Journal perfessor multigeek's Journal: What, exactly, am I *doing*? Hmmm. Good question. 2
Hey there, world.
I'm feeling a bit more mellow tonight. Not that anything concrete has gotten done, just that a few quiet days, a few beautiful walks in the sun (it amazes me how far I can walk in upper Manhattan while surrounded by woods), a restocked kitchen resulting in some satisfying meals, all have left me less twisted up inside.
Been doing yet more freeform web drifting. ("Surfing" has never suited my style. I'm more prone to a behavior closer to drifting down a wide shallow stream in a small raft, occasionally directing into a hidden rivulet behind rushes, occasionally stopping for a while to examine something on shore.) While, as always, carrying the background awareness of my ten or twelve ongoing projects (most importantly, military data and organizational/biographical stuff). I've mostly let the current carry me where it will. (Someday I will write down my theory of how this applies to effective reaserch of leading edge trends, but not tonight.)
Here are a few links for others who like to spend the time really saturating oneself with an issue.
Parameters Magazine - This calls itself the "The United States Army's Senior Professional Journal" and is out of the US Army War College. I've left the link at the index page so that you can better jump straight to articles like The CNN Effect: Strategic Enabler or Operational Risk and Jus Post Bellum: The Importance of War Crimes Trials. I consider this journal yet more proof of the honor, contemplative and intellectual skill, and overall professionalism of the US military. I'm very proud of them, they make me proud to be an American, and it just further underscores the gaping rift between the sanity and competence of our men and women on the ground relative to the twisted venality of the policy makers they must obey.
The Microship Project/BEHEMOTH - This is the home page of a team intensely exploring the boundaries of a mobile life, with their founder/leader having lived most of the past decade out of a recumbent bicycle with mini (less than six feet on a side) trailer. Counterpoint to folk like the late great Monk Magazine, this site helps me (and perhaps can help you) to understand how radically different the future will be for some people. When I talk to people about homesteaders making their way in little homemade ships out to the asteroid belts, I think of projects like this.
Unique Snowflake - Nothing that unique here that I can see; just another of the thousands of blogs popping up that manage to run at a level of readability and professionalism that many fully staffed print pubs couldn't hack less than twenty years ago. Of course, that's exactly the point. Freedom of the press truly is limited to those who own one and now we all (at least here) do.
/.'s beautiful dreamer (lower case fully intentional) has gotten me thinking about goals and radical change. In general she seems to be uncannily good at reaching my sensitive spots (a friend of mine evidently spent about ten minutes "cackling" (his fiance's term) about my having found somebody else online who would have big buckets of fermenting cabbage in her kitchen) and this whole diving-in-at-the-deep-end thing is certainly a big part of my life right now. I'm not sure where this is all headed for me but I can say that at the moment it's actually mostly disturbing, at least in the sense of motion muddying settled waters.
As my last entry mentioned, I left the cocoon of the corporate world to do my own startup and it has been an experience of enduring strain of a sort that I truly had never anticipated. The lack of money I sort of saw coming. The loneliness I certainly didn't. Of course having 9/11 lose me about six months wasn't much better. (I went for emergency funds and the FEMA people "reasonably" explained that everything was based on the previous year's revenue. Explaining that I had just finished spending three years on and off getting ready to pursue revenue was not something that they could grasp.)
The other side of this is an understated sort of grandeur that has become a common part of my life and work. You see, much of what I'm building could be thought of as a schema. Kinda like building a new combination Dewey decimal system/Standard Industrial Code from scratch. Naming conventions, industry categories, terminologies; the works. At the same time I've been putting together an archive (print and disk) of relevant source matter. All of which is based on hundreds of hours of work while sitting around at various tech support/consulting gigs so the setup/data has been trickling in (what's with all the water metaphors?) since 1996.
What does all of this mean? Well, in my other life my specialty was the dark operational corners of content creation. Workflow systems, asset tracking, you get the idea. So I've seen what's in place at top-of-the line places like FindSVP, Time Inc, and so forth. And now the system that I use on a day to day basis is in some ways just flat out better.
As you would figure out if you were to wade through enough of my posts is that while I'm well aware of how smart I am and how well informed (various people who should know have been calling me a "genius" since I was in first grade), I tend to have very little faith in my ability to turn that massive brainpower into anything useful. I tend to think of myself as a prototype car engine that yields, say, 900 horsepower, but doesn't have an effective throttle, requires odd and specialized operating conditions, and for which nobody has been able to figure out how to attach wheels.
So I'm amazed and delighted on a regular basis when I find that to my considerable surprise this whole mad plan of mine is actually working. I tend to spend far more effort than one would prefer sitting there thinking "how did that happen?" and "where did that come from?", unable readily to couple this formidible and effective thing (though certainly still unfinished) with the weird guy sitting alone in a cluttered and strange apartment. Picture the guy in Pi but having built his baroque system between years of freelance gigs and intervening crises and thereby unable to entirely associate his own contraption, even his own theories and architecture, with himself.
