

Horrible - llimllib
http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2008/10/06/horrible.html

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maryrosecook
This article finally made me understand why I don't always learn from Rands'
essays: he's not a detail person.

When he talks about technical stuff - the Free Electron, Nerd Attention
Deficit Disorder - I'm nodding along and he's explaining a ton of reasons for
phenomena that I had noticed but didn't understand.

When he talks about manager stuff - I'm the boss for now, What to do when
screwed - I don't get it. Because I have only just started doing some
management, I can't fill in the blanks of most of the situations he's talking
about because I haven't experienced them as a manager.

So, he's kind of like one of those automap things in a computer game - you can
see the structure and reasoning to your journey and experiences, but only once
you've fucking got there.

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webwright
I was about to write a snarky comment about non-descriptive link titles and
then I read the article. It's really good and the non-descriptive headline is
(presumably) part of it. ;-)

~~~
yters
Apparently he didn't want to be great.

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thaumaturgy
I just recently discovered, much to my own surprise, that I am in fact not a
good businessman. I've got management experience, and I've done that
exceptionally in the past, but it turns out that that's not the same as being
a good businessperson. I have good ideas about policies and customer service
and so on, but I really stink at paperwork and organization and all that kind
of stuff.

I need a partner. :-(

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redorb
"whether you’re an individual or a manager, your job is to scale at what makes
you great"

Great quote from the article, I have always wondered about scaling what I'm
good at.

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spydez

        "You’re uniquely good at them and you not quite sure why."
    

I don't know of anything like that... I know some stuff I'm pretty decent at,
but there's thousands that are better than I am at each of them. So how can I
"scale at what makes [me] great"?

~~~
johnb
Maybe think of it as uniquely good within your sphere of influence. I'm bottom
of the bell curve in generic small talk when you dump me in the middle of a
sales conference, but in the context of the IT department I work in, I'm
usually put forward first to chat with customers.

~~~
thaumaturgy
I tend to think of it as the one-in-one-hundred trait. Given yourself and 99
other random people, what can you do that they probably can't?

That doesn't mean you're the best in your country, or in your field, or in the
world, or whatever, it just means that you'll tend to be the best at a lot of
small companies, and among the best at the larger ones.

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tdavis
Good article, but I still vehemently hate people who turn adjectives into
nouns. I can't _have_ a "horrible" therefor I have determined I am perfect at
everything.

~~~
teaquaffer
Try reading it as an adjective with an understood noun, kind of in the spirit
of an "understood subject."

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yters
I really have this problem, and I think a lot of other people probably do too.
Often things seem obvious to me and I assume the same for everyone else.
Consequently, people have a hard time understanding what I'm saying.

To fix this, I really try to analytically break down my idea, which bores
people to tears.

Anyone solve this satisfactorily, or do you just find yourself a russian lit
major?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Try using a lot of cultural metaphors. They can convey a lot of information in
a small package, plus they're entertaining to the listener.

Not useful for everything, but for 1 or 2 technical ideas very handy.

~~~
yters
Thanks, that's a good suggestion. Any specifics you've found useful?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
It's age and audience-specific, but it used to be you could make references to
popular TV shows. With the net anymore that's gotten tougher. Movies are still
a good staple for metaphors. As are stip-mall Americana-type references.

For instance I had a project manager (I coach agile teams) that had obviously
lost track of her project. She kept coming up with new ways of doing the work,
and the team didn't respect her and wouldn't attend meetings.

I was trying to explain to my team what the atmosphere felt like. I finally
said "She's like a little girl at Wal-Mart, outside on one of those quarter
fire truck rides. She keeps spinning the wheel left and right, desperately
going to put out the fire, but the wheel's not connected to anything. She's
just frantically spinning away while everybody watches her and smiles" or
something like that. It got the point across at a deeper level, I think.

When I teach coupling and cohesion I usually talk about people living in
houses -- you want your stuff in your house, and you don't want all the
structural members of all the houses connected together, etc

Leaky Abstractions? Gilligan's Island. No matter what the professor or
Gilligan made with those coconuts, you just knew it wasn't as reliable as the
real thing.

Hope that helps. Kind of hard to come up with stuff without context.

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sammyo
Yep, you are your 'Horrible'. Deal.

