Stay with me. This is about software. Eventually.

Last night, Channel 4 broadcast once more the only “chick flick” I can stomach watching: Jerry Maguire. In fact, not only can I stomach it, I actually like it. I can’t put my finger on it, because I normally hate soppy films. Maybe it’s that Renée Zellweger kind of looks a bit like a girl I once loved. Maybe it’s that when I had hair and was a little thinner I thought that if I worked out I could pass for a fat, podgy, Tom Cruise (now I’m not 18, but 28, I realise how ridiculous that sounds). Maybe it’s because I’m an old romantic who believes in love conquering all. Maybe it’s because I’d probably love the little boy too if I ever met him. There’s just something in it, I can’t put my finger on.

One thing that nearly everybody remembers about the film is the occasional interjections by “Dicky Fox” a sports agent who taught Jerry everything he knows. His quotes are pretty worthy of remembering:

• The key to this business is personal relationships.
• Roll with the punches. Tomorrow is another day.
• If this [points to heart] is empty, this [points to head] doesn’t matter.
• I love getting up in the morning. I clap my hands and say ‘This is going to be a great day!’
• I’m not saying I have all the answers. I have failed as much as I have succeeded. But I love my life. I love my wife. And I wish you my kind of success.

He’s eternally optimistic, he has a positive outlook on life. I like that. I think when you start a business, you kind of have to feel this way, even if you don’t want to. You have no idea how important it is at 5am when you’re getting out of bed to make sure a deployment went through OK to clap your hands and say to yourself ‘This is going to be a great day!’ - for me, it’s the only thing that helps get me as far as the first cup of coffee.

Last night, I was wondering where the character of Dicky Fox came from. I knew he was played by a real-life exec at the studio, but nothing more. It turns out he was played by Executive Vice President of Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Intellectual Property Department, a man by the name of Jared Jussim. But where did the character come from, who was he based on?

The answer, I did not find. What I found instead, astonished me.

If you’ve seen the film, you’ll know Jerry basically screws his career by writing a memo/Mission Statement to all his colleagues about how they’re all bastards, that he then places in all their pigeon holes to discover on waking the next morning? It would appear that in creating the backstory, somebody, somewhere, actually wrote that Mission Statement. Parts of it are in the voiceover on the film, but I think there are substantial parts that aren’t in the film. You can read it online right now if you wish. I’m going to highlight some bits, so you don’t have to read it, but you might want to. If you do, I advise you go print it out, sit down with a cup of coffee and then come back here. Done? Weird, wasn’t it?

Weird because it was an interesting piece of fiction, never seen by anybody but a few cast members until somebody “put it out there” for us to digest. Weird because even though SMI isn’t real, Jerry isn’t real, Dicky Fox isn’t real, the audience he wrote it for isn’t real, it feels real. Weird, because it has so many truths in it.

I said this would be about software. I lied. There is no Ruby snippet or insight into Agile here, but there are some pieces of that Mission Statement that were so weird, they’ll haunt me as I go to sleep tonight.

Here are some of those things that I think people who want to be great coders should try and remember, or at least, if somebody came to me tomorrow and asked for advice on how to enjoy this industry more, or how to start a software company, or hell, how to do any job or start any company, I expect my answers would try and include the following quotes (with my notes in square brackets):

• My father once said, “Get the bad news over with first. You be the one to say the tough stuff”.

• “You and I are blessed, he said, “we do something that we love.” [note: if you aren’t loving your job, resign. Today. Life is too short]

• We are pushing numbers around, doing our best, but is there any real satisfaction in success without pride? Is there any real satisfaction in a success that exists only when we push the messiness of real human contact from our lives and minds?

• I have said “later” to most anything that required true sacrifice. Later I will spend a weekend reading real books, not just magazines. Later I will visit my grandmother who is 100 and unable to really know the difference. Later I will visit the clients whose careers are over, but of course I promised to stay in touch. Later later later later. It is too easy to say “later” because we all believe our work to be too important to stop, minute to minute, for something that might interfere with the restless and relentless pursuit of forward motion. Of greater success. Make no mistake, I am a huge fan of success. But tonight, I propose a better kind of success.

• How can we do something surprising, and memorable with our lives? How can we turn this job, in small but important ways, into a better representation of ourselves? Most of us would easily say that we are our jobs. That’s obvious from the late hours we all keep. So then, it is bigger than work, isn’t it? It is about us. [There is no industry on the planet like software. Trust me. We are like a collective, a Borg species moving across Usenet, Majordomo lists and blogs, interconnecting ourselves. We work late, we start early, we live the job. I just got an MSN from a colleague at 00:12am about a DNS change. We are our jobs. Or at least, those of who love it are. We should think about that more].

• It is not easy to hide a winning formula. Take a successful t.v. show. The following season, you see twenty others just like it. Same goes for our company. [How many Million Dollar Homepages have you seen in the last year? How many video clip websites? How many price comparison search engines? Copying a winning formula is easy. You might even make money. It won’t last though, and it’s not what you got into this business for] … But the great ones all do one thing at the time of their greatest success. They change the game. They make it harder for themselves. They raise the bar. They work not just harder, but they work smarter. That is why the great athletes, politicians, musicians, philosophers all got stronger instead of more weary. We must do the same.

• Coffee tastes different at night. It tastes like college. [Any coder who doesn’t know this, isn’t really a coder. You code for work, not for love. Change your career, or you’ll hate your life when you look back on it in forty years time]

• How many rich people have said this in our presence: “I thought I would feel better when I was rich, but I don’t.” [Too many people get into IT because they think it is a path to riches. Right now, Computer Science and “Informatics” labs are full of kids who are hoping to get rich, and hoping to get rich quick. They will either fail in getting rich, or fail in feeling happy when they’re there. Those of us in this for the job, we’re here because of the game, the Zone, the challenge, we’re going to win]

• I am wondering what that exact moment is when we truly, truly love our jobs. Is it during the day, or at the end of the day, or is it years later looking back on all we accomplished? I think perhaps truly loving something is the ability to love it at that moment. It is an elusive ability, something I have never been able to quite accomplish. I must go home, and take my experiences like a squirrel, and consider them, before I can truly enjoy them. I must work on this. The daily journey is everything. Being able to enjoy enjoyment while it is happening.

• A life is not worth living if you are sleepwalking through it. Because that is what feels like death. That is what causes athletes to, out of despair, get drunk and wrap their cars around a pole. Or lash out at someone they love … It is the feeling of sleepwalking. Of others living life around you, keeping their fists tightly wound around whatever dollars they can muster, caring little more than nothing about those around you. We cannot sleepwalk. We cannot just survive, anything goes. We can take control of our lives, we can quit sleepwalking, we can say - right now, these are our lives, it is time to start living it. It is time to not second guess, to move forward, to make mistakes if we have to, but to do it with a greater good in mind.