Winding Down
No, not my blog... though I don't post that often. Darn you facebook.
Rachel arrives very early tomorrow morning so my days of being lonely with a dog that doesn't really trust me are coming to an end. My expectations for this month never really came to fruition and sadly I have no one to blame but myself. Oh, and the dog. Nice thing about having a dog is that she now assumes blame for most things. Like funny smells. It's all her... But I digress.
I had so many plans. I was going to pick up my guitar again. I was going to paint some of the walls. Clean out the closet. Mount the TV. JOG! I was even thinking about writing a novel and establishing world peace. But nothing.
I finally got around to cleaning the apartment though. Today. I wanted to scrub the whole place down the first chance I got. Which of course I didn't. So the place has been a disaster zone and only until today does it look presentable.
In fact, and this is just crazy, I've played maybe 1 hour of video games over the past 4 weeks. That's just crazy. Where did the time go? Oh, I know... taking care of the dog. This might sound strange but I realize that my entire life (for the past 4 weeks) can be broken down into small chunks of time. Chunks of time between walking the dog. That's it. My life have been a series of boring nothingness connected to when my dog needs to go out to the bathroom... Which apparently is quite often. Even when I was walking my dog, I was thinking about when I would have to walk her next and what I could squeeze in between now and then. But of course what I did do was either feed her, eat, work, sleep or watch TV.
This does sound like I'm blaming her. But I'm allowed. She's a dog. Please see paragraph 2.
So anyway, this is it. Rachel arrives. I did nothing. Well, that's not 100% true. I did do something.
I missed Rachel.
You don’t know what you don’t know. You know?
So I'm just plodding along. Hows that for excitement?
Work has been busy but not too busy. I'm still getting out of here at a reasonable time but there is lots going on. Which means that I'm either getting better at time management or I'm not doing the things I should be doing (and don't know it). It's probably the latter.
Speaking of things I don't know... which could fill a warehouse... I read a blog the other day that changed the way I look at information. I've been using this thought process with my teams here at work. They all look at me like I'm on crack but really, it's quit interesting.
There is nothing revolutionary about this model of knowledge. I just had never really thought about it before. I'll paraphrase...
#1. There are things we know.
#2. There are things we know we don't know.
#3. There are thing we don't know we don't know.
We spend the first 20 years of our life (or more) going to school tying to cram as much information into #1.
People who refuse to understand that #3 exist are both arrogant and dangerous.
We should be spending as much of our time increasing the size of #2 by reducing #3.
We should change our educational system to focus on #2, not #1.
As a manager, I would much rather have a person who knows they don't know something than someone who believes they know everything and refuses to believe that there are things that they don't know that they don't know.
In this age of accessible knowledge, why are we trying to learn and memorize information? I'm not saying that we should turn into button pushing morons. But imagine if we could focus on what we REALLY need to know, and then focus on understanding that we won't know everything, accepting that, and learning how to deal with that.
I can still remember in grade 5 learning to spell the word Iroquois. It took me a very long time to memorize this word. Yes, I was a slow child. I suppose this taught me that some words are really messed up. Oddly though, I've never actually met an Iroquois nor used the word in a sentence before now. Are kids in school today learning how to spell Iroquois or are they learning how to right click on a word underlined by a squiggly red line telling them that they spelled it incorrectly. If I answer that based on some of the reports I receive at work by some of the young kids on my team, I would guess neither... sigh.
Regardless. I work in an environment which is far from cookie-cutter. Like most software companies, we're constantly evolving our practices, finding new ways to operate, keeping up to date with new technologies and so on and so forth. I'm sure this is the same with most companies. But anyway, there is no way we can know everything. And it's very easy to fall into the trap of not knowing what we don't know. The struggle is to make sure we're aware of what we know we don't know. And this is what I try and teach my guys. It's ok that you don't know. I'm not going to get mad because you don't have every answer. Welcome to my world. Just make sure you are investing your time in understanding that you know you don't know.
Know what I mean?
I think taking crack would just be easier.
Any thoughts out there on what you don't know?
Oh So Clever
I'm stealing this from a friend's site. Who actually stole it from YouTube. Well, if you can call it stealing from YouTube. You can't really. So technically I'm not stealing it either. I just didn't... find it. Well, I did find it. But on my friends blag. Not on YouTube. First that is.
I think I'll have another beer.