education

I was a little nervous about a meeting a thread by @EPrecipice

Thread by @EPrecipice on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App:

When talking about our agendas for the day, I told my 5yo I was a little nervous about a meeting I have today. He said, “Mama, I am nervous all the time. I know what to do.” So friends, here is all the advice he could fit into the drive to school:
1. “You gotta say your affirmations in your mouth and your heart. You say, ‘I am brave of this meeting!’ , ‘I am loved!’, ‘I smell good!’ And you can say five or three or ten until you know it.”
2. “You gotta walk big. You gotta mean it. Like Dolly on a dinosaur. Because you got it.”
3. “Never put a skunk on a bus.”
4. “Think about the donuts of your day! Even if you cry a little, you can think about potato chips!”
5. “You gotta take a deep breath and you gotta do it again.”
6. “Even if it’s a yucky day, you can get a hug.”
Extra addition from this afternoon: “Don’t get distracted and your feet will stay on the sidewalk and not too full of snow.”

[Speechless at the emotional wisdom. Also, someone’s else’s child… wanted to be an astronaut. Mom says, study hard, go to college, learn a lot of science, take a physical fitness test. The response? “That’s just 4 things.”]

Happy Public Domain Day 2022! – The Public Domain Review

Happy Public Domain Day 2022! – The Public Domain Review:

On the chime of midnight last night, as many of us welcomed in — by booze-fuelled countdown or bliss of sleep — the start of a new year, the public domain had a special moment too, welcoming in many thousands more works into its ever-growing expanse, including Winnie The Pooh, poems by Dorothy Parker, and Franz Kafka’s The Castle.
Each January 1st is Public Domain Day, where a new crop of works have their copyrights expire and become free to enjoy, share, and reuse for any purpose.

[Stravinsky eh? Cool.]

Does it make you enjoy?

Does it make you enjoy?

Making you happy is too high a bar for anything. It’s unfair to ask that of anyone or anything — it’s something you can really only ask yourself, or bring yourself.

But enjoying something? That’s possible! It’s very much within reach.

So I said, will you enjoy the car? Could you see yourself enjoying the car? Will you enjoy the drive?

And that’s a much easier question to answer. And an expectation that’s easier to accept.

Objects (and experiences) don’t make you anything, you have to enjoy them.

Enjoying something is plenty.

I think he’s going to buy one.

[Happiness is a choice.]

Source: Jason Fried

The Habit of Adequacy

The Habit of Adequacy:

I honor the word habit on the days that it is hard, but I show up anyway. The habit serves me on the days when I doubt that I can, but I show up and give myself the opportunity to surprise myself. To have it be great even though my expectations are low.

[I think about how bad habits are easy and good habits are hard. “Is the Dark Side stronger? ‘No, no, no. Quicker, easier, more seductive…’ “]

Source: Accidentally in Code

How we should be…

I came across this article because, in the Internet sense of knowing someone, I know the author. I can assure you that neither of us would know the other if we sat across a table from each other, but I purchase books and tools from her husband’s companies and then the Internet takes over.

So autism. It’s not easy on the parents, it’s not easy on the child, and without kindness from others it’s a total mess. There. I’ve wrapped a heart wrenching and complicated topic in a few short sentences. Time for you to read: Cutting with kindness.

That’s a beautiful story. But let’s extract the autism for a moment. When I was growing up one of the things I was taught was “patience”. Now patience, like all things, has a balance to it. There’s the “it’s not all about you” patience. And then there’s the “put up with other’s crap” patience.

I know I’m far less patient (both kinds) with my family than with not family or strangers. I expect more from the people closest to me, and so I have less patience with their needs. And, of course, I feel safer expressing myself in glorious detail, dissecting exactly how their actions affect me with possible means for rectification. Feels kinda backwards to me right now after reading that story. As I’ve said before, living an examined life is a PITA.

The lesson here however is not in being more patient, kinder, and understanding to children with autism. Although everyone should be more understanding of the families it’s not my point. Also, there will always some people whose problems are too deep—who will take whatever you offer no matter how much. Let’s avoid discussing that problem…it’s one side of the bell curve. So, the point is… it can only improve my life to continue to be ever more aware of people’s needs and respond kindly, thoughtfully, with ever greater awareness.

What it’s about — moderation, preservation, and gradualism.

I wanted to write about what this election is about to me… and I assure you it’s not about parties, candidates, media news cycles, or predictions.

Here’s what I think this is about… it’s about getting small. It’s about realizing that growth is not the only answer to how you improve your life. It’s about doing and creating things that other need, without allowing that to become more important than family, friends, and making the most of the unknown amount of time you have.

Think about the following…in 2008 when you were spending $4 a gallon for gas. It took me back to 1973 when waiting on a gas line (and no cell phones!!) was a thing. Even the folks driving us to school waited on line with us kids in the car, because you needed every advantage. Even if we put up with things like fracking (oh heavens, no), and giant oil lines running across our wilderness (please, have a little respect) we’re running out of oil, no matter which way you want to look at it.

Global warming? It’s not a future problem, it’s a now problem. Please take a few minutes to read through this, and you’ll understand why I say that. The drawing makes it abundantly clear. I know it impinges on the way people want to live their lives, and I feel bad about that. But not so bad that I lose sight of where we are headed to the best of our knowledge. It’s not even a “we’re good, let our kids worry about it” problem—which is venal enough… it’s a now, like we really need to change our behavior problem. When you mix that with the rapidly diminishing oil reserves, and it represents a clarion call to action. Even if all the scientists are wrong (How could that be? All of them?), are you willing to the bet the only inhabitable planet we all live on that they’re all wrong, and that with no particular proof you are correct? C’mon. That’s nuts.

