Life Archives - Scott S Nelson

A proven method to accelerate learning by doing

April 9, 2024April 9, 2024Scott S NelsonLeave a comment

As a writer, architect, and manager, I am always looking to improve my communication because I sometimes experience that what I say and how people respond are out of synch and I firmly believe in the presupposition that “The meaning of any communication is the response it elicits, regardless of the intent of the communicator.” (Robert B. Dilts, et al.), which is why I was watching How to Be More Articulate (Structure Your Thoughts With 1 Framework), where Vicky Zhao mentioned “…Jeff Bezos’ famous Reversibility Decision Making Framework, is asking if I choose to do this. Is the result reversible? If yes, we should do it. If no, then let’s think about it deeply.”

This was the first time I heard of the “Reversibility Decision Making Framework”, though it perfectly describes the approach that I started following on my own at around the same time Bezos was running Amazon from his home. It is how I learned to manage computers, then networks, then scripting, then programming, then team leadership, and (eventually) architecture. I had no formal education in these areas, and at the time of learning them I had insufficient funds for books, let alone trainings.

I did have a computer (that took two years to pay off), an internet connection (at 14400 baud), and curiosity. After a couple of painful (and unplanned) lessons on how to re-install Windows and restoring a network from back up tapes, I began looking for ways to back out mistakes before I made them. After adding that small step to my process learning moved forward much more rapidly.

We all know that it is much faster to learn by doing. What many people I know fear (all of whom have extensive formal education in IT and related topics) is learning by what is often referred to as a “trial and error”, or what I prefer to call “trial and success”. If you have a safe sandbox to work in, doing something is much more efficient and effective than doing nothing until you are certain of the outcome.

The other habit that helps with trail and success is small increments. Sure, in the bad old days of punch cards or paper tapes it was necessary to write the entire program before running it. But modern IDEs make it trivial to run small pieces of code, and some simple discipline in planning your work can make it easy to test your code a line or a method at a time. Essentially, when not certain how a particular approach will work, rather than spending hours looking for “proven” solutions (that still might not work in the specific context), take your best guess and see how it works.

If the “proven” approach fails, it is likely one of many and finding which failed where can be a daunting task, where figuring out a better solution to the one you wrote 2 minutes ago is generally much easier and less stressful. Sure, there are few feelings better than writing dozens of lines of code in one session and having it run perfectly, but it feels so good because it happens so rarely. Writing two lines of code and getting a result is motivating, because even if it fails you have an idea of where to go next, and when it succeeds there is still a good feeling. Those little successes will easily total up to a higher overall sense of satisfaction than the one big one.

Pro tip: VirtualBox is a free virtual machine platform with lots of pre-built machines available at no cost. It is easy to learn the basics of how to use one and once you can, you have endless environments that you can completely destroy and start over again in the manner many games let you re-spawn where you left off instead of having to start over.

Humble PS: As illustrated by the feature image for this post, I am still trying to get the hang of prompting for image generation 😛

Photo by Michael Judkins: https://www.pexels.com/photo/gray-and-black-rock-formation-1113552/

Work – Life Balance is Rubbish

February 12, 2023Scott S NelsonLeave a comment

What we need is work – self balance.

There should be parts of your work that are also parts of yourself (or else you are in the wrong profession).

If work is all of yourself, you aren’t happy (not applicable to periods of intense flow).

A work-self balance means that enough of your work is about your self that you can experience flow, derive satisfaction, and generate value. To point out the obvious, this also means enough of your self is about your work. The key is finding what enough is for you. To find the key, you must not look for it. They key is to pay attention to your experience while not looking for it.

The balance should be represented as a wave, where balance is found in the median over time, and not the a scale, where the impression is that of opposing forces.

Meditating with My Monkey Mind

September 1, 2022September 21, 2023Scott S NelsonLeave a comment

In all honesty, this post is more about liking the alliteration of the title than the topic itself.

In my mid-teens I found a book somewhere (yard sale, or used bookstore, or in a box in the garage, the memory fades after a handful of decades pass) about self-improvement and meditation. I don’t recall the title, though I do recall it was written sometime in the early 1900’s. It was my first introduction to concepts like affirmations and meditation.

I loaned the book to a friend who really took to the affirmations (I can still hear his radio-announcer-deep voice repeating “every day in every way I’m getting bitchener and bitchener”).

I was fascinated with meditation. I don’t recall the book pointing out the self-discipline aspect of it, though that is how I thought of it. Until recently, my meditation practice was never really a practice, but a series of abandoned attempts. This time has been different in two ways. First, I have an app (Balance). When I read Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki, I understood the value of meditating in groups, but I’m not a group-joiner by nature, so that never happened. The app gives me guidance, which I think is part of the group value. It also gamifies the process. I started using it around December of 2021. At some point I noticed that it tracked sequential days of practice. I took a sabbatical this year, and as part of it decided to make meditation a larger part of my life. As of today, I have 113 days of daily practice in.

The second difference in my approach this time around is that I have dropped the association with discipline. While intellectually I know that discipline is not about making yourself do things, experientially I still feel that way. In reality, discipline is about doing things for the sake of the doing and the reward. Maybe making yourself is necessary at the start, before the discipline becomes rewarding, but forcing yourself despite yourself will not lead to discipline.

And that brings me to my monkey mind, what I call that inner voice that I know I should have more control over and yet it still goes off yammering about things, and more about things I tell it that I really don’t want to hear about. Once my monkey mind acquires some discipline, I think the next level will come.