I remember my first days when I was 15 years old. I was really determined on learning more about technology. I used to be a passive consumer enjoying the immersion technology provided. I guess I have no much shame to say that as I think the majority of us land there as our primary and main destination. In the circa time 1997-2003 while I was 9-15 years old, the first 3 years of that period was an inception of the world wide web being more widespread than ever before. The major points during that time for kids our age was:
1. Nintendo 64 for the fist time had the ability to render 3 dimensional playable games.
2. The computer was booming in the world wide web with 30-second video clips or songs from famous cartoons or tourist destinations in inferior youtube 144p quality with dial-up modem 56k connection.
3. There were a lot of free video game demos on downloads.com, such as riding large monster trucks through dirt or space cars in a future apocalyptic highway.
Although limited, for us kids they were more enough to drool around. I am pretty sure there was more educative content around that time, but I believe most passive consumers at such young age would browse those websites on their free time, especially if your computer was shipped with Windows. After some point, the content of the internet exponentially grew to a point which the traditional search engine Yahoo couldn't keep up, and the rest is history.
Above are just two images of two PC demo games I used to download on the old layout of downloads.com before it was merged with CNET: croc and monster truck madness.
Skills with no direction
Then, while I was on vacation after one of my summer breaks in high school, I had the opportunity to spend some of my free time to stumble myself on learning some new programming language by reading the book "Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 21 Days" by Jesse Liberty. I tried other books before that, such as "The C++ Programming Language" by Bjarne Stroustrup, but they were too deep, not practical enough. I was at this stage where I didn't know what you could do with a programming language and never heard the word compiler before. Beyond that this book was very popular, it shouldn't be confused with other book mockups "Teach yourself... in 21 days". This book didn't try to skip foundational parts of the programming language. It discussed topics related to the hardware of the computer, such as how pointers have a tangible connection with allocated memory. In other words, although it said you could learn all this material in 21 days, it took me about 1-2 quarters to complete reading the book, as I had no previous experience in programming before. It was really fun learning all the stuff that you could do with a computer. I was kind of determined already that I wanted to be a programmer at that time.
I bought Bjarne Stroustrup book because it was recommended by the bookstore. It was too deep for me, I need it something more elementary, so I picked later on during vacation C++ in 21 days.
At my last years of high school, I tried to compete in one programming competitions centered on high school students. It consisted of solving puzzles by using a programming language of your choice and using the appropriate algorithms. I had no idea what algorithms was all about. There was one puzzle that I had to solve by using Dijkstra's algorithm. I thought all problems could be solved by common sense. It was like I was ignoring all the arduous efforts others spent enough time and I was going back in time to be the first one to find the algorithm instead. After a lot of effort figuring it out myself, I gave up. I found a link that portrayed the steps of using Djikstra's algorithm. What is fascinating is that I was a beginner on programming. I had no experience of using any libraries at all. There were at that time a lot of libraries that contained elements that could solve Djikstra's algorithm. If I used those, I could have solved this puzzle with less than a couple dozen lines of code. At least, the code that way wouldn't be so complex while reading it. However, I spent a lot of time just by using multidimensional arrays. I managed to pass all the test cases and was accepted to compete in the final round of the national competition. This was my first time entering in such competition. I only started to solve puzzles within the last 3 months at that time. Compared to other competitors who studied algorithms for years, I knew that I could be outnumbered. I remembered that I had to take those big fat computer programming books within my school in order to prepare myself for the competition. I was actually ignoring the lectures and the study material within my high school for the sake of preparing myself to compete well. Some classmates would compliment me on what I was doing while teachers could condemn me for not being able to remember the school lecture notes. It was a mixed feeling, but I didn't regret it. I was able to solve some of the puzzles within the national competition. I was outnumbered and was not able to participate in the global competition. I ended up in 12th place. Besides that I felt it was remarkable how far I reached up to the competition based on how much time I spent on puzzles and algorithms, I already knew at that time programming was my career choice with no doubts.
This is just an illustration and a diagram of the puzzle that requires Dijkstra's Algorithm that I had to solve. The exercise of the project is named Acropolis. Click here for the complete puzzle.
