism, and that's painful.
^ A small pebble of courage is to listen despite the pain.
^ I feel this pain too, and when you feel it, I send you my hugs.
^ https://www.flickr.com/photos/tompagenet/2595893059
^ Now, speaking of being open to correction:
^ It turns out that Ford didn't actually say this! People wanted cars, they just couldn't afford them.
^ Ford's innovation was making cars affordable.
^ I didn't know that until I prepared this talk.
^ (public domain)
^ This reminds us that lots of conventional wisdom is wrong. Lots of things everybody knows, aren't true.
^ So have the courage to question.
^ And have the courage to listen, and to be open to learning.
^ Thank you.