Blogging Ottinger (tim)Scylla and Charybdis: Fear and Ambition
I’ve been in meetings this week, estimating tasks for the next iteration. Our ambitious, optimistic team member was pushing for us committing to more work while the more beaten-down were arguing for less. We ended up with a good compromise, which is the point of such meetings (I think).
It made me think about how so much of our lives are involved in sailing between Scylla and Charybdis, between fear of failure and ambition to get more done — between the comfortable and the impossible. I don’t think it’s just a feature of software development teams, but maybe a human feature. We find the same issues in ministry. We are always wanting to risk too little out of fear or risk too much out of enthusiasm.
My recent church history has me thinking about this a lot. The question is how to navigate between these two monsters and make decisions based on something other than fear and ambition. In software, we push to make decisions based on data, and we talk about “yesterday’s weather” being our best guide — what we’ve done before is what we’re likely to do again.
What about when you’re talking about faith? Maybe we should use yesterday’s weather — what God has brought us through, what he’s done for our friends, what we see he’s done in the past. Maybe we need to stop watching what we’re afraid of and what we’re capable of doing so much.
But what do I know?