Now, even more surreal for me, is the feedback that I'm starting to get. These days whan I see certain kinds of relevant articles online or projects underway, I send them a note, perhaps a pdf of my primary poster, some means of conveying, "hey there, if you are into *that* then you should look at *this*". I do this both because that is just what one is supposed to do to promote this sort of project and also just to be in contact with sympatico folk. What somehow still shakes me to my roots is that they're actually taking me seriously. Returning my calls, inviting me to meetings, sending glowing emails, sometimes passing my name on down the line.
Again, I'm somehow surprised. Doesn't seem real or even possible somehow. After all, my image in my head for years of my personal projects has been of increasingly developed systems that never ever enter the real world.
As yes, imposter syndrome. The disease of the modern entrepreneur. Of coure it's all getting kinda endemic, isn't it? How does one measure one's own competence at something when one is inventing the skill itself?
Anyway, I'm afraid that I'm again having to leave an entry without a conclusion (though perhaps that's the only honest thing to do here) as I have *got* to get some more sleep.
I'm feeling a bit more mellow tonight. Not that anything concrete has gotten done, just that a few quiet days, a few beautiful walks in the sun (it amazes me how far I can walk in upper Manhattan while surrounded by woods), a restocked kitchen resulting in some satisfying meals, all have left me less twisted up inside.
Been doing yet more freeform web drifting. ("Surfing" has never suited my style. I'm more prone to a behavior closer to drifting down a wide shallow stream in a small raft, occasionally directing into a hidden rivulet behind rushes, occasionally stopping for a while to examine something on shore.) While, as always, carrying the background awareness of my ten or twelve ongoing projects (most importantly, military data and organizational/biographical stuff). I've mostly let the current carry me where it will. (Someday I will write down my theory of how this applies to effective reaserch of leading edge trends, but not tonight.)
Here are a few links for others who like to spend the time really saturating oneself with an issue.
Parameters Magazine - This calls itself the "The United States Army's Senior Professional Journal" and is out of the US Army War College. I've left the link at the index page so that you can better jump straight to articles like The CNN Effect: Strategic Enabler or Operational Risk and Jus Post Bellum: The Importance of War Crimes Trials. I consider this journal yet more proof of the honor, contemplative and intellectual skill, and overall professionalism of the US military. I'm very proud of them, they make me proud to be an American, and it just further underscores the gaping rift between the sanity and competence of our men and women on the ground relative to the twisted venality of the policy makers they must obey.
The Microship Project/BEHEMOTH - This is the home page of a team intensely exploring the boundaries of a mobile life, with their founder/leader having lived most of the past decade out of a recumbent bicycle with mini (less than six feet on a side) trailer. Counterpoint to folk like the late great Monk Magazine, this site helps me (and perhaps can help you) to understand how radically different the future will be for some people. When I talk to people about homesteaders making their way in little homemade ships out to the asteroid belts, I think of projects like this.
Unique Snowflake - Nothing that unique here that I can see; just another of the thousands of blogs popping up that manage to run at a level of readability and professionalism that many fully staffed print pubs couldn't hack less than twenty years ago. Of course, that's exactly the point. Freedom of the press truly is limited to those who own one and now we all (at least here) do.
/.'s beautiful dreamer (lower case fully intentional) has gotten me thinking about goals and radical change. In general she seems to be uncannily good at reaching my sensitive spots (a friend of mine evidently spent about ten minutes "cackling" (his fiance's term) about my having found somebody else online who would have big buckets of fermenting cabbage in her kitchen) and this whole diving-in-at-the-deep-end thing is certainly a big part of my life right now. I'm not sure where this is all headed for me but I can say that at the moment it's actually mostly disturbing, at least in the sense of motion muddying settled waters.
As my last entry mentioned, I left the cocoon of the corporate world to do my own startup and it has been an experience of enduring strain of a sort that I truly had never anticipated. The lack of money I sort of saw coming. The loneliness I certainly didn't. Of course having 9/11 lose me about six months wasn't much better. (I went for emergency funds and the FEMA people "reasonably" explained that everything was based on the previous year's revenue. Explaining that I had just finished spending three years on and off getting ready to pursue revenue was not something that they could grasp.)
The other side of this is an understated sort of grandeur that has become a common part of my life and work. You see, much of what I'm building could be thought of as a schema. Kinda like building a new combination Dewey decimal system/Standard Industrial Code from scratch. Naming conventions, industry categories, terminologies; the works. At the same time I've been putting together an archive (print and disk) of relevant source matter. All of which is based on hundreds of hours of work while sitting around at various tech support/consulting gigs so the setup/data has been trickling in (what's with all the water metaphors?) since 1996.
