Category: General

What Your Actions Say About You

The other day I stumbled into another short post from Steven Barnes that reminded me of what I had written several days back. 
If you were judged by your actions more than your words and your words more than your intents or feelings…how would you look?
Easy enough, right? I stated that the choices we make day to day, minute to minute, demonstrate whether we really make a priority of the things we claim we want. And Steven asks you to step outside of yourself and look at how you appear – what is the discrepancy between what you do, what you say, and what you intend? Are they the same? If not, why?
Both of these also mesh with Eric Raymonds essay: Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun, which, no matter what you think of guns themselves, discusses several universal truths. First, the fact that in the end, no matter what your predilections, strengths, and weaknesses are, it all comes down to your choices – and no-one else’s. Circumstances can inform or skew your choices, but in the end, it’s your decision to act, or not.
A second is that choices cannot simply be undone. Time’s arrow runs in only one direction, and any action, once taken, is permanent. The best that you can do in most cases is expend additional effort to counteract the consequences of the original decision or action. This is important because it applies to not only large, obvious actions, like pulling a trigger, but to small ones without immediately visible consequences: Eating a slice of cake probably won’t harm you (diabetics may beg to differ), but a person complaining about their weight who has a dessert every night is making a series of small decisions that in the end add up to weight gain. 
Thirdly – the universe does not care about your motives. It doesn’t care if you want to be thin, fat, famous, a writer, an actor, and engineer, or bum. As I said earlier, whether or not you become these things depends on what you choices you make every time you reach a decision point. It depends on what you do when other, easier alternatives may present themselves.
“You are who you decide to be.” Not who you want to be, not who you say you are. Who you decide to be. It’s a great truth, but most people forget that this is an ongoing and constant decision, at every turn that other options present themselves.
And as Steve Barnes reminds us: actions speak far louder than words.
Just what are you going to do about it?

Reading

Aside from my work, and studying that I’m doing, I try to set a little time aside each day to simply read, for pleasure’s sake. Even if only for a few minutes. Right now, I’m at the beginning of Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon

Neal is an incredibly geeky and clever writer, and I can almost feel the delight at the wordplay he employs.

Bluntly, he is one of the very, very few authors who I appreciate as much for their ability to turn prose into poetry as I do for their ability to tell a story. Dan Simmons, Gene Wolfe, Cormac McCarthy are the others.

I don’t read empty style, so you won’t see me recommend someone with no substance just because they put a lot of effort into style.

 

Priorities – Being Personally “Busy”

Hand in hand with my other post on priorities is the inherent waffling in telling yourself you’re too busy. 

What you choose to do, moment to moment, inherently defines what your priorities are. Period. If you don’t have time or money to do everything that needs to be done within a given time frame or budget, then you need to figure out which of those you’re going to drop or push off until later.

You can tell yourself all you want that you wish to learn to play an instrument, but if you watch TV or read instead of making 15-30 minutes a day, 4-5 days a week, minimum, available to practice, you will never gain proficiency.

You can tell yourself that you wish to be more fit, but if you sit around all day in front of a TV or monitor and don’t do something every day that makes you use your body’s strength and balance, then build up to do more and more, then your muscles will be just as flabby as they were the entire time you’ve been sitting on your butt beforehand.

You can say you want to lose weight, but if your choice every meal, or even every day is to down a bowl of ice cream, a cake, or a few cookies, instead of making them an occasional treat, or you constantly load up on empty calories, then you will gain weight.

You can “want” to learn to program, or write, or draw, or whatever, but if you go play darts at the bar and don’t take the time to practice writing, drawing, etc., how badly can you really, really say you want to do learn those skills?

There’s nothing wrong with watching movies or TV. I love to read, and it’s a valuable life skill as well as a form of entertainment. There’s nothing wrong with spending time with friends, playing darts, drinking beer, or having a huge dessert every once in a while. Just be honest with yourself.

If you look back at the week, and see that you haven’t spent some time every night working on the things you supposedly want to do, because you decided to do something else at every “what to do” decision point for the next half hour, then it’s obvious what your priorities were, eh?

Priorities – Being “busy” to Other People

These days, I try to never tell people I’m busy.

It just feels more honest that way. When someone asks you to do something, and you reply “I’m busy,” what you are really saying is “I am doing something else that I consider to be a higher priority right now.” This is true by dint of the simple fact that if taking more time to talk to them or to do what you are being asked was a higher priority, you’d stop doing what you are doing as long as you felt necessary.

If it’s your priority to wrap up the thought you are writing, or the page you are reading, or the lap you are running, tell them that. “Let me finish this up in just a second/minute.” If you have a scheduling conflict, tell them you have a prior commitment you can’t move. 

Sometimes, though, you just have to say “no.” It may be physically impossible – “Sorry sir, but I can’t get Jupiter moved closer by tomorrow night…”. It may be something that you have no interest in – “Sorry Bob, I’m not going to set aside a week to go to the snail darter convention.” Of course there’s the obvious caveat that just because you’re not interested, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be.

Some people will dislike it, but compared to a vague “I’m busy” – letting people know when you are and aren’t available gives them a concrete idea of what your boundaries are, and a better idea of when they can actually expect something done. It also gives them an idea of how to get you interested. You see, going hand in hand with this is a little bit of tact. Being polite with anyone you are turning down is just good common sense unless you have a reason to be actively rude. I also try to not tell my clients “no” if I can avoid it. Unavoidable “no’s” include “You can’t install that desktop drive in this laptop case,” but many of them, even if it’s not your core business, are avoidable.

