Alex Pooley's Blog

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Here’s a warning for those who deny that nothing lasts forever, and a strategy for those who choose to accept the premise.

Evolution is the perpetual process of finding an optimal local fit in a ever changing global environment.

Business is a vehicle that finds a best local fit between suppliers and demanders in a world of ever changing supply and demand constraints.

The global search space changes without correlation of our own actions.

When the global search space changes, previously optimal fits are no longer necessarily optimal.

Given that the world is forever changing, business therefore has a limited life span.

The lesson: Learn about some small area of the global search space, build a best fit for that local space given the current environment, adapt where possible but don’t go down with the ship due to exogenous factors.

Here’s an example, substituting the above generics for real life businesses.

Evolution is the perpetual process of finding an optimal local fit in an ever changing global environment.

Blockbuster is a vehicle that finds the best way to connect movie distributors with movie watchers in a world of ever changing viewer desires and distribution technology.

Movie watcher desires, and video distribution changes without correlation to Blockbusters actions. Such as the birth of the XBox and the boom of piracy via the Internet.

When the watchers start playing XBox instead of passively watching movies and technological advances such as the Internet change the game for distributors, Blockbuster in not necessarily the optimal fit.

Given that movie watcher desires and movie distribution are always changing, Blockbuster as a DVD rental company, has a limited life span.

Like all the other cool kids these days, I’m slowly migrating all of my subversion repositories to git. Here’s how you can migrate too (this post also serves to remind me next time I need to import from an svn repository to a git repo):

Remote Git Repository
(Assuming you are running your own repository)
mkdir myproject.git
cd myproject.git
git init

Local Computer 
git svn clone -s YOUR_SVN_REPO
cd your_repo
git remote add origin REMOTE_GIT_REPO
git push origin master

Using Your Local Repo
You’re almost set, but probably also want to wire up your master branch on your local repository with the master branch on the remote repo. To do this you’ll need to edit your your_repo/.git/config file and append the following to the file:
[branch "master"]
remote = origin
merge = master

Now when you “git pull” everything will hopefully just work.

Back when I was working for “the man”, it was far easier to continue down that path than to change my course. Life wasn’t too bad. Bills were paid, life was easy, but there was something missing - passion. Fast forward almost three years and I’m glad I left. I’m now making a living working with beautiful technologies (Ruby, Rails) and have assimilated with a bunch of great freelancers who “get me”. My eventual shift in course was due to one single hard decision, the decision to leave the confines of my employer and my existing mindset, and head off in to the blackness of uncertainty.

Often decisions are imperfect. They require taking a side based on imperfect knowledge, and then taking a leap of faith. At the time of leaving my employer I had no way of knowing what the future would hold, but I rationalised my decision and jumped!

You have to take a side to make a decision. I took the side that it was worth jumping ship. I rationalised the decision by imagining what I might think on my death bed had I stayed under the auspice of full time employment.

Sure, my decision was totally irrational founded on nothing but wants and desires. But hey, beyond the basics of survival, that’s all decisions really are: trade-offs between what you want but don’t really need, and the effort and risk required to fulfil those desires. In these situations it’s only ever an optimisation problem that yields a best guess, and not a perfect solution!

Here’s the kicker though. Things worth doing require decisions, and decisions mean taking sides. So if you want to do things worth doing, then you’ll need to start taking sides, and taking sides mean imperfect decisions! Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Life is imperfect. Get over it. Once you stop the bullshit belief that you can make perfect decisions it’s much easier to jump.