As I begin this post, I am nine days, six hours and 31 minutes away from leaving a very comfortable, generously-paid job where my colleagues and leadership respect me and treat me well. In just over a week’s time, my girlfriend (and adventuring partner), Aubrey, and I will be driving off into the night, embarking on an incredible roadtrip to seek out a new home somewhere beyond the Rocky Mountains.
There are no words to convey my excitement.
For as long as I’ve existed, there has always been an obligation to someone else’s rules lurking just beyond the horizon. Even on vacations, where time is theoretically mine, there was the lingering, ever-present knowledge that before I knew it, I would go back to a world of obliging someone else’s whims. For the first time, I’ll escape those bonds. It’s a feeling of freedom I’ve never known.
It must be stressed that while Full Sail has been a great place to work and I’m grateful for the experience, I had a job there and I have a handful of problems with working any “job,” no matter who supplies it. When I say job in this context, I mean any paid activity wherein you provide 40+ weekly hours in exchange for a regular paycheck, benefits and perhaps a reasonable approximation of social interaction. I’m a difficult, demanding, even impossible person, so these problems loom larger for me than perhaps they do you.
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For the last two years, one of the most fun parts of my (soon-to-end) day job has been giving the occasional tour for visiting VIPs. Sometimes my boss has his schedule packed so tight that he can’t do these tours, so I get called in as his relief. I’ll definitely miss this when I’m gone — it’s one in a small list of things I do extraordinarily well.
A couple of months back, a Washington DC-based intellectual property attorney from a prominent national firm came for a tour. Let’s call this guy Rich. I was tapped to run the tour, but when one of the owners decided to come along, I spent the bulk of the morning opening doors and walking quietly alongside the conversation. I was extra quiet when the subject turned to the recording industry. Rich explained that he wasn’t terribly popular for representing the recording industry but that it was important work. He then trotted out the same tired old tripe suggesting that a decline in recording industry revenues was caused by piracy — a decline Richard assured us could be reversed if only young people were educated on the importance of respecting intellectual property.
This is Bullshit
I listened to all of this and swallowed so hard I bruised my own throat. First of all, as has been mentioned, piracy is murderous, ruthless work done by indefensible criminals. What these guys mean is bootlegging.
I failed to ask Rich if it were possible, just even the slightest bit possible, that recording industry revenues were on the way down because the record companies make over-priced garbage. I failed to mention that education is indeed necessary… for the luddite morons who ran these businesses into the ground in the first place. I failed to point out to Rich that if each pirated track really represented a lost sale, any miraculous absence of bootlegging would have to also transform the economy dramatically as to permit people the opportunity to drop $20,000 on a half-filled iPod Classic.
I failed to say any of it. Whaddya want from me? I’m not my own man for another few weeks yet.
Even so, the encounter was instructive. I learned that there still exist real, living, breathing people who believe this bullshit. Not to be ageist, but I suspect being over 30 years old has a lot do with this, though surely there are exceptions in either direction of that mark.
The recording industry has spent millions of dollars on technical and legal measures to prevent bootlegging. The pinnacle of that achievement? A multi-million anti-piracy measure that was defeated with a Sharpie and the most impressively tarnished image of any industry that doesn’t make guns or pollution. I’m talking out of my ass, but I expect that the number of people who partake in bootlegging has only grown since this crusade began. Talk about money well spent. Can you imagine where their business model would be if, instead of wasting their money fighting an unstoppable force, they’d instead took a good hard look at the way the wind was blowing and invested that cash in reinventing their business model in such a way that made bootlegging irrelevant?
The result would be a recording industry that neither you nor I could recognize.
Instead, the RIAA makes a habit of suing the very people to whom they’d like to sell their product while attempting to destroy any service or platform that challenges the traditional ways for people to discover music.
Unstoppable Force
Anywhere there exists a non-scarce encapsulation of value, that value will be reproduced and distributed outside the bounds of the author’s license or intent. Put another way, if your shit is digital and desired, your shit will be pirated. The question with piracy isn’t whether or not it will happen. The question, rather, is whether or not your digital property is valuable enough to be worth the trouble of pirating. Trouble, here, has a very flexible definition, depending upon how much stands between wanting to distribute and being able to distribute. This varies from platform to platform, from absurdly simple with digital music to decently pain in the ass with console games.
Why? There are two simple reasons. People want things and, as we know from economics, the capacity to produce is infinitely outstripped by the capacity to desire. Secondly, and most crucially, distribution is gratifying. People feel good sharing — that’s simple human nature. In many cases, too, distribution of something digital, something protected, requires solving someone else’s puzzle. The high that comes from accomplishing something intended to be impossible is well-known nerd crack.
