When we think about what we can do, the possibilities are virtually infinite, but what we will do is a completely different story.
Understanding the difference between can do and will do, might be the key to understanding the affordance of possibilities especially when it comes to development decisions and what a user will chose to do because of that choice.
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There's an ocean of a difference between can and will. When you think about what we can do, the possibilities are virtually infinite. Not in the sense that we can do absolutely anything, but rather that the number of options and potential timelines that we could follow, well, we can't really calculate them. And so they might as well be infinite. But what we will do is a completely different story. And thinking about this ocean of a difference between can and will is something that we do as developers every single day. Thinking this difference is perhaps the critical key to becoming a great product developer. Maybe you're a product manager and you're listening to this episode. And understanding that what is possible or what there is an affordance for in your application, for example, well, that doesn't necessarily mean that your user will use that affordance. We're going to talk about this difference in today's episode. My name is Jonathan Cutrell and you're listening to Developer Tea. My goal on this show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in your careers. Many of us have a list of things that we would like to do. And these are things that are achievable, perhaps simply by making a choice. Some of these things are not necessarily a simple choice away, but they're certainly within our grasp, within our reach. What we can do is very different from what we will do. And in the ocean between what we can and what we will do, we have a critical and fundamental function of the human mind. And that is choice. When we observe the things that we can do, our options, and we have to convert our energy and our time and our resources into some kind of choice. We're narrowing down that list of things we could do. And somehow, amongst an infinite number of choices, we choose only one. And of course, this choice cascades and it has effects on what we can do after that choice is made. But this fundamental concept, the idea that we have a vast amount in front of us that we could choose and yet we only end up choosing one thing can be debilitating. Now the good news is that our brains help us out a lot. Our brains are actually making a lot of these choices automatically for us. And cutting down a lot of those options, making us believe that they're not options at all. For example, most of us follow cultural norms as if it was not optional to break from them. So we're going to talk about two ways that this affects you in your career. We're going to talk about it both in the kind of day to day work that you do and the assumptions that you make about others. But then we're also going to talk about it in kind of a zoomed out perspective about the choices you make at a broad scale about your career and about your life. So first let's talk about how this applies to the work that you do on a day to day basis and the assumptions that you make about other people and your users and other developers. If the list of options that are available to us is nearly infinite, then our brains job is to constantly be sorting that list by the most relevant options to us. And sometimes that sorting process produces a clear winner. Sometimes that sorting process requires more kind of analysis from our conscious thinking, from our more deliberate thinking processes. But here's what's interesting. We intuitively believe that other people's brains do the same kind of sorting, or at least given the same problem, or given the same choice, the topmost options, maybe the top five, are going to be the same between us and a colleague or a user. But what we miss is that one of the inputs to this kind of sorting machine, this algorithm that we're unconsciously often doing is our position in relation to the choice. In other words, if I am observing someone else making a choice, then I am sorting the options differently than if I was making the choice myself. On top of that, you can add the complexity that not only would I make a different choice if I was in their shoes, but they would make a different choice for me in their shoes, even with the exact same scenario. Your sorting algorithm is different, even when they are relating to the problem from the same vantage point. Beyond this, we often believe that by simply making something possible, we've taken enough steps so that the user that we are building for or another developer will go the rest of the way, that because the option is available, that they will then choose to do it. This is entirely skipping over this ocean of difference between can and will. And the vast majority of our work as developers and really as humans in our careers is understanding and working in the complex space between can and will. And so in our day to day interactions, our expectations of what others will do are very often going to be wrong. And perhaps even more importantly, it's hard for us to see why. It's hard for us to adopt the decision making algorithm that someone else has in their mind, that sorting algorithm. And so what can we do about this? We'll have two basic recommendations. They're very simple. We'll get through them very quickly. The first is to simply listen more. Now the person to express the things that are kind of going into their decision making process. There's probably something that they will say that you could not have predicted. This is particularly true if you are building a product for an audience that you're not really a part of. Listen to that audience and gain the knowledge from their feedback rather than from simply your own intuition. My second recommendation on this day to day gap between can and will is to build a common framework, a shared framework for making decisions and making decisions based on, for example, a shared set of values or a shared set of clear goals. We're going to talk a little bit more about how this disparity between what you could do and what you will do can affect your career in drastic and meaningful ways. But first let's talk about today's sponsor, Blue Madora. Blue Madora is monitoring integration unlocked. You can seamlessly stream metrics and logs from all of your on-prem, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud technologies to your favorite monitoring platform. With Blue Madora you can easily access metrics and logs from over 150 technology sources and bring them right into your favorite monitoring tool. For example, Google Stackdriver, New Relic, or DataDog, any of these tools that you're probably already using. This gives you the opportunity to kind of achieve a single pane of glass for your entire stack. You don't have to go to 100 different places to figure out what's going on in your stack. It's just one place now. With frictionless integration, you have no more dealing with open source configurations or managing monitoring agents. You get a visual health dashboard of all of your monitoring integrations. And here's the important part. It's free to install and upgrade your Google Stackdriver monitoring. You only pay for the more metrics you stream reflected in your normal GCP bill. You can get $200 worth of GCP credit, which by the way can be combined with your free trial credits, when you upgrade Stackdriver with bind plane at bluemadora.com slash t. That's bluemadora.com slash t e a thanks again to blue madora for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. We're talking about choice today on Developer Tea. And we're framing it in the kind of picture of the ocean between what you could do and what you will do. You have this infinite number of options in any given scenario. And your brain kind of automatically narrows it down to the top five or top whatever number. But when we make big decisions, career level decisions, decisions like whether to go to college or go straight to work, what title you want to go for in your career, whether to stay in individual contribution or to jump tracks over to management, whether you should quit your job or stay. These are all major decisions that have profound impacts on our lives. And often we make the mistake of believing that our sorting algorithm that our own brains are going to make the perfect decision given enough time. In other words, as long as we can think things through, as long as we can take the time to really figure out what our options are, we can weigh them carefully and ultimately make the most optimum decision for ourselves. This is incredibly unlikely to be true. Most research on the subject says that humans are not very good about predicting their own future and predicting the things that they're going to care about in the future. We're not very good at predicting how much we're going to change in the future. And so when we're making these choices about our future, we almost definitely are doing some kind of prediction. And if we trust ourselves, if we trust ourselves to predict and extrapolate into the future, without seeking outside guidance or input, we are incredibly likely to let ourselves down. We can probably make better decisions by getting the insight and the input from other people. People who know us well or people who know the subject that we're talking about well. People who are entirely outside of our situation and looking from the outside in. If you take and combine all of these different vantage points, you're going to come away with a lot more knowledge about the decision that you're about to make. Ultimately that decision is up to you and arguably your brain is still the one that makes that decision. But at least you are exposed to different levels of reasoning and kind of different core principles, is that people are thinking about the options at hand. Perhaps you'll even see a new option that you hadn't seen before at all. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. I hope that this episode has encouraged you to think about the way that you make choices and to find ways to be more empathetic to others who make choices differently from yourself. Thank you again to today's sponsor, Bloomadora, head over to bloomadora.com slash T. It's a bloomadora.com slash T-E-A to get started today. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed this episode and you don't want to miss out on future episodes that are kind of like this one, I encourage you to subscribe and whatever podcasting app you're currently using before the episode ends. Today's episode wouldn't be possible without our wonderful producer Sarah Jackson and spec.fm. My name is Jonathan Cutrell and until next time, enjoy your tea.