HIM
What’s your contingency plan?
ME
(details a variety of scenarios)
. . . in summary, my contingency plan is to just fucking find a way.
HIM
What’s your contingency plan?
ME
(details a variety of scenarios)
. . . in summary, my contingency plan is to just fucking find a way.
I took this photo with Instagram
“Never underestimate the importance of your ability to self motivate and learn. Even the most exciting projects contain mind numbing tasks.”
Quotation from Daniel Wearne’s post What I learnt pretending to be a programmer. Continuous learning is required in all manners of careers, so this insight is by no means unique to programmers. I like this quotation largely because of the second sentence.
“You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.”
– Albert Einstein
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Peter Gabriel’s album New Blood has shuffled on to my playlist. Listening to the song “Darkness” while on a long run/hike this weekend, the lyric “I have my fears, but they do not have me” stood out. Fear does not force paralysis.
Leaders are perceived as fearless, yet this external judgement rests on how the leader functions rather than feels.
At the recommendation of a friend, I also watched Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010) this weekend. I always thought this documentary was about street art, but that’s only a partial description. The film serves as a case study on role models, timing, vision, and rule breaking.
The focus of the film is the excellent and ridiculous Thierry Guetta. At one point he says “I don’t know how to play chess, but to me, life is like a game of chess.”
Despite his not knowing, Thierry manages to play and, by many measures, win.
Others see Thierry as crazy and fearless . . . a different sort of emotional being than them. But so much of this chasm of difference is in the eye of the beholder.
All I (want to) see is someone who started something big and saw it through.
“This project is experimental and of course comes without any warranty whatsoever. However, it could start a revolution in information access.”
– WorldWideWeb wide-area hypertext app available – comp.sys.next.announce (via fred-wilson)
Holy shit. This could be big.
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I recently spoke with a newly promoted engineer at work. He went back to school to do his MBA because he felt that his software development skills, while valuable, would become increasingly obsolete as companies outsourced to other nations and new programming tools made software engineering more available to the masses.
The projection of my colleague aligns with the hypothesis of Roger and Mike about the future of technology (a great blog I follow): soon, building software applications will be far easier than it is today.
This recent video from Bret Victor shows how close that future might be. There is a powerful personal message in the video as well, which is well worth the 54 minutes. If you’re a technical person, the code in this video will have you hand-clapping like a hipster on the Friday night dance floor. Whoever you are, I hope you’ll appreciate Victor’s focus on the importance of a personal, guiding principle and his drive to creative discovery.
Edwin Herbert Land, who deeply influenced Steve Jobs, said that “industry is best at the intersection of science and art.” My excitement at the rapid pace of technological development is because, soon, the basic building blocks of new products, services, communications, and arts will better amplify human creativity.
“All my life, I will strive to live up to my imagination.”
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I took this photo with Instagram