Piracy is Always Possible
This recipe creates a world where the dreaded boogeyman of scary piracy will always exist. Any business model where a 100% lack of piracy is integral to success is doomed to failure. What to do about this truth is a difficult question — one beyond the scope of what I can tell you here.
What’s important to understand is that time spent fighting the unstoppable is almost always time wasted.
By definition, anti-piracy measures require an investment of development time that will never benefit your paying users. Who are you working for, if not your paying users?
You have a choice. You can allocate 500 hours to one of these options:
- Building an incredible feature set that your customers love
- Developing a new anti-piracy scheme that will be defeated in X weeks and may genuinely annoy your paying customers
Which do you choose? The exhausted Microsoft vs. Apple comparison is apt here. If you’re Microsoft, you roll out Windows Genuine Advantage and truly piss off anyone who ever has to reinstall Windows. If you’re Apple, you sell a five-pack license and let your customers buy on their honor. I’m sure there’s a decent set of folks who install Leopard on more than their purchased share of machines, but the Leopard family pack is ranked #201 in Amazon’s software sales and was an even better seller when Leopard was new. And you know what? Apple makes more money through the family pack than if they were dicks by using anti-piracy measures and only selling single-user licenses.
I’ve Got One Boss
And it’s not me. The boss is the customer. By definition, my customer doesn’t give a damn about the boogeyman. They want the very best features in a piece of software that does everything it possibly can not to annoy them. As far as I’m concerned, every minute I spend on anti-piracy measures for my apps is a minute I should have spent making something incredibly useful. I’m in this to make people happy with incredibly useful stuff. If can’t focus my time on that, there’s no point.
The only time I should worry about writing code related to users who haven’t paid me money is when their existence will affect users who have. If pirates adversely impact resources essential to your paying users’ happiness, by all means, write a bit of throttling code that gives their requests a lower priority.
You’ve Got a Decision to Make
Whether or not you spend time writing code that benefits you instead of your paying customers is a personal choice. I can’t tell you what you should do — that conversation is one you need to have with your collaborators and moneymen. The temptation is a strong one. I remember how angry I was when I discovered Tallymander being distributed by iPhone bootleggers for the first time.
Still: last week, I submitted my latest app, GlobeJot, for App Store review. GlobeJot’s source contains precisely 0 lines of copy protection code.
The choice is made easier for me by Apple’s inclusion of good-enough copy protection for iPhone OS apps. Even without that, though, I wouldn’t bother putting up much of a fight. I want to make money by creating honest relationships with paying customers who appreciate that I spend every last ounce of my energies making something they will love to use.
If that ideal one day ceases to be realistic, I’ll find somewhere else to put my productive ability.
My distrust for organized, established power began early. I’m not sure how many other kindergarten students had a nemesis, but I had mine. His name was Nick Davis and he was a dickhead. The specifics of his assorted torments have been lost in the mists of my early childhood memory, but rest assured they were heinous enough to sow a burning dislike for this kid deep in my 5-year-old soul. Between Nick and the idiots who ran my after-school daycare center, I already had a handful of people I’d come to dislike at an early age.
Ms. Cordova began our first week of school by assuring my later embrace of capitalism. She took all of our school supplies, dutifully purchased by our parents with varying levels of commitment to quality workmanship, and seized them for the collective good of the class. The means of kindergarten arts and crafts production were thus pooled for the duration of the year. Knowing my mother as I do, I can only imagine how she’d seethed at this news. Despite what was invariably a limited budget, she’d been excited to provide me with quality stuff for my very first year of school. Her dismay at the thought of my rich and lustrous Crayolas being commingled with shitass waxy RoseArt crayons was a feeling that transmuted easily to anger at the well-meaning Ms. Cordova, who quickly redeemed herself as an otherwise excellent teacher.
I wasn’t thrilled to say goodbye to my first set of school goodies. I tempered my disappointment by seeking out the most exotic of markers and tools each time an art project brought us to select from the collective supply depot. In no time at all, the incident was forgotten amid all the crap that kindergarten students spend their days doing. Before I knew it, the sweet, perfect feeling of the last day of school was upon us.
Ms. Cordova said many sweet things to us and encouraged us all to do well in our lives. We then began the business of settling our kindergarten affairs: collecting our art and classwork into handmade, oversized folders. At the end, what remained of the art supply depot was redistributed to the class. We each got some say in our spoils and my top priority was to secure a year-long favorite: a long, slender Crayola marker of deep and lovely crimson – my favorite color at that age. I secured my prize and a few other selections and closed the book on kindergarten.
Or so I thought.
There remained the always interminable afternoon of mindless daycare time. This bothered me less than it otherwise might have as I contemplated the future and reflected on my collection of classroom junk. The afternoon passed unremarkably and I busied myself with my newly-claimed marker. Which, I now noticed, had a name inscribed in tiny, fine-point permanent marker and cursive script: “Nick Davis.” This, I knew, was written by his mother, doubtless similarly unaware of the seizure of property that would follow. Smugness washed over me as I relished finally getting one over on my bully. The marker’s dark red ink seemed richer than ever.