What does all of this mean? Well, in my other life my specialty was the dark operational corners of content creation. Workflow systems, asset tracking, you get the idea. So I've seen what's in place at top-of-the line places like FindSVP, Time Inc, and so forth. And now the system that I use on a day to day basis is in some ways just flat out better.
As you would figure out if you were to wade through enough of my posts is that while I'm well aware of how smart I am and how well informed (various people who should know have been calling me a "genius" since I was in first grade), I tend to have very little faith in my ability to turn that massive brainpower into anything useful. I tend to think of myself as a prototype car engine that yields, say, 900 horsepower, but doesn't have an effective throttle, requires odd and specialized operating conditions, and for which nobody has been able to figure out how to attach wheels.
So I'm amazed and delighted on a regular basis when I find that to my considerable surprise this whole mad plan of mine is actually working. I tend to spend far more effort than one would prefer sitting there thinking "how did that happen?" and "where did that come from?", unable readily to couple this formidible and effective thing (though certainly still unfinished) with the weird guy sitting alone in a cluttered and strange apartment. Picture the guy in Pi but having built his baroque system between years of freelance gigs and intervening crises and thereby unable to entirely associate his own contraption, even his own theories and architecture, with himself.
Now, even more surreal for me, is the feedback that I'm starting to get. These days whan I see certain kinds of relevant articles online or projects underway, I send them a note, perhaps a pdf of my primary poster, some means of conveying, "hey there, if you are into *that* then you should look at *this*". I do this both because that is just what one is supposed to do to promote this sort of project and also just to be in contact with sympatico folk. What somehow still shakes me to my roots is that they're actually taking me seriously. Returning my calls, inviting me to meetings, sending glowing emails, sometimes passing my name on down the line.
Again, I'm somehow surprised. Doesn't seem real or even possible somehow. After all, my image in my head for years of my personal projects has been of increasingly developed systems that never ever enter the real world.
As yes, imposter syndrome. The disease of the modern entrepreneur. Of coure it's all getting kinda endemic, isn't it? How does one measure one's own competence at something when one is inventing the skill itself?
Anyway, I'm afraid that I'm again having to leave an entry without a conclusion (though perhaps that's the only honest thing to do here) as I have *got* to get some more sleep.
Hope is neccissary in all things (Score:1)
Your choice to venture out onto the field of self-employment is highly laudable. Many people are too frightened by the possibility of failure that they stick to paths that the masses have already trod. By taking this initial step you have already risen above normalcy in ways that intellect alone cannot dictate. You've been labeled a "genius" for so long, and I do not doubt the fact that you are, but maybe you need to step out of that label for a while. You describe yourself as a powerful car with no wheels. Why drive when you have the capability to fly?
Also, one often has the tendency to be super-critical about themselves. Certainly I have fallen prey to that tendency on occasions too numerous to count. But when you are telling yourself that you have made a mistake, ask if you would tell that same remark to a friend or loved one. Would you really tell someone you care about that their heartfelt venture is destined to fail, no of course not.
Don't be surprised by your success, use it to fuel your passion
Re:Hope is necessary in all things (Score:1)
Your choice to venture out onto the field of self-employment is highly laudable. Many people are too frightened by the possibility of failure that they stick to paths that the masses have already trod.
Thank you. However it's much easier when one keeps drifting off the common path anyway.
You've been labeled a "genius" for so long, and I do not doubt the fact that you are, but maybe you need to step out of that label for a while.
To quote somebody I know, mmm...good point... I'm workin' on it. Actually the day-to-dayness of what's needed to create a company really helps. When the key variable is one's ability to get up for the nth time and jump back into the fray, intellect matters a lot less than sheer bloody-minded doggedness. I feel like if I ever had a coat of arms (that I was willing to acknowledge) the motto would be "study, understand, persist, accomplish" with the "persist" being by far the most important.
Also, one often has the tendency to be super-critical about themselves. Certainly I have fallen prey to that tendency on occasions too numerous to count. But when you are telling yourself that you have made a mistake, ask if you would tell that same remark to a friend or loved one. Would you really tell someone you care about that their heartfelt venture is destined to fail, no of course not.
Ouch.. To go back to the same source, Just stop making so much sense
You know, in many years of talking with assorted folk about such issues, nobody has provided such a neat reality check. As it happens, if I thought that somebody's heartfelt venture *was* clearly destined to fail I *would* tell them so. And have. But no, if I were an outsider looking at this company of mine I would not consider such denigration accurate, appropriate, or an acceptable use of time.
Thanks for the insight. It will help me separate the venting from the valid self-analysis.
Back to the job,
Rustin