I recently finished reading Things a Little Bird Told Me by Biz Stone. FYI Biz is one of the co-founders of twitter. In his book he drives the reader through his life and explores the founding and creation of the internet’s favorite microblog. It’s a pretty interesting read, and I highly recommend you check the book out.
Twitter has changed the world, no doubt about it. It allows people to do much more than just share (in 140 characters or less) what they’re eating for breakfast. People can organize through twitter more easily than ever before (see the Arab Spring) and quite literally change communities, countries, and the global landscape. Pretty cool.
As interesting as twitter is, I think the why behind Biz’s book is even more important. He emphasizes the importance of empathy. Its unsurprising that given Biz’s outlook, the spirit of twitter is heavily infused with this same ethos. This seems like a rather obvious way to go about founding a successful company, doesn’t it? ‘What’s best for our people(users/company members)’ > ‘what’s best for profits/shareholders.’ If you take care of people first, the other important elements (like profits) have a better chance of appearing. That’s powerful stuff.
A really great empathetic example Biz highlights stems from the Arab Spring in 2009-2010. There was a day in Tehran when organizers were planning (through twitter) to march en masse in protest of the current regime’s totalitarian policies. Twitter’s back-end was in dire need of upgrades (someone was definitely itching to rake db:migrate), and these upgrades were planned for the day on which these protests were to occur. News of this hit twitter HQ and the maintenance was postponed.
Just as amazing, this kind of empathy was noticed by twitter users during the unstable days of the site. When twitter was crashing far too often in its early days, users actually sent pizza to twitters HQ. These users knew the twitter engineers were probably going crazy trying to fix the site, and they figured that a bit of kindness (in the form of a wonderful, cheesy, Italian pastry) might make the bug fixing a little more bearable. Twitter was openly empathetic, which instilled a sense of empathy in its user base. The engineers weren’t perceived as being at fault by the users, they were seen as people who were probably really stressed out, and in need of some kindness.
This back and forth, of giving and receiving kindness, really struck me.
I’ve always tacitly considered myself to show some empathy, but I’ve never really thought about it as an actual concept. As I started paying more attention to empathy, I, myself, started changing. I started becoming more positive. I started noticing that I was becoming much better at listening when other spoke. I started smiling more at strangers. Little things, but I feel like they make a big difference when added up, and I think its a great outlook.
I’d regret not mentioning anything about software development in this post. It goes without saying that good developers are able to show empathy towards those that will end up using what they build. Not only can empathy be healthy mentally (at least for me), but it can have tangible benefits. Your latest build/release may be that much better because you’re putting yourself in the shoes of the end user.
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