Why do I do what I do?

On Tuesday at the end of class we watched a video.  I took the scenic route home so I could think about it more.  Simon Sinek was the speaker and he kept repeating: "People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it."  This inspired me to think about why do I do what I do?  Since I am a geek, I usually approach things from a technical view and am scared to abandon that view because I don't want to fall behind with the tech.  (That would make me look stupid in the eyes of my fellow alpha geeks.)  But the tech is what I do ... why do I do it?  People don't care that I "build distributed cloud applications on Amazon EC2 using node.js that can be leveraged by mobile clients and rich internet applications using HTML5 and CSS3."  In my mind they should care because otherwise they wouldn't reap the benefits of the tech.  But why do I do it?  What do I believe that makes me choose this?  I'm not doing it for money right now (although I hope to one day).  Last week, Eric said that people should be valued over ideas so how does this concept affect people?

My first belief is that each of us have unique talents that have to be discovered in our own personal way.  These talents cannot be discovered by standardized testing or jobs training programs.  We must have the freedom and flexibility to leverage our talents to their fullest degree.  Also, I believe that given ample opportunity, everyone has the potential to achieve this.  Notice I said ample opportunity and not equal opportunity.  While equal opportunity must be decided and guaranteed by an outside influence, ample opportunity is measured by the individual.  The moral of the story is that opportunity must not be limited.  The pair of unique talent and ample opportunity, can be enhanced or hindered by technology.  Technology that enhances must be flexible and accessible enough so that it is usable by a broad range of interests.  

For business a standard platform makes sense internally.  Standards are easier and cheaper to deploy and maintain but they also hinder individual traits.  This actually is (sadly) desired as deviances from procedures can take more time and money.  An simple example: using technology, you can play chess with someone on the other side of the world who you have never met and you don't even have to speak the same language.  You can be paired with an opponent who has a skill level like yours.  You can choose to have your pieces be maple wood while your opponent sees marble.  This is all impossible in the physical world.  Therefore technology has increased opportunity to leverage individual talents in unique ways.  A geek would ask "What language was the application written in?", "What OS is the server running on?" or "What browser is most useful for this?"  People shouldn't have to worry about that.  (If this sounds like I am saying geeks are not people that's another topic for debate.)

A few years ago I was a hardcore Microsoft fanboy.  I wouldn't touch anything that hadn't been blessed by the Redmond Gang.  I would wait with great anticipation for the next release of Visual Studio or Windows and then when it arrived, wait for the next one.  I'm not putting down Microsoft's products.  I am a huge fan of Windows Phone 7 despite its limitations which I think will be fixed soon.  I was not focused on using Microsoft technology to do what I believed.  I was a 'Microsoft' developer and not an 'application' developer.  If it couldn't be done using Microsoft software (a limitation/constraint) I didn't do it.  I was focused on what I was doing, not why I was doing it.  

Glance through the listings for IT professionals and you'll see descriptions that sound like what I wrote above "5 years of experience writing messaging applications using Sharepoint with C# 2.0"  When they are this specific ... they mean it!  The standard is set and no deviations are allowed.  Consumers who download smartphone apps might want to connect with Facebook.  They have a goal in doing this.  They want to be able to communicate something unique about themselves to others with similar interests.  This is why they use Facebook.  They don't want to connect to Facebook because it runs on XYZ nor do they care.

There has to be a summary in here somewhere.  I say that the reason I do what I do is because I believe that when people are not constrained by the technology, they can leverage their own unique talents.  That sounds like something from a marketing campaign.  But (and no offense to marketers) the goal of marketing is to make people think that your product is the only one to purchase, despite its constraints.  Marketing does not educate people to make up their own minds because that means they might decide to purchase a competitors offering.  Is it possible for me to be more specific? (without being limiting)  I also have unique talents and interests.  I want to create applications which enable people with those same talents and interests to communicate, collaborate and progress their contributions.  The set of talents and interests I have is not served best by a particular language or OS.  I doesn't matter which I choose as long as it doesn't constrain the users of whatever I build.  My choice of technology is driven by this goal.  So that is why I do what I do.