I've spent much of my life in what some uncomfortably call, pleasing people. That term feels subservient though. To me, pleasing people means over-delivering on some promise or transaction that two people may or may not be explicitly acknowledging.

Niki Nakayama in Chef's Table (which if you haven't seen it... just go watch that entire series now) says something profound in the middle of a sentence that captures why she works so hard doing what she does.

She says that she's not serving food to please customers; she's doing it to honor the work her customers have put into their own lives to bring themselves to her restaurant. People save money, a little bit each month so they may eat in her restaurant. Food costs money, and she's going to serve the best food she can to honor that effort.

Homeless ten years ago, I found myself with a lot of idle time finding things to do to pass the time. One of those things was browsing in a bookstore, looking at things I couldn't afford in an effort to take little bits of knowledge with me. I came upon Thomas Keller's French Laundry Cookbook and for the first time in a long time, found myself with wet eyes looking at this body of work that a person had created for themselves in order to inspire other people. That was the moment I decided to look at my own work, even if it was as an assistant manager  a fast casual restaurant, for ways to execute tightly on the work we were doing. Even if that meant being extra rigorous about counting bags of pasta late after close as a means to create a better method to inventory our cost of goods sold. 

We have all had these experiences where someone which whom we're entering a transaction with believes beyond the transaction; every transaction becomes an opportunity to elevate themselves and prove their own histories to themselves.

Users in product design, deserve this same level of respect. The fact that a morning commute in the morning must be done is honored with playful, expressive illustrations that elevate the person's own experience even if that medium is through email. 

We make an advertising analyst who reads at ads dashboards for hours a day look good when those pages load faster. The designed experience is better not because it's beautiful, but because the pages load fast. Yes, speed is design too and is respectful of that person's own time. Because of us, they go home sooner and feel more successful because of the insight we provide them.

For a user who doesn't understand the platform, we provide a hundred open doors for them to get lost in so that they can understand the platform for themselves, an create their own understanding of it, instead of being led to understand something they don't believe in.

We owe that to our users, because they've worked an entire life to get to where they are in this moment as they use the products we've defined for them.

To do this, to truly respect with profound understanding the journeys of the people we build things for, we must work. Work extremely hard. This is what we mean by doublewick, and to burn the candle at both ends from time to time.

We owe this same level of execution to the teams we work with because they've worked very hard to get to where they are. Where we work, we're surrounded by engineers who came from the world's top institutions of learning –– MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley –– and we take those journeys for granted because we work for one of the most important companies in the world. To get to those places, our team members worked very hard, long nights to be admitted to those schools. 

--

So that's why we work hard, but from time to time we should also take it upon ourselves to be on the opposite side of the table and seek out people who burn both ends of the candle to serve their customers. This means flying somewhere to visit a restaurant that works so hard that customers like you can see what they've poured an entire life into.

Go seek out those opportunities to find people who are doing the same thing, pushing themselves further than anyone else so that they may feel your gratitude as fuel to make the next step in their own path to excellence. They may be someone who lays bricks for a living; they may paint houses; they make espresso. They all make something.

This isn't weekend warrior work hard-play hard bullshit, it's doing something that's meaningful to you so that you can please people in order to push yourself further.

They do those things to sure ––please or delight people––, but underneath it all there's an inspiring unspoken pact that's created saying, "here, be inspired, but now you go and make your own thing."