Two Different Mindsets
Intro
Throughout life we learn to adapt to how other people think, speak and make decisions. We alter our ways to exhibit and perceive thoughts and emotions towards and from various people to enjoy better communication and deeper connection with them.
Rather than using the same way to connect with everybody we learn how to adjust our own style to make more sustainable, enjoyable and efficient connections with people around us. But to connect with different people smoothly different adjustments are often “required”.
Why is there no single way of communication that “just works” with everybody? Why can’t we just “be ourselves”, “act naturally” and keep discovering that one natural behavior achieves desired results just fine?
Abstract
I think the key to why people “respond well” to different ways of communication lays in the fact that different people use their brains in fundamentally different ways.
Let me explain the idea by an example. I will use engineer vs. business mindset dichotomy to keep it short.
A while ago I could say that someone thinks and acts more like an engineer or more like a businesswoman simply because her life predominantly had to do with engineering or with business.
Now I suggest replacing this logic by an alternate one. She used to be and now is a person whose brain prefers certain way of thinking. Hence she had a predisposition to become an engineer or a businesswoman; which is exactly what happened.
Simply put, the way someone thinks is not due to the nature of what she used to do in life. It goes the other way around: what the person has been doing in life is largely the result of the very fact that throughout the years she used to prefer certain way of thinking.
Understanding this concept turned out to be more important for me than getting all the facts right. Now, being aware of what people do, observing how they act and listening to how they speak allows me to have an insight to the way they think and thus adjust my communication style accordingly, for the mutual benefit.
Model
It won’t be exactly what I’m about to get into details. But if you wish to remember one thing it would be: don’t underestimate the ultimate differences between analysis-based and faith-based ways of living.
Certain behavioral traits can be grouped together. Together they form a solid system through which an individual sees the world. Let’s take “analysis-based” and “faith-based” approaches as seeds and grow the universes of traits around them.
- Along with analytical approach comes critical thinking. Then follows worst-case scenario analysis. It implies negative thinking and being pessimistic until proven otherwise. There follows precise structure and organization of thought. This, in turn, translates into how an analytical person would reason, present an argument or outline the course of action. This becomes the basis from which she would act and expect others act. She would stick to the plan until a better plan is presented; and the definition of “the better plan” would again involve worst-case scenario analysis, critical thinking and prospective course of action outlined step-by-step.
- Along with faith comes trust in and attachment to the upcoming result. It implies positive thinking; castles in the sky. This translates to being optimistic about the outcome and ignoring red flags along the way. The faith-driven person does not need a plan, at least not in the analytical definition of what the plan is. She knows the pieces will eventually come together one way or another. Talking about the worst-case scenario is pretty much pointless: a faith-driven person believes that if something is not working out, a new, totally unexpected opportunity will present itself and that would be the one to switch to.
A truly analytical person would never be dumbfounded or taken aback. She is already prepared and well-equipped for several worst-case scenarios. “Anything different is good”: if something does not go according to the plan, it can be nothing but a pleasant surprise.
A truly faith-driven person, on the other end, can hardly be pleasantly surprised. Not to say she is waiting for the success, but she is certainly expecting one. When you are prepared for the world to turn to you and have dismissed other possibilities, why bother acknowledging that the world does indeed cooperate?
Theory
I am coming to the conclusion that being analytical- or faith-driven is more or less a hard-coded thing for a grown up.
It is not something that can be easily changed. Nor should it be, given that the whole character of the person largely revolves around the way she observes the world. Changing it instantaneously would almost certainly kick her way out of her comfort zone to say the least.
Having accepted this it’s natural to expect that throughout our lives:
- Analytical people will constantly be reminded that the people around them often are reckless and don’t have a clue of fundamental cause-effect relationship. They just seem to try and fail only to try and fail again.
- Faith-driven people, on the other hand, would be surprised how often their bright ideas are not supported by the people around them, when all it should take for everybody around is to “just” trust and follow.
