Lord Stanley’s Cup
I grew up playing hockey. My parents had me on the ice when I was two, and I have been playing ever since. Growing up, winters were spent traveling every weekend throughout upstate New York, and weeknights were spent at practices in rinks that only had three solid walls, the forth being a tarp.
Grippen ice rink, the rink I grew up playing on that only had three solid walls. Sadly, it is now closed forever after the flood of 2006. Picture credit NOAA.gov
Summers were spent traveling from hockey camp to hockey camp, picking up new techniques, and learning edge control from a figure skating coach who emigrated from the USSR. Once we were home in the summer my brother and I would break out the street hockey nets and start pickup games in front of our house.
Dr. Smushkin's springboards used to teach coordination and muscle control . Photo credit http://www.hockeyagility.com
It is safe to say hockey dominated my childhood.
The Transition
After high school I stopped playing competitively. Now, twice a week I break out the equipment. Pickup hockey is on Sunday night, and Tuesday is league night. My league team won the championship last fall, yes I am a member of a championship team, a championship beer league team.
Transitioning from competitive hockey to a beer league can be jarring at first. For one, no more contact. The game completely changes when you know you are not going to be hit. Secondly, the amount of ice I see in any given season is drastically less; there are no practices in a beer league.
There are a couple of upsides to playing in a beer league. Since I know I’m not going to be hit anymore I participate in a lot more risky plays than I did in the past. Fancy passes, dekes between the legs, having a little “fun” on the ice talking to the players on the other team, most of these things would have been a “no no” in competitive hockey. Now, however, since nothing is really on the line every game is a fun game where I can go out and really enjoy playing for the sake of playing.
Plus, let’s not forget about the beer in the locker room after the game. One really couldn’t call it a beer league if there wasn’t beer in the locker room after the game.
I’m not longer striving to be an athlete in hockey, but I am still out there enjoying the game I grew up playing.
The Athlete’s Mentality
Athlete’s practice day in day out, hit the gym, run on their off days, and are constantly preparing for their next game. Beer league players pick up the equipment once or twice a week, enjoy a relaxing game, and get up the next morning and head into work. For most of us we can no longer be athletes on the field, but we can each take our athletic mentality and apply it now where it counts the most, in the office.
Do you train and compete like an athlete in the office, or are you merely showing up, collecting a paycheck, and putting in a beer league performance?
To see if you are a beer leaguer or still working on making it to the pros ask yourself a few questions:
Do you read about your industry?
I feel reading is key to staying a head in software development, a topic I have touched on before in My Digital Reading List, http://benjaminhysell.com/archive/2009/01/my-digital-reading-list/.
- Athletes read about their industry in their spare time.
- Beer leaguers enjoy not knowing about what is happening outside of their cubical.
Do you try new techniques, software packages, and play with new hardware?
Our industry moves fast, staying on top of what others are doing, researching, and implementing is key to staying ahead of the curve.
- Athletes are always playing with the latest and greatest, they know when to stay with what works, or jump to newer technologies.
- Beer leaguers wait to be told what hardware and software they should use.
Do you try to learn about tools and techniques outside of your core field of competence?
There are a lot of other industries out there besides software development,
::I know I was shocked too when I heard this news, but there really is!::
…what can we learn from those industries and bring back to our own? The restaurant industry has been working with and managing teams of people for decades, do they have tools or techniques we could then apply to software development?
- Athletes learn about other industries outside of their own to learn from them, and see how they would fit in with their primary fields.
- Beer leaguers have already found their set of tools and don’t want to know what others are doing.
One might not be able to “go pro” in their job, but who are you likely to want to hire, work with, start a startup with, given the chance?
.
, but I am now proud to stand up and count myself as one of the many artist in the world.
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Whose Brand are You Building?
Towards the end of 2009 there were two great articles published by two of my favorite bloggers, Joel Spolsky from Fog Creek Software and David Heinemeier from 37signals.
Joel’s post wonders if growing your company too slowly means your company is bound to die:
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-slow-growth-equal-slow-death.html?partner=fogcreek
David responds to Joel in his own post on his blog:
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2002-bug-tracking-isnt-a-network-effect-business
Normally, I would save each one of these links and break them down in my series “Breaking Down the Game Film,” however, there was something else here in these two posts that I thought was more interesting than their primary messages.
Scroll to the bottom of each of the posts and look at the number of comments attached to each one. I would venture to say there is more written in the comments than in the original posts. I’ve seen this before, but there was something that really struck me oddly as I compared and contrasted these two articles.
The idea of commenting on an article on the Internet seems to be one of the founding principals of the Internet. Take http://www.slashdot.org, for example, Slashdot is built around people commenting on articles posted all around the Internet. I have never found this phenomenon of people wanting to comment on other people’s work too interesting before. In fact I would spend a considerable amount of time reading each one of the comments, never posting mind you, but normally reading the majority of the opinions listed below the articles.
Then something happened, I completely stopped reading comments on other websites.
When I first stopped reading the comments I attributed it to a lack of time-who has the time to scroll through 120 comments for just one article? After that personal revelation I haven’t given it too much thought, however, lately, after a year of maintaining a technical blog, I realized what my real issue is with comments, and it boils down to this, whose brand are you building?
::We have a blog title, J::
David Heinemeier could have just as easily added his comments below Joel’s article, but he didn’t, he brought the conversation to his own blog. On 37signals David controls the content, and most importantly of all, he will be able to find his comments again if he ever wants to. He has a collection of all of his content and thoughts in one location, building his own brand, and his company’s brand on his servers and under his logo.
His thoughts won’t disappear if the server Joel posted his article on ever crashes or that company goes out of business. His brand is being built in a location he has ultimate control over, and he can assure it never goes away if he chooses to.
Jeff Atwood has covered this topic on his own blog, referring to people who provide content to websites as “digital sharecroppers”. Jeff doesn’t call out people who comment on blog posts directly, but rather cites the larger trend of people supplying content to the Facebooks and YouTubes of the world: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001295.html.
Ironically, below his post the comments are full with the people doing just what he suggests they shouldn’t.
I agree with Jeff that one should focus on building their own brand. I’m not suggesting you don’t comment on what you read on the Internet, but rather, if you feel passionately about something you have read take that thought or idea and turn it into a post on your own website, expand upon the points made by the author, and strive to control your own brand.
Posted in: blogging, comments.
Tagged: blogging