Train of Thought

I’ve been interviewing people a fair amount lately. If the discussion gets to the area of workplace environment I often talk about the Netflix Freedom and Responsibility Culture. I’ve blogged about that before so just read it if you haven’t.

Since I forwarded the link to someone I interviewed, I read it again. This time I was struck by this quote:

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders.

Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

— Antione de Saint Exupery

I didn’t recall that in The Little Prince, which is my sole exposure to the author, so I Googled it. Aside from discovering that it’s a bad translation from the original French I found a link to this very old post by Jeff Atwood. It talks about Stack Overflow and Jeff makes this point:

I don’t care how much you pay me, you’ll never be able to recreate the incredibly satisfying feeling I get when demonstrating mastery within my community of peers.

And he links to this video. Which you should watch.

It’s amazing where your thoughts can take you…