Much like muscles in our body tend to overdevelop to compensate for the ones that, for some reason, are not doing their job well, our brain would also adjust to “compensate” for the “downsides” of our major way of thinking.
- For those who tend to think analytically, their brain would strongly resist any desire to have faith in something that obviously has drawbacks. And the more analytical someone is the more drawbacks would she see in pretty much any idea. Being perfectionists by nature, often times even success of a similar idea would not be a convincing factor for an analytical person as long as they can point out what possible alternative scenarios might have yielded different results.
- For those who tend to rely on faith in their ideas, their brain would pretty much become incapable of performing or even following an analysis of a worst-case scenario. Faith-driven people literally lose the ability to learn from their mistakes. Since plans are never cut in stone, something not going as it was originally supposed to is hardly a mistake. The world was not ready, the time has not come yet, the people involved did not have faith strong enough to push it through — but nothing was done wrong. A person powered by faith will continue believing in her ideas until some of them eventually work out.
Language Barrier
Bitter irony is that when a mature faith-driven person starts dealing with a mature analytical person they are destined to speak in different languages being unaware of this very fact.
I spent some time trying to pinpoint what sorts of “language barriers” cause most troubles and have identified two major pitfalls to watch for.
Misalignment: Responsibility
The concept of responsibility is fundamentally different, even when the same words are being used.
Analytical people would weigh the pros and cons, estimate the amount of time and energy required from their side, and say “yes” once they are willing to commit.
People of faith would accept a milestone as soon as they believe hitting it goes along the path to success they have envisioned.
Later on if or when something goes wrong an analytical person would apologize for the inconvenience, find a flaw in her analysis and come up with a new plan that accomplishes the higher-level goal. To some extent, she would take such a failure personally: after all, the cards were out, the commitment was made and signed by her, therefore, something that should have been accounted for apparently was not.
The person of faith, on the other hand, would not take missing a mid-term goal anyhow seriously. As long as it doesn't feel that overall success is anyhow endangered, they will keep moving forward. If the obstacle is severe, their higher-level intuition will kick in and some “big gun” will be introduced into the picture — and they would prefer to see themselves as visionaries and saviors, as the driving force behind making things happen, rather than as someone who did not do the planning part well.
To an analytical person a commitment backed up by faith is not more trustworthy than a horoscope. Unfortunately, faith-driven people frequently have amazing speaking skills. Even people who are extremely strong in analytics would sometimes find themselves fooled by a convincing story that could not possibly pass any rational rejection test yet was presented just right to “click it” and get accepted.
To a faith person the analysis of exactly why certain commitment can be made does not carry much value. Something can be done and the person who claims this can be trusted — that’s good enough for a faith-driven person to proceed. Unfortunately, she would almost never understand and appreciate that the degree of confidence and the success rate of commitments coming from an analytical person is much higher compared to what she might usually be getting from other people.
Simply put, the strength of the very same English phrase “I will have it done” ranges widely from vague “this is likely to happen according to what I believe should happen” up until “I hereby commit to having this done and will relentlessly do whatever it takes to keep my word”.
Misalignment: Motivation
Another big area of misunderstanding is the source of motivation different people employ.
People of faith consider achieving the end result to be the ultimate goal. They want to “get it”, be it the reward, destination, recognition or something else. How easy or hard has the path been has nothing to do with the overall satisfaction. It only matters whether they have made it there.
Naturally, this attitude teaches to “stick to the opportunities”, “chase success” and “snatch the victory”. For such a straightforward definition of the goal people of faith are more than willing to change their approach completely as long as they see a “shortcut” that may get to the goal faster or with less effort.
Analytical people find joy in solving complex problems. It’s equally meaningless to be doing something too easy or something absolutely impossible: an obvious success or an obvious failure teaches nothing new. The sweet spot is to work on something on the boundary of extremely challenging yet possible to accomplish.
