All of us speak about our “ultimate goal in life”, and philosophical stuff. Nothing makes it more prominent when you wake up one day and you’re 24 years old! Damn! Just one year to the round-figure 25 after which you’re not even a “young man” any more, but just a man. It’s scary as hell, and I went through a major mid-life crisis due to my approaching birthday.
If you were immersed in coding, contests, conferences, etc. for the last ten years like me, then it becomes all the more prominent. One day, you’re struggling to turn 16 so you can get your first driver’s licence. The next day you wake up and find you’re a long-time car-owner and have to pay bills, argue with the house maid, make sure your house is well-maintained, buying groceries and all the stuff which was supposed to be “far, far away….”
In my introduction mail to my team last year, I accidentally used the word “teenager” because ever since entering college, almost all of us thought of ourselves as teenagers. The thresholds were never visible. However, when half the people across the corridor began knocking on my door wondering if I really was a teenager, the reality hit me like never before!
What really frightens us is the fact that we don’t matter, that we’re irrelevant in the world. Relevance is the real answer to all those questions regarding the grand unifying goal of life, or the purpose of the universe and all that stuff.
Take our jobs for example. What are those “cool” jobs that we all look for? Well, I do admit most people look for more money, but all my friends struggle for work that makes them relevant. Work that matters to someone. Work that makes us feel like we matter in this world. Why is working at Google’s search so cool? Because it matters to millions and millions of people. You can pretend all you like that it’s about more money – I’m sure IBM’s mainframe people make shitloads of more money. You can pretend it’s about the “algorithms”. But you can work on algorithms at a research institute. What really makes Google the fun place for many people is relevance. What they do matters. It makes them matter!
Relevance is also what differentiates the top brands in the world from everyone else. If you look carefully, technology, products, etc. doesn’t matter to a brand image, so much as relevance matters. Look at Apple today. In 1996, Jobs could have turned Apple into some kind of super-enterprise-support company, and they would have made tens of billions instead of the billions they make today. But Steve Jobs made the company relevant! That’s what really makes Apple such a powerful brand. They can literally wrap an Apple logo around a piece of crap and people would pay for iCrap. What Eric Schmit really did to Google was make it relevant. With all that real estate sporting Google’s Ads. With so many people using the search engine. Sure, he may not have contributed to the algorithm, but he brought relevance to the company! And I see Microsoft very seriously trying to get into the web space to remain relevant. IBM will have my utmost God-like respect for “The IBM PC”. They changed the world! They changed humanity! IBM’s stamp from the computer age can never be erased or forgotten. In the 90′s every single machine that any of us cared for had to say, “100% IBM compatible”.
What really makes these places cool to work at is their struggle to remain relevant as the world changes – and in many cases change the world themselves. The iPod wasn’t the first mp3 player in the world, and it certainly isn’t the only one. However, NASA’s astronauts use a modified “iPod” because the iPod’s batteries are not certified to be used on board the shuttle. They don’t use “an mp3 player with alkaline batteries”. They use “an iPod that was specially modified by Apple to use alkaline batteries.” Even if Microsoft did manage to get NASA to use Zunes on the shuttle, NASA’s description would go something like, “We use Zunes, Microsoft’s version of the iPod.” Just like “IBM compatible” has been etched in our memories, the “like the iPod” is a phrase that will remain.
Microsoft has it’s fair share of relevance too. I am one of the fortunate few who got to use a PC in the 80′s and was aware of what an “operating system” was. My sister, however, realised that Windows runs on top of a machine only after she turned 14. She was under the impression that computers have Windows like human beings have arms. You can speak against monopoly all you like, but the fact remains that the most popular version of Unix to date has been Xenix – a Microsoft product. Apple’s ads weren’t “Mac OS vs. Windows”, they were “Mac vs. PC” ads. Even Apple had the notion of PC’s being born with Windows attached to them. It’s this struggle for relevance which makes all the difference in the world.
The reason I’m commenting on this right now is because when I began working on this team as a fresh college passout, our project seemed like a distant dream – something that will come around after ages. In between there were times when it all appeared to be frozen still. Lots of dead-ends, workarounds and sleepless nights later, we’re about to go public, and it feels great. There were times when I felt that all of this was completely irrelevant, and that it would never happen. Afterall, an 18-month cycle isn’t easy to deal with for a fresher – especially if you’re beginning with the very first line of code.
Back in the 90′s I always thought stuff like Norton Utilities, Windows, Lotus 123, DBase comes out of some hyper-top-secret team in a lab 30-feet underground. Interestingly enough, an year later, and I work on just such a team, building something just as relevant, implementing a vision of the guy who made Lotus 123, with the guys who built WinNT on the same team. And now I feel like I want more. I’ve always wanted to shake hands with Peter Norton once in my life. I’ve always wanted to meet Tony Hoare (he runs Microsoft Research in Europe), and unfortunately, I never knew the stars behind DBase.
The takeaway from the whole soulsearching was that relevance is sweet to achieve, but what really makes life worth living is the Quest for Relevance. The struggle to make yourself matter, to make yourself relevant.
