Pandemics and Stoics

Knowing that being born is a fatal condition is useless, until we figure out how to live a life worth living, as Mr. Willie Nelson lyrically explains.

Pandemic, a poem by Lynn Ungur

I found this poem on LinkedIn, thanks to Susan Cain. Loved it so much I had to write it out.

Will this pandemic bring us closer together? Will we miss the simplest of things - a pat on the arm, a hug, a kiss, things that make us human - so much that we will over-compensate for it?
Or will this drive us further apart?

Thank you Lynn Ungur for this inspiring verse.

The full text of the poem's (because I know I could barely read my own handwriting 😃

Pandemic
What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath—
the most sacred of times?
Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.
Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.

And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.
(You could hardly deny it now.)
Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.
(Surely, that has come clear.)
Do not reach out your hands.
Reach out your heart.
Reach out your words.
Reach out all the tendrils
of compassion that move, invisibly,
where we cannot touch.

Promise this world your love–
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we all shall live.

~Lynn Ungar

Goals

A poem by Ella Wheeler Cox

Effort

It isn't easy and it's worth it.

Everything we really value.

My ability to take reasonable pictures of these wrotings at dawn is one of them. :) A long way to go. Any ideas welcome.

Authenticity

Every evening when I get home, I have to take off the mask(s) I unconsciously wore that day.

I had none on when I woke up that morning.
I put on one of seriousness when waking the kids up, hurrying them to get ready for school.
I put on another one when I got on to public transport, that fear of the virus very visible around me.
A stoic mask when at work - like I didn't care about the decision that will likely decimate a whole team.
I forget to take one off before I put another on.

And on those days when I get home & forget to take the various masks off, those dearest to me can't even recognise me.

I wish for more days when I don't have to wear any masks at all.

Showing up

An act of the professional is being able to show up at work every day, no matter what. 

Professional as opposed to an amateur. Steven Pressfield makes the point amply well in his book "War of Art".

I'm no professional, yet.

Doing the AltMBA rekindled the simple things I loved to do when I was younger: write. Using pen & paper, not type stuff out like I'm doing now. I found the time to do this, despite everything else going on at work & in life. 

The first weekend after the AltMBA, I decided to write a quote every day and publish it to the Akimbo community portal.   Nearly every day since then, I've done it, mostly for myself - and partly because I've thought of it as a very private act, to be shared with only those I want to see it. Irrational, but that's not the only thing I'm irrational about. And you dear reader, have your fair share of irrational acts too. 

Today was Day 30, & I published this along with my written quote.  A small victory for me. 

Day 30: GratitudeFor thirty days (a couple of exceptions aside), I’ve posted here on a single thread, a quote a day. I’m grateful for having had the opportunity and the space to rekindle the joy I have of simply writing out things I enjoy, and to do it consistently. Thank you, & I’ll say this myself, enough hogging this thread :smile:
I will continue putting my work on the interwebs at sequeiraneil.blogspot.com. Swing by anytime if you’re curious. I also made a simple album of these here

Meaning of life..

Womanhood, Walt Whitman

Found this on the brilliant Brain Pickings site - Walt Whitman on womanhood.

Interconnected

Paul Kelly's lullaby to Australia, while our political establishment continues to enable the destruction of this planet, is a sad but apt contemporary background music to today's quote.

Courage

I wrote this note for my teenage daughter today on International Women’s Day.

I encourage her to do public speaking at every opportunity: and I find her peer-pressure and hormones are my opponents, against who I am at a significant persuasive disadvantage. She’d rather be, & blend into, the audience than to lead and inspire it.

A bit like the torn paper I wrote this on, parental relationships aren’t always complete, or pretty. It’s the words, mine or borrowed, that I hope can make a little difference.

As her father, I’ll continue to do everything I can to support her growth into the kind, generous and wonderful young woman she is.

Words as pegs

No, not the drinking kind :)

I didn't have my glasses on, & didn't quite see the tiny fibre on the nib as I was writing this. The funny shape of 'ha' in that quote was the result.

Warm up drills and exercises haven't been a thing for me for a few days and I can feel the shakes as I write cold.

Time travel

A part of my routine includes writing a journal.
Paper & fountain pen.
It's my way of tending to the garden of my mind, which tends to be overgrown with weeds.
The weeds grow pretty quickly, nurtured & watered by the emotions of the day.
Writing is how I remove the weeds from one small area of the mind.

I write in whatever notebooks I find lying around, usually cheap notebooks that we buy for the kids.
For last decade or so, I've not thrown them out with the garbage.

$0.10 each when blank.

I picked one of them at random this morning, & it turned out to be from 2014, March.

I don't know about you, dear reader, but I can't remember what I had for lunch yesterday. It's impossible to remember what I was thinking and feeling  and worried about 6 years ago.  Using a journal to time-travel (or space travel) is a little bit of my idea of fun. Also why I enjoy reading.

There was no entry dated 7 March, but there was one for the 5th, made in the evening.  I'd not discovered the treasure trove of learning how to use the writing tools well, so my handwriting is barely legible.

For a little context, it was a time of upheaval at work with the usual restructures et al.
I had my desk in a corner of the basement garage.

05 Mar 14, 8:01 pm

Another day passes him by. A day full of pretend business and busy-ness. Meetings. Passing paper around. Or e-paper. Practising politics. Pretending things are more important than they really are.

But lest this become all doom and gloom, he discovered a blog by a Sydneysider, "Life and other crises", by Kerri Sackville. An entertaining writer no doubt, but it was her secret self-help tool that inspired the writing style in this 3rd person today. He wants to see if this is useful or merely a passing curiosity.

