Love Your Work

In the 1840’s Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis noticed a pattern. He noticed that too many new mothers were dying of a fever. And it didn’t seem like a coincidence to him that many of these women who were dying shortly after childbirth had something in common. The doctors who delivered their babies had just performed autopsies.

The death rate – by this fever – of new mothers, whose babies were delivered by doctors who had just handled dead bodies, was sometimes over thirty percent! That’s incredibly high, even by the standards of the 1840’s.

The death rate of this clinic, where doctors performed autopsies and delivered babies, was so high that some women gave birth on the street, rather than go to this clinic.

So Dr. Semmelweis performed an experiment. He tried one simple thing. This one simple thing dropped the death rate from this fever from the double digits to the single digits. Some months the death rate was zero!

The one simple thing Dr. Semmelweis did: After doctors were done performing autopsies, before they delivered babies – he had them wash their hands.

Today, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis is recognized as a pioneer in antiseptic procedures. I wish I could tell you the same was true during his lifetime.

Instead, he was ridiculed. He lost his job. He eventually moved away.

Nearly twenty years after his experiment, Dr. Semmelweis still couldn’t convince most of the medical community to wash their hands. He was committed to a mental institution, where he died fourteen days later, after being beaten by guards.

The guards didn’t beat Dr. Semmelweis to death, though. You can’t make up cruel irony like this. He died from an infection in his wounds – an infection which could have been prevented with antiseptic treatment. The antiseptic treatment for which he is now known as a pioneer.

Image: The Death of Marat, Jacques-Louis David

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David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative.

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Show Notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/cell-phone-emfs/

Many businesses have “SOP’s” It sounds very official as an acronym, and what it stands for sounds even more official: Standard Operating Procedure. It’s a document which outlines a process within a business. What’s the purpose of the process? What are the steps to follow? Who will do different parts of the processes, and which parts can’t begin until another part is finished?

I was telling a friend about the process documents I have for running my business, and he said, “oh, you mean SOPs?” I could feel a visceral reaction to that term. It made the muscles in my back and neck tense up.

“Yeah, SOPs,” I said. “But they aren’t Standard Operating Procedures. They’re Sloppy Operating Procedures.”

Every business has processes. The employees of that business follow these processes to build a product, or perform a service.

Processes make businesses possible. Processes help the business create a consistent product, at scale. Through repetition, processes allow businesses to create more of their product, at higher quality, with lower expenses -- to increase profits. Each time a process is followed is another opportunity to reduce error, or to simplify the process.

It took me a really long time to realize that processes are important for creatives, too. I thought that process was the enemy of creativity. I’ve come to learn that process is creativity’s best friend.

I wasn’t completely wrong in thinking that process was the enemy of creativity. My problem was that I was thinking about process in the wrong way. I was thinking of process as an SOP -- Standard Operating Procedure, when I needed to be thinking of a process as the other SOP -- Sloppy Operating Procedure.

Whenever I sat down to try to writing a Standard Operating Procedure, my brain would shut down. It wasn’t until I gave myself permission to suck -- permission to create a Sloppy Operating Procedure -- that I really made progress.

The Sloppy Operating Procedure is not a neatly-edited list of steps and standards and dependencies that help you deliver a product.

No, the Sloppy Operating Procedure is a living document. It’s disorganized. It has free-written paragraphs that might be incomplete or end mid-sentence. It’s full of grammar and spelling mistakes. The Sloppy Operating Procedure is, well, sloppy.

There are two important mechanisms that make the Sloppy Operating Procedure powerful.

One is that the Sloppy Operating Procedure kills procrastination. It does this in a couple of ways.

One way the Sloppy Operating Procedure kills procrastination is that it gets you started on creating a process document. If you’re expecting to sit down and crank out a polished Standard Operating Procedure document, you’re going to put it off.

The second way that the Sloppy Operating Procedure kills procrastination is that it makes it easier to do things that are boring or repetitive. This point requires some more explanation.

I may dread collecting data for my monthly income reports, but the reason for the dread can be found in a document called “How to Be a Hacker.” A document dating back to 1996, which outlines the values of the “hacker” -- a word which has gained a lot of baggage over the years, but which to me still means someone who likes to know how something works, who will tinker around to find new ways of doing things.

I shared this hacker credo in my first book, Design for Hackers, and rule number three of this credo explains the second way that the Sloppy Operating Procedure kills procrastination. That rule is as follows: Boredom and drudgery are evil.

Boredom and drudgery are evil. Anything that you’ve had to figure out one time, you shouldn’t have to figure out a second time. And this, I’ve found, is at the root of why I procrastinate on some tasks in my business.

So the reason I used to dread collecting the information for my income reports is that I’ve already figured out how to collect information for my income reports, and I don’t want to figure it out again.

I don’t want to ask myself again, “are book sales cash-based or accrual-based? What are all of the places my books are published again? How do I get a report from this aggregator?” I’ve already answered these questions once. I don’t want to answer them again.

Since I create Sloppy Operating Procedures, the second time I do a process, I don’t have everything all figured out from the first time I did that process. I have some sloppy notes. My notes might say:

“Collecting Amazon book sales: Have to convert currencies from each country into USD. Maybe there’s a way to automate this?”

That’s what it might say after the first time I collect Amazo...