Using a shortcut to get to the solution may be pleasant but has bitter aftertaste. Not noticing one beforehand is, in a way, a planning failure. Constantly improving the analytical skills themselves is a crucial goal on its own. The hard way that leads to the success is often as important and rewarding as the success itself.
Analytical people would often perceive successful faith-driven people as cheaters. Indeed, due to the survivorship bias, the most successful people would be the ones that didn’t have to work hard for their success — all it took to get there was to pick the right shortcut or two.
People of faith, on the other hand, would find the approach of analytical people unimaginative. Why focus on delivering a flawless, near-perfect result if by opening large number of doors over an extended period of time the treasure, eventually, is to be found right behind some of them?
If an analytical person is being presented someone else’s success as the reference, her first thinking would often go along the lines of “they have been lucky to be doing the right thing at the right place at the right time”. Asking to repeat this success “because someone else managed to make it through” is a sure way to get an analytical person suspicious. After all, how does one’s success story guarantee future success of a similar idea?
Similarly, carefully analyzing how big of a role did luck play in the referenced scenario is a sure way to annoy a faith-driven person. “Just try it, you’ll have even more luck since you now have the path outlined for you” — would their faith say, and it’s hard to blame such an approach.
Example Characters
The above can be illustrated by looking at several fictional characters.
Not mentioning Mr. Spock, a canonical analytical person would be Dr. Gregory House. Solving tricky puzzles is what his life is about. He wouldn't hesitate to use borderline methods and even put other people’s health and lives at risk in order to get to the solution he’s seeking for.
In the other camp, discounting Forrest Gump, a decent example of a person of faith would be James Bond. He often gets himself into trouble by literally walking into some relatively predictable pitfalls. Consecutively, he requires lots of lucky circumstances to get away with it yet another time.
Out of Dr. House and Mr. Bond the latter accomplishes results of larger magnitude. At the same time, he requires much greater deal of luck than the former.
It is also worth pointing out that both characters have complementary counterparts, namely Dr. James Wilson and Q, who provide significant help along the way.
The Real World
As you have probably guessed by now, I am about to throw in an assumption that successful engineers would mostly be the people of analytical mindset while successful businessmen would often rely on their faith as their main strength.
Obviously there are always shades of grey, but the differences in behaviors are noticeable enough and can be categorized accordingly.
The World from an Engineering Standpoint
When engineers are deep in a conversation they would constantly challenge each other. They will find flaws in each other’s reasoning and shape their models of the world to ultimately account for every possible issue they can see.
Engineers love Murphy’s law: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”. They would analyze every aspect of the problem and its domain until they get convinced they understand it well enough to crack.
Throughout the process of decomposition, a real-life problem starts to look much like a chess one. The constraints are clearly identified, the figures are placed and the task is to find that one strategy that leads to flawless victory no matter how your opponent would try to counter.
For people with perfect analytical mind the games are won before the first move is made. They play to win or don’t play.
If there is more than one flawless strategy, then the constraints are too loose and should be tightened for increased fun and excitement. Do it faster. Do it using less resources. Make it perfect. Strive for beauty along with efficiency.
Another good quote Google Site Reliability Engineers like to use is “hope is not a strategy”. It indeed is not: when GMail is at risk of going down, the only right thing to do is to preventatively eliminate this possibility or at least reduce its chance to an acceptable, negligibly tiny one.
While the above quotes are very much in line with how engineers speak, talking in that manner to a business person may cause troubles.
“It’s working out well for the others, why are you trying to find more ways it may not work for you?” — would a reply from a business person often sound like. My personal favorite is: “We are going to make certain assumptions along our way to success. Don’t try to account for any possible bad scenario, just do the right things and let’s count on getting lucky”.
While being an amazing strategy at the late stages of poker tournaments, life is not meant to allow someone else turn it into a gamble because that’s a natural way of living for that person. Admittedly, faith-driven people are not great at critical thinking and worst-case scenario analysis.
The World from Business Standpoint
Business people tend to skip the details and talk big.