The Toastmasters contest needed more contestants in this speech evaluation, so he decided he would take part. He was disqualified on time grounds, but had fun nonetheless. Imagery was widely used by all the speakers throughout. It was as if each took some random color & threw it on to the grey matter in everyone's brain & magically created a masterpiece in each one of the audience's minds. 

He witnessed another master communication in action, the CEO, & the fear in the MD's eyes & body during a "meet-the-folks-who-pay-my-lifestyle" meeting. People pretend they are uncaring about the whole affair, while each one, internally, is terrified of the changes that will shortly be unleashed. 
His wife was here, inviting him back into real life, so head upstairs he will. And must.

Premature worry

Many of our troubles are as much a figment of our imagination as our achievements.

These “fear & worry” thoughts have a free tenancy in my head, still here long after they ended being useful. These daily practices, trivial as they seem, help to kick out these persistent infiltrators, one day at a time.

A little humor helps more than anything else.

Also, I forgot todays date as I was writing it down :)

Two videos to re-watch

Kevin Breel talking at TEDxKids
















Andrew Solomon at TEDxMet
https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_solomon_depression_the_secret_we_share

One day at a time...

Some days, it's harder to get out of bed. 

To do what is otherwise easy. 

Or necessary.

To do the work.

To listen.

To say the things that need saying...like "thank you" and "I love you" and "You did a great job"...

To ask for help.

To smile. 

To have fun.

Today's reading was a good reminder. 

One day at a time is enough.

Also, flourishes are hard😅

Connection and introversion

Life's full of apparent contradictions.

Connection is one of my core values.
I'm also an introvert.
My close friends cannot reconcile the two.  Quite often, neither can I.

I need time to recover from human interactions. The interactions are messy. They usually don't go according to plan. They require ongoing maintenance for "professional" reasons.
The damage or discontent they cause on a daily basis is often transmuted into other areas of my life, especially with people most dear to me.

Thankfully, the daily commute to & from work allows me some time to put a separation between the two.

little steps

Radio Silence

Throughout the AltMBA, a recurring feedback I had, that despite my oft-used crutch that English is not my first language, the assumptions I have about opportunities & the self-imposed constraints were invalid. My writing was "easy to read", I "already have a voice, use it", I have "a way with words" were some of the comments I received on my writing. The challenge for me: How could I reframe the problem or the situation so I could see the options?

I was mulling over this question driving home one night. The car radio was locked on our local country music station. The presenter was having a ball, talking about the music he was about to play for his captive audience. It's funny how the mind works: I remembered immediately of "Pedro", the presenter on the morning show, who seemed to have gone off air for a while now.

The next morning, I was on the radio station's website to see if I could find out if his segment / time had changed.  That was when I saw an advertisement pop-up: "Volunteers required for administration of the station". Things seemed to connect in my mind, radio - music - voice - volunteer - community. Feeling excited, I dashed off an email offering to help, using their "contact us" form.

Two weeks went by, & I hadn't heard back. "Their move" is my default response to most things after I've taken the first step - "let them take the next step".   To my bad luck, the echoes in my head, the words in my writing have all been saying the same thing: "examine your assumptions, examine your narratives".

There were several alternatives for the radio silence - pun intended. There didn't actually have anyone reading the emails. The email may not even have been delivered. The person responsible for correspondence didn't get my mail. And so on. So I followed it up with an email from my mailbox, gently reminding that I had volunteered, & was hoping the lack of response was because they didn't need my help.

That email got an immediate, apologetic response: the secretary was away for the next two or so weeks, and could we meet in the radio studio office on a Sunday morning to talk about how I could help. Finally a response! And child-like excitement: the last time I was in a radio station studio was 38 years ago, a chance visit thanks to my uncle singing Christmas carols on the radio.

That Sunday morning was yesterday.
I spent three hours at the studio, overlooking the beautiful waterfront. It was a surreal experience:  listening to the presenter both on the radio & in person, loving the music he was playing, & learning what needed to be done around the studio. The gentleman was multi-tasking: mentoring a new presenter, operating the playlist, talking to me about the station's history & the generosity of the local community, the challenges of running a community radio station. I was mesmerized by how smoothly he went from frantic activity around the office to a calm, soothing voice on the radio, & told him so.  I felt at home in the tiny studio, enjoying the conversation & the music. Oh, & among the memorablia on the walls, I found this picture of Glen Campbell. I've been blown away with his rendition of "Gentle on my mind"


I'll be at the station next Sunday, helping however I can. Maybe I'll even get to host a show :)

Meditation

I’ve not meditated for a few months now, a practice I used to do religiously, that requires just sitting down. My meditation has morphed into writing a quote every day, after reading a short passage from a book I always have around me.

For me, the act of writing involves the process of getting my pens, nibs, inks, paper, positioning the chair, and myriad other things. It is my active meditation, done in the moments before the silence of the night is gently shaken by the birds beginning their day.

How to read a book

Or more relevant, why to read books..

Leadership lessons from the cello tutor

We've been finding it a challenge to get our 9-year old to practice his cello, with procrastination on his part & yelling on ours for him to practice being the norm.  At his last 1:1 lesson, he finally admitted to his tutor that he wasn't enjoying playing the cello because he's hated practising the newer exercises she's assigned him. 

I should have picked this signal of dislike from his procrastination so I was felt quite angry with myself when I heard this aloud. 