So one last item, the collapse of the banks. Displaying a singular lack of integrity they based their choices on a crazed belief (as is the anti-global warming crowd) that things will not change. That they way things have been recently is all there is. That at the very bottom, in the ooze and muck of “me first”, the personal interest ($$$) of the individuals in the banks is far more important than the needs of anyone or everyone else. They cannot be trusted any more because their interest is uncoupled from yours by an abyss so vast that you cannot expect them to act in even a vague notion of alignment to your interests, which they claim to represent.

We need to stop thinking that the answer to everything is growth. Bigger is not better, and we should stop painting ourselves into a corner that leaves no room for any other answer. Why don’t we ever consider shrinking? Why can’t small be not only good but great? And better or best! Why can’t less really be more? The answer, of course, is it can, because it relies on community, and alignment of values and concerns.

So the election… I’m thinking about the above. I’m thinking about folks who are remarkably not represented in any way shape or form. I’m thinking about folks who just want to live their lives with the dignity and respect accorded others. I don’t see a clear party or candidate that represents “less”, “smaller”, “more simple”. I do not hear anyone talking about moderation, preservation, and talking about a gradual approach to anything. Well, maybe they all talk about gradually increasing taxes in one form or another. But that’s it. So go vote, and do the best you can. That’s as close to a plan as I have for this election.

Congratulations! You’ve Been Fired

Congratulations! You’ve Been Fired – The New York Times:

Treating workers as if they are widgets to be used up and discarded is a central part of the revised relationship between employers and employees that techies proclaim is an innovation as important as chips and software. The model originated in Silicon Valley, but it’s spreading. Old-guard companies are hiring “growth hackers” and building “incubators,” too. They see Silicon Valley as a model of enlightenment and forward thinking, even though this “new” way of working is actually the oldest game in the world: the exploitation of labor by capital.

HubSpot was founded in 2006 in Cambridge, Mass., and went public in 2014. It’s one of those slick, fast-growing start-ups that are so much in the news these days, with the beanbag chairs and unlimited vacation — a corporate utopia where there is no need for work-life balance because work is life and life is work. Imagine a frat house mixed with a kindergarten mixed with Scientology, and you have an idea of what it’s like.

[One of the differences between sports and almost any other job, is that while you can try and reduce people to numbers, it’s often horribly shaded by the perception of others. I’ve often said that sports that requires “judges” is not a sport. It’s performed by athletes, but a sport can be measured. You hit the ball fairly or not. You ran faster than the next gal or not. And because of that ability to measure, you can apply other arithmetic solutions to the problem of “value”. That simplicity of goal and skill is why sports is so much fun for all of this. Instead of myriad shades of gray and decisions you have the clarity of simple goals and yes or no. Applying that thinking to most workplace jobs simply reduces people to… well read the article. I know folks are replaceable at a skills level, but you’re failing if you miss the human behind those skills and bringing out the best in them.

Here’s my prescription since I’ve been from one end of the US hiring economy and back.

  1. Stay out of or get out of debt
  2. Build, author, design, create things that other people want with quality and integrity.
  3. Enjoy what time you have, none of us know our allotment.

Since so many young people start off with lots of debt relative their income, I say this to the parents now (it applies to them to, but some bandwagons are hard to abandon) don’t saddle your kids with debt by allowing them to run up huge debt to start out. (and try and teach them that it’s not the Way.) Consider eliminating your own. (cars, house, business loans, venture capital, etc. the stuff that really ties you down.)]

Glasshole?

★ Thoughts on Google Glass:

Imagine too, how such glasses would affect something like the proctoring of an exam. A cheater could use their glasses to read the questions (OCR) and give them the answers. It’s not practical to administer all tests within Faraday cages, and for some subjects, like math, you wouldn’t even need network access to facilitate the cheating: just the camera and HUD. ↩

[Up until this last paragraph of the footnote I was in agreement. I find the single use versions much more compelling than the walk about town version. Riding my bike with a HUD? Nice. Operating heavy machinery with an overlay of whatever’s important? Sure. Exam proctoring? Tests taken in a classroom? That’s not the future.]

Continuations : Twitter: Life is Unfair?

Continuations : Twitter: Life is Unfair?:

So why does the Twitter story remind me of Prof. Hausman’s admonition? Because it demonstrates the relative importance of hitting upon the right thing at the right time over early execution. This goes a bit against one of the historic ideas held dear in venture capital that execution matters more than ideas. And yes it remains true that an idea alone is worthless, you have to build something. But beyond that it turns out that building the right thing at the right time will let you get away with all sorts of mistakes. Conversely, hypothetically perfect execution but too early or too late or on the wrong variant will not get you very far. For everyone working really hard on a startup that’s not going gangbuster this seems, well, unfair.

So there you have it. Prof. Hausman was right all along. Actually not quite. I used to think that but more recently I have changed my outlook to: Life just is. Unfair implies some kind of moral standard. Somewhere somebody right now is building the next big thing and most likely it is not you. Just accept that and you’ll be happier.

[Raise your hand if you think it’s you?]