Teach the application over the idea

Some concepts are taught in a way that focuses entirely on the concept itself. When I’ve learned about various musical scales (major, minor, modes, etc.), passive voice in English, and object-oriented programming the mode of teaching has been to focus on the idea and what it literally is.

I’ve found that this almost universally doesn’t work well for me. The idea becomes a pure thing unto itself. When I see it in practice, I might not identify whether it’s properly applied or not.

I think the application is far more important. Don’t teach me a scale, have me play a few songs that use that scale, or write a melody only in that scale. Don’t tell me the heuristic for passive voice, show me examples of passive voice and rewriting it to avoid that scourge of English teachers. Don’t demonstrate object-oriented programming with cat-is-an-animal examples, show me how I build an application using an object-oriented language.

In short: theory and practice are interconnected, as are teaching and executing.

Our projects in the context of a moonshot

Think about how complex the man-on-the-moon project was: more than a dozen disciplines, multiple project sites, two “training-wheels” projects (Mercury and Gemini), hundreds of entirely new inventions, amazing odds against, thousands of people, several years of effort and billions of dollars.

Now think about whatever team projects you’re working on. Who are the people on your team, in your organization, outside your organization, and out in the world who have to do something to make your project happen? How many new things do you need to invent, or put together in a novel way? Do you need to run one or more projects before you can even start on the end goal in earnest?

Thus is the state of human endeavor that the answer to all of those questions is not as intimidating as the Apollo project. And yet, if you start to think about the network of people and work in even the simplest projects, they are more complicated than you probably thought when you said yes to the project.

My new fun thought experiment is to quantify my projects in fractional moonshots. Writing a blog post is an infinitesimal fraction of a moonshot. Shipping a new application is probably a ten-thousandth of a moonshot. To build a new consumer hardware platform, all of its software, and build up a manufacturing and logistics flow for that platform probably approaches a centi-moonshot, maybe even a deci-moonshot.

Carefully allowing negative people into your life

In general, I unfollow negative people on something like Twitter. If someone is providing mostly frowns, I’m not interested in dealing with that in my life. This works 95% of the time.

The 5% problem is that there are people who are too smart to ignore but more negative than I want to put up with. Maybe not negative all the time, but intensely negative when they are in a funk. What am I to do?

My first tactic is to unfollow them, but still read their material when its mentioned by others whose opinions I value. This is a good way to filter out the bad stuff while still giving me access to the good stuff.

If I still feel like I’m missing out on smart comments from a negative person, I’ll try following them again. Maybe they have grown as a person and aren’t so negative now. Maybe I have grown as a person and have more empathy for whatever it is they are negative about.

If the medium that I’m following a person is has a temporary mute function, like Tweetbot does, it comes in super handy. Mute them for a day if they’re ranting, a week if they are worked up about an event, or a month if they are seasonally grouchy.

The interesting thing about me is I’ve grown a little more empathetic about why someone would rant on the internet. I don’t necessarily like it, but I’m better at understanding how they got there and giving them the benefit of the doubt. What I don’t tolerate these days is dishing out negativity and then expecting others to not treat you like you’re a downer of a person. If you can’t stand the heat, don’t start a fight in the kitchen.

How the cold open is done

You don’t have to be a fan of Parks and Recreation, or even know much about the plot and characters, to enjoy this cold open. Not having done any professional comedy writing, I imagine that the cold open, a TV writing form where the show starts without any introduction or credits, is a gift and a curse. The challenge is to make sense to someone who happened upon the show, who doesn’t have any context. The gift is that it’s a chance to take some scene that doesn’t really belong to any particular plot line and put it right up front for everyone to enjoy.

What makes this particular cold open great is that there are several punchlines in only a couple minutes, but none of the lines are wasted. A new viewer can learn a lot about the relationship between the two characters from just the jokes. A long-time viewer gets to watch two somewhat antisocial characters teach each other while exuding their typical antisocial behavior at each other.

Whomever wrote that scene is my hero.

Your homework for this week is thus: the thing that you sometimes use, listen to, watch, or read and think “this is great, exceptionally great even”. Think about that thing, and its exceptional quality. Now tell me about that quality. No description of that quality is too short.

Your pal, ~akk