When I was at college, my goal was to study computer science. Computer Science majors have to study a lot of maths and physics. However, an accident happened. It seems fate can be changed by an opportunity you accidentally do. What happened was: While I was at San Diego City College in the first semester, I mistook some classes that were not for the degree path of getting a major in computer science but instead to a major in business administration. I thought business law and business communication was general education classes all students had to take and I did those for the first semester. When I completed the business law class, it fascinated me. I conclusively figured out that complexity did not exist only within computer world, complexity also existed in the social world for centuries. There was so much critical thinking on solving these puzzles of human behavior with the use of law and order. There were so many similarities to the things I learned in computer programming, I indeed wanted to learn more how the social world operated as well. I realized on the second semester from my advisor that I was on the wrong career path to get my computer science degree. In addition, the amount of additional courses of math and physics I had to go through would require delaying my degree for at least a year from the existing degree path I was taking. It was this accident that guided me to see things from new perspectives, to get a degree in Business Administration: Computer Information Systems. For the next 5 years, I did the most deliberate learning on this interdisciplinary major. I ended up getting a CGPA of 3.95. To this day, I still associate and reference through my expressions and decisions from the lectures that I completed, especially within the business, computer information system, and physical and social science domains.
Right now I work in data stuff within my career. I only completed only one data course in my university and I had no clue how to use SQL besides doing the basic stuff. The lecturer at that time that was teaching databases solved database solutions that I didn't understand at all that I just copied and paste. From work experience in creating custom format flexible reports and managing data warehouses, I was able to excel databases. I spent this year just a week on Hackerrank going through the practice exercises and ended up in 9th place in the last SQL competition they run this year.
I only spent 30 hours in Hackerrank & I was able to rank in the top 10 in their "Simply SQL" contest
Reading a book, competing in a competition, doing an education, gaining experience, re-enforces your skills. However, skills are just the tip of the iceberg. A skill is a tool that gets created for a reason in the first place. Tools are used to solve our social complexity. You need creativity on how to solve social problems and that will get you to the right direction on what tools you really need in order to tackle the problems.
Creating a mental map
One of the things that I noticed while working on technological corporations is how an organization lacks or forgets what foundations it needs on how to run itself instead of only looking if the tools work properly or not. Smarter, Faster, Better by Charles Duhigg although it doesn't provide the full picture, it is a great book that illustrates how organizations found over the years specific foundations that made them be more productive and effective. Unfortunately, I suffered from companies attributing to fate or take it for granted on their reaction of why software don't work properly, why there is a high turn-over or low morale in the workplace, and many more. I spent the last 2 years by starting doing my own rants on my blog to see how much I know, then correlate with other human behavior theories I already knew, and then correlate with other books and analyzing them. The final product is the result of this blog. If I have to present the main highlights of the blog, then they are the following:
An analysis of the books: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg and Mind what you wear by Professor Karen J Pine
An
This discusses some of the features of habits, which represent mercy mental networks within the theory of mental symmetry. We also discuss the nature and differences between holding mercy mental networks (external self-esteem) and teacher mental networks (internal self-esteem).
This is a great reference to understand how the mercy cognitive style mindset works with mental networks. The mercy cognitive style lives mainly in the concrete world and focuses a lot on creating a platonic form for the individual self. That is a main reason why Mercy people love to reflect their identity with the right attire of clothes. We follow the story on how mercy mental networks become a supporting pillar to our identity. However, we also look why we should pay attention to teacher mental networks, which represent abstract concepts (i.e. the framework of how habits work within the book the power of habit). Teacher mental networks makes us become more independent and less depending our self on specific concrete external cues.
An analysis of the book Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed
When making a mistake is treated as a dead end instead of growth for society, when individuals do not want long term effort on admitting mistakes and shortcut to workaround, then we are straying away from the ideal platonic forms of making a world a better place. Admitting mistakes and working with mistakes and handling them humbly is the only way for ours and everyone's else growth.
Focusing on a platonic form (a teacher mental network that consists a theory) that handles mistakes makes the whole system to continuously improve and withstand on new situations within the environment and not fragment itself. Focusing on a platonic form that uses tactics which focuses on embracing mercy mental networks (protecting our individuality from humiliation of a mistake) is a prime example of how many organizations with an ideal foundation (i.e. hospitals mission to save people's life) to become fragmented (i.e. the norms of the hospital on how they reacted to mistakes lead for hospital mistakes to be one of the top 3 causes of people's death)
An analysis of the book The Executive's Paradox by David G.Jensen
We have seen basic frameworks of how mental networks work described by others, such as "cue-> routine->reward" within the book the power of habit. In contrast, this is the closest a book has achieved to describe a cognitive style within a framework. As the book discusses its main audience are those that work on leadership roles, it apparently describes the "Contributor" Cognitive style.
Here we describe how each of the 4 modules correlate with Contributor thought and its associated concepts. Contributor thought works with Perceiver and Server cognitive modules. Perceiver and Server cognitive modules interact with Mercy and Teacher cognitive modules correspondingly. One of the weakness of leaders that use Contributor thought is using Perceiver mode and ignoring Server Mode and vice versa. Hence, the author recommendation for leaders is to stretch instead of snapping out due to the negligence of the other modes. I describe lastly a story that agile is all about balancing those modes. In contrast, we stray away from being agile when we don't balance those modes.
