How do I perform? For knowledge workers, How do I perform? may be an even more important question than What are my strengths?. A few common personality traits usually determine how a person performs: Am I a reader or a listener? How do I learn? Writing? Taking notes? Doing? Talking? Do I work well with people, or am I a loner? And if I do work well with people, in what relationship? Do I produce results as a decision maker or as an adviser? Do I perform well under stress, or do I need a highly structured and predictable environment? Do I work best in a big organization or a small one? Peter F. Drucker, Managing Oneself personality
What Le Corbusier got right about office space An Article by Tim Harford timharford.com In the 1960s, the designer Robert Propst worked with the Herman Miller company to produce “The Action Office”, a stylish system of open-plan office furniture that allowed workers to sit, stand, move around and configure the space as they wished. Propst then watched in horror as his ideas were corrupted into cheap modular dividers, and then to cubicle farms or, as Propst described them, “barren, rathole places”. Managers had squeezed the style and the space out of the action office, but above all they had squeezed the ability of workers to make choices about the place where they spent much of their waking lives. ...It should be easy for the office to provide a vastly superior working environment to the home, because it is designed and equipped with work in mind. Few people can afford the space for a well-designed, well-specified home office. Many are reduced to perching on a bed or coffee table. And yet at home, nobody will rearrange the posters on your wall, and nobody will sneer about your “dog pictures, or whatever”. That seems trivial, but it is not. workpersonalityownershipmodularitychoice
Downsides of the internet An Essay blog.royalsloth.eu The type of nitpicking behavior that I mentioned earlier, is especially problematic since it often causes the loss of writer’s authenticity. With time, these criticisms cause one of the following: The writer stops publishing their work. The writer stops reading comments and minds their own business. The writer learns their lesson and sands off their edges in order to fit better in the society du jour. The larger the writer’s audience, the more likely it is for the writer to pick the last option and tone down their voice. You can experience this first hand when reading the essays of prominent bloggers. Their early work is usually interesting and fun to read, which naturally brought a large audience to their doors. But the more the show goes on, the more they will waffle around the topic, since with a large enough audience every thought will be misunderstood and nitpicked mercilessly. writingwwwcritiquepersonality
Idiolect A Definition en.wikipedia.org Idiolect is an individual's unique use of language, including speech. This unique usage encompasses vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. An idiolect is the variety of language unique to an individual. This differs from a dialect, a common set of linguistic characteristics shared among a group of people. Things you didn't know you can be bad at languagepersonalityidentityexpressionspeech
Matter versus Materials: A Historical View An Essay from A Search for Structure by Cyril Stanley Smith Atoms and aggregatesAesthetically motivated curiosityWhose eyes had seen and whose fingers had feltThe alchemists in their mixingsA holograph of itself+3 More
Atoms and aggregates I see science reversing the trend toward atomistic explanation that has been so triumphant in the last 400 years, and I predict a more human future based on the symbiosis of exact knowledge (which is by its very nature limited) and experience. ...Matter cannot be understood without a knowledge of atoms; yet it is now becoming evident that the properties of materials that we enjoy in a work of art or exploit in an interplanetary rocket are really not those of atoms but those of aggregates...It is not stretching the analogy much to suggest that the chemical explanation of matter is analogous to using an identification of individual brick types as an explanation of Hagia Sophia. The edifice from which they came architecturescience
Whose eyes had seen and whose fingers had felt Aristotle’s 18 qualities of homoeomerous bodies that he chose to explain in detail in his Meteorologica, are just those fine points of behavior that would be noticed in a workshop. They are: solidifiable meltable softenable by heat softenable by water flexible breakable fragmentable capable of taking an impression plastic squeezable ductile malleable fissile curable viscous compressible combustible capable of giving off fumes This redundant list of properties is not the neat classification of a philosopher. It reads more as if it were based on a conversation with a workman whose eyes had seen and whose fingers had felt the intricacies of the behavior of materials. craftmaterialtexturecollections
The alchemists in their mixings Many wonderful things must have been seen by the alchemists in their mixings. The Alchemist euphonycuriosity
A holograph of itself All [physical properties of matter] derive from the different patterns of the interaction of electrons and photons within the fields of the positively charged atomic nuclei, stabilized in a particular morphology by the interaction of the levels themselves. Matter is a holograph of itself in its own internal radiation. physics
To worship at the shrine of mathematics The new [physics-based] viewpoint is so potent that it has perhaps, caused too many metallurgists to forsake their partially intuitive knowledge of the nature of materials to worship at the shrine of mathematics, a trend reinforced by the curious human tendency to laud the more abstract. mathabstraction
What the advancing interface leaves behind I see in the complex structure of any material—biological or geological, natural or artificial—a record of its history, a history of many individual events each of which did predictably follow physical principles. Nothing containing more than a few parts appears full panoplied, but it grows. And as it grows, the advancing interface leaves behind a pattern of structure perfection or imperfection which is both a record of historical events and a framework within which future ones must occur. From the head of Jove historygrowthstructure
A realization that this leaves out something essential Nothing so fundamental lies in the realm of concern to us aggregate humans, where the need is, now, for the study of real complexity, not idealized simplicity. In every field except high-energy physics on one hand, and cosmology on the other, one hears the same. The immense understanding that has come from digging deeper to atomic explanations has been followed by a realization that this leaves out something essential. In its rapid advance, science has had to ignore the fact that a whole is more than the sum of its parts. knowledgecomplexityholism