A holiday card to the industry, 2009
An annual tradition, reprinted from Keep the Joint Running
Follow @ITCatalystsIt's an annual tradition that in Keep the Joint Running, I step outside the usual boundaries of advice and industry commentary to offer something a bit different. Since not everyone who reads Advice Line subscribes to KJR, I'm re-posting my "Holiday Card to the Industry" here. - Bob
"This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."- Werner Heisenberg
Just who do you think you are?
It's a simple question. If you aren't sure, you'll find the answer on your driver's license.
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Not really. You are quite a lot more than a name, an address, and an identifying number. You're a complex collection of memories, opinions, habits, skills, abilities, and relationships. You're the result of random chance, pure and simple: You can no more take credit or accept blame for who you are than for the weather.
Unless, that is, you chose your genes, parents, teachers, mentors, and everyone else who had a hand in your becoming who you are, before you became you.
Our choices define us. The choices we make today depend on who we are, which depends on the choices we each made before that, which depended in turn on earlier choices, with no moment separating our own choices from the age at which others, or sheer randomness, chose for us.
Makes your head hurt, doesn't it? Yet, we're each still responsible for the choices we make from now on.
Whoever we are, however we got here, we are who we are and have to figure out the rest for ourselves. That it's more complicated than we usually consider it to be doesn't let us off the hook.
I know I'm the result of random chance: In second grade, in the school library, I ran across the Mushroom Planet series of children's novels. They hooked me on science fiction. Without that random encounter I'd have never chosen to read the Tom Swift Jr. series, from which I decided scientists were cool people to be -- which is why I chose to enter graduate school. In addition to sociobiology, I learned what it means to understand a subject in depth and, by extension, how to recognize when I don't.
Mostly, I don't, because everything is more complicated than we usually accept. Take the entire world. You and every other human being have a square plot of dry land less than 500 feet on a side to call your own. Some is arable, some mountainous, some frozen, desert, prairie, or jungle. It has to provide the living space and work space you occupy, grow all the food you eat, provide all of the energy and raw materials you use, and absorb all of the waste and garbage you create.
"Complicated" is an anemic description of just how unlikely it is that this can work. And yet we all have friends who know the solutions to our problems are "really very simple."
