When I worked at Signature BioScience, there were ten other software developers, all of whom wrote better and more sophisticated code than I did. Yet I survived through multiple layoffs as Signature spiralled into bankruptcy, and I was the only developer re-hired by MDS Sciex when they picked up the pieces from Signature’s carnage. Seem […]
Category: people
Happiness and Satisfaction
I’m almost halfway through my summer “vacation” from classes and it’s time to pause and reflect on what I’m doing with my time off. One of the joys of having free time again is being able to waste it, but I’m finding that spending time in certain ways doesn’t make me particularly happy. For instance, […]
Embracing constraint
A friend recently told me about his vacation where he felt surprisingly productive despite not having access to his normal resources (he only had a carry-on bag of clothes, a laptop and a couple books). Because he had fewer choices about what to do, he just picked a task available to him and started working […]
Laying the foundation
Twyla Tharp, in her book The Creative Habit, tells the story of working on the musical Moving Out, set to Billy Joel’s work. She listened to all of his music, watched all of his music videos, read or watched every interview with him, watched iconic movies of the Vietnam war like Full Metal Jacket, read […]
Mastery
Following up on the previous post about discipline, I think another reason for discipline is that it’s necessary to achieve mastery. I was reminded of this while reading Artful Making, by Robert Austin and Lee Devin. They relate the process of management to the making of collaborative art, such as putting a play together. I’ll […]
Discipline
I was talking to a friend over the weekend, and somehow we got onto the topic of discipline. I think we had been talking about PhD programs. We’re both generalists and tend to have interests that are broad rather than deep, so there’s no intrinsic appeal to the idea of getting up each day and […]
Is a Maven “The Guy”?
Two different commenters have now said that my conception of “The Guy” was what Malcolm Gladwell dubbed a Maven in The Tipping Point. That didn’t feel right to me, so I went back and re-read the “Law of the Few” chapter where Gladwell describes Mavens to see if I could figure out why I thought […]
Paradox of Career Choice
I’ve mentioned the Paradox of Choice before, both the New Yorker article and the book I haven’t read. The basic idea is that although it seems like more options would be better, too many options actually creates a situation where we are overwhelmed by choice and can’t make a decision at all. The canonical study […]
Thinking by talking
I had a teddy bear moment today. I was trying to debug something at work, got stuck, asked one of my coworkers to help me, explained the problem to him, and said “Oh, I see what’s going on” without them saying anything. I guess I should bring a teddy bear into work so that I […]
“The Guy” theory
[Apologies in advance for the sexism inherent in calling it “The Guy” theory – the people with whom I was having these conversations were all male, so it made sense in those instances, and I can’t think of an appropriate gender-neutral term right now] So I’ve been referring to “The Guy” theory in several recent […]