Then Nick, also a daycare inmate, strolled along to say whatever it is that very young people find so dismaying. Today, thousands of hands of Poker have taught me never to overplay my hand. Back then, I was infinitely more impulsive.
“Oh yeah? Well now I get to keep your marker,” I said, waves of invincibility and vindication blasting from every pore.
Uncharacteristically, Nick shut up. Even more unusual, he turned and left me alone. I frowned, but held onto the feeling.
Minutes later, Nick returned. Accompanying him was one of those people whose list of accomplishments ended with “completed high school” and who were thus popular at my particular daycare.
“Did you take Nick’s marker?” The daycare employee gazed at me as she spoke, words plopping out of her mouth like bits of mayonnaise.
“Uh, no,” I stammered. I then explained the restitution Ms. Cordova had made earlier that day for collectivizing our stuff.
“Yeah, but it has my name on it,” Nick squealed, pointing as emphatically as any child his age could at the meek white instrument in my hand.
The employee looked at the name scribbled on the shaft of the marker and confirmed Nick’s assessment.
She looked pained as she told me, “I’m sorry, it has his name on it, I have to give it back to him.”
I didn’t put up a fight. I hadn’t quite learned how to stand up for myself yet and, unaccountably, these employees were authorities like my teacher at school, like the police, like my mom. I relinquished the marker to a jubilant Nick.
I spent the rest of the afternoon stewing. I also hadn’t learned how to curse, but I’m sure if you translated my brainwave patterns to a modern equivalent, they would have read “What a bunch of fucking idiots.” I was never the kid who painted his nails black and listened to depressing music, but nor could I ever again blindly accept existing authority or “the way things are done.”
Today, I would change none of it. Iconoclasm is power to ignore established limitations, throw out the rulebook and go further than everyone tells you is possible. It opens your eyes to new ways of thinking and new means of solving problems. I suppose the social order requires that this way of thinking be kept to a bare minimum, but if you’re among the lucky few who delights in a bit of herecy now and then, shed your shame for it and trust the alternatives it helps you to discover.
In my adult life, few things have ever been more satisfying than going beyond what people have told me I was capable of doing.
At the same time, I find myself wondering how much this particular leaning of mine handicaps me. In the long term, I resent the hell out of being led or managed. I also dislike leading others. I am an organizational anomaly, suitable only for short-to-medium-term freelance work.
I think I’m okay with that.
I love Bear Naked granola. It’s a delicious snack that’s full of flavor and decently healthy. It makes an appearance at least once a day, either as a component of breakfast or as a mid-afternoon snack. Their Banana Nut and Peak Protein varieties are among the most satisfying consumer goods in human history.
There’s not an easy way to explain why I love Bear Naked. It’s good, obviously, but that doesn’t really tell you much. The texture is perfect for me: a good crunch without feeling like I’m chewing into a handful of gravel. The taste is friendly without being sugary or otherwise cloying. The packaging is zipper-topped with a big window that lets you inspect the contents of the bag, evaluate the topography of the granola and decide if you’re feeling like nuts or dried fruit that week.
Last Sunday I bought a bag of Bear Naked and found something unexpectedly dismaying the next day at the office. My bag was missing its zipper top. An email to their customer care folks assures me that this was anomalous — the zipper hasn’t been cut as a cost saving measure or anything. I was surprised by my relief for retaining something so seemingly unrelated to the product itself.
Surely, package design has a big role in the stuff we buy. I’m not walking through the cereal aisle in the supermarket making my granola decisions based on whether or not the package includes a zipper, but packaging helps me establish the product’s credibility. Yet, I found the more I bought Bear Naked, the more the zipper became associated with the overall experience of the granola. The zipper meant portability: I could toss my Bear Naked into my laptop bag and take it with me. The zipper allowed impulsiveness: instead of letting my hunger gnaw away at me, I could easily remove the bag from my cabinet, open it, and shake out a snack without worrying about container management or doing some sort of origami to keep the bag sealed. Best of all, the zipper provided quality assurance: with virtually no effort on my part, my granola would remain fresh and safe from staling and other food-killing yuckiness.
So while the zipper isn’t central to eating Bear Naked, it becomes central to how Bear Naked slots into the puzzle that is my every day life. Intangibles like flavor and texture bear heavily on the moment-to-moment satisfaction of having this stuff in my mouth. Without them, there’s no point and a zipper won’t make a lick of difference there.
What the zipper does is add the barest touch of lubrication to the whole process. It makes it brainlessly easy to integrate Bear Naked into the rest of what you do. It spares you the trouble of having to think, taking care of your storage chores for you.
