Just...

We have this tendency to think things are much simpler than they are. Brad Frost pointed this out a few months ago with his piece here on the Pastry Box about the word “just.”

We say it to individuals, but also to groups of people, to organizations, to entire industries.

“Why don’t you just…”

Fix your websites. Improve this archaic process. Use this new technology.

We’re a community of problem solvers, and that’s a great skill to have. But we can’t solve problems we don’t actually understand. And much as we might be loathe to admit it, problem solving isn’t simply a matter of coming up with the right answer. Truly solving a problem requires finding a solution that can actually be implemented with the resources at hand.

I’m as guilty of this as anyone, believe me. Somewhere along the way, my critical-thinking skills got distilled down to looking at a situation and asking, “Why is this broken?” or “Where did they make the wrong assumptions?”

Those questions introduce assumptions of their own though; that I know more about this problem than the people living with it, for one.

These days, I’m trying to take a step back and ask, “How did this come to be?” instead. “What am I not seeing here?” is a nice follow up.

Next time you’re tempted to jump in with a “Why don’t you just…” I invite you to do the same.

This post originally appeared on The Pastry Box Project.

A worrier

When I was in first grade, I got left behind on a field trip to the National Zoo.

The Amazonia exhibit had just opened and my little group waited with our chaperone for what seemed like hours to walk through the massive jungle exhibit.

As we walked briskly from parking lot to parking lot in search of our bus, I voiced the question that I suspect was on everyone’s mind:

“What if they leave without us?”

“They’re not going to leave with out us.”

When it became clear that they had, in fact, left without us, I was mildly distraught that no one had answered my question or offered a contingency plan.

Ultimately, we sat and waited at the visitor’s center for a while. Our chaperone called the school (this was pre-cell phone, of course) and then bought us all some ice cream. Eventually another chaperone came to pick us up and drive us back to school. We missed half of math class and were briefly notorious as the kids who got left at the zoo.

This was somewhere in a series of events during my childhood where I expressed concerns about something going wrong, and then they did. What if my grandfather’s little motor boat ran out of gas? What if my grandmother’s car broke down on the way to our summer camp at the Y?

What I probably should have learned was that, by and large, these things work out. I am not still living at the National Zoo, drifting in a motor boat with a hinky gas meter, or stranded on the side of a Florida highway.

Instead, what I took away from these moments was that I should probably stop asking “what if” questions out loud. My superstitious little brain believed that saying these things was what had caused them to come true. I had a secret superpower, and it wasn’t a cool one like flying or being invisible.

So for a few years, I tried to keep all the what-ifs in my head. Sometimes thinking of one would cause another to pop up, but I did my best to keep them to myself. With my silence, I could prevent things from going wrong.

This is how you become “a worrier.”

A few years later, something shifted. I saw that this was ridiculous—clearly, I did not have the ability to make cars break down simply by giving voice to thought. Nor had my silence somehow prevented all bad things from happening. Weird, right?

Instead, I reinterpreted these events as an adept ability to foresee potential problems. I had predicted the Great Zoo Abandonment of 1992. Because I was a child, no one had taken my concerns seriously, but now that I was older—in high school, college, an “adult”—I had more control over the variables and thus, the outcomes. My ability to see potential minefields was a skill; it made me an effective planner, a dedicated student, and well-prepared employee.

Or rather, I thought it did.

Herein lies the catch-22 of stress. You get stuck in a feedback loop: you’re stressed, which propels you to succeed, which validates your stress. When you fail, you simply weren’t worried about the right things—you didn’t stress enough.

The stress, the busyness, the importance of getting everything right—that becomes a part of who you are.

What if you didn’t stress? Would you still be productive? What if you didn’t worry about all the things? Would you still be able to identify actual problems before they became full-blown crises?

These are the what-if questions I’ve been asking myself over the last few years. For me, stress is like a bad habit—it’s not my only means of dealing with uncertainty, but for a very long time, it was almost always my first approach.

I haven’t totally figured this out yet, and honestly, I’m not sure I ever will. It’s something I’m working on though. I try to remember that there’s a difference between stressing and planning, despite how often I’ve conflated the two, and that when problems arise, I’m a lot better at solving them when my fight-or-flight response isn’t kicked into high gear.

When something becomes so deeply engrained, it can be hard to separate cause and effect. I’m finally starting to see that maybe the stress isn’t what pushed me to do well. Maybe it wasn’t a skill—maybe the stress was just noise.

This post originally appeared on The Pastry Box Project.

If you build it, they will come

About a year ago, I had the opportunity to talk with an HIV educator working in rural Malawi. We were discussing the challenges he faces in his work, and he told me that when they built the clinic where he works a few years ago, they assumed people would immediately start showing up for treatment. Many members of the community were living with HIV, and here was a place for them to receive care. “We thought,” he laughed, “if we build it, they will come.”

Turns out it’s more complicated than that. Stigma, education, gender politics, community dynamics, economics, and so much more kept people at bay; prevented people from seeking treatments that could dramatically improve their lives.

If you build it, they will come.

This is my least favorite phrase about the internet.

It’s so pervasive, you’d be forgiven for thinking its origins were biblical, and not say, a late 80s baseball flick. Maybe it worked for Kevin Costner, but it’s not going to work for you.

If you build it, they will come.

I should pause here and confess that I may be a little biased. I do, after all, work in community management—my professional success depends on people believing that “building it” is not enough. Still, I’d like to think my distaste for this phrase has more to do with the underlying assumptions it perpetuates than any particular interest in self-preservation.

If you build it, they will come.

To my mind, it’s one of the biggest, most pernicious myths of the internet. It plays on a number of fallacies our industry has clung to aggressively over the years: that the facts speak for themselves, that we are a meritocracy, and that the web is a great, global equalizer.

“If you build it, they will come” separates us from the people we are trying to serve. We are the builders. They? They are the masses. We do not need to ask them, understand them, build with them, because if we build it, they will come, like sheep to a greener pasture.

“If you build it, they will come” perpetuates the notion that building something is enough. That creating your website, or your app, or your online community platform, is all you need to do. If it’s good enough, if it’s better than your competitors’, if it meets an unmet need, and disrupts the right industry, users and profits will flow your way.

It is sorely tempting to believe this idea. It’s the 21st century American Dream—we’re all starring in our own Horatio Alger novel, pulling ourselves up with Bootstrap and the answers we find in StackExchange.

If you build it, they will come.

If this is all it takes, if the only qualification is how well something’s been built, then whatever is left standing must be what was built best, right?

I think few of us actually believe that (given that this, can happen at the same time as this, for instance), yet it still permeates our notion of what it takes to succeed, and who is capable of succeeding. When we buy in to “if you build it, they will come,” it becomes easier to believe that Mark Zuckerberg is the only portrait of success for our work.

If you build it, they will come.

Our work, our responsibility, does not end when building is complete. Perhaps because the building is never really complete. The universe of our work is constantly evolving, and if we want what we’ve built to survive, we must evolve with it. That means doing the hard work of maintaining our products, our projects and our content.

It also means we can’t sit around looking pretty, hoping our users will finally call. We have to remind them that we’re here, and show them—by building with them, incorporating their feedback, supporting them while they use our sites—that we’ve built something worth coming back to.

This post originally appeared on The Pastry Box Project.