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Non-Linear Thought Process and a Message for my Children
I have recently been investigating and visiting universities with my eldest daughter, a Senior in High School. Last week we visited Stanford University (an amazing experience) and spent a week in Northern California on vacation. After being home for a day and a half, I am in Texas for a week of team meetings and training.
On the first night of a trip, I seldom sleep, so I listened to the song “Don’t Let It Bring You Down” by Annie Lennox, a cover of a Neil Young song. That led to a YouTube search for the original Neil Young version, which led to me listening to “Old Man” – a favorite song of mine for over 30 years. That led to some reflection, which ultimately led to this post.
I mention this because it is an example of the nonlinear or divergent thought process (generally viewed as a negative trait) that occurs naturally for me. It helps me “connect the dots” faster and more naturally. It is a manner of thinking associated with ADHD (again, something generally viewed as negative). The interesting thing is that to fit in and succeed with ADHD, you tend to develop logical systems for focus and consistency. That has many positive benefits for me – such as systemic thinking, creating repeatable processes, and automation.
The combination of linear and non-linear thinking can really fuel creativity. The downside is that it can take quite a while for others to see the potential of your ideas, which can be extremely frustrating. But you learn to communicate better out of necessity. The upside is that you tend to create relationships with other innovators because they think like you, making you relatable and interesting to them. The world is a strange place.
It is funny how there are several points in your life when you have an epiphany, and things suddenly make complete sense. That makes you realize how much time and effort you could have saved if you’d figured something out sooner. As a parent, I always try to identify and create learning shortcuts for my children so they reach those points much sooner than I did.
I started this post thinking that I would document as many of those lessons as possible to serve as a future reminder and possibly help others. Instead, I decided to post a few things I view as foundational truisms in life that could help foster that personal growth process. So, here goes…
- Always work hard to be the best, but never let yourself believe you are the best. Even if you truly are, it will be short-lived, as there are always people doing everything they can to be the best. Ultimately, that is a good thing. You need to have enough of an ego to test the limits and capabilities of things, but not one that is so big that it alienates or marginalizes those around you.
- Learn from everything you do – good and bad. Continuous improvement is so important. By focusing on this, you constantly challenge yourself to try new things and find better (i.e., more effective, more efficient, and more consistent) ways to do things.
- Realize that the difference between a brilliant and a stupid idea is often perspective. Years ago, I taught technical courses, and occasionally someone would describe something they did that seemed strange or wrong. But if you asked questions and tried to understand why they did what they did, you would often identify the brilliance in that approach. It is both exciting and humbling.
- Incorporating new approaches or the best practices of others into your own proven methods and processes is part of continuous improvement, but it only works if you can set aside your ego and keep an open mind.
- Believe in yourself, even when others don’t share that belief. Remain open to feedback and constructive criticism as a way to learn and improve, but never give up on yourself. There is a huge but sometimes subtle difference between confidence and arrogance, and that line is often drawn at the point where you can accept that you might be wrong or that there might be a better way to do something. Become the person people like working with and not the person they avoid or want to see fail.
- Surround yourself with the best people that you can find. Look for people with diverse backgrounds and complementary skills. The best teams I have ever been involved with consisted of high achievers who constantly raised the bar for each other while simultaneously creating a safety net for their teammates. Those teams grew and did amazing things because everyone was very competitive and supportive of each other.
- Keep notes or a journal because good ideas are often fleeting and hard to recall. Remember, good ideas can come from anywhere, so keep track of others’ suggestions and make sure you attribute them to the proper source.
- Try to make a difference in the world. Try to leave everything you “touch” (job, relationship, project, whatever) in a better state than before you were there. Helping others improve and leading by example are two simple ways of making a difference.
- Accept that failure is a natural obstacle on your path to success. You are not trying hard enough if you never fail. But you are also not trying hard enough if you fail too often. That is very subjective, and honest introspection is your best gauge. Be accountable, accept responsibility, document the lessons learned, and move on.
- Dream big, and use that as motivation to learn new things. While I funded medical research, I learned about genetics, genomics, and biology. That expanded into interests in nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, and interfaces such as natural language and non-verbal/emotional communication. Someday I hope to tie these together to help cure a disease (Arthritis) and improve the quality of life for millions of people. Will that ever happen? I don’t know, but I do know that if I don’t try, it will never happen because of anything I did.
- Focus on the positive, not the negative. Creativity is stifled in environments where fear and blame rule.
- Never hesitate to apologize when you are wrong. This is a sign of strength, not weakness.
- And above all else, honesty and integrity should be the foundation for everything you do and are.
