This week’s New Yorker has an article describing Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBits project. I’ve heard about this project for years, and I’ve never understood what the point is. Collecting all of those pictures and articles and emails about one’s life just creates an overwhelming mass of data that can’t be processed effectively. It’s like the shoeboxes […]
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 […]
Fiction Roundup May 2007
It looks like I haven’t done a fiction review for most of the past year, so this will be a chance to collect everything I’ve read but wouldn’t admit to reading when I was supposed to be studying 🙂 Intuition, by Allegra Goodman This sounded interesting after reading the Economist review, so I picked it […]
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 […]
What makes a community?
I’ve been thinking about what it means to be part of a community. There’s so much mixed up in it that I’m having trouble disentangling all the threads, so I’m going to do what I always do and blog to try to make sense of it. One thread is the community of family. Families are […]
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 […]
“The Guy” and community
After pondering “The Guy” theory for a few more days, I think it’s inextricably tied into the formation of community. Every example of “The Guy” that I came up with involved the creation of a new community. This made sense when I thought about it. If a community exists, it’s much harder to become “The […]
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 […]
