Andrew Skotzko

On always being wrong

I learned a new phrase from the one and only Seth that has lit my mind on fire and freed up my creativity: “Always be wrong.” (Expect this and much more in his highly anticipated new book, “This is Marketing,” which comes out next week.)

WHAT? Be…wrong? Are you kidding me?

That was my first reaction, anyway.

But here’s the deal, and it’s actually very freeing:

The idea is to be wrong all the time. To ship generously, and get it wrong. But to be getting it wrong from a posture of generosity and service. Coming from a posture of trying to serve. Showing up for people, for customers, with right heart and right intention to serve.

And then, take notes.

Take notes about where you’re wrong, learn the lesson, make it better, ship again.

We’ve given “wrong” a bad name. I don’t know about you, but I’ve grappled with this for a long time. We’ve all been trained that there is a right answer and that we have to have that answer. Looking for The One Answer to Rule Them All, when there are Many Possible Great Answers.

This often manifests as over-preparing, studying too much in advance, trying to reverse engineer it all up front.

Turns out, it’s much more efficient, faster, and simpler to make a generous attempt, be wrong, learn, and repeat. As long as it’s done with the right intention, it builds connection and trust with customers, with those I seek to serve.

But there is a simple fix: take the sting out of “wrong.” Make “wrong” a friend.

How? Two steps:

Step one: Give yourself permission to ‘always be wrong.’ If you do, and the market does, this is permission to get it wrong. Permission to stop endlessly preparing and trying to get it perfect from the jump. Freedom from trying to reverse engineer everything in advance and solve it all before you leap.

Step two: Pair ‘always be wrong’ with ‘always be learning.’ This is about cultivating a growth mindset (for more on how to do this, see Lesson 2 in my altMBA recap).

If you’re just wrong, but getting better and trying again, you’ll burn out. And that doesn’t serve you or those you seek to serve.

This isn’t permission to ship crap. Give it your best attempt. But it is permission to be imperfect and go anyway.

“Wrong” is the doorway to better, and what opens that door is saying “thank you.”

“Wrong” is the only place I get to be a learner and get better and grow.

“Wrong” is a wonderful place to visit. Just don’t stay there.

Adulting: The Fundamentals

“Get it together, dude.”

“Ugh, I hate my job.”

“I have no idea what to do next.”

“I feel like such a loser.”

We’ve all been there.

Life can be hard, unfair, challenging. But no matter what life brings my way, I want to be always learning, growing, and getting better. I want to get the most out of my life and assume you do, too.

Whenever I’ve thought something like the above, it’s always come from a place of deep frustration. I’ve wanted and needed an answer. I knew something was off, but was stuck as to how to move forward.

In my experience, the real problem is usually that I’ve stopped taking care of the fundamentals. Part of the foundation of my life is out of whack.

So I start in the wrong place, putting the cart before the horse. I address the symptoms but not the causes.

Oh, you too? Glad I’m not the only one.

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altMBA recap: 84 hours, 105 kindred spirits, and countless lessons

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I recently completed a month-long, intense online workshop called the altMBA. It was created by Seth Godin, one of the thinkers and leaders I most respect.

Raven: spirit animal of the altMBA

My intention here is to debrief myself on my experience and share some of the lessons learned from the experience. I’m writing this as much for myself and a reminder to future me as anything else.

I hope that this contributes something to your own journey. Let’s get into it.

Why’d you do it?

I’m the kind of person that is always looking to learn and grow. I love my life now, and I’m obsessed with getting to the next version of myself. I love who I am today, and this version of me better be obsolete compared to who I am and what I’m capable of in a year.

I took the altMBA for three reasons:

  1. to level up as a leader and creative
  2. to learn to ship work regularly and overcome my perfectionism / to beat “the resistance“
  3. to push myself (and be pushed) to get clear about the change I seek to make

In this context, “shipping” means putting work out there for others to engage with.

What does it cover? Is it a “real MBA”?

First off, no, it’s not a “real MBA,” not in the way you mean it if you’re asking the question. There are no degrees and few “right answers” in the altMBA. And, you learn a tremendous amount about business, yourself, and being an effective changemaker and leader.

Does it work?

Unequivocally, yes.

I got everything I wanted out of it, and much more.

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Book notes: The Art of Possibility

A brilliant book on redefining your perceptions and experience of what is possible in the world and in life. Absolutely shifted my experience of life.

Amazon book link.

Introductions / Premise

Our premise is that many of the circumstances that seem to block us in our daily lives may only appear to do so based on a framework of assumptions we carry with us. Draw a different frame around the same set of circumstances and new pathways come into view. Find the right framework and extraordinary accomplishment becomes an everyday experience.

The history of transformational phenomena—the Internet, for example, or paradigm shifts in science, or the spread of a new religion—suggests that transformation happens less by arguing cogently for something new than by generating active, ongoing practices that shift a culture’s experience of the basis for reality.

Practicing

Our practices will take a good deal more than three minutes to master. Additionally, everything you think and feel and see around you will argue against them. So it takes dedication, a leap of faith, and, yes, practicing to get them into your repertoire.

When you are out of the boat, you cannot think your way back in; you have no point of reference. You must call on something that has been established in advance, a catch phrase, like “toes to nose.”

Practice 1: “It’s All Invented”

Experiments in neuroscience have demonstrated that we reach an understanding of the world in roughly this sequence: first, our senses bring us selective information about what is out there; second, the brain constructs its own simulation of the sensations; and only then, third, do we have our first conscious experience of our milieu.

We perceive only the sensations we are programmed to receive, and our awareness is further restricted by the fact that we recognize only those for which we have mental maps or categories.

Our minds are also designed to string events into story lines, whether or not there is any connection between the parts.

“It’s all invented anyway, so we might as well invent a story or a framework of meaning that enhances our quality of life and the life of those around us.”

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Understanding the Internet: How Messages Flow Through TCP Sockets

One of the questions that has been coming up a lot lately as many people are building with Akka.Remote is this:

How big of a message can I send over the network?

I’ve been asked about this four or five times this week alone, so it’s time to put out a blog post and stop re-writing the answer. This is a great question to cover, as it starts to reveal more about what is going on under the hood with Akka.Remote and the networking layer.

Up until I worked on Akka.NET, I honestly hadn’t thought much about the networking layer and so this was a fun question for me to dig into and research.

When does this come up?

This comes up all the time when people have large chunks of data that they need to transmit and process. I’ve been asked about this lately in the context of doing big ETL jobs, running calculations on lab data, web scraping, for video processing, and more. People asking about sending files that range anywhere from 20MB to 5GB.

All of these contexts involve large amounts of data that need to be processed, but no clear way to link that up with the distributed processing capabilities that Akka.NET provides.

So what’s a developer to do?

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