All they need to establish a connection is a high-level confirmation that they understand some phenomenon in more or less the same way. As soon as the beliefs of one businessman align well with the prospective picture of the world of another businessman, they “click”. The details are less important: once they intuitively agree that the idea is plausible and money can be made there, details aside, it’s a done deal.
“Never be afraid to try something new. Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark. A large group of professionals built the Titanic”. This Dave Barry’s quote is an example of high-level speech people of faith love using. Inserting such a phrase makes business presentation stronger: indeed, the speaker assures us that she is well aware of the magnitude of her ambitions but doesn’t let it question the strength of her faith in success.
An engineer, on the other hand, would instantly point out that there is no rational explanation how “the Ark argument” has anything to do with convincing her to commit to a crazy idea.
One can’t compare Titanic, as one of many vessels built, to an Ark, that stands as one of a kind. The of evidence for Ark’s reliability is based on one case; putting aside the fact we still exist, who knows if it would have survived another journey? Given a choice on how to cross the Atlantic, an engineer would certainly pick Olympic, Titanic’s twin, over Ark. While she is well aware of Titanic’s tragedy and a dozen more, transatlantic travel industry is consistently producing reliable boats and the success rate for them reaching the other side of the ocean is high enough — while no substantial engineering analysis of how reliable the Ark is was ever performed.
An engineer would be very careful trusting someone who compares Titanic to Ark in an attempt to convince her to pursue working on something. It would be — correctly — heard as an indicator of absence of anyhow decent plan, at least for her definition of how the “plan” should look like.
A Note on Sustainability
While I myself have come to the world of business from engineering, I would like to point out that while putting this analysis together I have tried to be as unbiased as possible, and have done so for a reason.
Fundamentally our societal structure as of today needs experts from both worlds.
It’s true that it does take tons of critical thinking and worst-case-scenario sort of analysis to drive technology forward. Faith is by far not enough to build satellite-based global positioning system or an Internet service for a billion users. Experience and hard work come in handy here.
It’s true that to bring technology to the people, on the other hand, it takes a visionary. Someone who has an idea, believes in it and leads the way. The stories of the ideas that did make it to change our lives today would often feature people who were obsessed by their idea and ignoring negative arguments. One has to firmly state that the moon is solid to get the first spacecraft there.
History does know quite a few people who believed in the idea that just could not work, but to me this only demonstrates how does the mechanism, that moves the world forward, function.
Also I have come to an understanding that the way analytical and visionary ways of thinking co-exist we will always disagree on our contribution.
Those who do the math will proudly believe that the rocket could not take satellites into space if not their zealous, careful work. And they will be right. Those who have been obsessed by how great would it be to connect a billion people online would attribute the success of such a product to the fact that they have presented this idea in the right way to the right people. And they will be right too.
Within engineers and visionaries it may be possible to share the credit among the team for it to sum up to 100%. But if you ask each group to estimate their contribution individually, leaving some credit to the other group, the sum among both groups will always exceed 100%.
What Have We Learned
Luckily, our world is not black and white. Canonically analytical and canonically faith-driven people don’t appear often. Under normal circumstances we deal with some blends of these two extreme personalities.
Nonetheless, the traits have been identified and behavioral patterns are clear. I myself have transitioned from an engineer into a business person and have witnessed drastic differences in the ways these two world operate.
Having observed engineers in their natural habitat and being part of it for quite some time, I can confirm that many of us do more or less mimic Dr. House or Q from MI6 in the ways we think and act. Engineers prefer structure and predictability. They can afford to rely on each other in many ways. Their planning, even for years ahead, has nothing to do with daydreaming and can be surprisingly accurate. James Bond type of people, who happened to have the world work out well for them all the time, are quite rare in engineering, although one does work for Google.
On the other hand, being exposed to the business side of the world I can confirm that business people talk and make decisions differently. They assign values to ideas based on how well those ideas match their beliefs, based on who has come up with the idea, based on how, when and where was the idea presented. Implementation details are not on their radar as long as there is enough evidence to back up the assumption that the idea can be implemented and the people who can reliably make it live are available and can be motivated to do so.
