Hard stuff. Great privilege.
How I felt stupid and made wise decisions
Sometimes we need a privilege to feel stupid. (Ok, if you don’t need this privilege, you can think that I wrote the first sentence just because I loved the way it sounded. Anyway…)
Stanford is one of the greatest places on earth to get this privilege. Especially, the computer science classes. For instance, before starting this post, I was reading about search strategies in graphs that are called breadth-first search and depth-first search and trying to understand (trying is a key word here) the big-O notation that describes their efficiency…
Hard stuff.
Great privilege.
In Russia we say “every joke has a piece of joke,” which means in English: “There’s a grain of truth in every joke,” So, I really found it very useful to feel myself stupid in the CS classes. And here is why.
My background is in investigative reporting. Before becoming a JSK Fellow at Stanford I was leading a team of investigative reporters in the Moscow-based newspaper called Novaya Gazeta for more than 10 years. In other words, my job was to find bad things about all sorts of crooks and write interesting stories based on these findings. When I came to the U.S. I was told that in American English my job is described differently — “hold the powerful accountable.” Anyway…
So, half a year ago I came to Stanford with this idea of somehow automating this process so that we better “hold those powerful accountable.” And of course, I hoped that in one year of CS classes I would be able to build this tool by myself. Just now, I shifted my glaze again from writing this text to the breadth-first search strategy and the big-O notation and laughed at myself one more time: “What an idiot you were half a year ago.”
Understanding what is impossible is a great skill. It can save you a lot of time. Once I realized that I can’t build the tool by myself, I started seeking advice from people who know how to build these tools. I’ve heard a lot of interesting and very useful things from them, but in the end, all of them meant the same: “You need to start a company, you need to apply for money, you need to hire people, you need to become a boss…”
And I was listening to them and nodding the way we usually nod to somebody who has been talking for five hours and you missed the Super Bowl because of this speech (for those reading me in Russia: I actually meant the final of the football World Cup). But this time I didn’t feel stupid, I just felt that I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to start companies, I don’t want to apply for money, I don’t want to hire people.
And these numerous “don’t wants” automatically led to “what then do you want?” Such a simple and such a difficult question.
(A very quick side note about simple-difficult questions. Many years ago a little girl in Moscow asked me: “Why do grownups say about years that they fly and about seconds on the traffic light that they drag on?” I promised her to answer one day. Anyway…)
So, in some time I realized that actually the only thing I want to do is to publish stories. In other words, I want to do the same thing I’ve been doing for more than 10 years already. Sounds so easy, but how many times we’ve made wrong choices because we felt this social pressure to move up the career ladder?
The privilege of feeling stupid sometimes leads to wise decisions. I realized what I love, what I miss and on what I don’t need to spend time.
Someone might ask at this moment: “Wait a second, have you just used 644 words to tell us that you are “too stupid to accomplish your project idea?” After spending half a year in the Bay Area — this world capital of euphemisms — I know what to answer to this criticism: “No, I’ve spent 644 words already to tell you that I decomposed my project idea.”
Decomposition is a great technique that coding can teach you. The moment I realized that I don’t want to move anywhere up the corporate ladder, but just have fun doing stories, was the moment when I loved coding. That was the moment when I started treating coding not as a hard science, but as a tool to better tell stories. And that was the time when I was able to solve my first journalism problem with code that I’ve written by myself. And what is even more important: I realized that this skill will now remain with me for the rest of my life.
So, my project idea hasn’t changed since the first quarter at Stanford. But what has changed is the way I want to accomplish it. Instead of trying to build a kind of panacea tool for investigative reporters worth millions of dollars, I’ll focus on building some smaller, but more practical tools, that I hope would help me and other reporters find more bad things about croo … ah, I mean “keep the powerful accountable.”