Hopefully, this will help my children become the best people possible, ideally early on in their lives. I was 30 years old before I had a clue about many of these things. Until that point, I was somewhat self-centered and focused on winning. Winning and success are good things, but are better when accomplished the right way.
Ideas are sometimes Slippery and Hard to Grasp
I started this blog to be an “idea exchange,” as well as a way to pass along lessons learned to help others. Typical blog advice is to focus on one thing and do it well to build a following. That is especially important if you want to monetize the blog, but that is not and has not been my goal.
One thing that has surprised me is how different the comments and likes are for each post. Feedback from the last post was even more diverse and surprising than usual. It ranged from comments about “Siri vs Google” to feedback about Sci-Fi books and movies to Artificial Intelligence.
I asked a few friends for feedback and received something very insightful (thanks, Jim). He stated that he found the blog interesting but wasn’t sure of the objective. He went on to identify several possible goals for the last post. Strangely enough (or maybe not), his comments mirrored the type of feedback that I received. That pointed out an area for improvement, and I appreciated that as well as the wisdom of focusing on one thing. Who knows, maybe in the future…
This also reminded me of a white paper written 12-13 years ago by someone I used to work with. It was about how Bluetooth would be the “next big thing.” He had read an IEEE paper or something and saw potential for this new technology. He used the example of your toaster and coffee maker communicating so that your breakfast would be ready when you walk into the kitchen in the morning.
At that time, I had a couple of thoughts. Who cared about something that only had a 20-30-foot range when WiFi had become popular and had a much greater range? In addition, a couple of years earlier, I toured the Microsoft “House of the Future,” where everything was automated and key components communicated. But everything in the house was all hardwired or used WiFi – not Bluetooth. It was easy to dismiss his assertion because it seemed impractical. The value of the idea was difficult to quantify, given the use case provided.
Looking back now, I see that white paper as insightful. If it was visionary, he would have come out with the first Bluetooth speakers, car interface, or even phone earpiece and gotten rich, but it failed to present practical use cases that were easy enough to understand yet different enough from what was available at the time to demonstrate the real value of the idea. His expression of the idea was not tangible enough and, therefore, too slippery to grasp and value.
I believe that good ideas sometimes originate where you least expect them. Those ideas are often incremental – seemingly simple and sometimes borderline obvious, often building on another idea or concept. An idea does not need to be unique to be important or valuable, but it needs to be presented in a way that makes it easy to understand the benefits, differentiation, and value. That is just good communication.
One of the things I miss most from when my consulting company was active was the interaction between a couple of key people (Jason and Peter) and myself. Those guys were very good at taking an idea and helping build it out. This worked well because we had overlapping expertise and experiences, as well as complementary skills and perspectives. That diversity increased the depth and breadth of our efforts to develop and extend those ideas by asking the tough questions early and ensuring we could convince each other of the value.
Our discussions were creative, highly collaborative, and a lot of fun. We improved from them, and the outcome was usually commercially viable. As a growing and profitable small business, you must constantly innovate to differentiate yourself. Our discussions were driven as much by necessity as intellectual curiosity, and I believe this was part of the magic.
So, back to the last post. I view various technologies as building blocks. Some are foundational, and others are complementary. To me, the key is not viewing those various technologies as competing with each other. Instead, I look for potential value created by integrating them. That may not always be possible and does not always lead to something better, but occasionally it does, so to me, it is a worthwhile exercise. With regard to voice technology, I believe we will see more, better, and smarter applications of it – especially as real-time and AI systems become more complex due to the use of an increasing number of specialized chips, component systems, geospatial technology, and sensors.
While today’s smartphone interfaces would not pass the Turing Test or proposed alternatives, they are an improvement over more simplistic voice translation tools available just a few years ago. Advancement requires tools that understand context to make inferences. This brings you closer to machine learning, and big data (when done right) significantly increases that potential.
Ultimately, this all leads back to Artificial Intelligence (at least in my mind). It’s a big leap from a simple voice translation tool to AI, but it is not such a stretch when viewed as building blocks.
Now think about creating an interface (API) that allows one smart device to communicate with another, like the collaborative efforts described above with my old team. It’s not simply having a front-end device exchanging keywords or queries with a back-end device. Instead, it is two or more devices and/or systems having a “discussion” about what is being requested, looking at what each component “knows,” making inferences based on location and speed, asking clarifying questions and making suggestions, and then finally taking that multi-dimensional understanding of the problem to determine what is really needed.
