Say The Thing

In the long long ago, I used to be an EMT. I’ve picked up a lot of good stories from what I’d describe as a quite remarkable experience. EMTs generally, and instructors specifically are a very special breed. I also learned a lot of things while doing that training, many of them had nothing to do with medicine or healthcare of any kind. It was from firefighters I learned what might be the most important lesson I’ve ever learned.

Many of the instructors from my class were active duty firefighters. Which is probably the way it should be, not just because nearly everyone in the class wanted to be a firefighter, but because they were quite obviously experts. There was a lot of extra curricular education that would benefit anyone, EMT or firefighter, or just human. I was one of the few¹, that were there with a goal other than becoming a firefighter. During some down time in between classes, all of the instructors would start “general” or “friendly” conversations. [Can you feel the trap comming yet?]

This particular conversation was just so everyone could get to know each other. [Uh… Why do I hear boss music?] We’d all had various conversations, almost everyone had already asked a question about some part of how to be a firefighter. That had to be nearly everyone, right? After a bit of Q & A, one of the instructors decided to ask the whole class:

Why do you want to be an EMT? What do you plan to do after you get your license, and why?

Everyone had a slightly different reason or explanation [Huh… that’s strange, why is there a huge red bar floating there?], a lot of the “why” answers were quite similar, most were some version of “I want to join the fire service”, a lot of them had what seemed like good reasons, I remember being surprised how many people were continuing family traditions. I was one of the few students who was in class as the step towards paramedic, and later nursing. Unfortunately, I was towards the back, so someone beat me to the answer; “I want to be a nurse.” Well damn, now I can’t say that! It’s ok, I still have my unique answer. I can just say the unique part: [Did I just hear a clicking sound?] It was finally my turn so I answered:

I want to become a paramedic, and work on a helicopter as a flight medic, maybe a flight nurse eventually.

I felt satisfied with that answer.

The instructor won, but I still had no idea. Seems likely this is just some copium, but I’m pretty sure none of us knew. The answers continued for a while longer. The only remaining remarkable response, was one of the students who was ‘repeating’ the class, someone who was already friends with the instructors didn’t get to answer. The instructor just saying “I know why you’re here”, and pointing to the next person. [That’s what you’d refer to as ‘a clue’!] Eventually, we all learned the lesson. Because then he said:

Ok, so everyone here, you all will never get a job as a firefighter!

I’m sorry, what?!

The correct answer is, and the only way you’ll get hired is if you say “I’m here because I want to save someone’s life”.

Oh, fuck!

He had no problem making that assertion, and we all knew he was right. Everyone fell into his trap, because everyone knew their first order, primary reason, fundamental motivation, for joining this course, for starting training to become an EMT; was because each of us were there because we wanted to save lives.

But not a single one of us gave that as our answer. We all correctly “failed” our interview that day. Thankfully, that day was just a lesson. It feels impossible for me to explain how profoundly useful this lesson has been for me².

Say the most important thing first!

At $OLDJOB, I got to use this lesson a lot. Everyone working with me in safety & security would make this mistake all the time. When asked to describe the reasons we should deploy any solution, or which bugs we should fix first. Everyone would always give secondary advantages. “This will improve performance”, or “this will save gCPU”, or “this will be easy to maintain”. Because everyone knew we were all trying to do whats right for users. We never actually said it. That was a mistake we all made, not everyone in the company spent their whole day, every day, trying to figure out how to protect users from abuse. It’s wasn’t their core understanding, like it was ours. So even for those who knew they didn’t really know.

If you ever find yourself presenting options for a decision. You’d be surprised how easily and how quickly your suggestion will be chosen, when you list “protecting users” as the first order reason to do anything. Just, and I can’t stress this enough!

Say the important thing first!

Say it first, not last, it’s not a side benefit! Don’t list how it’ll make more money, and improve performance, oh and bonus, I guess it’ll help users too. That’s the most important reason. It deserves to be said first. And your users deserve to be listed first. As much as it hurts me to admit, we all live in a world, where everyone, somehow, wrongly believes, the line must go up! Yes, it’s better when the line goes up, but not when it’s at the expense of other humans. So, always… Say the important thing first³!