Category: lessons & learning

dusty memory

Arguably, I have spent many years taking my experience for granted. As I set out into the world of contracting this year, I have found myself in the interesting postion of suddenly and very quickly needing to do a lot of professional self-reflection and inventory work. Specificially, I’ve needed to spend a couple weeks digging…
discomfort

I was in class this past weekend, continuing the work on my Business Analysis Certification, and the topic we were discussing was “solution design.” One thing led to another and we were going round the table talking about interfaces and user experience and people-centric innovation. This all came to me bringing up my current desktop…
little experiments

Goals are out. Experiments are in. I was listening to a podcast a few weeks ago and an interesting idea was suggested by one of the guests. We have these big ideas about goals and resolutions and accomplishments, but maybe we’re wrong about all that. Thinking about self-improvement or personal projects as zero-sum must-achieve-end-state goals…
measuring up

Capitalism has done great things, sure, but it has also forced us all to weigh our worth against a single accounting ledger. That is to say, of all the ways to measure a human being, tallys of the good and bad parts of ourselves set against a moral backdrop or a social yardstick or an…
negative stimuli

As much as we like to think of ourselves as reflective and thoughtful creatures, the hard truth is that our brains are highly reactive. They are, perhaps literally, hard-wired to respond to stimuli from our senses. It may even be true that much of this reaction occurs outside of our conscious perception of it: visual…
little ol’ you

You are self-contained. No matter how much you may think that you are interconnected with other people, interdependent with someone else or aligned in either a positive or negative way to the existence of another, at the end of the day biology and physics dictate that you cannot be merged, combined, subdivided, or otherwise change…
beta testing words

I’m kinda hung up on the idea of beta testing my writing these days. How does that work? Well, the thing is that each time I’ve written something—anything—and then published it online there is usually a bit of metrics attached to that. Clicks. Read throughs. Search presence. All of those things form a pretty robust…
on entropy

There is an inbuilt and inherent temporary-ness to everything, which means that everything, eventually turns back into it’s sub-atomic components of atoms and energy. You and I, our homes, our cars, our cell phones, our refrigerators, beds, toothbrushs, shoe laces, those television shows we stream over the internet, the film we watched last weekend and…
snippets of thoughts

Writing every day and posting to a blog every day is like beta testing any product. Words are a means to convey ideas, and you don’t know how useful that idea is until you expose it to the pressures of the user, which in the case of any piece of content like a blog post…
dabbling

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the idea of dabbling. There is value in the trying. What is failure, after all? By my reckoing failure doesn’t necessarily need to be a binary outcome. I mean, just because you’re not a raging success at something doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth trying, does it? …