Chris Wilken (@whereswilken) is founder and CEO of Let's Fix Security. He takes a behavioral approach to thinking about security, trying to make good security practices easy to implement. As a small business owner and a person in general, I've been thinking more and more about how to stay secure online.

As soon as you start trying to think about how to stay secure online, you start to feel overwhelmed. It's hard to think up new passwords that are tough to hack, and it's even harder to keep them all straight. The two-factor authentication that more and more services are starting to require is annoying.

I have limited resources as a solopreneur. Any unexpected interruption or loss of data means I'm not working on the things I want to be working on. Yet I also don't have the resources to have a full-time security expert to keep things buttoned up. It's probably the same for you. So this episode is for you.

In this episode, we'll talk about:

• Are you a target? You don't have to be high-profile to be a victim of a security breach. Find out why everyone is vulnerable.
• How can good habits make security easy? We often put off thinking about digital security because it can be overwhelming. Throughout this whole conversation we'll be talking about how to reduce overwhelm so you can take action.
• Learn what the four "buckets" of security are. We'll be talking about how to prioritize your security concerns, again so you can take action. Make sure your most important stuff is secure.

One thing I wanted to mention. I talk in this conversation about canisters for securing cryptocurrency paper wallets. I researched further, and it turns out that's not what they're called, so if you search, you'll have trouble finding them.

They're actually intended to be "pill cases,". They are still very handy for keeping paper-based two-factor authentication numbers – especially if you're nomadic or traveling.

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Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/digital-security-basics/

A long and detailed update about the status of my Colombian visa.

Before I moved to Colombia, I lived several “mini lives” in Medellín. I came and lived here for a few months. I escaped the very worst portion of the Chicago winters.

There was a phenomenon I experienced every time I came here, which taught me a lot about how I think about time. It always happened right around the three week mark.

The pace of life in Medellín is different from the pace of life in Chicago. It’s slower. People talk slower, people walk slower. That thing where you stand on the right side of the escalator so people can pass on the left -- yeah, people don’t really do that here. They stand wherever they like. It’s usually not a problem. It’s rare that anyone climbs up the escalator while it’s moving, anyway.

Whenever I came on a trip to Medellín, the same thing happened: The first week, the slower pace of life was refreshing. The second week, as I was trying to get into a routine, it started to get annoying. The third week, some incident would occur, and I would -- I’m not proud to say -- lose my shit.

The last time I went through this transition, it was a concert malfunction. I showed up to the theater to see a concert, and the gates were locked. A chulito wrapper rolled by in the wind, like a tumbleweed. Nobody was around, except a stray cat.

Is it the wrong day? I confirmed on the website: The concert is today, at this time, at this place. So where is everybody?

As I walked around the building, looking for another entrance, I saw a security guard. He told me the concert was cancelled. Something broken on the ceiling of the theater.

This was especially aggravating because of everything I had gone through to get these tickets. My foreign credit card didn’t work on the ticket website, so I had to go to a physical ticket kiosk. But then the girl working the kiosk said the system was down. So I came back the next day, and the system was also down. No, it wasn’t “still” down -- it was just down “again.” So I waited in a nearby chair in the mall for forty-five minutes. Then I finally got my tickets.

And now the concert is cancelled. I go to the ticket booth at the theater to get my money back. But they tell me I can’t do that here -- I have to go to a special kiosk, across town. Oh, and I can’t do it today -- they won’t be ready to process my refund until tomorrow.

I take the afternoon off to go get my refund. After standing in line for half an hour, they tell me they can’t process my refund on my foreign credit card. I have to fill out a form, which they’ll mail to the home office in Bogotá. I should get my refund within ten days.

I’m always wary that I’m an immigrant living in another country -- that sometimes the way they do things in that country makes no sense to me. I never want to come off as the “impatient gringo.” But at this point, I become the impatient gringo. I demand my money back, and recount the whole experience to the clerk. In my perturbed state, my Spanish is even more embarrassingly broken.

I give in, fill out the form, and leave the ticket kiosk -- without my money. And I’ve been through this enough times to know what’s coming.

Out on the sidewalk, in an instant, as if a switch were flipped in my brain, I go from steaming with anger, to calm as a clam. Months worth of pent-up tension melts away from the muscles in my neck and back. I feel relaxed -- almost high.

I call this moment the “temporal switch.” I’ve talked to other expats about this phenomenon, and they report something similar. That when you first come to Medellín, it takes awhile to get into the rhythm of life here. But once you’re in that rhythm, you’re more relaxed, more laid back. You’re even happier.

You might wonder what my concert catastrophe has to do with the rhythm of life in Colombia. I might be wrong, but somehow it seems that malfunctions are incredibly common here. It certainly seems so to myself and other expats that live here, and even Colombians agree. (If the concert incident is any support for this theory, I’ll add that I never did get a refund -- I ended up calling AMEX to do a chargeback.)

These malfunctions have a symbiotic relationship with the rhythm of life. The internal chatter I experience whenever I make the temporal switch might provide some insight. I’m telling myself, “Things aren’t going to work out the first time you try them. You might as well relax, go with the flow, and enjoy the moment.”

So perhaps everyone is telling themselves that. “Things aren’t going to work out the first time you try them.” That could be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In any case, even if things don’t work out on the first try, don’t worry. It will work out eventually. As the Colombians say,