I'm sitting now and having a hard time coming up with something to write. I want these daily entries to be about my everyday life or ideas that come to me that day that I want to share. My mind screams I'm tired, but actually, it's more of laziness and my current health (have a mild couch). Anyways I'm a persistent guy, and some thoughts did come up.
I was thinking today about my family and close friends, how they aged, how I aged. And these context keywords related to my thoughts:
Patience, Doubt, Strike.
When I was younger, I was less patient in a general way, but also had less doubt, and I was striking (actioning / doing something) way more even if it wasn't something essential to me.
Now I'm older, I have more patience, but I also have more doubt, and I strike less, but when I do, I try to make it count (or I just think so).
When I look at older people my grandparents, maybe even my parents I see a big part of patience transformed into kind ignorance, and only a little bit of doubt and strike.
It is an observation from a personal standpoint, but it has interesting trajectories.
Patience - seems can be transformative.
Doubt - has the nicest curve, goes low-high-low.
Strike - decreasing.
I don't want to make any conclusions now, but it is an exciting observation for me. I wonder If now that I identified this (and keep this in mind), can I more easily also change the curves in the long run? I would opt for - enough patience, more strikes, and less doubt.
I know from this writing it is quite hard to grasp what I'm talking about, I could probably give an example, but as I said, I'm lazy today.
I talked today with my friend. As one would expect, the first topic we talked about was the coronavirus, and I specifically asked him what he thinks about the economic downturn.
How strongly will it affect the software development field (which we are both in)? I was more optimistic and hopeful by saying that people use software products now even more because of the virus. Still, he pointed out that the apps are the ones that help pass pastime or software that allows creating for those apps, i.e., Adobe suite and others. That was the gist of his notion.
He thinks that we will have to wait and see the effect, as the domino chain of bankruptcies just started. There is hope that the support and cash injections from country governments will act sort of a circuit breaker, and that the chain of "despair" will be firmly cut earlier than later, and that it will stick and not rebound. 🤞
That is a question I ask myself when I'm sometimes lost, or undecided. Even for teenagers who don't know what to do after school. To study or to work, but study where? These decisions are hard, and many don't know just yet.
I found that asking yourself "what I'm not?" and "what I don't do" can narrow the search field and put things in a more transparent route. Then combine that with fallowing your interests and curiosity, and it will lead you to answers, for some maybe even to a life goal.
In my opinion, creativity is the most overlooked ability/skill of the past western generation.
Parents were strictly pushing their kids to be engineers, lawyers, or doctors. To learn everything in this strict - memorization, "one way of doing" fashion.
Due to that, the kids were and even still are losing their inner childish creative explorer. Later many would have regrets and maybe also face a mid-life crisis.
The above is a pessimistic and sad notion. Take it with a grain of salt. Still, I do believe that there is a lot of truth in those words.
We are heading into a feature where automated tools, AI, and robotics will do most of the jobs for us. We will only need to be creative about the matter of execution and the end product design. In essence, this is where creativity will shine.
It's good that more and more parents and people generaly are now becoming aware of this. Not sure if I'm slow, but this epiphany only happened to me in my later twenties.
Now I try to teach my kids creativity by empowering them to explore, give them tools, means, and ideas. I hope that they will remain my little explorers as long as they "can". As a parent, I will be there and support them, even if they decide to paint on the walls of the rented apartment. Walls can be fixed - childhood will not come back.
Continuing, have you ever noticed, or been made aware of the fact, that some of the brightest leaders of today were the ones that went against status-quo? Against these norm "soul-killing" teachings - like Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, Paul Allen, Larry Elisson, and many others - all school/college dropouts.
If you look around, the people from your school or college who did not fit, but were somehow different (in a right way), now have reached more, or are at least seemingly enjoying life fullest. - Well, I have noticed this, have you?
Today was a slow day, or at least it feels so.
I have done multiple things today, from updating my "about me" page to talking quite a lot on the phone, but it doesn't feel that I was very productive, but maybe its the way I assert productivity 🤔, giving more "points" to one thing and less to others.
Also, I completely agree that people do overestimate how much they can do in the short-term and underestimate how much they can do in the longer-term.
One thing that bothered me today was a random article on a news site and its comments.
Some people were saying that X should die, wishing bad and cursing. I don't get it. From where is such random hate coming? I mean, I could justify hatred in a case where you knew the person, and he wronged you super badly, but even then, wishing death might be too extreme. Comments like that should be filtered out, commentator downrated, and in rare cases, authorities notified.
But most of the "news" sites, keep them, show them, let people get agitated, just so that people engage more with the website so that they can get more ad money.
I'm so glad adblockers exist, it is pushing publication companies to think of other types of monetization.
I hope once they switch to a "cleaner" source of income, they will also introduce better practices around commenting systems.
It's good that at least Public mega-corporations like Facebook are getting a shit ton of attention from both daily consumers and politicians for such things.