Work at the edge of your range
blog.ayjay.org
blog.ayjay.org
Yeah, of course. Let's not think about it. Except for we should.
Here is my view. Introduce balance in your life - push yourself for a limited amount of time per day, pursuing a specific goal, and do it intelligently. Like when you are in the gym - lift more than you should for longer than you should and get to enjoy 6 months of tendonitis.
It is not because you are weak/dumb. It's because your approach is weak and dumb.
The inner-most was labeled "comfort zone." The second was labeled "discomfort zone." The third was "panic zone." Outside the third was "the universe."
The presenter argued that you never got rid of your "discomfort zone" or your "panic zone," but you could slowly expand your "comfort zone" by venturing into your "discomfort zone," essentially making things comfortable that used to be uncomfortable to you, and stretching your boundaries. As long as you don't stray into panic zone, you'd be ok. And as long as you keep doing this, your little circles would encompass more and more of the universe.
So an example - you're trying to learn guitar. You are extremely uncomfortable about playing in front of other people, so first you force yourself to play in front of your romantic partner. That eventually becomes comfortable, and so you play in front of some close friends. Over time, you're finally comfortable enough to play an open mic night... and so on.
But, if you had gone straight from beginner to open mic night, with nothing in between, you might have gone into a full blown panic, and permanently associated guitar playing with the sheer panic scenario of open mic night with no prior context, and forever ruined the hobby for you.
I think I'm comfortable with the notion that pushing forward to greatness in one spot will almost always come at the expense of something else.
We can only do so much. Balance is a hard concept. I think we're largely in agreement, but I don't think Adele would take back her career and her royalties to save herself from a surgery, nor should anyone compel her to do so. If she could learn how to be a superstar while preserving her voice that'd be ideal, but in our professions and lifestyles we don't always get that choice.
That said, I think baseball pitchers have a Tommy John problem. If baseball culture pushes the human body beyond what it can bear because it knows there's another tendon to play with after a year of rehab, you could make a case that there is a systemic issue worth fighting against.
Anyone with any familiarity of physical training knows why deload is important, but culturally so many people feel like they're slacking off if they take it easy for a couple days, much less a week.
But, seriously, why not use Blogger. Operates at Google scale, absolutely free.
Really though, what does this mean for people who work in Software?
Take a more complicated project than you think you can handle?
More speaking engagements (assuming you don't do that regularly?) Asking people out to lunch?
Hard to say.
- never take a job for which you meet all of the "required skills and experience" (e.g. look for jobs in which there is at least one new technology in the stack)
- never take on a project that's a rehash of one you've done before
It's never bad idea to get paid to learn something new.
- technical expertise (esp a subject new to you)
- project time management
- project cost estimating
- writing up and publishing your work
- coordinating resources for new contracts
- writing proposals for new projects
- speaking publicly in promotion of what you will do or in explanation of what you have done
- exploring / growing a new business area
There are many ways in software to expand your range.
Is there a way to do this without knowing someone who can get you through the HR firewall, then being known as "That Idiot" until you figure it out?
EDIT: Difficulty, you must be an average programmer. Linus could probably get a job wherever.
Leaves the HR firewall. You undermine that by having somebody on the inside refer you. Or by having a work history that gets you in the door (which, of course, has a bootstrap problem). Or by working on OSS in that field. In other words: Anything that makes you stand out positively from all the other average programmers.
Fortunately, difficulty is often correlated with interestingness (not always though).
Found wordpress better for that. Now I feel like I should just set up a database and some sort of blogging app on my own. Ugh, so many sideprojects, so little time / focus.
Anyway just look how ugly - ablate.blogspot.com I never could figure out how to just make it less... shit.
PS if anybody knows a good way to set up mass-redirect for all my blogspot posts so I can finally get them off blogspot, I'm open ears.
I don't think on medium you can do something like have blog.yourname.com point to your blog, such that you can do blog.yourname.com/writing/how-to-blahblah be one article, etc. Maybe you can't even do that on wordpress.com, now that I think about it.
He has more than a passing interest in technology as I do in literature, but I think his lack of web optimisation skills or interest for a website that normally isn't deluged under oncoming web traffic is at least as excusable as my writing ones are.
I understand if this is still too much work though. I'm trying to make a setup where I have an API + DB to manage my content via a SPA that can trigger a static site build so it's easier to write from places that aren't my dev machine.
If you try to do what Gordy did with experienced musicians they'll probably permanently blacklist you.
In the mental/emotional arena I don't have as easy a time. I started with judo recently and encountered a phenomenon I remember from other sports back in school, which is the other beginners being extremely hyped up and trying to backseat coach, telling you to do a thing NOW without allowing time or space to take a careful or exploratory stance (also they aren't necessarily doing it right themselves). I'm a lot more resilient in putting up with that stuff than when I was a kid but it still bothers me - fortunately, with the class being just once a week, there's plenty of time to recover.
And with programming, I definitely have a cycle but it's extremely hard to schedule it like I can with the gym. I don't get to pick exactly what I'm working on so it might be too easy(boring) or too hard(can't pick it back up) that day. Sometimes my attention gets torn by other stuff during the day, too, which cuts into coding.
You cannot develop when you're within your comfort zone.
And the same goes for programming. You must go outside your comfort zone, or you'll stagnate. One of the poor souls who have 20 years experience, but alas the same year 20 times over. You grow because you failed. Over, and over, and over.
If you code at the edge of your range? More senior people will help you get things into a better shape. You don't have more senior people? Don't worry, you'll learn to refactor what you created. You'll curse your past self, but you'll learn :)
If you play it safe, you'll burn out from pure boredom.
As for programming - I've seen countless noobs make things that were far too complicated for them to understand later - let alone anybody else. If I had only one piece of advice to any intern it would be 'keep it simple'. I don't agree with learning everything the hard way, by trial and error because maybe you'll never get the chance to fix that crap you made because y'know there will always be people who can do it to an acceptable standard first time. Life does not always give you do-overs.
"Obviously the range of solo voices, yes, even of choral voices, is in reality larger than, perhaps different from, that indicated here, which only aims at a fairly correct average. The middle register, which should be the one chiefly used, lies a fourth or a fifth from the highest and lowest tones, so that we have:"
<image of vocal ranges>
"Of course the pupil cannot get along with just the tones of the middle register and will have to use some from the higher or lower registers- naturally, at first only the adjacent tones, but then also on occasion the highest or lowest, if there is no other way. In general, however, he should seldom overstep to any significant degree the bounds of an octave whoever wants to write parts comfortable for the voice will avoid, even in actual composition, extended passages exclusively in one of the outer registers. The pupil should therefore enter these registers only for a short time and leave them as soon as possible. Whenever the treatment of solo or choral voices in practice indicates otherwise, it is because the composer sought some compositional or acoustical effects irrelevant to our present aims."
"The characteristics of the voices indicate the requirements, supported by experience for their combination in choral writing. If no voice is to stand out, then all voices will seek out registers whose acoustical potential is approximately the same. For, were a voice to sing in a more brilliant register, while the others move in a duller register, that voice would naturally be quite noticeable. If this voice is intended to stand out (for example, when an inner voice has the melody), then it is well that it sing in a more expressive register. But if it is inadvertently conspicuous, then the director would have to rely on shading, he would have to create equilibrium by subduing the prominent voice or by strengthening the weaker ones."
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dalio (September 01 2012)
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