22 Jun 2015
When I started working at Microsoft, almost five years ago now (!), I remember early career meetings with my manager at the time. God bless his patience. I was fresh out of college and, up until graduation, success and the problems I was required to solve had been clearly defined. Make this sculpture, write this paper, write a compiler. I was very good at execution and terrible at defining intermediate tasks. My conversations with my manager usually consisted of him asking what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go with my career. I had no conception at the time, and mentioned something about coding my features and fixing bugs. No self direction and a pain in the ass for my manager.
I thought that I was an asset at the time. I was a competent coder and I was a resource to be used. In reality, I was a time and energy sink for my manager. Instead of figuring out how I could help and self directing my energies at work, I acted the part of an automaton and waited for directions. Telling a computer what to do is hard, telling a person and trying to keep them happy seems way harder.
Then came startup life. I no longer had a manager. I no longer had someone to tell me what problems to solve and how to go about doing that. I needed to identify problems, diagnose them, design a solution, and execute. It took me about a year to figure out how to do that efficiently. By that time though we ran out of money and the startup quietly failed. However, I did learn how to solve problems, and in my recent adventure as an Education Consultant I’m seeing how valuable that can be to the people around me.
tl;dr; Don’t ask people what you should be doing. You’re smart. Ask about their problems, figure out how to solve them, and do it.
09 Jun 2015
I just had the pleasure of finishing a weeklong bootcamp with the Flatiron School and I’d like to take a moment and reflect on what I learned about teaching from the example of my excellent peers.
Teaching is hard. It’s a tricky blend of preparation, improvisation, and omniscience. It’s a craft that requires constant reflection, attention to detail, and extensive preparation. There is a difference between talking through content you know and teaching it. Especially when dealing with younger people.
When teaching adults there are expectations about behavior and attention that you can generally rely upon. There are no such accomodations when teaching teenagers, and this is where the craft of teaching comes into play. So much energy and preparation needs to go into making sure your material is accessible, engaging and timely.
Like any craft that I have tried I don’t know that I, or any other teachers, are ever (or should be) fully satisfied with the way their lesson went. During the week everyone had a chance to teach a 40 minute lecture and have a 20 minute feedback session. Everyone started the feedback section reflecting on their own work and most everyone was critical of their work. Everyone believed they had room to improve no matter how fantastic their session.
Such is the curse of craft.
27 May 2015
In my most recent post I wrote about timing and putting myself on a regular schedule to keep my writing on track. I received this valuable feedback from a good friend:
I know you subscribe to the commit often philosophy for blogging but why is it necessary? Shouldn’t one speak only when they have something valuable to offer? You’re going to force yourself into writing sub-par content.
I’d like to respond to publicly as my response taps into a fundamental belief of mine.
Quantity over Quality
There’s a popular anecdote, that I find particularly appealing given my background as a potter, from the book Art & Fear:
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
I find this idea of Quantity over Quality to be true for everything I have ever tried. When I teach, I encourage my students to make mistakes and start over quickly. A novice potter will learn more from messing up 10 pots than spending an hour on one. I know this to be true because I have seen it happen. (And since they’re beginners that one pot will still probably suck, which is how it should be).
I see the efficacy of quantity in my own work as well. My current commitment to draw every day means I often produce crap work, but I have also discovered really cool patterns and effects from this forced experimentation. If I was waiting till I had something valuable to draw I would never make anything, and I certainly wouldn’t have stumbled across some of my coolest work.
To answer the initial question, I am committed to writing more because focusing on quantity relieves the internal pressure to write perfectly. I will never be satisfied with the quality of my writing (or probably anything), and if I waited till I had something valuable to write I would never write. I’m ok writing sub-par content sometimes if that means I occasionally write excellent content. But if I can’t abide the churn of getting to great I will never arrive.
Quantity over Quality. Get ‘er done.
17 May 2015
It’s been almost 3 weeks since my last post, and I’m losing steam. I think there’s an issue of timing and visibility with writing these posts. And since I’m making this a meta-discussion on writing posts in the first place, let’s take a look at those issues.
Timing. I need to schedule time to write. Full stop. Things have been a little crazy of late, but I generally write the bones for one of these posts in a single Pomodoro (25 minutes for those of you that aren’t trying to be productivity nerds). That’s a manageable chunk of time, and moving forward I will put that time on my schedule.
Visibility. I have historically not really enjoyed being public with my thoughts and actions, and I don’t think I’m unique in this regard. Anytime I speak, write, or perform it places me in a position where my inner workings feel more exposed. Now, logically, I’m pretty confident that no one really cares enough about what I’m writing here to make an issue, and more importantly, anyone who would start something negative over what I’ve written here isn’t really worth my time. So there’s that. But it still tickles.
On an visibility related note, I think a post on Nerdiness is in order. There’s beauty in owning up to the things you love, and discord in keeping the things you love hidden in an attempt to fit in.
Ice broken. Joseph out.
28 Apr 2015
Friendships/Relationships have a time and a place
I have been lucky enough to have met a large number of people in my life. If Facebook is any indicator its probably over a thousand. However, I’m only in contact with a small percentage of those people at the present time.
I have old friends from camp as a kid, from my time abroad, from college, from sports teams, from the naval academy, from the Governor’s school for the Arts, and who knows where else. Very few of these relationships are currently active.
However, they remain what they were, great relationships that had a time and place.
I expect very few relationships in my life to be forever. I’m probably stuck with my family, a couple friends, and eventually a partner, but otherwise my other relationships have remained in the space they were born and nurtured.
That’s how it should be.
It’s natural for a relationship to be born from a specific setting, and it’s natural that it might not survive outside of that setting. The fact that it hasn’t actively survived all of life’s changes doesn’t lessen it’s significance.
I try not to worry if the nature of a current relationship changes or fades. What it was is worthy of my respect and appreciation, and you never know when an old relationship may flourish again in new setting.
