Which Books You Truly Love An Essay by Salman Rushdie www.nytimes.com I believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, the beloved tale becomes a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives. A book may cease to speak to us as we grow older, and our feeling for it will fade. Or we may suddenly, as our lives shape and hopefully increase our understanding, be able to appreciate a book we dismissed earlier; we may suddenly be able to hear its music, to be enraptured by its song. readingloveidentitylife
On online collaboration and our obligations as makers of software An Essay by Baldur Bjarnason www.baldurbjarnason.com Is it the notetaking system that’s helping you think more clearly? Or is it the act of writing that forces you to clarify your thoughts? Is it the complex interlinked web of notes that helps you get new ideas? Or is it all the reading you’re doing to fill that notetaking app bucket? Is all of this notetaking work making you smarter? Or is it just indirectly forcing you into deliberate, goalless practice? Towards a crap decisionSo much knowledge not being applied notetakingbloggingsoftwarethinkingcommonplace
Towards a crap decision You have a thing. You would like to improve said thing. So, you ask a bunch of people what they think, giving more weight to those with relevant expertise. It’s a time-tested strategy. The pitfall here is that if the participants are aware of each other’s contributions, they will almost always automatically switch to consensus-building instead of providing their honest feedback. Worst case scenario: the bandwagon effect gathers steam and drives you toward a crap decision. collaborationdecisions
So much knowledge not being applied Most organisations have a lot of documents and data floating around that hardly ever gets revisited or used. They all have research, reading, and relevant information collecting dust. Stuff that should be informing the decisions and strategies of the company. Some of it sits unread in a knowledge base or a wiki. Some of it lies in the drives of individual employees who don’t have a way to share it productively. So much knowledge not being applied! Except that’s not how we work as human beings. If you haven’t read it, experienced it, and contextualised it, then it isn’t knowledge to you. Knowledge is a quality that people possess, not documents, and the only way to transfer it from one place to another is for people at both ends to apply themselves and make it their own. knowledgedocumentationwork