H has been a splendid teacher (I wrote about how she used an analogy she used a few weeks ago), & she did something magical again. Rather than berate him for not having done what she'd assigned him, she simply asked him what he liked. He said he liked the cello, and wanted to play pieces of music, rather than just do exercises. She took out a different book, and played a beautiful piece for him. She then got him to play it along with her, occasionally playing duet. 

You could see the change in his demeanour instantly. His posture went from slouching to sitting up straight, his eyes twinkled as he smiled at me.  She said so to him, & he was beaming from ear to ear.

She assigned him passages from the book to work on during the week, and showed him where the techniques he has to practice too come into play (pun intended).  

Practice this week has been a breeze, twice as long as usual, with little procrastination & no yelling. 

A little change in approach. A disproportionately larger change in behavior.

Angels as creative forces

We are not alone in the universe. We are surrounded by mighty creative forces. When you are needed by others, when you have something valuable to contribute, these beneficial forces will support you, give you greater health, greater energy levels, longer life and deeper creativity. Life may strike at you, and challenges can hurtle themselves against you, but you will feel equal to them. Deeper forces from within will support you, hold you up, and act as a shield. - Eknath Eswaran

Change is imperceptible in the moment

While the quote is dated, and solar energy accounts for a sizeable portion of the energy market now, it wasn’t all that long ago that it was dismissed as a fad. Like many other things we see around us, ideas are dismissed because they shake the status quo for the establishment. Time (& heat?) changes everything, even though it may be imperceptible in the moment.

Noodling on a pen

This pen is about 25 years old. 
It has been one of my best teachers.

Fountain pens were the only writing instruments allowed at school, & so my parents got me a couple of cheap ones. I was fascinated with italic calligraphy back then, & had no access to broad nibs. The only nibs available then were fine nibs. Fountain pens have a way of falling out of the hands of a 12 year old when the cap is unscrewed, often landing nib first on the ground. If the (sometimes deliberate) damage to the nib was bad, I'd use a pair of pliers to break them, and scratch them on a mirror, trying rather unsuccessfully to make them smooth & make it into a broad nib for italic writing.

When my dearest aunt got me this Shaeffer italic calligraphy pen as a gift, I felt like the richest person on the planet. Until then, I had only seen one of the kids in my class brandish his calligraphy pen, one he would not allow anyone to touch, let alone write with.  So when I became the proud owner of this pen, the first words I wrote with it were "Thank you". For the next decade & a half, I wrote with this pen nearly every day. Whether it was during my exams, for birthday & Christmas cards, love notes or just random scribbles, it was my constant companion.

No pen writes the same. Writing cursive with an italic calligraphy pen is a fun exercise. I learned how to hold it at the proper angle to the paper to make the smoothest mark. There is no single grip that lets you write every stroke well so I learned how to adapt at speed.

Calligraphy, among other things, is about consistency. Training the hand & the eye to work in tandem at speed requires millions of repetitious exercises. As a teenager (& even as an adult), I hated repetition because it's boring. It's only when I realised that while I was doing inconsistent marks on the page that it dawned on me to go back to the basic lines & ovals that make up every letter of the cursive alphabet. And do them millions of times over the years. 

This pen leaks. Runs out of ink. Needs to be cleaned. The barrel has cracked. It's easy to discard it & get a new one, especially now that I can afford it.

But I won't.
Because it is a reminder of many things.
That you can change someone's life with a simple meaningful gift, like my aunt did for me.
That like pens, people too are different. Each one requires to be handled differently if they have to make their best mark in this life. This is even more true when I'm a leader, whether at work or out of it.
That persistence, purposeful practice is the only way to mastery. And while you may appear to be very good at what you do,  there's still room to improve. Lots of room.
That everything grows old, cracks & leaks, & runs out of ink (or steam). Especially your body.

Noodling with, & on pens, is fun :)

Writing

Growth

Food

Reading

Learning active listening .. on public transport

Public transport is a great observatory for human behaviour. 

 

I notice that most people, myself included, prefer to drown out the noise with earphones of some sort: squeaking wheels, rumbling engines, boring announcements don't make for a good soundtrack for our commuting lives. We'd rather prefer our favourite music or a podcast or a movie to the cacophony that surrounds us. 

Occasionally though you get yanked out of the commuter reverie by someone talking. Often because the voice is at a higher frequency than the captivating sounds in our ears. You turn the volume down, & eavesdrop on this conversation that, at first, sounds like an argument. But no. It's the local fishing enthusiast, explaining to the tourist-y looking types, about the best spots to go fishing. They're doing a day trip into the city but want to check out the outdoors tomorrow. No, you don't need a boat. Walk down that leafy lane, & you'll see a little path - only if you look carefully. Here, look at what I caught there  yesterday. (Loud guard announcement drowns out the rest of the conversation). 

Every now & then, I forget my earphones or to charge the laptop or to carry a book. On those commutes, I learn something about the community I live in.  I also get to practice my listening skills. 

Not because I want to know the juicy details of that story the two women who can't (won't?) keep their voices down, but because I have no choice than to keep my mouth shut.

If I approached the same listening-to-speaking ratio in other areas of my life, I wonder what I'd discover?

Empowerment

Priorities

Stories

Every one of us has a story we tell ourselves. Sometimes it’s the same one we tell others. Other times, it's a slightly altered one. Or maybe even a different one. There are times when we even believe the story we tell others. There are some stories we believe ourselves.

Sometimes we don't like the stories we tell ourselves. We talk to friends, who might help us see the story in a different light. Sometimes we believe them & change. Other times we stop talking to them.
"That girl I really hit it off with at the party won't talk to me". "Mate, she gave you her number and asked you to call her. Then you got piss drunk & ….".  
"I never seem to be considered for a promotion, even though my boss knows how much I am willing to take up the opportunity. I think 'they' hate me so much as to sabotage every opportunity that comes my way." "You didn't even apply for the job."

