I recently watched highlights of a soccer game between the US Men’s National Team (USMNT) and Mexico where the contest became a little heated, resulting in 4 red cards – which left both teams playing with two fewer men by the end of the game.
It’s a pretty ugly sight – some hot tempers and anger bubbling over as the two teams fight hard to win the game. The US eventually won 3-0.
Facebook’s algorithm obviously noticed my interest in these events, because yesterday it decided to show me a video of an even worse red-card fiasco. In 2005 my home-town team, Newcastle United, decided to shoot themselves in the foot when two of their players received red cards for fighting – not against the opposition, but against each other! At least the red cards in the US vs Mexico game were evenly distributed between the teams!
So our lesson today is… don’t get into fist-fights in the office!
Nah – just kidding. Hopefully you already know that.
At a less extreme level, these stories highlight the danger of letting short-term desires or emotions overwhelm our long-term goals.
Any elite athlete has made huge sacrifices and dedicated many years of their life to training, eating right, traveling and competing. And yet in these examples we can see that even someone who is so dedicated to their sport, who has sacrificed so much for so long, can lose control – can make a choice that feels good in the moment (lashing out at someone) but is detrimental to the long term goal. And not only bad for that player, but harmful to the whole team. David Beckham was hated in England after his foolish red card in the 1998 world cup saw England get knocked out of the tournament. He eventually became a hero, but it took several years before fans forgave him.
What does this short-term gratification look like in our work?
The closest parallel is obviously in relationships – losing your temper with an annoying coworker / boss / customer. But there are less obvious situations where we might be tempted to allow a short-term desire to hinder our long-term goal.
- Cutting corners in testing: It’s late, you’re tired and hungry, you’re pretty confident that this change is good to go. Maybe we can just skip these last few tests and put the change into production.
- Skimping on MOPs for maintenance activities: Are you relying too much on the tech to figure things out on the fly? Have you taken the time to write down the backout plan if everything goes wrong?
- Skipping maintenance windows: Does this change really need to be done at midnight? It’ll probably work just fine – let’s just give it a go now.
- Hoping you won’t need a backup plan: Do we really need to buy spares for this equipment? I’m sure it’ll never fail. Do we really need to build a redundant IP path – a fiber cut is really unlikely?
I could go on for a while, but hopefully the principle is clear. To meet your long-term goals, to operate a high-quality service on a reliable network, requires that you act like a professional. You set rigorous standards, you follow processes, you think about what might go wrong, you perform tests.
In our household we talk with our kids about “your future self” – and making decisions that are kind to your future self. These can be simple – “when you wake up tomorrow, your future self will be glad you went to bed on time”, but all of the above decisions have the same mindset.
What can you do today that will make life easier for your future self?
