1 week. 1 project.

I just came across an article called How Geniuses Think. It talks about strategies geniuses use to achieve their breakthroughs. This week I’m going to tackle two of these strategies by writing 5 blog posts explaining things metaphorically.

5 Posts

I want to take on an ambitious 5 blog posts because geniuses produce. They are prolific. One benefit is that I’ll have 5 new blog posts. Another is that I will be forced to think in depth about a breadth of subjects.

Thinking Metaphorically

Communication is difficult. Especially when the subject is complicated as well. How can this be made easier? Package the idea in familiar wrapping paper. That way the idea can be associated with something that the audience already understands making it easier to digest.

If you haven’t read the entire article, please do. It provides some very pragmatic advice for pretending to be genius. Because isn’t that the point? Pretend who you’re who you want to be.

Welp, here goes!!

With the proliferation of text-based communication, I’ve found that I am a worse communicator. For every tweet, status update, text message, or blog post, I lose spontaneity, authenticity, and confidence in my communication with others. So this week I’m going to degrade these “proactive” or controllable mediums, to the old school in person/phone call.

When I’m with people I’m pretty easy to talk with. I’ve got an arsenal of puns and terrible jokes, I’m inquisitive, and I love eliciting and listening to stories. However when I enter the world of text I become my own worst enemy. I lose confidence and overthink things. I lose visual and verbal cues. But the major missing aspect is the immediacy to respond. When talking with someone you have to respond. You can’t stop a conversation, think of a clever response, make some edits, add some ‘lols’ and ‘omgs’, and then hit send. You have to a say something. It’s not the best thing you could have come up with, but it is genuine and it is authentically you.

With this week’s project I’m still going to use text mediums but when I’m struggling with a way to phrase something, I’m going to talk with the other person. If I’m agonizing over a text, it’s either: not worth saying or should be said with my own voice.

Welp, here goes!

This past week Eoin and I created, crafted, and submitted a proposal to Rails Conf, THE conference about Ruby on Rails. Now all we can do is wait and see if our talk gets selected.

Preparing this talk was great because I had to sit down and really think about my job. What causes my despair at work? How do I work myself out of that? This reflection gave me some greater insights into why some days I come home feeling great and others utterly defeated. Also, to some extent, I control these feelings and as a result, can control how I feel when I come home each day. There’s a great satisfaction in self-discovery.

We also got great support from a developer at Living Social, Mike Gehard. He was not only a great sounding board for some of our ideas, but he validated the theme of our talk with some of his own examples. This gave us additional confidence that we were delving into a subject that should be talked about.

So we’ll see what becomes of this talk and this conference. It’s been a great experience thus far and as a result this week was a resounding success.

Here is the abstract of Eoin and I’s submission to Rails conf. The title is: Deprecating Despair.

Abstract

One of the biggest unaddressed problems we’ve encountered as an engineering team is: despair.

Despair is when you are fixing a bug and you happen upon the ghetto of your code base. Ill maintained, written a long time ago, duct taped together to just barely work. You go in and are immediately crippled by the state of affairs. The poor code causes you to seize up, incapacitated. How do you go forward? The business still needs the bug fixed. So you carefully tiptoe in, make your fix, and try to leave without touching anything else, fearing any reason to return.

How can you avoid this? How can your code base instill hope? A hope that is the premise of responsible activity, not an empty optimism that the future will necessarily be better than the past.*

Trada is a mid sized shop, working in our 3 year old application filled with one-offs and best guesses. This is how we are turning this around. This is how we’re Deprecating Despair.

* from Pope John Paul II’s address to the United Nations

This week I’ll be submitting a proposal to talk at this years Rails Conf in Austin. This’ll be my first talk submission to a technical conference but luckily I’ve got an idea of what I want to talk about. By the end of the week I want to have my application submitted.

When looking at past presentations, people magnify their daily challenges and explain their solution. So I tried to think about the challenges we’ve experienced at Trada. One of the biggest problems I’ve encountered is: despair.

Despair is when you are fixing a bug and you happen upon the ghetto of your code base. Ill maintained, written a long time ago, duct taped so that it just barely works. You go in and are just crippled by the state of affairs. You are physically incapacitated because the code is so poor. How do you go forward? The business still needs the bug fixed. So you carefully tiptoe in, make your fix, and try to leave without touching anything else, fearing any reason for returning.

How can you avoid this? How can your code base instead instill hope? That’s the subject I’d like to talk about. This week will be researching the subjects I need to talk about and just how to propose a talk.

Welp, here goes!

This week I will be tackling the project of Morning Pages. A coworker mentioned them to me and after some googling I stumbled across a blogger that had already undertaken the endeavor: Morning Pages: Results From My Two-Week Experiment and 3 Reasons You Should Write “Morning Pages”.