What Can We Do
Having thought this over carefully, it crossed my mind that there may be some hints younger me might have found useful a while ago; hints slightly less general and more actionable than “Surround yourself with people you are comfortable with” or “Listen, smile, agree and then do whatever the f**k you were gonna do anyway”.
I have to make a disclaimer here that my heart is with the engineering world and, much like I’d love to be as unbiased as possible, next few paragraphs would probably be favoring analytical approach.
What Can Business People Do
Be prepared visionaries are often not taken seriously.
That’s one of the destinies of the visionary. Although it’s obvious that somebody out here is seeing what the future would bring, people in general are having hard time telling the picture of the future from plain fantasies.
It’s great to be able to say “I was the guy who first believed in Google and I know Sergey personally”. It’s even better when it sounds “Yes, I am a strong believer in collaborative consumption, and in fact I was one of the first investors into AirBnb, which yielded me several million net”. While sounds awesome, not many people have the luxury to present themselves this way. And, frankly, we all understand that even big prior successes may have to largely owe luck for themselves.
Unlike engineering capacities your business skills are harder to be judged. An engineer with background and reputation will almost always deliver the service she has committed to deliver. In your world, due to the very nature of how business works, you will not be able to provide guarantees no matter how clear your vision is.
But don’t let this fact force you to focus exclusively on mastering the skills of talking people into believing you. At the end wise people from the other, analytical, camp will look at the facts, not at how well you speak. So grow your network and build the track record. Start early and it will pay off.
When talking to engineers, be willing to make sacrifices.
Understand that fundamentally the level of guarantee and commitment you can get from an engineer is higher than the faith you can bring to the table from your side. Her skills would build the service, while your connections guarantee neither money, nor traction, nor bright future.
My business partner once told me: “There can be no guarantees in what I do! If you heard something as if I promised to have that done, you heard it wrong!”. Needless to say, the commitments from my side not only have been more formal and more carefully communicated: they have been accomplished or just about to get there.
Therefore, be willing to compromise on the terms. Do your homework better to convince the people who refuse to trust your faith and want the proof. Establish strong partnerships before starting to build the product. Raise money first and do it in a way that ensures that your investors would keep funding your project while you are searching for other markets or considering to pivot the product.
Keep in mind that from the point of view of an engineer an issue in any of these business tasks will be your and only your fault. Engineers don’t like to gamble. They like to deliver products and see them take off. And you will have to speak in their language to have them follow you.
Improve clarity of your communication.
On its own this is a much broader topic but it should be touched here at least briefly.
Engineers like the communication to be structured and complete. Especially over the e-mail. Look back to the last few e-mail threads involving engineers and business people. The engineers would often be the guys with the last reply. Because we are addicted to completeness. We follow up.
Engineering “protocol” to communications is quite a formal one. Questions are asked in the way that allows — and expects — short, clear and simple answers. Ideally an e-mail to an engineer should be composed such that it is possible to give a meaningful and useful answer by spending just a few seconds.
So, when communicating with an engineer, answer the questions she asks. All of them. Like the engineers in her world would do. Make sure your answers answer precisely the questions asked and do so in full. If uncertain, make it clear that you understand that your answer may not be complete and that you would be willing to discuss the matter in more detail or answer lower lever clarification questions as the follow-up.
Similarly, formulate your questions in a way that answering them in complete and unambiguous manner takes seconds. The less clear your question is and the more effort it requires to answer, the higher the chance is it would just be ignored.
Break down multiple unrelated or loosely-related topics into different e-mails. And stick to this breakdown!
This way, even months and years after communications took place they make perfect sense. It’s clear which decisions were made, who was supposed to follow up, if that was required and what the result of the follow-up was — or where should one look for it.
