“If, at some point in your life,” Marcus Aurelius wrote, “you should come across anything better than justice, truth, self-control, courage—it must be an extraordinary thing indeed.”
I think the greatest lesson in life is beyond all work and play, it’s learning to love and be loved.
It’s the only true thing in my experience.
Do not seek for your own gain, seek to lift others up and you will be great!
Leaders, serve the people you lead. Seek their best and not your own. This is true capitalism.
We have certainly lost our way to greed and progress and fear of not having what we want.
I have found nothing greater than forgiveness, kindness and patience. Lifting up the least of us, makes us great.
Make yourself available to invest in others and you will be great.
I’m just a dreamer you may think, no, I stand in the sun sunny I know the hard won freedom of true love.
One has to learn to love themselves first and best and from there, give from an overflowing abundance.
This is all I have really learned of value in my life and I will never cease sharing it, until my dying breath.
I have been having a little debate on my team with some of the younger engineers. I like to wrestle with them. I enjoy a good wrestling match. They get me down on the mat sometimes, but they can’t pin me, yet. Well, old goats
know a trick or two to make up for being so dumb and stubborn.
When I wrestle, both win. I don’t try to beat my opponent. I want to share a superpower that will make a good engineer great and give you an advantage over 99% of the folks working today. I know this to be a fact, as I have lived it and from experience, I can tell you the theme in the below article works.
A great engineer is not the most intelligent or highest paid, they are the ones who get the most done in a clutch, exerting the best amount of energy, for maximum effect. It ain’t always pretty or evident who is holding things up on their shoulders. No one may notice your contribution, but you know. That’s why you don’t have to work 80 hours a week to be great. If you work that way, you will be the worst actually.
Until you have honed this superpower, it will feel counterintuitive and strange exercising it. Give this a chance maybe. We are not independent minds and contributors, we are a team, a network.
A great team is not a higharchy, it’s more like a self organizing mesh network, look it up. https://lnkd.in/gaJs8_5z The node that makes the most connections, is the best. You extend the network one node at a time. You can have a full or partial network. One big benefit is a node doesn’t need the strongest
signal to talk to a central station, it needs just enough to send info to the nearest nodes. When the nodes are connected optimally, you get a much more consistent, even speed across the network. Because a mesh network provides multiple possible paths for transferring data from point A to point B, the network will preferentially use the fastest most efficient path. But if that path becomes blocked or congested for some reason, alternate paths can be and are used instead.
Thus, a team is only as good as its connections between its members. This superpower will help you to design and implement the best solutions. I learned this at Adobe for 5 years. A guy named Steven Webster taught me this. I wasn’t very good at this at the time. This superpower will supercharge your interactions with teammates too. Don’t judge the other, always lend a helping hand.
When I interview someone, it is the soft skills that are most important to me. I know using these, I get the biggest bang for my effort and best teams. Practice them and you will see. Study what makes teams great. Study yourself. Brutally refactor and cut away what is not needed. Practice. They take years to develop. Be great! I don’t hire calculators or machines, I hire human beings.
– The Northern California air is heavy with smoke today. It’s 82F with sun and haze. Today will be partly sunny, high of 100F, low of 64F. I’ve seen better days. But this one is fine.
In Smelly News…
– Northern California is burning
It is a cleansing fire. Dream homes have burned is all. Wood 🪵 fuel has burned is all. I burn, slow burn. Smell of smoke is in the air.
– There is more corruption popping up everywhere now in our fallen politics, out of our delusional fear. Corruption abounds. Yet, as all that is temporary falls away, what we are, remains. Castoffs, a mote in God’s eye. This process of living has altered consciousness.
– I work with electric self driving cars in the dream. I’m here to do the work and I’m doing it. I help train deep learning algorithms to recognize objects and respond. I move massive amounts of data around. Humans are very clever. My approach is a minimal one to support the work, just enough planning. What I am good it is making progress in chaos. Emotions overwhelm logic and reason. How would you program this? Do we want thinking machines with new emotions? If cars had emotion, would they be depressed? Kaizen, continuous improvement, is my way through this. Improve anything I touch and I do. I have a team now I have been building over last 4 months. This has been a new chapter in my own small life and I give joyfully and freely to my team and they respond with their best. AI needs conditioning and training. As do people. It takes practice to be good. To be great? It takes heart. Show me the algorithm for this. I dare you. Ironic while the world burns, I am doing my best work.
“I know this because I just know, it is my purpose.” —The Keymaster
Today’s poetry…
“I dreamed a dream . . . but now that dream is gone from me.”
Quantum Heart 