Other times, we need professional help.
Sometimes we can afford this help, sometimes not.
In either case, we tell ourselves a story about why it is so.

Some are great story tellers. We listen in rapt attention to their stories. In pubs, restaurants, coffee shops, sometimes even on public transport, you can see this play out every day.  Stop whatever it is you're doing, take off your headphones & listen to the conversations going on around you. And if you're alone, go back to the story you were telling yourself. These stories are rich in detail.

We all have friends who bend the truth while they tell their story. We know it because we were there in the situation they are describing, & It's not exactly how we saw it. "Correcting facts in this moment is not appropriate, everyone's having a great time" is the story we tell ourselves. Other times we do, & results in an argument, lost friendships, & sometimes tragically loss of life or limb.

Then sometimes we believe our own stories. We live our entire lives that way. Sometimes we find out the truth. & we are unshackled. Other times, it destroys everything.  See the newspapers for examples. Actually, don't ever read the newspapers.

We sometimes write our stories & publish them. We categorise it - fiction, biographies, autobiographies. They're all versions of the truth.

Job descriptions these days. Regardless of your career, "story-telling is a key skill" is the story that is told around the world. There are thousands of courses that claim to teach us how to story-tell with data.

Ad infinitum.

What's your story?

Silence

Just do it, Epictetus edition

Fear, that impostor, turns the possible into probable

You could hear the child's screaming above the loudspeaker blaring announcements.

He was 7 or so, dressed in the event-issued jersey, looking like the 1200 other kids taking part at the annual TRYathlon event.  He was lost & terrified. Worst of all, he didn't know how to find his mother.  A volunteer kneeled down beside him, trying to pacify him, & to walk him to the information marquee that was just a few metres away.

Two other things also happened simultaneously. The compere's voice, calmly, announced that a mother was looking for her lost child.  The mother, wailing as loud as the child, with another little crying bub in her arms, rushed out of the crowd, from the direction of the information marquee. 

The tears & the wails continued loudly, but this time in happiness at the family reunion.

In the moment, there was a possibility that the child might never see his mother ever again.
In the moment, also, there was a probability that the child would be quickly reunited with his mother.

For the child, there was no difference between possibility & probability.
For the mother, fear triumphed for a brief moment - so there was no difference between possibility & probability either.

I saw them a little while later. The young fellow, with an ice-cream in his hand, sweat on his brow, and a medal around his neck,  was beaming from ear to ear at having completed his first ever TRYathlon. So was his mother.  Neither looked frightened.

See it from the edges

See it from the edges

Opinions

Health Goals & Public Accountability

I made a new year's resolution of exercising 5 days a week.

You know how it goes with new year's resolutions:
Before you know it, it's the second month of the year. Life's coming at you from all fronts. And to be honest, you weren't quite clear why you made that resolution in the first place. So it falls by the wayside.

That's been my Standard Operating Procedure for a couple of ... ahem, decades.

While the human body has an amazing ability to heal itself, I've ignored several little signals I've had from mine over the last few years to stop testing that. Given my slow yet steady horizontal expansion, the not-so-subtle digs from my kids & wife about said expansion, & the annual reminder from my doctor to get more active, all of which I've ignored, I've a feeling this habit is long overdue.

My resolution this year was to keep up at least one of my new year's resolutions about my health. A couple of my colleagues have, quite likely without knowing it, been my inspiration for various reasons. Thank you Vicki & Alex!

So, in the first week back at work this January, I accompanied Alex to the local gym. A week of consistent attendance, thanks to these New Year freebie offers, & then I actually signed up. Matt has been a fantastic trainer, keeping me on my toes, back, stomach… and pushing me just a little bit beyond my comfort zone. About six weeks in, I've kept up this exercise habit nearly every day. See here for pictures of my six-pack.

Why bother sharing this?

This is an experiment of sorts. Putting it out there apparently increases the odds that I will keep at this genuinely important personal goal. When I want to give up, quietly, there will be at least a few of you good people who'll ask how I'm going on this journey, & I will probably hate to have tell you I failed.

The second is a reminder to myself that it's never too late to start on my (health) goals. This one was from my 2016 edition: it only took 4 years to work up the courage to walk into a gym. Luckily I'm still around to be able to pursue it.

Do you have any goals that have taken a while to start?

Also, a little inspiration of a different kind:

Work that you love

Is that an oxymoron?

Really, if it's work, can you love it?
And if you love it, is it work?

Pedantic questions aside, what is it that I really enjoy about my work?

For much of my last two decades, my identity has been defined by my qualifications & work. In direct contrast to how I thought of myself for the previous two decades of my life. I loved art, music, life in general. I drew my energy from the world around me, from books, from sketching & cartooning, from spending time in nature, observing things around me, curiosity driving many of my questions, & driving the adults in charge mad. I loved solving problems, words, cross-words, puzzles & math. I loved the idea of travel, the idea of meeting my idols, the idea of learning new things.

While I didn't have much of a choice in the path I ended up on, it started a course of events in my life that didn't make any sense at the time, but in retrospect, have been perfect. Maybe that's the case of most people, if not everyone. For two decades,  I tried to find every avenue to learn & do things other than what I had "qualifications" to do. Not  being formally accountable  for these things was a double-edged sword: I could experiment with my learning, but I would forever remain a dilettante.

Today, I find myself doing work I love. I get to work with words, help apply math to real-world puzzles & problems, to learn. I occasionally get to travel, & rather than just meet my idols, I get to meet amazing people every day.