If you see that more effort than plain “yes” would be required to reply, it’s your job to reformulate the question or suggestion to invite a short and simple answer. Instead of “How would this look like?” you may say “I’d like to better understand how this would look, could you find time to talk to me for half an hour after lunch today?” Instead of “How would these modules communicate?” ask “Am I getting it right that you are working on a design doc for this? Could you prepare a draft by Wednesday so that we could take a look together?”
Special “kudos” go to people who don’t bother transferring ownership, asking questions or stating action items in the way they communicate. If you just like writing as a process itself, there’s Facebook to give you audience. People with analytical mindsets would soon start ignoring the e-mails from you.
While formalities may feel constraining to a high-flying business visionary, try sticking to them for a while when dealing with analytical people. You’ll be surprised how smoother the communication would become, how much more you would achieve and how noticeable the relief from stress will be.
And if you wish an engineer to never want to deal with you in the future, nothing works better than bloated communication. Don’t provide clear answers to her questions. Write long thoughts on unrelated topics and don’t ask explicit questions. Reply with an idea or suggestion that has nothing to do with how the conversation started. Engineers will start avoiding you very soon, and you will be able to dedicate 100% of your time to corporate bullshit… err, to important strategic conversations.
Admit your mistakes.
What you consider an attempt to express your optimistic picture of the world other people may and will take as your plan. Consecutively, when most of this “plan” doesn’t come true, you would develop an aura of a very anxious person who tends to be overoptimistic — read “wrong” — more often than not.
And nothing can make an analytical person choose to not have anything to do with you better than demonstrating your ignorance towards your past “successes”.
If you wanted to bulid a mobile application for 100M users but ended up getting only 10K, losing the key developer and selling it to a competitor — that’s a failure. It doesn’t matter if you managed to make some money of it. You may be able to “sell” this story as the demonstration of your solid business skills to other business people. But not to an engineer.
Be aware that you may be overestimating yourself.
While in more arranged and structured environments strong signals and metrics exist, business skills are very situational. The nature of the business world makes it less predictable and more random.
This makes the people deep involved in it more likely to suffer from the Dunning–Kruger effect.
Basically, you may think you are awesome because you have:
- decent understanding of how the world works,
- vision of how it should it look like soon,
- good idea of your role and your prospective contribution to the world,
- solid presentation and speaking skills,
- some success in the past, and
- listeners, supporters and followers, who constantly fuel your belief of how awesome of a business person you are.
Unfortunately, one can easily have all six bullet points of the above and yet not be as great in business as you think.
Business team can rely on the engineering team delivering the results. Engineering team can not rely on business team to have the business side covered. Building the product is easier than selling it, and you are the one doing the latter.
With great power comes great responsibility and this responsibility starts with how true are you to yourself and how well do you understand your strengths and weaknesses. Otherwise you’ll be risking letting your team down.
What Can Engineers Do
Master your negotiation skills.
Your words and commitments are orders of magnitude stronger than those from many other people. Combine this with your skill of rationally presenting an argument no matter how complex it is. And with your ability to express thoughts clearly in writing, over e-mail.
That’s a damn strong superpower that would be embarrassing not to use. Yet, many people with engineering mindsets pass on it from time to time.
They carefully design and develop stuff at work, yet accept job offers “because I liked it there” without going through their standard “routine” of considering worst-case scenarios and protecting against them.
They choose to speak “they way people are supposed to speak in those situations” vastly underestimating the effect their “standard”, analytical, approach could have — and the respect it could have earned had they chosen to use it. With business people around this prevents them from making connections that may have changed their whole lives later on — just because they were afraid to “misbehave”.
Keep in mind that you are superior to most people around you when it comes to decomposing big picture into pieces and finding weak links. But people who would be persuading you to do something for them are, in their turn, well trained in making you lower your defense and follow your intuition instead. They won’t be able to fool your brain. But they can sneak past it and call for your “gut feeling”, which is surprisingly easy to be fooled by an expert.
Often times people around you will try to abuse this fact. It would benefit you greatly if you are able to identify those “experts” and force them to play on your field of rational reasoning and critical thinking.
