Be The Roomba
Who doesn’t want more people paying attention to their projects? You want more readers, more users, more followers.
The instinct often is: Be bigger. Be bolder. Be louder. Be hustle-yer?
Perhaps there's another way.
I’m in the middle of a new hobby: improv. I’ve got my good days and bad days.
Recently, a bad one.
Two of my classmates were on stage pretending to be a couple. One character was complaining that their partner keeps taking them on extreme dates. This date was a trip to an Egyptian desert to do some yoga.
That’s where I spotted my chance.
I’ve had this “boot camp style yoga teacher” character I wanted to try out. I thought it could be a funny addition to what my classmates had set up. I enter their scene, all bold and loud, yelling poses and motivational platitudes at my cadets. I’m large and in charge.
Laughs? Hardly. It felt like I killed the scene and, thankfully, someone came in switched it out for something new.
The following week, my improv coach shared an important lesson.
Think of an improv scene like a dish at a restaurant. Meat is often the main star. It’s accompanied with an influential partner like a potato. But if there’s a third thing, it’s something like parsley. Losing it wouldn’t cripple the dish, but when it’s fresh and subtle, it raises the meal to something you bothered to go to a restaurant for in the first place.
So we have another 10-minute round of improv with my class. We’re getting towards the end, but I haven’t contributed much in this one, so I’m due to be in a scene. Two students are up doing their thing.
It seems like my fellow classmates have the Meat and Potatoes here. How can I simply and subtly raise up what they’re doing without making it all about me?
I come up with an idea. I don’t talk. Don’t make a noise. I simply crouch down like a fellow classmate did 5 minutes ago, and I pretend to be a Roomba vacuum, whirring my hands in circles and walking quietly around my scene partners.
It was barely a thing. If you weren’t watching you'd have missed it. It’s one of those “you had to be there” to get why it might be funny, but it tied this scene so well to something we did earlier that the whole 10 minutes felt satisfying.
What’s even better is that the class went into hysterics.
I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten such an huge laugh.
All I did was be parsley.
Last week, a colleague at work mentioned an email she got:
Nice. That’s me and Census at the top of Ruby Weekly. Even the subject of the email is about this new open source project I posted called Faraday Loop.
I’ve created a fair number of open source projects, some of them have gotten a decent amount of attention. But this thing really got a following in just its first week.
What's the deal?
Faraday Loop is code we spotted inside another open source project (Faraday Retry middleware). But inside that other project, it’s a very inside baseball thing you can’t get any general use from.
We realized it could be useful outside of that project for things we do here at Census. So Dave at work stuck this chunk of code into one of our Utility files so others here could use it.
But I come along, and think there’s an easy way to lift this whole thing up with a tiny bit of work: just stick our code in a gem.
Meat, Potatoes, Parsley.
Lostisland made the original work, already had a great thing here. Meat. Dave understood we could get even more general use out of it. Potatoes.
I just wanted to raise up both of their efforts a little. Nothing original. Nothing bold. Nothing loud. Parsley.
It makes me realize how much we’re missing when we think we need to always be the bold, original, attention grabber in the room. Sure, that's a role we sometimes need to play. But maybe only 1/3 of the time. Sometimes we need to be a solid partner carrying the rest of the load for the leading singer. And another 1/3 of the time we need to let the main ingredients be the stars. We’re just there for a little lift.
Doesn’t mean you need to be stuck in these roles either. Improv is full of lessons in realizing you’re always in a new situation. You just need to adapt and work with what the universe and your partners are giving you in that moment. Sometimes you’re meat. Sometimes potatoes.
And sometimes you’re a Roomba vacuum slinking around on stage barely making an effort. But bringing down the house.
P.S. Come be some meat, potatoes, and parsley with us. We’re hiring!