What isn't to love?

what do we life for?

Right or Moral

Accountabilities

Paying attention is what I didn't do for a moment :)

If something's not correct, should you fix it? Or should you leave it be, and learn from it the next time? Obviously, not everything in life is as binary as this, or as simple. 

Roots and freedom

I see you

Spreading light

Discovery

"Mistakes are the portals of discovery" 

-James Joyce

A month of writing

Despite following its journey since it's launch, I had no idea what to actually expect from the AltMBA.

I'm glad I leaned into the experience after the first conference call, because it has been, without doubt, one of the two best courses I've done in the last decade (the other being Dr. Barbara Oakley's Learning How to Learn). I've met some amazing people, dismantled several assumptions I've held:  both about myself & about how connections between people happened in general, & discovered how much time I actually have in the day that goes to waste. 

I've written every day.
Whether it was responding to the 13 "prompts", or feeling some sort of emotion that needed to be transferred from my brain to paper, I've been writing incessantly. Cathartic, in many ways.

The AtlMBA officially ended yesterday.

Analogies

My son's cello tutor, while trying to explain how to keep his 9-year old fingers on the finger-board:

"Imagine an O made with your thumb and middle finger, separated by the fingerboard. It's like the fulcrum on a see-saw, lets you move your other fingers without losing their balance"

He understood it instantly. The power of a relevant analogy.

Now if only I had the right analogy for him to keep up his practice.

Recommendations list from the "warm up project"

Good lord, I'll never have the time to go through all these, but here's a list of things /books/ resources recommended by first few warm up projects on AltMba37.
I'll update this list as I go along

Books

Contagious - why things catch on (viral marketing)
A Technique for Producing Ideas - James Wood Young
Obviously Awesome  - April Dunford (product positioning)
The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking
The Order of Time - Carlo Rovelli

Sites

http://startupstatus.co/ - Australian startup ecosystem
http://www.liberatingstructures.com/ Radically inclusive effective meetings

Podcasts

Episode: Homes for the homeless

Tools

Visualise your work, aka mindmapping:  Whimsical 

Biteable 

Mindjet Mindmanager 

Save hours of repeated text typing. TextExpander 

Others

Improve your handwriting

This was my warm-up project on the 37th cohort of the AltMBA.

I’ve been fascinated with handwriting for as long as I can remember. Ornate letters, written neatly often using a reusable (!) fountain pen, the words as beautiful as the sentiment they gave shape to. Most of the adults I knew back then seemed to have that ability to write beautifully, and very few of my pre-teen peers seemed to care.

Fast forward a little over three decades. Internet access, time, curiosity all aligned late one Friday night. Browsing through the returns for a web search for “calligraphy”, I came across https://www.iampeth.com/ (The International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers & Teachers of Handwriting).

What blew my mind was this quote: “In the tradition of the Zanerian College, Master Penman inductees were required to produce their own certificate as proof of their ability.” There are only 16 living Master Pen(folks) in the world.

The treasure trove that is the library of rare books (https://www.iampeth.com/rare-books) inspired me to re-learn how to write better. Simple as it is, it’s craftsmanship that I find worthy of trying out myself. It’s helped my kids and a few of their friends start learning how to write better - a process that seemingly isn’t greatly encouraged these days.

I must be getting a little better after a few years of inconsistent practice: our family’s Christmas cards are, according to my wife, getting more attention than (in my opinion) the absolutely delicious Christmas savories she spends hours making :slight_smile:

On Learning habits

I'm sure I'm not alone in doing this.

Something catches my attention, & I want to learn more about it.
I immediately jump to the resources that seem to appeal to me.
I try to do it.
I fail.
I give up.
Ad infinitum.

I think there's a word for it: dilettante. A pejorative.

Occasionally, something sticks with me long enough that I learn the basics well enough that they become habits. "know enough to be dangerous".

On a quest now to figure out, mid-life, what motivates me to want to learn something new, and how to learn about it so it sticks.

Learning to type

My son, all of 8 years old, has started learning to type.  He's figuring out what the home row means, & how his fingers don't have to move all that distance to type just one letter, that he can do it with both hands, and things are not as complicated as the jumbled letters on the keyboard.  Sure, it confuses the bejesus out of him, but he keeps going on.

What's the point of this post? Who knows, I just found it fascinating that age is just a number when it comes to learning. Kids probably learn much faster than than we give them credit for.

Random thoughts throughout today

Nearly 3 weeks into 2019, & it already feels like a whole year has gone by.

What do you do when you feel like there's no more energy to get through the day? At mid-day?

How often should I take a break from work? Or from whatever it is I'm doing?

How much is enough?  How do you know?

Why is motivation so often intrinsic?


Quote of the day: 
In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit. -Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, musician, Nobel laureate (14 Jan 1875-1965)

the MailChimp founders, a profile

A profile of the MailChimp founders:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2018/10/08/the-new-atlanta-billionaires-behind-an-unlikely-tech-unicorn


Keyhole surgery

A goldmine

https://www.r-bloggers.com/in-depth-introduction-to-machine-learning-in-15-hours-of-expert-videos/

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/asadoughi/stat-learning/master/ch2/answers

http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/

Skills for the next 5 years

Vala Afshar's outlines the transformation going on right this moment in time

Transitioning towards a data science career

These two articles made for good reading/ reference

Rafael Knuth blogged about his transition into a data science career. He inspired someone else to follow his footsteps, & write about his experience.