Build on your strengths.
You can have things done. And it scales. You are lucky to live in the XXI century where the means to be doing so are available as they have never been before.
A business person requires time, resources and sometimes luck in order to influence the world. You can do it from the bathroom, consistently, in small but persistent steps with no risks whatsoever.
Creating something that lasts long enough to mean something is a rare talent that you possess. It would be a shame to not make good use of it.
Just do stuff. Pick the right things to do and do them well. Attend conferences. Take part in competitions. Contribute back to the community. Become a tech evangelist. Give talks. Participate in an open source project. Start a blog.
Just one reasonable and appropriate comment on a tricky question on StackOverflow puts you way above many others. I know this for a fact after hiring engineers based on this very signal.
While others are waiting passively or keep complaining about stuff, choose to contribute part of your time and energy to make the world a better place. You will be surprised how soon would this approach get rewarded.
Be aware that you may be underestimating yourself.
While this bullet point may sound insulting for the people attributing themselves to the world of business, the next one will be even more insulting — so bear with me for a while.
Looking back at their successful projects engineers would literally always find it possible to have achieved the same result faster or with less resources. The feeling of imperfection, “I could have done this better”, would be there all the time.
It used to haunt me all the time until I’ve realized that engineering execution is in fact a small part of the job: analysis and planning is the big one. To bring in an analogy, an engineer is a lot like a bomb technician. The job looks routine from the outside: evacuate people and cut the red wire. But it’s not the skill of cutting the wire that makes a good bomb technician; it’s knowing a hell lot more to back up this decision and make it right all the times.
Consistency and predictability of the results, along with our availability at hand is what we are paid for. Don’t worry if something doesn’t look that difficult or impressive after you’ve built it. It’s up and running! No many products nowadays are technically impressive. From the engineering standpoint ultimately making them work is what counts.
Don’t let it catch you by surprise when you, again, find yourself surrounded by morons.
Yes, you are reading this right. Neither your definition of moron nor your estimate of their density are off. A grown up incapable of using reasoning mechanisms an average ten year old human being possesses does qualify for one. And there are plenty around.
Moreover, they will ambush you more and more often should you decide to get exposed to the world of business.
If you happen to have strong analytical mind, chances are that your level of commitment is way above commonly accepted average. To sustain your life though, you still have to count on people. You will be let down frequently, and your perfectly rational explanation of how easily could this have been avoided would just not be heard. At best.
In the world of engineering when twenty people tell you “It’s easy, would take me a day, I’ll do it”, nineteen of them will eventually do it. You might have to remind them, perhaps twice, and it would take a week instead of a day. But it will be done.
In the world of business it’s not unusual to have nineteen of those twenty people label you as someone who “doesn’t understand how business works at all” once you approach them firmly asking to keep their word. Even if you have spoken to them a while ago and have confirmed they will do it. Even if you have an e-mail from each and every of them saying “Yes, I will do it”.
My business partner once said “Yes, 95% of the people we try to work with are going to be idiots. But we should face it together as the team.” He was noticeably upset after I pointed out that those idiots are conveniently clustered in the field of business and that our initial agreement was that dealing with business issues is his job.
Bottom line: if you are an engineer willing to get involved with business tasks get ready for morons around you. Get used to it. Or delegate dealing with them to someone else. Or both. But save your nerves and energies — you will need them to build more solutions down the road.
Conslusions
Praemonitus praemunitus. Being aware of the existence of two different worlds is an important piece of knowledge. It allows you to quickly tell what drives this person. It allows you to understand which areas would she excel at and which would she be trying to avoid.
Analysis- and faith-driven processes complement each other. You will definitely need people from both sides on your team.
And, more importantly, being capable of playing both roles yourself is a huge overpower.
If you are an engineer considering going into business, or a businessman considering engineer, I’d like to wish you serenity to accept the things you cannot change, courage to change the things you can and wisdom to tell the difference.