Inevitable Annoyance
The use of every product inevitably includes the opportunity for something annoying to sneak in, either in maintenance, integration into the rest of your life’s flow, or simple consequences to overall use. There’s a huge benefit to considering those annoyances and including a little packet of grease to ease the burden on your users.
The now-standard auxiliary input jack in most cars is a great example of this: early on, five bucks worth of wiring and hardware turned into a solid, satisfying differentiator for the carmakers who were paying attention to the rise of iPod. Just a little touch, but it meant no lame car clutter, like tape adaptors or FM transmitters. Would anyone now in the market for a new car even tolerate the absence of that simple accessory?
It’s surely more expensive to develop, but MagSafe makes using a portable computer just incrementally less obnoxious every time the battery drains. Unlike the moronically-sized electric schlongs that jut out the back of almost every Dell I ever had to use, MagSafe is unobtrustive, plugs into the side of the machine, and doesn’t even really plug in at all. Bring it somewhat close to home and the magnets sort out the rest of the orientation issues for you. Best of all, it’s impossible to break off the plug.
Modern usability becomes more and more about eroding the minor annoyances that build into major resentment. No one buys a car to plug their iPod into it, granola for the included zipper, or even a computer just because they enjoy plugging it in. But by taking the time to beat back the mediocrity that creeps into those simple elements of using the product, there’s one less rough edge to gradually wear away at the love the user feels for the experience of having it in their world.
Put another way: beat on it until the suck is gone.
“You’re quitting.”
My boss is a good guy. I’ve observed to him that he is one of the most peculiar fellows I’ve ever met. Though this seems to wound him, he takes it in good cheer. While I find him utterly indecipherable, that sense of opacity doesn’t go both ways. He reads minds, when he remembers to venture outside of his own.
“…How did you know?”
I decided one afternoon in January that I would quit my job. In the midst of terrifying economic headlines, soaring unemployment and an uncertain future, I chose to separate myself from an organization that loved me, paid me well and showed me endless respect and appreciation.
“It’s nothing about working for me, or anything, is it? Because if there’s something else you’d rather be doing, we can find you a different spot, working on something else.”
Full Sail University is a private school on the northern end of Orlando. Trying to describe Full Sail takes the better part of our 200 page catalog, and even that barely scratches the surface. Let’s just say it’s one of the most incredible places anyone could ever work. I got my Bachelor’s at Full Sail and I’ve worked there six years: first as an intern, next as its first search engine marketing manager, then as a project manager for our COO.
“You’ve been a great boss. I’m not leaving because of you. And I still believe in the incredible work we do. I’m leaving because if I stay here, I’ll have a solid future with a lot of growth and responsibility. And that will be great. But I’ll never do the thing that I’m supposed to do. The thing I was made to do.”
I never planned a six year stint at a private college in Florida, of all places. But I was lucky: Full Sail took me seriously and invested heavily in my growth. I was spoiled rotten and so I stayed. Despite this prolonged comfort, somehow I felt no fear as I told my boss I’d be leaving no later than July 1st. The sense of command, clarity and confidence it gave to my future was a powerful horse that I rode into the decision.
“Early on, I had this same conversation with my boss. I was convinced I had to leave to do what I had to do. Are you sure leaving is the only way you can do this?”
Since that day, I half-heartedly worked at finding my next job. The realization came slowly, over three months. The truth is that I don’t want another job. I don’t want another boss. I am the best-qualified person to analyze and direct my energies. I am happiest when I have the freedom to split up my day into two or three chunks. I’m happiest when I can work all morning and take the afternoon off, then come back to my project at midnight and work until sunrise. I am positively blissful when making my own decisions and executing them without need for approval, delegation or committee discussion. As of today, my job search is over. I’m my next job.
“I love everyone here. It’s not that I want to get away from here. It’s that I need to make things. I need to take a space that has nothing and fill it with a something. Something that works well. Something that makes people happy. That makes their lives better. I need to go in search of how to dedicate 100% of my energies to that task.”
So on July 1st, I’ll say goodbye to my job. I’ll say goodbye to Florida on my longest roadtrip ever and make a new home somewhere around Seattle — Bellevue is looking great. I will cultivate my lifelong obsession with the creation of things that make people happy. Somehow, I will keep myself clothed, fed and out of the rain. It’s going to be hard. I’m confident that if I keep at it, continue working at it every single day until it drives me mad, then keep going anyway, I’ll be okay. The details are, as they say, just details.
Most importantly, though, I will be living for my own purposes as my own keeper.
I’m sure there will be a paycheck or two still to be collected in my future: maybe something part-time at Whole Foods to make ends meet or, heck, even some short-term officey stuff if it’s for a group who can teach me about how to better be a maker of things. The focus, though, is now all about personally setting the course for my everyday life.
I can’t wait for July.
