Management, technology, random thoughts
I took a long walk today by the seafront in Malahide, a charming coastal town in Dublin. The sun was shining, and there was a cold easterly wind. I wasn’t in top mental form – I’ve been in a good deal of pain following a recent surgery, and frankly, I was feeling grumpy. I thought the walk would do me good, and I had a podcast for company – Jocko Podcast 174. If you’re interested in leadership principles, I would strongly recommend a listen.
The human brain loves patterns. We identify patterns everywhere, even where they don’t exist. In the past, this has been of evolutionary benefit. Being able to recognise poisonous tree frogs or tigers or gaps in a forest floor, or tribe members who look like us have all been helpful to our survival. The brain is an expensive engine to run, and any heuristic that helps us be more efficient saves us energy.
Continue reading “Pattern matching and the lost evolutionary high ground”
From an early age, we are encouraged to “dream big”, “be ambitious” or otherwise supersize our mental and physical lives. Those of us who think in larger terms are often those who, being unhappy in the world, or unreasonable in the right way, find ways to better it.
For today, I want to focus on why it’s sometimes ok to live a smaller life.
I’m currently reading Bounce, the book by Matthew Syed that debunks the “Talent Myth”. It’s a well-written exposition of how the individuals we think of as being child prodigies or otherwise abnormally gifted, often had circumstances that were highly conducive to their later success.
He writes convincingly of the 10,000 hour “rule” for developing expertise. This states that in order to develop world class expertise in a particular field, one has to apply focussed practice for around 10,000 hours in order to achieve it. In the case of many of the highly recognisable names, they had accumulated that level of practice by their late teens or early twenties.
So what do we do if we want to become expert-level (not necessarily world-class) at something later in life? How do we accumulate the expertise when we are typically much more time-poor?
Continue reading “Practice, obsession and the catch-up game”
There have been warnings for many years about the potential for disaster with Artificial Intelligence implementations. Many luminaries, from Elon Musk to Stephen Hawking, have warned about the implications if we unwittingly create a robotic overlord who deems that we are irrelevant at best and destructive at worst, and decides the world will be better off without us.
So why am I concerned now, and should you be?
I don’t know how many times this has come up in conversations with staff members and mentees over the years, but it’s been quite a few. “I’m too busy to take a course..”; “My manager won’t let me study.”; “I would have to do the study in my personal time..”; “The tools are too difficult to use.”. I don’t have time to learn.
I sympathise with anyone who feels tremendously time-poor, for often valid reasons, but the above comments, and variants of them, feel like excuses.
On the day of my daughter’s 15th birthday I stood in the cold in the local churchyard with her, and well more than a hundred others, and waited for the body of her best friend’s father to arrive.
A very private man, I had met him only once, and didn’t know him at all. Despite his private nature the crowd of people there was testament to the impact he had on many lives. We were there to offer our support and consolation to his family, and to say goodbye to a brother, husband, father, co-worker and friend. While we waited there, I thought that while it may not be obvious to us as we travel through our lives, the decisions we make have lasting consequences, and those consequences live beyond us.