Separating the interesting from the important

Back in my drama school days, I had an acting teacher who had a knack for the unexpected metaphor.

We were working on monologues from Shakespeare, each actor would take their turn in front of the class and our prof would then give notes. Pretty standard stuff. One of the guys got up to do his bit, and positioned a chair in the middle of the stage. As our professor lit another cigarette, the monologue began.

Over the course of the next 5 minutes and throughout the speech, my actor friend did the following:

1. Stood on the chair
   
2. Flipped over the chair
   
3. Held the chair over his head
   
4. Did a cartwheel over the chair
   
5. Balanced on top of the chair
   
6. Rinse & repeat until the speech ended...
   

When he had finished, there was an unusually long and uncomfortable pause. The prof took a long slow drag of his Marlboro Light 100 and said: "There is difference between milking a cow, and fondling the teets. You were fondling the teets."

Now, many years later, I tell this story a couple times a year to my engineers.

It is often fun to add features or spend time on those parts of a project that are easy, sexy or fun. But are we really focused on what is important? All of us have a tendency to gravitate toward the exciting parts of what we do, or invest time and energy into the bits on the surface to the neglect of the core issue at hand. If we turn this natural behavior on its ear, and focus on the core problems, we can learn to separate the interesting from the important.

This story has turned into a fundamental engineering philosophy over my time leading and growing technology teams. Are we solving the real problem? Or are we just fondling the teets?