Tag: advice

Superheroes and saints never make art. Only imperfect beings can make art because art begins in what is broken – from Excellent Advice for Living

Interesting advice for living here. What is art? For many of us this is a painting, a piece of music, a theatrical performance, maybe a garden. In those cases, often inspiration comes from something broken. A broken heart, a tragedy, maybe something else.

Even in software, where I work, we might seek to create something amazing, an artistic piece of code, because we’ve seen other things that were broken and caused problems.

However.

What about love songs, the inspiration of which might be something great. I looked for some, but in most of the lyrics, there seems to be something broken. I Will Always Love You is popular, but seems to be a relationship that isn’t amazing.  Something, one of my favorites has the idea that the the author doesn’t know. There’s some lack of confidence.

Maybe the best one I found is Just the Way You Are (Billy Joel, not Bruno Mars). Here the author doesn’t care about any sort of imperfections of problems, and doesn’t seem to imply there are. He just says I accept you for what you are. That isn’t broken.

In most other songs, the singer, or the object of their affection is broken in some way, so maybe there’s more to this advice than I thought at first.

I’ve been posting New Words on Fridays from a book I was reading, however, a friend thought they were a little depressing. They should be as they are obscure sorrows. I like them because they make me think.

To counter-balance those, I’m adding in thoughts on advice, mostly from Kevin Kelley’s book. You can read all these posts under the advice tag.

If it fails where you thought it would fail that is not a failure. – from Excellent Advice for Living

This is a great quote, especially for those of us working in computer systems. We often design things like HA (which I wrote about this past week), circuit breakers, and other techniques to handle problems we know about.

When those things occur, we’ve planned for them, so I get that these are not a failure. In fact, they are a known case we’ve designed for.

The same thing for me, if I am building something on the ranch. If I put in a post and don’t cement it, and then need to add a wheel to a gate (ask me how I know this), then if the gate leans over, it’s expected.

On the other hand, if the piece of metal holding the wheel on fails, that’s a failure. I expected it would keep the wheel on, but apparently, it isn’t engineered well enough to handle a load from a slight slope.

I’ve been posting New Words on Fridays from a book I was reading, however, a friend thought they were a little depressing. They should be as they are obscure sorrows. I like them because they make me think.

To counter-balance those, I’m adding in thoughts on advice, mostly from Kevin Kelley’s book. You can read all these posts under the advice tag.

Train employees well enough that they could get another job but treat them well enough that they never want to. – from Excellent Advice for Living

This one is close to my heart. I firmly believe that you need to find good employees and invest in them. Employees can make a big difference in how well you succeed as well as how efficiently you can run an organization. If you trust employees, you can get a lot done, but takes work.

There’s an old joke that expresses a similar sentiment. Here it is as a quote attributed to Peter Drucker, a well known management consultant.

Perhaps one of the best reasons to train people is time. Time is a valuable resource, and the more it’s wasted, the less you get done, the less competitive you are, and the less your employers earn their pay.

Train them and benefit more.

If you worry about training those that might not be worth investing in, that’s hard to know. Train everyone, but hold them accountable to use that training and improve. If not, cut them loose and move on.

I’ve been posting New Words on Fridays from a book I was reading, however, a friend thought they were a little depressing. They should be as they are obscure sorrows. I like them because they make me think.

To counter-balance those, I’m adding in thoughts on advice, mostly from Kevin Kelley’s book. You can read all these posts under the advice tag.

Fear is fueled by a lack of imagination. The antidote to fear is not bravery; it looks more like imagination – from Excellent Advice for Living

What a neat way to look at things. Most of us have fear. I have fear all the time. I fear illness as I age (or injury), I fear failure at work, I have fear before new presentations. I do think that bravery is just pushing down your fear and continuing on in the face of it.

I certainly don’t think brave people get rid of fear. Maybe they get used to it and it feels less impactful.

However, I haven’t thought about imagination. Though, I do sometimes confront people’s concerns with advice or a suggestion to think it through. It seems often that people afraid of things have too much imagination. They consider, or assign a likelihood score to things that is too high. Most of the time the worst thing isn’t likely to happen, but we fear it.

I do think that if you imagine positively, then perhaps you have less fear. If you look for the good, the opportunity, then you have less fear.

I I’ve been posting New Words on Fridays from a book I was reading, however, a friend thought they were a little depressing. They should be as they are obscure sorrows. I like them because they make me think.

To counter-balance those, I’m adding in thoughts on advice, mostly from Kevin Kelley’s book. You can read all these posts under the advice tag.