Musings & Meanderings

When Kathy Sierra makes a point, it resonates. Her diagrams are wonderful, but more than anything it is the unity of mind with instinct, the voice informed simultaneously by both experience and caring, that gives her writing impact. Her post on Friday about “Engineering/Math/Science Education in the US” offers an excellent personal perspective on how we are taught and what’s wrong with it.

Learning how life really works, and especially how the business world works, isn’t taught. Even if you’re lucky enough to have a good mentor when young (and smart enough to want one), you’ll receive guidance on specifics that relate to a task or situation at hand and your immediate destination, but the full life lessons we usually only learn by living.

Why don’t we teach each other how things really work? Is it purely selfish fear that sharing our knowledge and ideas will dilute our own advantage? Or is it that people simply don’t want to be informed by someone else’s view? How much of it is generation gaps and how much the spreading alienation pervading our world?

As a child, and mostly by default, I learned to seek and think. It was harsh and sometimes painful. The result, though, is something I consider one of my most precious possessions. It spurred me to develop the ability to observe and analyze beyond the immediate and on many different levels at once. As someone who is both creative and naturally idealistic, I can easily credit the mercilessness of my early world view with my survival and successes.

The ways in which many schools teach offer examples of personal and community alienation and disconnects. There are really good teachers out there, soldiering on, unfortunately rare, but the reality is that we can improve our learning institutions only by rebuilding our communities and our relationships to one another.

There are ways in which we can reach out to each other and teach the realities of life as well as perspective, in tandem with hard knowledge: through a metaphorical holding of hands, via infectious enthusiasms, sometimes in response to crucibles. We can’t be taught anything, though, unless we choose to learn.

It is remarkable, in my experience, how often thinking for oneself will lead us to conclusions written about before we were born. It isn’t the conventional knowledge itself that is lacking, but rather our understanding of ourselves, of relationships, and of how to learn. If your desire is strong enough, you’ll find sources, and teachers, and relationships that can amaze you.

The desire to learn will suffice alone, but when it also encounters the desire to teach the result is powerful.

Considering the following examples has me musing today on the ramifications of small differences in points of view.

1. In 1992 I was sitting in a movie theater with my younger son, when suddenly the world tilted and fell. I had ‘lost my balance’ completely (cause: neurological). It did not return. Over the next several years, I re-learned balance, or most of it, from scratch, the way that a stroke victim does. I rented a portable wheelchair long enough to have paid for it at least 20 times over. My refusal to purchase it was an expensive act that was symbolic of my determination to eventually overcome the need for this aid.

Needing the wheelchair also meant needing a friend or family member to push it around on any excursion. It was a surprise to discover that, no matter who my ‘driver’ was, every one of them did the following. Upon spying something that they wished to investigate more quickly and easily than could be done with me in tow, they’d say, “Wait here a sec …I’ll be right back.” and park me facing a wall. Neither their relationship to me, nor whether they had experience with or an affinity for taking care of others, seemed to have any bearing on this behavior. I could make book on it. Initially frustrating, it finally became humorous.

2. I don’t like insects. I’d rather deal with a temperamental stallion or play with a snake than confront insects. I’m in awe of anyone who can pick up a live spider and carry it outside. Therefore, if I spy a spider or such, and someone else is present, I naturally ask them if they would please deal with it.

Insects have a talent for blending in. When I point to one that is not in an easily describable place, my companion of the moment will look in the direction of my pointing …from wherever they happen to be in the room. A common first response is, “Where? I don’t see it.”. When I suggest that they move to my exact position they might pause and hesitate. A natural response is often something like, “I can see perfectly well over here, just as well as you.”. This comes as often from people who are perfectly comfortable with close physical proximity in different circumstances.

The first example is more about learning empathy and the second about how we create barriers for all kinds of subconscious reasons. What examples like this illustrate to me, though, is that we often resist seeing each others’ exact viewpoint. For one thing, how to do so is rarely as obvious as, say, wearing a blindfold for a couple of days to gain more understanding of a family member who is blind. More relevant, I think, is our fervent devotion to our own view, our personal space, and our belief in ourselves.

The fact that one’s best friend or spouse sees things from a slightly different angle can easily be one of the most wonderful things about our relationship with them. My thoughts here are more about how we can better understand and communicate with those outside of the small handful of our immediate personal relationships.

In group psychotherapy, it is common practice to have each member describe their unique view of a conflict or situation. Doing this verbally and in a free-form manner has many specific benefits.

Conversely, in gathering business information, from focus groups and consumer product testing to political polling or surveying community needs, we almost invariably use an interviewer tool that is designed to break the responses down into manageable categories, making the resulting data easier to manipulate. This approach is further refined by medical and scientific researchers.

In terms of really getting to know and understand one another’s POVs, though, in communities or marketplaces, a brief written description of what each interviewee sees when presented with a situation or theory or product, can be more productive in a very different way, often introducing new and surprising components. Discovering, for example, what someone expected to see, spent time searching for, and didn’t find, can sometimes be more important than how much they liked what was there.

My wheelchair experience reinforced for me the importance of avoiding the assumption that others will notice what is obvious to you.

Conflict Resolution.

That is at the heart of everything.
Scientific discovery. Brilliant code. Religious bliss. Love. Peace. Prosperity.

We begin with a dream, a goal, a destination.

We team with others who share the vision if we can.

We’re sometimes surrounded by people who get in the way, inadvertently creating obstacles for us, by people who like us and are supportive in a general or even loving way, yet simply either can’t or don’t get it …it being where we’re headed. We encounter others who deliberately get in the way.

We get there anyway.

It’s a bonus if you’ve managed not to run anyone over on the way, and if all your friends and loved ones are happy that you’re happy.

Getting there, to that dream or goal or destination, means resolving many conflicts, bringing everything into compliance, creating an oasis of harmony.

It’s far from easy, but words like righteous and awesome aren’t an overstatement of how it feels.

There is no drug known to man that can get you as high as the euphoria of making the perfect business deal, one where everyone wins, or building a successful community that makes your corner of the world a better place, and writing perfect code is as ideal a means of human accomplishment as any.

Not to leave out the quests for divine understanding or high art, angelic music or the love of one’s life, but these belong on a more singular and highly personal plane.

There is no human discipline which does not require resolution of conflict to produce outstanding achievements.

Coders, it seems to me, occupy a territory uniquely situated between science and humanities, a place without many barriers to progress, a place as pure as scientific theory or musical composition and as rich to mine as any frontier man has discovered. The best will gift us all with things as ubiquitous as kleenex or the telephone, and with images as powerful as our most beautiful buildings, our fastest cars, and our favorite heroes.