So how do I deal with “avoidable” no’s? Through “Yes, but.”

You know what your priorities are. Factor in what would make taking on a project worth your while like time spent researching, and opportunity costs. “I really was looking forward to the beach vacation, finishing that book, and on top of that I’d have to bump two clients a few days to get this done.” I’ve even factored in whether or not a client is particularly needy or requests more than average rework by reflecting the additional time it would take up on the estimate. For business, these are often relayed in dollar amounts or working conditions. 

Either way, this puts the ball in the other person’s court. They now know what it will take to make something enough of a priority for you to tackle it, and they now have to decide yes, or no.

Learning by Doing, part Three

I’ve discussed before my friend Mike, and his quest to learn new things by mastering them, by taking the time to do them the painful, hard, and slow way so that he could get a nearly intuitive feel of what was involved. 

Again, the goal here wasn’t to knock out as many tomahawks./bows/etc. of a good quality in as short a time as possible – in which case he would have had no problems with modern power tools like dremels, etc., but to learn the skills required at a deeper level.

That depth takes time.

We’ve seen the books. “Learn php in Seven Days!” 

Let’s try the reality: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. 

In the article, Peter Norvig, researcher at Google, utterly skewers the attitude that you can “learn to program in ‘x’ in seven days.”

Again, it takes time. It takes practice. It takes repetition and challenging yourself to build new constructs and try new things so you don’t just understand the basic theory, but you have a near-intuitive grasp of how they fit together. You have a model in your head of what actually works, and what doesn’t.

The key is persistence. 

 

Learning by Doing, part Deux.

You can study the diagrams for a valve, or motor, or computer. You can read the manuals, often written with input from people who designed the hardware in question, and trace out the concepts of what goes where, and which piece does what.

But it’s not until you disassemble the valve, the transaxle, the pump casing, the computer case, or the vacuum cleaner, fix it, and put it back together, that you will know the system as well as you think you do. You can read several books on programming, but it’s not until you actually start writing code, and slamming your head up against the wall of “now why in the hell does it do THAT??!” that you really learn to program.

Writing is one of the few areas where the act of studying – reading – helps prepare you by not only giving you the knowledge base of words and ideas, but helps lay out the paths in your mind in turn with which to write. 

And yet, even writing well is, as I recently noted, a skill that needs to be practiced to be brought to mastery. By writing.

So what is the hands on for learning academic knowledge?

Writing.

No, not pretty posters, though the research involved in building dioramas and such, combined with the focus of working on them can help. I’m talking about how you process the information you are receiving to memorize it as efficiently as possible.

The Navy likes to tell you in training that they will a) tell you what they are about to tell you (the objectives and goals), b) Tell you what they’re telling you, and c) tell you what they just told you. They also make a habit of repeating information – by speaking it, by putting it up on the board so you can see it, and by expecting you to write it down.

Note taking. That awful, dreaded, old-fashioned way to learn.

Aside from the sheer repetition, the focus required to write, especially by hand, what you are hearing or reading, seems to be very efficient at helping ingrain information that you wish to remember because it engages multiple senses at once – including the tactile – while holding your focus on the subject you are writing about.

Even when I’m not in a class, teaching myself, I will go through the information and (if possible) highlight anything that looks relevant. Then I will take a second pass through the data, notebook in hand, writing out every bit of relevant data. When truly dedicated I will go back through and retype my handwritten notes.

Mastery vs. Education

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water. — John W. Gardner

 My friend Mike is making his own bows. From scratch. From rawhide and sinew and wood. He’s also doing his own bone inlay work, and while he could use a dremel or similar power tool to polish, cut, and fit the bone, he doesn’t.

He’s not doing this to merely do it as skillfully as possible to as high a degree of craftsmanship as possible, while doing it efficiently right now. He’s trying to make it to as high a degree of craftsmanship as he can, while learning and improving his knowledge of the art of making a bow from scratch.

He is forgoing the convenience of power tools to learn the craft better through patience and repetition.

He is actively seeking mastery.

It is humble work, but he revels in it, takes pride in it.

I bring this up because we, as a society, seem to think that just because a person talks like they’re educated and can drop references to various philosophers or operas, that the person in question is somehow better, more ‘educated.’

I grew up with this attitude, but one thing twelve years in the Navy taught me, among a bunch of motivated Navy nukes from all over the country just as smart as me, is that talk doesn’t matter when it is time to do, and that while smart people may talk educated, a lot of ridiculously smart, scarily competent people don’t bother to talk educated unless that’s the subject matter of the moment.

Some of them still sound like good ole boys from the sticks.

And some of the most book smart, “educated”-sounding people I’ve met have been completely worthless.

Mastery is independent of subject matter. It could be achieved in philosophy or history through extensive reading, in bowmaking, in plumbing, or in simply chopping firewood.

Achieving mastery, striving for excellence, is the education. Not the nature of the subject studied. It is an attitude, and one that must be lived. It must be humble, for one is not a master of all things.

This is doubly important to anyone in a service capacity – which ultimately, in any business you are. Yes, you will run into stupid people sometimes, but I always hesitate to refer to someone as stupid. Why? Because I’ve seen some ridiculously smart and competent people who were completely oblivious about my field – computers – and yet I could not find the time in my life to achieve the level of skill and proficiency they have at their profession.