“As a general rule, in prosperous societies we have been outsourcing more and more of the work that, a generation ago, was done “internally” in the home. It sounds almost quaint by comparison to life now, but in the modest neighborhood in which I grew up, there was a lot of work going on in […]
I started working at Microsoft when I was 18 years old. It paid better than the landscaping job I was enjoying at the time. I didn’t know much about writing code, but I was fairly proficient with computers and wanted to learn more. There seemed to be a real opportunity to help make some great […]
“A master doesn’t retire. A master doesn’t stop. They do it until their dead. It’s a part of them. It’s who you are.”
Our life is full of ill-formed problems. These are problems that have no easy answer. These are problems that require judgement and the ability to discern between right and wrong, good and evil. Unlike so much of what is taught in school, education for life is really about education for judgement; the ability to discern. […]
Maybe we are optimizing for the wrong things. Maybe efficiency isn’t as important effectiveness. According to the Wikipedia page on photosynthetic efficiency, typical plants have a radiant energy to chemical energy conversion efficiency of between 0.1% and 2%. And yet all human life depends upon the oxygen provided by these inefficient plants. Efficient? Clearly no, but very […]
“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” – Samuel Beckett So many things in life focus on success, but that’s not even half of the story. Every success comes after a series of failures. For this reason your focus most of the time needs to be on properly responding to failure. At work, school, even concerned family […]
Most of us maintain a mythical view of how things are made: springing fully formed from the nothingness, a product of genius. I’m beginning to think that this almost never happens. What does happen is a question, then an answer, then more questions, then more answers. Write, rewrite, then rewrite again. Build, then fail, then learn, […]
Be careful how you judge success and failure.
“Innovation is a series of repetitive failures.” – Judah Folkman
David Weiss 