A User Manual to Me

When am I most useful?

I like reasoning and logic, and I think I am reasonably good at both explaining and inspiring. I break complexity down. I believe in experimentation over instinct, especially when the instinct is to say no. I would much rather be wrong than never have tried.

Beyond fixing the family IT, people tend to come to me for two things:

• Influencing others to see things the same way. People believe I am effective at this, despite ample evidence to the contrary. I suspect it is because I am close to only a few people, and those people tend, sooner or later, to see the world much as I do. It is easy to extrapolate from that and assume I will have the same effect on everyone. I will always try to help, but the alignment people are after tends to happen by osmosis rather than by intent.
• Absorbing new, complex information quickly and then deciding. Contracts and legal agreements, finances, reports, academic papers. I have a broad understanding of a lot of topics and a deep understanding of very few, so I can usually follow the thread and be useful almost anywhere.

My style

Most people know me as a talker. In truth I find meeting new people uncomfortable, and I would innately rather not talk to anyone at all. I prefer to read and listen, form my own view, and then act on it, often independently if I can get away with it.

What frustrates me is doing all of that, reaching a conclusion, and then fumbling to communicate it. So when something really matters, you will find me retreating into prose and documents. Writing lets me lay out a coherent set of statements that test my own argument and give me room to show the thinking behind it. Running a company, I am often expected to make decisions about marginal things. Making them is easy; what I actually care about is explaining them.

I like words and stories, but I am often at my most effective with pictures and diagrams drawn on the fly. They are never pretty. Working remotely, the thing I miss most is the simple power of a whiteboard or a scrap of paper to show someone exactly what I mean.

When I argue, it is almost always about a failure to deliver something. Whether the failure is mine or someone else's, the root cause is rarely anything other than overcommitment.

What I value

I value the people closest to me, my family first.

I have enormous energy for fairness, to the point where others sometimes find it ridiculous. I will happily go against my own interests and better judgement to reach a fair outcome.

Logic matters to me. Some things simply are, but for me the joy is in the understanding, and I have deep reverence for a good explanation. Some things are beautiful, in prose, music, buildings, books and art. I revere uniqueness as much as beauty, and the destruction of something unique feels like an assault on my soul. And bad dad humour runs through my head on a constant loop.

I value building new things that might solve big problems, whether that is a local meetup, a one-off gathering, a piece of software or a whole organisation. When I build something new I do not mind failure at all; I expect it. Most of the time no one cares if you fail, and there is little real risk in trying.

The flip side is that I resent people who get in the way, even with a well-meant "let's plan" or "let's discuss". I find it intensely frustrating to plan for things whose external context is unknown and uncontrollable, and I suspect that most people who believe you can are simply deferring action out of fear. You can plan for your own responses to a situation, not for what the world will do. The rest is mostly luck, and the marginal value of more planning is tiny. These are my own views, and I accept that some of them are extreme.

What I have no patience for

Being held back, especially holding myself back, by what I see as irrational behaviour in others. At work that usually shows up as fear or indecision. Both tend to come from a lack of obvious information combined with a wildly catastrophic view of the consequences. Some people would rather sit on that gap and defer the decision than close it. I have been guilty of exactly this, which is probably why it irritates me so much. Sitting on a big decision that affects other people, out of fear, while doing nothing to resolve it, is the thing I find hardest to forgive. I am working on it.

Not doing the easy, obvious thing you said you would do, usually because of overcommitment or an overambitious plan. I do this too. It is annoying in me and annoying in everyone else.

Meddling in, or correcting, the really little things: the way to stir a pot. I do this as well, and I find it maddening to be corrected on something that does not matter. Even where I have no experience, I trust myself to learn from my own mistakes.

I am very slow to anger, and when it comes it tends to be rational rather than emotional. Two things make me lose faith in someone over time: repeated behaviour that damages other people, and a proven inability to learn from mistakes. On the first, I do not count disagreement or a good argument as damage; I mean politics, falsehoods and rumours, the things that corrode the relationships within a team or a family. On the second, learning is central to what I value: I do not mind things going wrong, as long as it is different things each time. I intensely dislike the same mistake twice.

And, finally, the road to hell is paved with fluffy language.

How best to communicate with me

When I am hot, tired or hungry I communicate badly and decide worse. It is a common enough affliction. I will try to flag when a conversation would be better saved for later, but if you sense we should come back to something, just say so.

I draw a hard line between an interruption and a communication. An interruption is something that genuinely demands attention now, because it needs an action that cannot wait. Almost everything else is a communication.

I manage my email carefully and almost never lose anything in it. So if you need me to read something and respond, that is where it should go. Anywhere else, there is a real chance it gets lost. If you are messaging me out of the blue, make it either something I can answer in twenty seconds off the top of my head, or something urgent enough to earn my immediate attention. If it is neither, all I will do is copy it into my email, where it belonged in the first place.

There is really only one state I mind being interrupted in, and that is the creative one: writing prose or code. When I am there, almost everything else is switched off, and if you break the spell you may get an emotional response, because it can take me days to find my way back. That said, protecting that state is my job, not yours, now that we work remotely.

Out of the blue phone calls terrify me, so I make them very rarely. Email or WhatsApp first. I will always give you room to reflect and think, and I ask for the same in return.

This next part is a little awkward. I like to think about something in advance, even for a single minute. But I am deeply impatient with thinking about it for much longer. Long stretches of thought mostly introduce bias and add no value: with no new input, no reading and no other voices, the brain just spins up stories to justify the instinct you already had. If there is time to spend, spend it gathering more information, not thinking.

I get frustrated by a mismatch between how urgent something is and how much action it gets. If something needs a decision, it needs attention: decisions left unmade only create more work later. So it is always fine to interrupt whatever I am doing to make a decision, especially one that affects other people.

And a warning: bring me a complex problem with very little information and ask for an answer on the spot, and you will get one that is elegant, well reasoned and fundamentally stupid. I might sound convincing. That does not make me right. With little information I am no better than you at a hard decision; I just may sound as though I am.

Why I do what I do

If I could do the same thing every day, I would cook with my family, walk through a forest, and help other people change the world for the better.

My ideal introductory conversation is one where we run through fifteen ideas for making the world a fairer, better place, and leave with some kind of plan or experiment to try.

A note on all this

I wrote this to help people work with me, or to decide not to. I have plenty of flaws, and setting them out in the open is not an invitation to conform to them. It is simply an attempt to make our time together better, and a signal that I care just as much about your version of this document, whether you have written it down or not.

If any of this helped, or if there is a part I could put better, I would genuinely like to know.