I’ve been meaning to write this post for several months (I referred to it two months ago over on Livejournal, so it’s older than that). It’s basically an exploration of how to deal with the situation where one’s personal values do not correspond to the values of an organization to which one belongs. I started […]
Category: people
Generalist
Beemer put up a thoughtful comment in response to my last post. To quote one part: Smart kids, especially the ones who go places like MIT, often get this idea that they need to be Einstein or Newton, which is frankly silly. Because that’s not how the world works — it’s the total contribution of […]
Productivity and existentialism
I’ve been tossing this post around in my head for close to a month now, and it’s not coming together, so I’m just going to get down what I have and invite feedback to see what others think. Be warned, it’s a long one, with lots of whining. It starts with my tendency to procrastinate. […]
Why do we write?
I’ve spent some time over the past couple days thinking about why Infinite Jest annoyed me so much. I went and read several gushing reviews of the book, as well as interviews with Wallace where he explains what he was trying to do. Part of what Wallace was apparently trying to convey was that life […]
Self promotion
In the spirit of Paul Graham, I’m going to start this entry with a question that re-occurred to me a couple days ago: What is the right balance of self promotion to do? I was sitting in a project update meeting and noted the difference in how much detail people put into their various updates. […]
Changing my mind
So picking up the threads of my post about harshness, I realized that one of the possible sources of people not wanting negative feedback is that people never want to admit they’re wrong. In fact, they don’t even want to admit they don’t know (thanks to my father for pointing that out). They want to […]
Taking responsibility
This post is going to be a little bit disjointed. I apologize from the start. I have several themes running through my head, and I know they all tie together, but I may not be able to express the connection coherently. But I’ve been mulling it over for a few days now, and it’s not […]
Harshness
One of the things that always surprises me is how gentle other people are around each other, and how fragile some people’s self-image is. There have been a couple occasions over the past few months where I asked for somebody’s opinion, and they prefaced their comments with “I know this is going to sound really […]
Social networks and rejection
I wanted to follow up on my recent post with more thoughts about social networks. I was thinking about the networks I’m part of, and how they interact, and realized that a component that is often missing from social software is the requirement for rejection. Nobody ever turns down a friend request in Orkut. But […]
The perception of safety
I really liked Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point. When a friend of mine lent me an article that Gladwell had written in the New Yorker, I went looking for it on the web and found that Gladwell publishes all of his articles on his website (that article, entitled “The Talent Myth: Are smart people […]
