balance

Good quote

Everyone can look perfect or they can look terrible. And it’s true for every job, as well. Every boss. Every co-worker.

It’s a pretty safe bet that we all live our lives somewhere between the perfect and the terrible. And nothing is really really good always. But there is still sometimes. Because the really really good parts exist only in brief moments.

So when you think you need to switch jobs, or switch cities, or switch spouses, or switch any of the other bazillion things that you might feel are not as good as they should be, remind yourself that your job, your family, and even your dinners are probably pretty much the same as everyone else’s. And remind yourself to enjoy those brief, really, really good parts.

Count your blessings kind of thing. But mainly I thought it is interesting about balance between perfect and terrible.

“well-read” for an IT guy?

There was a library newsletter with list of new books acquired. It had books like “25 Stupid Mistakes, Stock Market”and “SOLVE YOUR PROBLEMS -The Birbal Way” – so I asked them what is the criteria of selecting books to buy since the library don’t have books like Mythical Man Month, Making Things Happen, Design of Everyday Things etc. They replied promptly (happily surprised) to send a book recommendation and they will consider. I use this reading list as one reference. What would be a good list?


Two quotes:- about winging it without reading the masters of the field

How dare we, then, decide to just wing it? To skip class. To make up history. To imagine that science is a matter of opinion, something optional, a diversion for the leisure classes… How can we work in the marketing tech field, for example, without knowing about David Ogilvy and Lester Wunderman and Claude Hopkins? Or Kaushik and Shirky?

in similar lines, about learning the history of your chosen field

Learn all of the history of your chosen field. I always wonder why all crappy bands sound the same but the bands that make it through history (whether you like them or not: the Beatles, U2, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, etc.) have such unique sounds. Part of it is by studying as much as possible the entire history of your chosen field. I keep telling my kids: if they want to learn to sing, or to tap dance, or draw manga comics, or to do anything, use YouTube or whatever to learn everything you can about all the masters in your field over the past 100 years.
Learn all of their styles, learn how to mimic them, learn their styles better than they knew them and what influenced them. Be able to recognize them at a moment’s glance. And only then will you start to develop your own unique style, which you can only then begin to master. Louis Armstrong did this, studying every musician he could, working with every musician he could, blowing on the trumpet every day for 60 of the 70 years of his life. That’s the only way to get good. To be better than the other six billion people on the planet who would like to be as good as you would like to be. How can you compete against that? Only hard work backed by true, sincere passion.

So if you want to say, how can you work in IT without having read so and so – what might that be?

drop or support an underperformer

At lunch, we were discussing about Dhoni persisting with Piyush Chawla and leaving out Ashwin saying he is more stable character. Similarly read the criticisms of Kamran Akmal and why five Pakistan captains have carried him so far. It may be too simplistic to think that these are simply captains’s choices alone, but still.


I think the question is how far do you support someone with the hope that he will rectify his mistakes, find his form and ride this blip? How do you know that by giving someone a chance to not let him down is actually putting him a bad position of having to perform something he cannot at the moment? How do you know if your ultimate support for someone who is underperforming is not bordering on cronyism? Sometimes letting someone down may be good for both the parties, but it is a hard thing to do.

The reason these resonated so much with me is, once I had persisted with a team mate thinking he will improve, by trying to mentor until customer asked to remove him from the team at which point it felt worst for him. It was a life-long lesson – that if I had acted decisively before, I could have avoided the larger pain for everyone. I know it is an argument like the one Jack Welch would make about how firing someone is actually good for him, but most of us have become set in our ways and if mistakes repeat, it cannot magically turn the other way round – that is just wishful thinking.

random

1. There is a standing debate on whether to become a specialist or generalist. I guess sitting on the fence on that is called versatilist. I had an option once to move into a package specific group after working on it for years, but decided against it since I didn’t want to do that alone for rest of my life. Gaining enough depth is some things and enough breadth was more appealing – trick probably is to know what is enough depth/breadth and not end up knowing nothing. Jack of some trades and master of few?


2. My current project is doing a transition for 3 months and moved on from knowledge transfer to secondary support, we were discussing today morning about subtle differences in the way things were explained in classroom vs how they are actually done. Happened to see this article today on procedural knowledge – obvious stuff, but it is expressed well. Article quotes from the book The Design of Everyday Things by David Norman (had this book in my list for too long – ordered today):-

People function through their use of two kinds of knowledge: knowledge of and knowledge how.
…
Knowledge how [is] what psychologists call procedural knowledge.
…
Procedural knowledge is difficult or impossible to write down and difficult to teach. It is best taught by demonstration and best learned through practice. Even the best teachers cannot usually describe what they are doing. Procedural knowledge is largely subconscious.

3. Four levels of business knowledge:- 1. Data 2. Information – context of data and purpose of it 3. Insight – what information actually means 4. Wisdom – how to achieve a goal using insight and experience. Good framework to think about any knowledge.