It's not just cat videos!

The way you talk about something is the way you think about it….

(Like this article? Read more Wednesday Wisdom!)

(Short and sweet today because I got a terrible cold and that is impeding my ability to think and write clearly.)

Years ago I worked for a popular video sharing website. Originally the content on the site was not very sophisticated and quite a few videos we served seemed to focus on cats and their antics. I love cats, so obviously I can watch cat videos until the cows come home. However, I would be the first to acknowledge that cat videos are not consequential to my life; if the world’s entire collection of cat videos would disappear from the planet tomorrow (interesting concept for a SF novel if you ask me) I think I would do just fine.

Unfortunately the prevalence of cat videos on the site had not only taken hold of a lot of our hard disks, but also lodged itself into the heads of my colleagues. A lot of them seemed to be under the impression that our entire catalog of content was all cat videos or at least of a similar unimportant nature. Whenever we had an outage I could always hear some of my colleagues say: “So what, that’s just XX cat videos not served”.

I thought this was a terrible thought pattern; by talking about our content as “merely” cat videos they were severely diminishing the importance of our service and thereby holding themselves to a low standard of reliability. 

If what you do is not that important, it is surely not important to do it well.

I pointed out to them that our site was no longer just cat videos (if it had ever been). Instead we hosted college classes, instructional videos, music videos, vlogs, and whatnot. Over time our site had become integral to the core process of many businesses. I myself had used our site to learn how to replace a headlight in my car and to brush up on complex arithmetic. Bars used our site to play music, schools used it to disseminate academic content, companies used it as a platform for distributing customer service videos, and political parties used the site for campaign videos. Referring to all of this content as “cat videos” did not do justice to the myriad of ways in which we had become important to the world.

So I declared war on the “it’s just cat videos” train of thought by pointing out at every conceivable opportunity that we hosted content that was critical to many individuals and organizations. Consequently the availability of that content was of supreme importance to many. 

This reframing was validated by the fact that whenever we had a real site-wide outage I typically learned about it first from people texting me to check if there was a problem. These texts always came minutes before our alerts triggered.

The way you talk about things is the way you think about them. Don’t refer to your valuable service as something that is unimportant because that just helps justify doing a crappy job, which will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.