Comparing read_csv with spark_read_csv

Reading in a csv file into R using dplyr's `read_csv()` function is so simple. The syntax & parameters of dplyr are fairly easy to remember, once you've done it a few times.

read_csv(file, 
    col_names = TRUE, 
    col_types = NULL,
    locale = default_locale(),
    na = c("", "NA"), 
    quoted_na = TRUE,
    quote = "\"", 
    comment = "", 
    trim_ws = TRUE, 
    skip = 0, n_max = Inf,
    guess_max = min(1000, n_max), 
    progress = show_progress()
)



I've only just started working with big data sets, & was began wondering if what I know about the dplyr syntax can be carried over to sparklyr's spark_read_csv() function.

While not exactly the same, but if you know one, you can quite easily pick the other. There's an additional parameter `sc`, aka spark connection, that's required.

spark_read_csv(
    sc, 
    name,
    path, 
    header = TRUE, # FALSE forces a "V_" prefix
    columns = NULL,
    infer_schema = TRUE, # to infer column data type
    delimiter = ",", 
    quote = "\"", 
    escape = "\\",
    charset = "UTF-8", 
    null_value = NULL,
    options = list(),
    repartition = 0, # number of partitions to distribute the generated table.
    memory = TRUE, 
    overwrite = TRUE, ...
)

Inspirations for humorous speech contests

and John's Anatomy of the speech here


More movie based speeches - Johnny Cash - Walk the line 


and this one on any speech in general - David Henderson

Reading list - week ending 30 Sep 2018

https://stratechery.com/2018/instagrams-ceo/

https://fs.blog/mental-models/

https://medium.com/@timberners_lee/one-small-step-for-the-web-87f92217d085 & related https://solid.inrupt.com/

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/science/neil-armstrong-auction.html


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-13/amazon-s-clever-machines-are-moving-from-the-warehouse-to-headquarters

Asking Life's Questions

This ad from UBS was thought-provoking. A seamless flow of questions that nearly everyone can relate to.

Reading list - week ending 23 Sep 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/guides/smarterliving/be-better-at-parties

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/09/frasier-25th-anniversary-oral-history

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/well/family/why-you-should-stop-yelling-at-your-kids.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/09/spending-personal-finance-pain-of-paying/569575/

https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2018/09/dont-get-weighed-down-by-idea-debt/

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/kurt-vonnegut-the-drone-king/537870/

https://www.business-science.io/business/2018/09/18/data-science-team.html

https://www.forbes.com/sites/randalllane/2018/08/30/bezos-unbound-exclusive-interview-with-the-amazon-founder-on-what-he-plans-to-conquer-next/

https://www.conservethesound.de/en/

https://medium.com/@bryancostanich/the-future-is-tiny-44dea02e4517

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/23/business/media/the-markup-craig-newmark.html

Ray Dalio at Google

speaking about his book Principles. Fascinating talk.

Why bother writing here?

That is a question I ask myself every day. The answer, quite often, is "I don't know. Maybe I won't". And so I don't.

A few weeks ago, a colleague spoke at a meeting about feeling like an impostor. I think that is a feeling that I have lived with all my life. I know I don't know much, & I'm afraid all the time that I will be found out. So I say, or do, very little. And I suspect - no, I KNOW - that this fear has cost me an enormous deal.

Instead, I've been writing in my journal most days for the last 9 or so years. The journals I write in are a cheap ruled notebook I picked up in bulk for the kids to write. The words are banal, & describe very often my rather routine boring day. Other times, I'm caught in the emotion of the day, or the previous day, & it shows in my writing. The vocabulary changes. The handwriting changes. I just have to see the slant on the page to know how I was feeling that day :)

Over the last three years or so, I've gone back to my school days, & what I loved doing most - calligraphy. That focus has found itself showing up in my everyday handwriting. 

What's the point of this post?
Really, there was absolutely none. It was just a feeble attempt to get the words flowing again.

The hand of friendship

Yes Toastmasters Club celebrated it's 10th Anniversary with a simple, out-of-cycle meeting on Friday the 14th September.

No big deal, right? After all, Toastmasters is approaching its centenary.  There are hundreds of clubs that have been around for decades, so what's all the fuss about?

For me, it is. And I'm writing this down for my own memory's sake.

I'd moved with my family to Australia in 2009.  I'd struggled to find work, make friends & all the other challenges that a new migrant finds themselves in in the first year or so, sometimes longer. In my case, a chance meeting, about 4 months into this life-upending move, with someone who worked at Optus, turned into a 3 week contract, & then a  6.5 year stint there for me. A life-changing event but this story is about something else.

I'd been at Optus for a few months, when I realised that there was a Toastmasters club in there. I'd married into a family of Toastmasters, & had it inflicted on me previously :) so I knew what it entailed. So I decided to go along to a meeting. It was at work after all, lunch time, & I knew how welcoming these people are, so what I did I have to lose?

I walked down to the room that was listed on the campus info email. I don't think I've been that nervous even at my own wedding. The room was at the end of a long corridor, & there seemed to be a handful of people in there. Yeah, I can do this, I thought to myself. And then, I have no idea why, I had butterflies. What if they don't understand me? English is my fourth/fifth language, & these people are all going to judge me. Nope, not worth shattering my already frail self-esteem, & I literally ran back to my desk.

I did that for at least four months after that - every Wednesday at lunch time, I'd walk down that hall, pretend I was looking for a different meeting room, peer inside & then walk away. It was on my 17th attempt that as I was peering into the room, a man simply put his hand out, introduced himself, & said, "Welcome to Yes Toastmasters. Have you been here before?"  I have no idea if he'd seen me on my previous aborted missions, or if it was an innocent banal question.  I mumbled something, & sat down in that room that day.

