I watched them tearing a building down, A gang of men in a busy town. With a ho-heave-ho and a lusty yell, They swung the beams and the side walls fell. I asked the foreman, “Are these men skilled, The kind you’d hire were you to build?” He laughed and said, “Why, no indeed! Just […]
“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 […]
“It is often believed that people with different training have difficulty communicating because they have learned different specialist languages. But we have found a bigger problem – that they are actually trying to achieve different things. Different disciplines often have different core values, and have grown together as social groups precisely because of the shared […]
“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.
David Weiss 