In which I argue that great missions are transformed into great successes as the result of finding projects that satisfy the law of remarkability, which requires that an idea inspires people to remark about it, and is launched in a venue where such remarking is made easy.
Giles Bowkett loves what he does for a living. In fact, my first encounter with Giles was an e-mail he sent me with the subject line: “My remarkable life.”
Giles, however, didn’t always love his career. There were points when he was broke and unemployed, and other points when he suffered through jobs that bored him into a stupor. The turning point came in 2008 when Giles became a rock star in the community of computer programmers who specialize in a language called Ruby. “It seems as if every Ruby programmer on the planet knows my name,” he told me, reflecting on his newfound celebrity. “I literally met people from Argentina and Norway who not only knew who I was but were absolutely shocked that I didn’t expect them to know who I was.”
I’ll dive into the details of how Giles became a star soon, but what I want to emphasize now is that this fame allowed him to take control of his career and to transform it into something he loves. “I had a lot of interest from companies in San Francisco and Silicon Valley,” he told me, reflecting on the period that began in 2008. He decided to take a job with ENTP, one of the country’s top Ruby programming firms. They doubled his salary and put him to work on interesting projects. In 2009, Giles was bit by an entrepreneurial bug. He left ENTP and built up a blog and a collection of mini–Web applications that soon brought in enough money to support him. “I had an audience who wanted to know what I thought about a whole ton of different things,” he told me. “In many cases they were happy to pay money just to ask me questions.”
Eventually, he decided that he had had his fill with the solo lifestyle (“working from home is kind of lame when you don’t have roommates, a girlfriend, or even a dog”), so he pursued a longstanding interest in filmmaking by going to work for hitRECord: a company started by actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt that provides a Web-based platform for collaborative media projects. It’s not that the money was great (“the Hollywood understanding of what programmers get paid is wildly inaccurate”), but just that it sounded like a lot of fun—one of Giles’s most important criteria for his working life. “It was a pretty great experience,” he told me. “I got to hang out with one of the stars of Inception and the next Batman, drinking beers at his house, that kind of thing.” Not long after I met Giles, after he had successfully scratched his Hollywood itch, he once again moved on. A publisher had asked him to write a book, and he had agreed—and why not? It seemed like an interesting thing to do.
The speed with which Giles bounces from opportunity to opportunity might seem disorienting, but this lifestyle is a perfect match for his hyperkinetic personality. One of Giles’s favorite presentation techniques, for example, is to begin talking faster and faster, accompanying his speech with a rapid series of slides, each featuring a single keyword that flashes on the screen at the exact moment that he utters the term—the oratorical equivalent of a caffeine rush. In other words, he used his capital to build a career custom-fit to his personality, which is why he now loves his working life.
The reason I’m telling Giles’s story here in Rule #4 is that at the core of his rise to fame was his mission. In more detail, Giles committed himself to the mission of bringing together the worlds of art and Ruby programming. He made good on this commitment when he released Archaeopteryx, an open-source artificial intelligence program that writes and plays its own dance music. Watching Archaeopteryx in action can be eerie: An innocuous command typed into the Mac command line starts an aggressive and complicated techno breakbeat; a single value is changed in the Bayesian probability matrices underlying the AI engine; and all of a sudden the beat transforms into something entirely different. It’s as if musical creativity itself has been reduced to a series of equations and some lines of terse code. This feat made Giles a star.
But the question that interests me most about Giles is how he made the leap from a general mission—to bring together art and Ruby programming—to a specific, fame-inducing project: Archaeopteryx. In the last chapter, I highlighted the importance of using little bets to feel out a good way forward from general mission to specific project. Giles, however, adds another layer of nuance to this goal. He approached the task of finding good projects for his mission with the mindset of a marketer, systematically studying books on the subject to help identify why some ideas catch on while others fall flat. His marketing-centric approach is useful for anyone looking to wield mission as part of their quest for work they love.
Giles’s career story starts when he left Santa Fe College after his first year. He tried writing screenplays, “but they weren’t good,” and he tried writing music, “which I was better at, but which didn’t pay.” He also temped. Artistic in nature, Giles was drawn to the graphic designers in the companies where he worked and they introduced him to quirky new markup language that was poised to change the world of design—a language called HTML. Giles built his first Web page in 1994, and in 1996 he moved to San Francisco, bringing with him books on Java and Perl, programming languages that provided the foundation of the early Web. He made $30,000 in 1994. In 1996 this jumped to $100,000: The dot-com boom was picking up speed and Giles was in the right place with the right skills at the right time.