There was no timer that day, so I offered to do the role. It is, for those who've never done it before, a fairly difficult role, especially when you don't quite know who's speaking, or the club's customs, but I remembered getting praised for my effort, even a little comment about how I seemed to be a natural, even though it was my "first time" :) Little did they know I'd done this many times before!

I remembered the feeling at the end of that meeting.  The group, made up of Aussies & migrants & second generation Aussies & for some for whom English was like me a second or third or fourth language were friendlier than I'd expected. In fact, a couple spoke to me for a while after the meeting, most likely missing their lunch.

I joined that first meeting simply to make a few friends, & grow my confidence in public speaking. That meeting changed my life.  It has done so for all my time there, & then some. I've served every year on the committee in some official or unofficial role. I've given tens of speeches, struggled through hundreds of table topics & given as many evaluations. And I remember none of them. What I remember though is the hundreds of people I've been privileged to listen to, meet, & in many cases, to call my friends.

And most importantly, I've never forgotten the feeling of having Suben reach out & offer a heartfelt welcome. It's something I've tried to remember at every Toastmasters meeting when we've had guests. It's become a part of me at every work or social event that I've found myself at, when I notice someone on their own.

I'd never told anyone about that first meeting. Coincidentally, it was in the same room that we were celebrating the 10th anniversary meeting. I stood up as the last impromptu speaker, & memories came flooding back. They gushed forth, leaving me choking. And I could feel everyone of the 30 or so guests in the room egging me on. Suben was in the audience, & I may have seen a pair of moist eyes.

Happy 10 Years Yes Toastmasters. And with the legacy you're built on, I have no doubt, you'll last a ten-fold more.

Writing to describe problems

A large part of problem-solving is the ability to see a problem in its true form. If you're able to describe a problem in a sufficiently clear and precise fashion, most of the solution will become evident.

Writing helps. Write about your problems. It's more precise than thinking

— François Chollet (@fchollet) April 22, 2018

On Keeping Promises

Are all promises worth the same?
How do you know?
If they aren't, how do you discern which ones are worth making, & which ones should simply be a "Sorry, no, I don't have the time to make it happen".

******************

Day 1 of my 2 week break has been fabulous.  Made a promise to myself that I'd not be working, & I'd be fully devoted to the family. Took the kids to the local library for term holiday activities that are usually set up. We had breakfast & lunch together, which was so much fun.  We bought a new phone for mum, & did all the chores we'd planned for the day. We played a game of badminton. It was unstructured, & it was fun, & it was liberating.

I did, of course, break my promise - kept browsing the phone, pining to keep abreast of the things I've set in motion before I decided to get off the wagon for a couple of weeks.  The phone turns off tonight.  Will I keep that promise?

Looking back

It's been just over two years since I started my role at Australia's largest infrastructure project. My title suggests I'm a finance analyst, supporting the revenue earning arm of the Government Business Enterprise behemoth that is the company. I'm about to wrap this two year stint to move on to another role shortly.

I've been asked a few times: what has it been like?

The early days:
The team I joined two years ago had three other analysts, so it was a really small group. Our manager has a reputation for being one of the better managers around, and it was quite evident right from the first week. 

It so happened that I joined right in the middle of the annual long-term forecasting cycle, so I was right in the thick of things. Despite my previous experience in a similar industry, the  tasks I was assigned were new, different & frankly sometimes quite obtuse. I also had a regular role that I was to shoulder, as well as take over the weekly & monthly reporting. To top it all off, one of the team was going on leave for three weeks so it was a definite baptism by fire.

I did have a few things going for me:

• I knew many of the people I needed to interact with (staying in the same industry helps enormously!) or could fairly easily build a relationship with through introductions from mutual connections
• Data wrangling & analytics were two of my secret weapons & I wasn't shy about using the right tool for the job. I also knew my way around the IT department, thanks to a couple of my good friends who'd preceded me into the organisation. 
• I do have a commercial background after all, so I knew precisely what the numbers I was reporting would mean to the recipients

So while the first few weeks felt overwhelming (I also got the distinct impression that I was being pushed to the limit), I had landed on my feet within a couple of weeks, & was learning the ropes quickly.  My manager was regular with both feedback & praise, building my confidence & helping me get very clear with what I needed to deliver. 

It's been my personal mission to learn something new every week.  While still early days in my new job, I still kept up with my learning. I had also just finished reading Nancy Duarte's blog post on slidedocs, so was messing around with the corporate slide templates the organisation had recently issued to see if I could use them more effectively in my work. I had just started reading about the Google Places API. I wasn't quite sure if I would ever use it but it seemed interesting to me. 

By the end of month one, I'd put up a template (with some VBA) that made preparing & presenting the long-term budget a far-more effective & efficient task. The solution was simple: make the presentation a book-like form, laid out in landscape, with the even-numbered page showing the graphic & the odd-numbered page showing the numerics. While there was some initial resistance (finance processes, anyone?), the exec team loved it when shown a draft, & it was a resoundingly successful production effort. 

Less than 2 months into my primary job supporting a team with commercial reporting & analysis, I was told of the peculiar challenge that this team faced: they had no idea who their end customers were. It was like a light-bulb went off when I heard that.. why couldn't they use Google Places API? I spent the next few train trips to & from work using R (another tool I was teaching myself to use) and the Google Places API for R building a prototype that might possibly be a solution.  I shared my prototype with my manager, who immediately sent it on to the head of that team, but also reminded me that it was not my job to solve that specific problem.  Let's just say that prototype, & a few follow up actions on my part, earned me a trip to Google offices in Sydney. 

note to self:  Solve problems, even if they aren't in your specific job description. The value gained personally in the learning far far outweighs the politics of the situation. 

