It’s easy – it won’t take you any longer than it would to write the first draft of your resume. Want to do it?

OK.

Get out your word processor, and write your resume.

Twenty years from now.

When you’re done…

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What’s your job title? Software architect? Lead developer? CEO? Homeless? President? Billy Mays?

(Did you weird yourself out doing it? It’s OK, me too.)

1. How’d you pick it?

_______________________________________________

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• Have you always dreamed of selling Oxy-Clean?
• Do you like the fact that 200 people report to you?
• Money?
• Do you want college students to look at your life and say, “i want to be the next __________”?
• Do you want to be in the history books as “the Henry Ford of technology?”
• Do you want to be happy?

2. How did you get there?

_______________________________________________

_______________________________________________

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• Did you land a great interview after working your way up the ladder, doing great work and getting the attention of your managers?
• Did you run for City Council and pioneer a new initiative?
• Or make friends with everyone in the political machine?

Did you quit and get frustrated after 10 years of success your field to start over and become a teacher? Why’d you wait so long?

3. Look at your job now. How are you gonna get there?

_______________________________________________

_______________________________________________

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Programming languages are great because they make it easy to write code – in a way that makes it easier for us to understand.

In the end though, all of these abstractions were not written with your problem in mind, but a generic, off-the-shelf problem that you don’t actually have.

Thus, write with any language you want. But write in a way that’s appropriate to your problem, and write in a way that’s appropriate to you.

Anyway, when I was watching it for the first time, I spotted a reference to Chronotrigger that blew me away. The clip below is what I’m talking about:

It’s an island in the sky! And they’re playing the theme from Zeal!

The music is nearly identical to the music played in Chronotrigger when you set foot on the island of Zeal. Coincidence? I think not.

Previously

An update: While a doberman/chihuahua mix is certainly possible, apparently not all same-species crosses are viable.

Teams can basically function in one of two ways. Loosely speaking, let’s call them the light side and the dark side.

On the light side, everyone is communicating and everyone is focused on the success of the team. People are willing to make sacrifices, and everyone knows who’s making the sacrifices. There is openness and solidarity; the team shares one objective.

If this sounds a little bit doe-eyed and delusional, then I don’t need to introduce you to the dark side.

While I call it the dark side, the thinking that pulls someone over to this side is completely rational. “Why should I give up my time and my effort to get something done for someone who’s just going to claim it for themselves when I’m done, like he did last month when we finished the Spearmint project?” The big question a darksider asks is simple and practical: What’s in it for me.

The other thing about the dark side is that it’s contagious. Once one person starts doing it, everyone gets pulled in.

—

Now, I’m not going to claim that you should do anything for anyone if it’s only going to benefit them. But let’s consider what’s in it for you.

Did you ever think about what separates leaders from everyone else? Is it power? Money? The privilege of belonging to a special class, knowing special people? Education? Yes, all of those things matter. But what fills in the empty space when society no longer places them on a pedestal?

Leadership starts by being the one who acts when everyone else doesn’t.

Leadership starts by being the one who acts when everyone else doesn’t. Did you ever wonder, while you were sitting in the lecture hall, if you would ever stop being driven around by a system of authority beyond your ability to influence? Or why it didn’t seem to end when you left the high school classroom and found yourself in another set of forms and bureaucratic procedures driven by some unseen force?

There are two ways of coping in the workplace. The first way is the way of procedure, rule-taking, what’s in it for me. The rule followers are the dominant breed in high school and bureaucratic monoliths. You can’t change the rules, so you get what you can out of them. But the rest of the world doesn’t have to work that way.

The smaller the organization, and the simpler the bureaucracy, the more likely it is that part of the system and the rules is defined by you. When everyone else abdicates responsibility, that’s not an alarm warning you to rush to the doors while dodging all responsibility. That’s a vacuum, a power vacuum, and you’re going to fill it. If you choose to.

There are hundreds of newspapers across the globe, but if you took the national stories and put them together, a lot of them are about the same things. If you combine today’s papers with last week’s, you find that there’s even less new information – you could compress the whole story into, say, an eventual Wikipedia article, where a few sentences are enough to cover the salient points.

If you spent your whole day thinking, maybe you could come up with a blog post of information. But undoubtably tomorrow’s post would contain themes from previous posts.

The blogosphere, television, news…they all have the same problem. There’s not too much to say, but the talking never ceases. Modern media is a producer of raw content, not a way to digest it and put it into context.

What’s the best way to create a source of fully digested content?

cd | clip

With no parameters, cd just displays the current path, and piped to clip it’s on the clipboard now.

wahoo!  I finally got below the century mark.  I think i’m going to temporarily retire from competitive clicking.

Also, here is something interesting.  Apparently I now qualify as an “expert”, according to this site http://www.minesweeper.info/scorelists.html.  In case your too lazy to go there, it requires a 6 in beginner, 35 in intermediate, and 99 in Expert.  I now have a 3, 35, and 97.  This means i just squeeze into the requirements.  Also, in case your wondering, the world records on that site are 1, 10, and 37.7