So, possibly not true AI (yet), but a giant leap forward from what we have today. That would help turn the science fiction of the past into science fact in the near future. The better the smart system’s understanding and inferences, the better the results.
I also believe that an unintended consequence of these new smart systems is that they will likely make errors or have biases like humans as they become more human-like in their approach. Hopefully, those smart systems will be able to automatically back-test recommendations to validate and minimize errors. If they are intelligent enough to monitor results and suggest corrective actions when they determine the recommendation does not produce the desired results, they would become even “smarter.” There won’t be an ego creating a distortion filter about the approach or the results. Or maybe there will…
Many of the building blocks required to create these new systems are available today. But it takes vision and insight to see that potential, translate ideas from slippery and abstract to tangible and purposeful, and then start building something cool and useful. As that happens, we will see a paradigm shift in how we interact with computers and how they interact with us. It will become more interactive and intuitive. That will lead us to the systematic integration I wrote about in a big data/nanotechnology post.
So, what is the real objective of my blog? To get people thinking differently, foster collaboration and partnerships between businesses and educational institutions to push the limits of technology, and spark discussion about what others believe the future of computing and smart devices will look like. I’m confident that I will see these types of systems in my lifetime, and I believe this could happen within the next decade.
What are your thoughts?
If you enjoy Bill Murray
Then you will like this. It is definitely great stuff and a fun read. Enjoy!
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1vhjag/bill_murray_here_ok_ill_talk_ill_talk/
Investing in Others – Becoming a Mentor
I have been very fortunate throughout my career. There have been incredible opportunities, risks with big rewards, and lessons learned from mistakes and failures (e.g., one of the biggest early lessons is that most mistakes will not kill you, so you can find a way to recover from them). In hindsight, the people who saw something in me and invested in my career – my mentors – have been most valuable in shaping my career.
None of these people had to help me. It’s possible that they did so for their own benefit (i.e., the better I do my job, the easier it is for them), but I believe they were passing along a valuable gift. I was lucky to have received these gifts early in my career, as they have been invaluable both personally and professionally.
As a mentee, you may not recognize either the value of what you are receiving or the effort that has gone into providing that gift to you. You fully appreciate what others have done for you only years later.
In my first programming job, my manager (Jim) assigned me to work with various key people and would follow up to ask what I had learned. One day, he gave me my first project – something that was far above what a new programmer was tasked with. I was excited but anxious because I did not want to let my mentor down.
I only had six months of experience, and this was a big project for an important automotive customer (Subaru), the first fully customized customer loyalty coupon system for a major auto manufacturer in the late 1980s. It was a stretch for me, and the system had to be production-ready in six months.
Jim let me build it, checked daily at first to see if I had questions, and provided feedback and direction if I asked. Aside from that, he pretty much left me alone. He seemed more confident in my ability to succeed than I was at the time.
After two months, I thought I was finished. We reviewed everything, and Jim constructively picked apart my system, pointing out various flaws and discussing the logic and reasoning behind my decisions. We spent half a day on this exercise, and only years later did I realize he was helping me learn more than just validating the system design.
After another two months, we reviewed this system’s second iteration. He told me that while this version would work and would be acceptable from anyone else, I still had time remaining, and he was confident that I could do even better next time. He provided a couple of tips about high-level areas he focused on while designing and developing systems and left it at that.
When I returned with the third iteration of the system, he reviewed it, smiled, and said he could not have done it better himself. At first, I was proud to have completed my first independent project, but later I realized how much I had learned over those six months. This experience provided me with a lifelong benefit and the motivation to help others in a similar manner. My mentor was (and still is) a great leader!
As a manager, he had so many reasons not to give me the project, to just tell me what to do, and to not let me redo it (twice). From a short-term management perspective, what he did was wasteful. But, from a big-picture perspective, he was doing things that helped me create more value for the company for the 3-4 years I continued working there. The benefits outweighed the cost; Jim was wise enough to see that.
Several years ago, a young woman in Australia contacted me via LinkedIn, asking for suggestions on improving her skills to advance her career. I gave her many assignments over the course of a year, and she did amazing work. She advanced in her company, later relocated to another country, and then switched industries. She currently holds a high-level position and has been very successful. It made me feel good knowing that my efforts played a small part in her advancement.
From my perspective, it all comes down to how you view people and relationships. Are they like commodities that are used and replaced as needed, or are they assets that can grow in value? I like to think that I have helped several people’s “career portfolios,” which helps ensure that business is not a zero-sum game. Hopefully, those people will do the same, increasing leverage on the investments that started with Jim.
So, what do you think?
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Where Ideas, Experiences, and Lessons Learned Intersect 