At first, things went well for Giles in San Francisco. He enjoyed designing websites and in his free time he became involved in the local DJ scene. But careers have their own sort of momentum, and he soon found himself programming for an investment bank. “I was bored out of my mind,” he recalls, “so I decided to do something bold: I was going to apply to a really interesting start-up.” The day after he submitted his application the start-up went under. The first dot-com crash had begun. “Pretty soon I was the only one of my friends who had a job at all,” he recalled. “I talked to a recruiter about finding something I liked better, and he said I should be thrilled to have a job.”
Giles being Giles, however, he ignored the recruiter, quit his job, and moved back to Santa Fe. He lived in a rented camper on his parents’ land, helping them build a solar-powered house while taking courses at the local community college. He studied painting, voice, piano, and perhaps most importantly, studio engineering, the class that introduced him to aleatoric music: composition using algorithms. It’s here, among the desert landscapes and arts courses, that Giles made a key decision. A career untamed, he realized, can bring you into dangerous territory, such as being bored while writing computer code for an investment bank. He needed a mission to actively guide his career or he would end up trapped again and again. He decided that a good mission for him would somehow combine the artistic and technical sides of his life, but he didn’t know how to make this general idea into a money-making reality, so he went searching for answers. He found what he was looking for in an unlikely pair of books.
“You’re either remarkable or invisible,” says Seth Godin in his 2002 bestseller, Purple Cow.1 As he elaborated in a Fast Company manifesto he published on the subject: “The world is full of boring stuff—brown cows—which is why so few people pay attention…. A purple cow… now that would stand out. Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing.”2 When Giles read Godin’s book, he had an epiphany: For his mission to build a sustainable career, it had to produce purple cows, the type of remarkable projects that compel people to spread the word.
But this left him with a second question: In the world of computer programming, where does one launch remarkable projects? He found his second answer in a 2005 career guide with a quirky title: My Job Went to India: 52 Ways to Save Your Job.3 The book was written by Chad Fowler, a well-known Ruby programmer who also dabbles in career advice for software developers. Featured among Fowler’s fifty-two strategies is the idea that the job seeker should leverage the open-source software movement. This movement brings together computer programmers who volunteer their time to build software that’s freely available and modifiable. Fowler argued that this community is well respected and highly visible. If you want to make a name for yourself in software development—the type of name that can help you secure employment—focus your attention on making quality contributions to open-source projects. This is where the people who matter look for talent.
“At this point I basically just put two and two together,” Giles told me. “The synthesis of Purple Cow and My Job Went to India is that the best way to market yourself as a programmer is to create remarkable open-source software. So I did.”
Following Godin’s advice, Giles came up with the idea for Archaeopteryx, his AI-driven music creator. “I don’t think there was anybody else with my combined background,” he said. “Plenty of Ruby programmers love dance music, but I don’t think any of them has sacrificed the same ridiculous number of hours to tweaking breakbeats and synth patches over and over again, releasing white-label records that never made a dime, and studying music theory.” In other words, Giles’s ability to produce a Ruby program that produced real music was unique: If he could pull it off, it would be a purple cow.
Drawing from Fowler’s advice, Giles then decided that the open-source community was the perfect place to introduce this purple cow to the world. In addition to releasing the Archaeopteryx code as open source, he took to the road to spread the word. “I basically took Chad Fowler’s advice way too far and went to speak at almost every user group and conference that I could—at least fifteen in 2008,” Giles recalled. This hybrid Godin/Fowler strategy worked. “I got offers from all over the place,” Giles recalled. “I got to work with stars in my industry, I got approached to write a book on Archaeopteryx, I could charge a lot more money than I used to.” It was, in other words, a strategy that made his mission into a success.
Reflecting on Giles’s story, I kept coming back to the same adjective: “remarkable.” What Giles discovered, I decided, is that a good mission-driven project must be remarkable in two different ways. First, it should be remarkable in the literal sense of compelling people to remark about it. To understand this trait, let’s first look at something that lacks it. Before releasing Archaeopteryx, Giles had worked on another open-source project. He collected popular command-line tools for Ruby and combined them into one package with consistent documentation. If you asked a Ruby programmer about this project, he would tell you that this is solid, quality, useful work. But it’s not the type of achievement that would compel this same Ruby programmer to write his friends and tell them, “You have to see this!”
In the words of Seth Godin, this early project was a “brown cow.” By contrast, teaching your computer to write its own complex music is a purple cow; it inspires people to take notice and spread the word.
