6 Philosophy
This section has the following chapters:
- Happiness makes business sense
- The power of not being in power (and being ignored)
- We’re all mortals, so lets make the most of it
- Why do others think that I’m “hard to deal with” and that “I don’t listen”
6.1 Happiness makes business sense
This TED talk by Shawn Achor “The happy secret to better work” makes the case that positive energy and ‘happiness’ make us more productive and effective.
Not only his presentation style is great, I think he is completely right.
Specially on the part that ‘happiness’ is a habit and needs to be constantly exercised.
From a business or organisational point of view, this means that it should be a ‘corporate’ objective to deliver happiness to its players (employees, members, clients, partners, etc…)
They should do this not because it is ‘nice’, but because it makes business sense.
For example when I was working with Paulo on OWASP projects and initiatives, it was always amazing to see how a little bit of encouragement or contact/email, would motivate an owasp leader to get something done.
The problem is that creating these ‘happiness’ environments are very hard, take considerable commitment and can’t be done by people who don’t believe in it.
One of the reasons why I really believe that OWASP needs to have a lot more human resources, is because they need to have the time to deliverer ‘happiness’ to owasp leaders and community :)
Just to re-enforce the concept. OWASP should do this because it will increase OWASP productivity, synergies, serendipity, deliverables and community.
6.2 The power of not being in power (and being ignored)
I think helps a lot to give clarity and focus to ideas when the ‘idea maker’ doesn’t have enough power to ‘force’ their execution (or adoption)
I’ve talked about this before in You will not have your best ideas when you are in a position of Power and it is something that more and more fell that is needed.
As somebody who has a lot of opinions and ideas (see I wish that OWASP in 2014 ….) I think it is very healthy that once I Stepped down as Board Member I was able to (eventually) write freely about An Idea of a new model for OWASP
The same applies to the O2 Platform which I’ve been working on for the past 5 years. As I mention in Where Is .NET Headed? and the cost for Microsoft of ignoring the O2 Platform and Responding to Andrew’s O2 Platform feedback on the OWASP Leaders list I still think that the O2 Platform has a huge amount of innovation and great ideas for Application Security and development.
But isn’t the O2 Platform really hard to use? Yes, and part of the reason is that it has been designed to ‘allow problems to be solved’ not to ‘work outside of the box’.
That said there are quite a lot of examples out there on to use it, this post for example ‘How to start using the O2 Platform and its scripting capabilities?’ (and how I used the O2 Platform to solve a hard integration problem in May 2013) shows the O2 Platform’s powerful scripting capabilities, here are 39 videos and here is the begining of a book on the O2 Platform web scripting capabilties.
So in a weird way, I think it has been quite healthy for the O2 Platform to have a slow (but steady) adoption, since that means that its growth is quite solid and based on real merit and added-value (ironically the lack of real users also allowed me to make major changes to O2’s architecture and APIs which would had been very hard to do if its user-base quite large (for example the FluentSharp API’s would probably never had existed with the ability to perform major refactorings to the O2 Platform codebase).
The bottom line is that in the inter-connected world we had today, good ideas and tools will always have the opportunity to grow organically (linearly or exponentially). And a great idea, is one that will eventually reach exponential effects (where most of the growth happens in the last iterations ( see Chapter 3: Exponential Growth))), so in a way, what really matters is what part of the exponential curve some of my ideas currently are? :)
6.3 We’re all mortals, so lets make the most of it
Just heard today that a very good friend lost her husband to a 5 year cancer battle :(
I can’t image what she has been through and it does show how the lottery of live can sometimes be quite harsh.
It’s in times like this that one really must think about what we are doing with our time and make sure that we are having a positive impact.
In a way that is what I like so much about OWASP. It is a great community, made of amazing people, and each one of us, can be proud of our contributions, since we are having a positive impact on the solution of a big problem.
I fell very fortunate that I am able to spend my time doing what I am really passionate about, so if you are currently stuck in a job just because it ‘pays well’, or it is the ‘right thing to do’, get out of there.
Life’s too short to spend it on things we don’t believe and are not passionate about.
Lets make sure that we have a positive impact while we are still around