By the time I had completed my official probation period, I had already made my presence & value felt around the organisation. I'd saved a bunch of people a few hours of work, & not just in reporting, showcased some analytical capabilities, & build a bunch of reporting frameworks that made reporting very boring :) 

What does a good manager do? Find a challenging project, & throw it the bored employee's way. Alongside my day job, I was thrown into a pricing project that was struggling for modelling skills. Three months or so of intense optimization modelling later, the proposed pricing structure went into the market and dramatically changed the industry's behavior, but without endangering the revenue prospects of the company.  I value the learning on this project hugely - the mental models of thinking about problems, the approaches to solving them, & the wide variety of factors that were considered in the final solution, all within a deadline that seemed insane at the time. Most importantly, the relationships that were built in that project have grown into friendships. 

 

I've since been involved with some mind-mending business problems. I've been thrown into projects that seem irredeemable in the time available to solve them. I've learnt to see the problems of a behemoth operating at scale in many different angles - regulatory, commercial, operations, strategy, financial, and human. I've seen many of those angles considered and ignored, ideated & forgotten.  In any case, I think these last two years have shown me how much I can accomplish in a very large organisation, how much I can collaborate with people far smarter than I will ever be. I've also learnt about (& felt the impact of) the politics that accompanies a large organisation, of rewards & recognition (or the lack thereof), of personal & team motivation, of technological opportunities & technology's self-inflicted wounds, and a whole heap of things that won't ever make it to a blog post. 

The discipline of finishing

It must be a common trait - we begin doing something, & before long, it is left by the wayside,


*************

Ironically, I started writing this first sentence a few months ago, & didn't do any more than those words!

Tools of the trade...

For someone who works in finance & commercial, Microsoft's Excel & PPT are the glue that hold most organisations together. Forget the multi-million dollar BI implementation approved, ironically, by the CFO, when some analysis is required, its 'open an Excel spreadsheet' time every single day.

This week I found myself talking to a grad in my team about the tools worth getting familiar with, & I shared with her how my thinking has evolved over the last two decades:

Stage 0:
What's this Excel thing? And who on earth needs a million rows & 256 columns?

Stage  1:
Wow, I can get some pretty decently presented tax computation worksheets. The IF statement, especially those 6 nested conditions cover nearly all my likely needs.

Stage 1.1:
Why didn't someone tell me I could use VLOOKUP  instead of those nested conditional statements?

Stage 1.2 to 2:
There's so many more formulas? And you can combine them?

Stage 3-7:
Whoa!! Alt  + Ctrl + Shift + number keys + arrow keys + Page Up/Down keys can move me around the worksheet/ workbook faster than moving my hand to the mouse & then clicking!
Ok, time to learn to touch type because I can do things at x times the speed of mouse clicks.
Formulas, referential indexing, Data Analysis add-in.. holy f**8!!!! Pivot Tables, External Data, connecting to databases, MSSQL, formula auditing, charting......  there's more stuff here that will make my reporting life easier than ever..

Stage 8:
What's this 'macro' thing? It's totally pointless, does all sort of nonsense when I record something & then push play..

Stage 9:
I can take someone else's macro & copy it & then change it to suit my needs? I can integrate it with OLE & ODBC & SAP & Hyperion & other VBA reference libraries to automate some of my daily tasks? What am I going to do with all this spare time?

Fast forward several versions of Office release later, & all the power I need for my day job at my finger tip memory (PowerPivot, PowerQuery, PowerBI),  - there's no need to learn anything else... & well, Tableau came along that made visual analytics easy as point & click (grrrr, no finger memory possible, but I think that is deliberate to make you think while you click around dimensions & measures)

So if you're starting out in your career, it's probably best to get really good at three things with your tools:

1. Touch Typing (there's probably reams written on why this is important). Keyboard shortcuts in Excel will save your a$$ at midnight when all you want to do is shut the damn thing off instead of reaching for the mouse once again. My experience is that you will not even be working at midnight once finger memory takes over.

2. Navigation shortcuts using keyboard.  Get as familiar as possible with:

• Windows application keyboard shortcuts (that Win key + numbers can fire up the application you need)
• Excel keyboard shortcuts (and don't bother memorising these - watch the screen light up when you hit the Alt key). 
• Any other application - before you start playing with the application, read through the help file for keyboard shortcuts  (yes, even Tableau has a few!)

3. Get at least a basic understanding of how code works. You don't need to be a coder or programmer (you hate it so much & it also explains why you'd rather be an accountant :)) - but knowing how the thing you work on works (it is software after all!) will give you a few ideas when you're struggling to do something that seems nearly impossible (which will happen soon enough, anyway)

As the creator of D3.JS Mike Bostock says: "Code is the most general tool we have"

Progress... slow, but progress

The last few days, I've been spending a lot of time on teaching myself to think through problems in a different area.
The course on Deep Learning is pushing the boundaries of my comfort zones.
Every day, however small the progress may be, it feels like a breakthrough.
Waking up way before dawn again today, I spent just under two hours tackling the implementation of backward propagation in python code, vectorised no less.
It was very very hard going for me, yet, after I submitted the assignment & saw the score, there was a tiny sense of accomplishment.

That feeling, amid all the weariness, is very valuable to me at this point.
That, & the music I surround myself with.

Of course it is only month-1/ course-1 of a 5 part course, so things will only get harder from now on.