What’s nice about this first notion of remarkability is that it can be applied to any field. Take book writing: If I published a book of solid advice for helping recent graduates transition to the job market, you might find this a useful contribution, but probably wouldn’t find yourself whipping out your iPhone and Tweeting its praises. On the other hand, if I publish a book that says “follow your passion” is bad advice, (hopefully) this would compel you to spread the word. That is, the book you’re holding was conceived from the very early stages with the hope of being seen as “remarkable.”
There’s also, however, a second type of remarkability at play. Giles didn’t just find a project that compels remarks, but he also spread the word about the project in a venue that supports these remarks. In his case, this venue was the open-source software community. As he learned from Chad Fowler, there’s an established infrastructure in this community for noticing and spreading the word about interesting projects. Without this conduciveness to chatter, a purple cow, though striking, may never be seen. To be more concrete, if Giles had instead released Archaeopteryx as a closed-source piece of commercial software, perhaps trying to sell it from a slick website or at music conventions, it probably wouldn’t have caught fire as it did.
Once again, this notion of remarkability applies beyond just Giles’s world of Ruby programming. If we return to my example of writing career-advice books, I realized early on in my process that blogging was a remarkable venue for introducing my ideas. Blogs are visible and the infrastructure is in place for good ideas to quickly spread, through, for example, linking, Tweets, and Facebook. Because of this conduciveness to remarking, by the time I pitched this book to publishers, I not only had a large audience who appreciated my views on passion and skill, but the meme had spread: Newspapers and major websites around the world had begun to quote my thoughts on the topic, while the articles had been cited online and Tweeted thousands of times. If I had instead decided to confine my ideas to paid speaking gigs, for example, my mission to change the way we think about careers would have likely stagnated—the venue would not have been sufficiently remarkable.
To help organize our thinking, I’ll summarize these ideas in a succinct law:
The Law of Remarkability
For a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking.
Once I had articulated this law, I began to notice it at play in the examples I had previously found of mission leading to a compelling career. To help cement this marketing-centric approach to mission, it’s worth taking a moment to return to these examples and highlight the law in action.
Pardis Sabeti’s general mission was to use genetics to help fight infectious disease in Africa. This is a fine mission, but by itself it does not guarantee the type of fulfilling life Pardis leads. In fact, lots of researchers share this mission, and are doing good, basic science—such as sequencing the genes of viruses—but don’t have particularly compelling careers. Pardis, by contrast, pursued this mission by launching an arresting project: using powerful computers to seek out examples of humans evolving resistance to ancient diseases. If you want evidence of the remarkability of this approach, look no farther than the catchy headlines of the many articles that have been penned on the Sabeti Lab—articles with titles such as “5 Questions for the Woman Who Tracks Our DNA Footprints” (Discover, April 2010), “Picking Up Evolution’s Beat” (Science, April 2008), and “Are We Still Evolving?” (BBC Horizon, March 2011). This is a project that compels people to spread the word. It is a purple cow.
By seeking a remarkable project, Pardis satisfied the first part of the law of remarkability. The second part requires that she launch her project in a venue that supports remarking. For Pardis, as with all scientists, this is the easy part. Peer-reviewed publication is a system built around the idea of allowing good ideas to spread. The better the idea, the better the journal it gets published in. The better the journal an article is published in, the more people who read it. And the more people who read it, the more it gets cited, discussed at conferences, and in general affects the field. If you’re a scientist with a remarkable idea, there’s little doubt about how best to spread it: publish! This is exactly what Pardis did with the Nature article that jump-started her reputation.
With Kirk French, we also see the law of remarkability in action. His general mission was to popularize modern archaeology. There are lots of non-remarkable ways to pursue this mission. For example, he could have worked on making the archaeology curriculum at Penn State more appealing to undergraduates, or published articles on the field in general-interest science magazines. But these projects would not have generated the type of attention-grabbing success that can transform your career into something compelling. Instead, Kirk decided to head straight into people’s homes and use archaeological techniques to help them uncover the significance (if any) of family treasures. This approach is remarkable—an observation reinforced by the number of speaking invitations Kirk now receives, including a recent opportunity to address the largest conference in his field about lessons learned as a popularizer. When he gave the address, the crowd overflowed the auditorium (an impressive feat for someone who had just earned his doctorate).
In this example, Kirk had a remarkable project to support his mission—now all he needed was a venue conducive to remarking. He found this remarkable venue with television. We’re a society trained to watch what’s on and then discuss what caught our attention the next day.