Morning Pages come from Julia Cameron’s “The Artist Way” and are defined as

three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness

I’ve done stream of consciousness writing before (and read the stream-of-consciousness/high school classic: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) but have never practiced it. Since I’ve been getting up earlier I’ll wake up, sit down with the pen for 15 minutes, write whatever comes to mind, and become a member of the pen 15 club.

Welp, here goes!

This week was a belated success. I did everything Saturday and today but it worked out to be very, very intriguing. I did took visual notes of Shawn Achor’s talk The Happy Secret to Work 4 times and once on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s talk on Flow.

I realized I am terrible at drawing people. As good as my stick figures are, they just don’t convey all the emotion and passion I wanted them to. But I did notice, I was more confident drawing them when I was drawing on the whiteboard than in my notebook. I think it was because the thickness of the marker. 37Signals expound on this observation saying:

Fine tips invite you to draw while Sharpies invite you to just to get your concepts out into big bold shapes and lines.

The Happy Secret to Work

I picked this talk because it was one of the most emailed talks of the week on TED. It was a bit tough to draw out because there were a lot of anecdotes (although I think my unicorn representation came out pretty well. :) The core of his presentation was fantastic and I tried to capture it the best I could. Here are my results.

Round 1

Round 2

Round 3

Round 4

Flow

This was a talk I went into cold. I felt like I was listening to a lecturer in college again. The only difference was I had space. I had two whole white boards to work with. As a result I didn’t pressure myself skimp on notes or resort to text (as much). It was quite freeing. Here’s what I came up with.

The talk itself was fascinating. There were times where I would get lost in the presentation, have to pull myself out of it, and start taking notes again. It was a really interesting subject and I would highly encourage you to watch it.

This week I’m going to find a TED talk, listen to it, and try to visually illustrate what is being communicated. To see what I mean, check out this video - Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

What astounds me is the illustrator’s ability to provide a visual, coherent narrative. In the video above, he (pronoun based on the amount of arm hair) easily handled transitions, subject changes, and aptly represented each idea. So I will try this three different times, each time (hopefully) getting a better feel for the talk.

Why?

The impact of visualizations have been talked about in communicating ideas. By forcing myself to visually communicate ideas I hope to speak with greater visual cues to help me to become a better speaker.

Welp, here goes!

This past week was a success. I was able to do a majority of the first 7 challenges from the 30 Days to a Better Man. Although the past couple of days I slacked simply because I was doing other things.

A unique aspect of this week was that each day I was supposed to do a different challenge. So when I missed a day I didn’t know what to do. Do I skip it and move on? Or do I try and do two challenges in one day? I ended up going with the latter and did both challenges in one day. But I think that in the long run the former is better. Otherwise you risk having tasks pile up, self-induce paralysis, and end up getting nothing done.

Through running this blog I’ve found that if tasks pile up, they don’t get done. It is just better to drop them and start fresh. So if I miss writing up a conclusion post (like this one) I need to forget it and move onto the next week’s project. Whenever this blog has “died” I haven’t moved on to the next week. I didn’t keep up my momentum.

In order to get things done, I have to keep up my momentum.

Here is my progress report thus far for the week.

Day 1: Define Your Values

1. God - Try to get in closer union with Him and all else will fall into place.
2. Family - This is where my roots are. They provide me with stability, accountability, and confidence.
3. Friends - Really an extension of family.
4. Education - This is an effort of self improvement. Not just continued learning but accountability, consistency, simplicity, efficiency (being a computer science major and all…). Education also encompasses work; if I am no longer learning at work, it’s time to find something else to do.
5. Engagement - What ever I do I want to be fully engaged in it. If I’m hanging out with friends, that’s where my focus is, etc. It’s a little awkward too because all the other ones should be pursued with full engagement. This came from a blog post on engagement over balance in life: http://chuckblakeman.com/2012/1/texts/stop-trying-to-achieve-balance.

Day 2: Shine Your Shoes

Two days ago I cleaned my sperry’s. Fortunately they weren’t too dirty, unlike the last unfortunate pair I owned that made a trip to a certain Munich beer hall to a certain bathroom… Not too many memories there…

Day 3: Find a Mentor

Yesterday I compiled a list of mentors. One is a priest in his 20s in Boulder who takes a very philosophical approach faith, which I like. Another is a developer I just finished working with. At work we hired some consultants to come in and teach us how they go about programming. I was working with this guy for 3 weeks. If I could one day reach his level of programming skill I would be stoked. The third is my dad. I’d like to take time to ask him for advice. In my day to day life, I don’t talk with him too much about substantial subjects. It typically is pretty superficial. So I’d like take this as an opportunity to get to know him better and to learn from his experiences in life.

Day 4: Increase Your Testosterone

For the testosterone challenge, I first (obviously) drank a liter of powerthirst and now I have MORE TESTOSTERONE THAN MY BODY HAS ROOM FOOOOORRRR!!!!!! I also worked out this morning, for lunch I had a sandwich with a tuna patty, I did not smoke today, and I had some “afternoon delight” (a bowl of oatmeal around 3pm).

More to come this week!