tales from the rock

communication is an art, and like a more traditional art like say, painting, when practiced by an amateur, it is painfully obvious.  take written communication.  I for one, clearly have no passion for it, hence, the large breaks between posts here - a place where I was supposed to be practicing how to communicate.  I still send 50 emails a day, but they often looks like this:

• “yep, sounds good.”
• “let me get back to you”
• “…..” (ignored email)

spoken communication is even trickier, because so much of it is made up of context, and subtleties that are expressed through other means.  intonation, rising and falling pitch, excitable gestures, etc.

 for example, the word “conflict” takes 2 basic forms.  the first is that of a noun, (a fight, battle, or war).  it’s easy to pick this usage out due to the accent and extension of the first syllable;  CONflict.

the other form is that of intransitive verb, (competitive or opposing action of incompatibles : antagonistic state or action (as of divergent ideas, interests, or persons) b: mental struggle resulting from incompatible or opposing needs, drives, wishes, or external or internal demands.)  again, fairly easy to pick out due to the accent on the second syllable;  conFLICT.

you would think this is straighforward enough for any reasonably skilled adult to handle - doesn’t take Tony Robbins to pull this one off in front of a crowd.

however

if you are the fucking hack bitch that insists on saying the fucking word the same way in either usage (conFLICT), especially when you mostly use it as a noun, then the fucking act of sound coming out of your god damn mouth inflicts pain on every other person in the room as we are forced to translate english from your mother tongue of dumbfuck because you keep saying things like, “the conFLICT between the vendor and us is mostly due to a previous conFLICT that involved another person, and that conFLICT is what is causing this new conFLICT….”

like a needle through the ear into my brain.

this is my new professional goal.  kind of abstract, but this is really where I want to be.

the sunday paper’s Parade insert had an article on Randy Paush’s last lecture, which has turned into a second career for the guy.  google him if you need the backstory, but I reccomend watching the original last lecture from the CMU website, not the short Oprah version.

anyway, “glorius failure” was a term he used to describe groups in his classes that took big gambles that didn’t pay off, but still deserved recognition.  the idea of course being that you have to encourage big thinking, and the current establishment only punishes those with unrealized goals.

anyway, in an academic setting, that’s all well and good, but in a professional setting, you typically have more at stake to celebrate failure, which is why I think it’s a perfect goal. if you think about it, to achieve glorius failure, you have to have everything else working so great that a spectacular flameout is still an acceptable outcome for something.

working backwords, you have:

• project fails, but it was a fucking awesome ride
• EVERYONE is on board, working as a team, putting in tons of effort to pull off this miracle
• momentum is great, support is there, no end in sight, but the first steps are boldly taken 
• the sky is the limit when envisioning the product - it’s not worth doing unless current paradigms are destroyed
• simple, yet BRILLIANT idea pitched; sounds crazy, but could have significant impact on current model
• partnerships are working, communication is good and happens often.  we learn about each others jobs, objectives, and barriers to success
• daily grind is replaced with progress towards stability.  lacking pettyness, we can move the day to day ‘work’ to the back of our minds, to be rewarded with time to explore as the daily chores are complete
• all bullshit is eliminated

ah, and there is the rub.  as an army of one, I can only fight with myself (which does happen often, but I feel a victory is within reach.)  put 2 people in a room, and  sooner or later, one will think the other doesn’t deserve the good chair, even if they took the crappy desk.  a lot of times, we think we can eliminate the bullshit by skipping ahead to the awesome project everyone will love, but that never works.  eventually, you have 15 minutes of real work to do (even on the fun projects), and while you trudge through it, you notice that the bitch across the hall someone got the admin to order $15 ball point fucking pens, and you can’t even get the RIGHT KIND OF FUCKING KEYBOARD THAT YOU WILL USE ALL FUCKING DAY - WHO THE FUCK IS WRITING WITH A PEN ANYMORE ANYWAY….

so why not just focus on eliminating all the bullshit?  because if science can’t cure retardation, neither can I.  some people just like to be miserable, so they keep jobs they don’t like, for less money they think they deserve, working with people they hate, knowing that the boss 3 levels up only does the job 1/4 as well as they could do it.

step 1:  rally the no bullshit team.  it’s here somewhere - I just have to find it.

reader #2 asks - “so what do the perfect children on campus do?”

well, I don’t know what most of them do - for the most part, it just looks like a large collection of well behaved kids, whom we know to be wicked smart.  no bells and flexible schedules means there are always kids walking around. they probably acknowledge random adults more readily, although that doesn’t mean they don’t start mocking you once out of earshot.  these isn’t a whole lot of coupling on campus, but I’m sure it’s happening.  I don’ t believe there has been a single fight (on campus) or pregnancy in my 3 years here (knock on wood).

there are of course exceptions, and while I have no part of any disciplinary  process, I have heard of some fairly serious issues - suspensions, and maybe an expulsion (invitation to leave and reapply) or 2.

I think the part that always freaks me out, are the other exceptions - that portion of the population that does remarkable things.  it’s certainly not a majority, but I’ve come to realize it’s a measurable part of the population, and it’s also something you see through all the grade levels - it’s being coaxed out of every class.

yesterday, I went to an event organized by an 8th grader.  he wants to stop the war in northern uganda.  he saw a documentary, followed up and connected with a national organization (invisible children), formed a club in his grade level (8th graders!), created a logo, holds meetings (once or twice a week), and helped get Hawaii included on a promotional stop for the national org.  for the event, the whole campus was invited, and a few dozen showed up (not 8th graders - mostly the upper grades) - after hours, nothing much at stake.  a simple invitation to come watch a documentary on the situation, and learn how you could get involved (I went for the movie.)

this kind of thing happens with regularity here.  darfur is a pretty common subject area.  south africa and mainland china also get a lot of attention.  lots of niche issues, but always very broad thinking applied to complex issues.  student organized, adult supported activities.  they may not result in tons of action, or even impact, but it’s amazing to me that this is how so many of them choose to spend their time. also, the fact that they have such a global view, and can assimilate what they see and learn with their own lives and find connections.

personally, if I want to get involved in an issue, I would focus on something closer to home - the US at least, but hopefully something in Hawaii.  not a lot of sexy projects, but I’d like to think we would take care of our own before we solve the worlds problems.  I certainly wouldn’t stop a kid from aiding the country of Uganda though, if it was between that and another couple of hours on the good ole xbox.

all in all, I’m sure if you looked at the best kids from a public school, and compared them with a sampling of the kids here, it may not look too different on average, but I really think that the ‘remarkable’  side of the scale skews so heavily to the private school side, that there is really no comparison.

also, the last 5 minutes of the meeting was spent reviewing the plans to keep brown kids from learning physics.

like G-Money, I wonder if my career is going anywhere, if I should be doing more about it, or if I’m doing just fine.

working at the ‘hou, I’m never going to develop any kind of technical skills. best case is tread water. there are a lot of opportunities to work on projects with potentially high profile, but really, lots of breadth, not a whole lot of depth.

another problem is lack of peers. really, there are no other engineers employed here, and the rest of the department don’t have a whole lot of deep knowledge, if you get what I mean.

there are many upsides to working at this place, and here in Hawaii, I still think it has to be one of the best jobs I could get. if I live here for the rest of my life, this job will do me just fine.

somehow I feel like I’m cheating myself though - like I should be working harder, developing myself, challenging my skills, etc. I’m never going to be able to work at Google, but I’m certainly better than the work I’m going to see here.

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