An analysis of the book Feedback Revolution by Peter Mclaughlin
Feedback can be in different forms, but the most effective feedback is one where the message can get across and not pass out through the other ear. An attitude of having doubts of "our own" feedback we give, presenting feedback to others with patience as a path to personal growth that takes time instead as a dead end, trying to give feedback continuously incrementally asynchronously, as well presenting the message nearest to the time of the incident are great points to embrace.
However, being empowering, a Mercy cognitive style, a mode discussed in the Leadership role in Executive Paradox, is not so easy, especially in cultures that do not embrace accepting any feedback from others due to people being sensitive about it. As discussed in Black Box Thinking, dealing conflict by hiding or twisting input to avoid confrontation makes us and society fragmented instead of having a pace of progress. First, people need to learn to give feedback properly as discussed. Second, organizations need to give people the ability to express themselves as much as they can while handling and teaching people to give proper feedback so it doesn't become abused or as a dead end that makes an organization detrimental. We follow this story in detail.
An objection to John Locke's view on punishment
Merging John Locke on Personal Identity & Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed
Merging John Locke on Personal Identity & Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed
Personal Identity was always a topic that I always felt bonded to explore deeply. It really touched me to unravel Locke's Argument "On Personal Identity" over the period of years since the first time I read it on my "Intro To Philosophy:Values" class in San Diego City College. Locke's argument that is still controversial to this day is whether we should punish a character's mistake to the same degree even when the current character of the individual has shown legitimately actions and efforts that show the individual has learned from his past mistakes. Locke's argument on that is that we should, as long the individual remembers he did the mistake in the first place.
After reading Black Box Thinking and integrating such concept with the framework of Mental Symmetry and Executive Paradox, I object the argument of Locke's view on punishment. I present examples that point out that having consciousness of past actions are not a good enough basis of punishing a person rightfully. We should give a choice for the individual to quantify his level of misalignment to society by how his present attitude views the world presently. What matters is the character the individual is and tries to aim to. In addition, instead of punishing a person being the only choice, we should give the option and awareness to society for the guilty to embrace what steps are required to align himself with society. We should have the platonic form that people that did mistakes can have equal chances on becoming one day the presidents of this world instead of looking at clean record sheets. It is only by handling mistakes that we can learn to improve ourselves.
Analyzing the book Natural Cognitive Theology by Lorin Friesen
If we simulated beating the challenge of unraveling "mind and human behavior" as a vintage Super Mario video game, then treat the rest of the topics discussed so far as easy or challenging levels while this one in here as running through a boss level. It took me around a month with full effort on reading and grasping most of the material of this book. The reason it is not that easy to read is because it discusses the topic of theology and it brings mental pain when it embraces a theology which discusses which mental circuits are potent and which ones lead you to a dead end explicitly. Because believe it or not, our culture and way of doing things consciously or subconsciously may contradict with what the book discusses.
We have seen Philosophy brings a framework of how things work, such as mental networks being described within the book The Power Of Habit and Contributor cognitive style being described within the book Executive Paradox. Mental Symmetry framework covers that and many more. We also found books that describe a way of doing things in life, such as: 1. Learning from mistakes from Black Box Thinking 2. Stretching our other modes of thought from Executive Paradox 3. The attitude on the way we give feedback from Feedback Revolution 4. Becoming independent of external influences by embracing to control our habits by a use of a framework from The Power of Habit. We see all of them in some way teach a way of doing things, a theology. We shouldn't tone it down or be in denial about it, it is a theology, for avoiding such foundations, it does not make our society able to continuously progress itself. The book Natural Cognitive Theology describes how the current state of theology has stray away from the original colors of theology that used to bring advancements to our civilization. In contrast, out of the mill journalists, independent researchers and others who dedicate the study of human behavior bring forgotten pieces that embrace back the true colors of theology.
The book Natural Cognitive Theology tries to describe how mental symmetry as a model can be used to study the topic of Theology correctly, which if done properly, it can bring faster advancements to the development of human behavior and our interactions with other human beings in order to become more sophisticated, integral, and fulfilling to society. It will bring the same transformations as how science advanced the empirical world to our physical needs.
Conclusion - Aligning skills with mental map?
The process took long like getting a Master Degree, but it was well worth it. Now my skills can be aligned with some purpose instead with no purpose at all. I know now what skills I need to learn and where to align them exactly. Next post will detail my assessment to how I reached up so far and why my current direction has to eventually walk down to the ground firmly where my skills closely align with my path.
At first I was nothing
Then I eventually got skills but had no purpose
Then I eventually ended up knowing my purpose but did not got my hands dirty
Now it is time to do my rite of passage to commit my purpose with the required skills to create real value to this world.