Paint Drip People
Originally published August 2016
Keith Adams worked on kernels at VM Ware. Then virtual machines. Then search performance at Facebook. Then the HHVM implementation of PHP. Then machine learning. Now [ed: then…] he’s Chief Architect at Slack. In between he worked on hundreds of little projects that lasted hours or days or weeks. Keith is a Paint Drip Person. [ed: Keith is now a venture investor at PebbleBed.]
I was a big fan of the T model of skills, introduced by David Guest in 1991: know about a lot of things, be really good at one. The more I taught it, the more unhappy I got with the metaphor:
Skilled people are good at several things.
Skilled people’s interests develop over time.
Skilled people don’t plan their next focus area. Sometimes it seems completely unrelated to their previous focus area.
Skilled people are always exploring, just for the sake of curiosity.
Skilled people resurrect interests sometimes.
All of these metaphor fails led me to the paint drip model of skills.
You draw a brush across the top of the canvas.
Sometimes enough paint accumulates that a drip starts to roll.
Once a drip starts to roll, it’s not clear how far it will go.
You keep drawing the brush across the canvas, regardless.
“Moving the brush” is the curious exploration. Keith reports that he tries a project a week or so, but that most “don’t go anywhere” (I beg to differ). The drip rolling down is an area of specialization. Once it starts rolling, it’s not clear how far it will go. In any case, the brush keeps moving. Eventually the last drip stops and a new one starts.
I’m inspired by the idea of a new project every week. It seems like I spend too much time looking for the next project rather than just starting with the one at hand.
I learned of the following quotes from Daisaku Ikeda but never applied them to projects.
Beethoven’s motto was “No day without a line.”
Goethe said: "It is better to do the smallest thing in the world than to hold half an hour to be too small a thing."
I identified with the description of a "paint-drip" person, but it also reminded me of a leadership trap that catches a lot of organizations. Just because a leader or worker has success in one area or discipline does not make them more likely to succeed in another.
I do believe that many people find success when they've enjoyed a multi-discipline career. Myself, I bring parts of my business continuity, personnel security, logistics, and program analyst background to my job every day as an IT leader. But that said, I don't have some kind of secret leadership sauce that I would bring to a position in, say, finance or HR.
That's not to say that I couldn't be successful in those fields given time. My experience has been that success comes from equal portions of perspective, preparation, and straight-up luck. If you're in the chair when times are good and you don't mess it up, congratulations, you're successful. If the environment changes and your results decline, well, that's why leadership sucks sometimes. :)
Your job as a boss is to manage the good times and the bad, take care of your people AND the mission, and take the lumps when you have to. As the great historical figure Ted Lasso once said, be a goldfish.
All this to say, I don't think a "paint-drip" person is the result of some innate quality or personality type. It's the natural career path of someone with flexibility and tenacity who's actually had some hard-earned experience.