Your only job is to grow. From good and bad experiences. Triumphs and failures. Glorious surprises and grave disappointments. As long as you learn, no effort is ever wasted and in the end, you always come out ahead as a stronger, braver, wiser you.
Category: learning
Inspired: DFTBA – John and Hank Green’s mantra that we should all adopt
John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars, also runs a web series called Crash Course with his brother, Hank. In a series of 10-15 minute YouTube videos, John teaches humanities and Hank teaches science. My brother-in-law, Kyle, introduced Crash Course to me and I’m addicted. While I’m completely in love with the content and hosts, I’m even crazier about the tagline at the end of each one: “Don’t forget to be awesome” or #DFTBA for those in the know. Write it down and post it up all over your home. This is a mantra we all need to adopt and recite.
Inspired: Falling in love with knowledge
Smithsonian Magazine is one of my favorite publications. Every page is filled with some new and exciting piece of research. I read it cover to cover every month and feel better for having done so. It transports me to far-off lands and lets me dive deep into areas I’ve never heard of. It gets my curiosity motor running and reminds me just how much there is to learn in the world. And that gives me hope.
Inspired: Boston, We’re With You
Life’s ups and downs are unpredictable and difficult to understand in the moment. We’ve got to learn from our hardships and create solutions so others don’t encounter the same obstacles. Many hands (and hearts and minds) lighten the load, and goodness knows the load of life is H-E-A-V-Y. Let’s carry it together. Boston, we are with you.
Inspired: Who Are You in the Morning?
I woke up at 3:30am. Phineas was crying in his sleep so I got up and sat with him for a bit. He calmed down quickly. It’s impossible for us to hide who we really are in those hours between dusk and dawn. There are no secrets then. No facades. No brave faces. We have all our fears, insecurities, and joys right there on the surface. We’re just being; no doing. I hope someday the person I am at 3:30am is the person I am at every hour. I’m getting there but I’ve got some more work to do. Thanks for teaching me that, Phin.
Inspired: Put the Past in its Place
The past is a wonderful place to learn but I don’t recommend making it your home. It’s fun to remember, to be nostalgic, to pay tribute to what we’ve lived through – the good and the bad. However, we have to live it going forward. We have to take everything we learned in our past and carry it forward so that we make better, more informed choices today. We’ve got to learn to keep what serves us well and let go of everything else. In this way we can honor the past without repeating it or being hampered by it.
Beautiful: Jack of All Trades, Master of One
“Be a jack of all trades, master of one. Be a specialist and a generalist.” ~ Calvin Soh, SXSW V2V
This piece of insight from SXSW V2V may have been the most helpful in terms of my own personal career. For a long time I’ve wrestled with a way to reconcile my vast number of interests with the desire to choose an expertise. During the recession and in its aftermath, I’ve seen specialists struggle to make ends meet. Personally, I’ve felt the stress of being pulled in many different directions by my passions and eagerness to learn new skills and information. Calvin helped me see that both are possible in the world that we live in. Being a generalist and a specialist isn’t weird; it’s necessary.
The secret is self-control and self-monitoring. The key question I have to ask when tackling something new is: how much knowledge do I need to connect the dots and make this new information useful? My former boss Bob G. used to say, “I want to know enough to be dangerous.” In other words, know enough to be articulate and ask the best questions of the experts. I don’t need a PhD in every subject that interests me. I just need to go as far as the fun of learning takes me. That is enough.
Beautiful: What the Stars Teach Us
Every night, Phin and I take a spin around the block and we look up at the stars. We see them twinkling there. Phin’s just trying to find his next great pee spot and I’m trying to figure out where I go from here and how. A few months back, I had the idea of wiping the slate clean on my career and my life, starting over on a number of levels, fearless about my future and unhampered by my past. Then, I wanted newness in all its forms, and that’s what I want now, too, more than ever.
When we look at the stars, we realize how small we are. A speck in the cosmos. But still a speck, occupying some amount of space for some amount of time. We’re not nothing. We’re something. And we should try to do something meaningful and helpful and useful with our cosmic something-ness. That’s what I learned by staring at the stars and having them stare back at me. We’re here. We don’t know why, or how, or for how long, but let’s make the most of it.
Beautiful: Life Lessons from Baking Bread
I’ve been in my kitchen exploring the recipes of Jim Lahey, Founder of the famous Sullivan Street Bakery. His no-knead bread recipes have turned many non-bakers into flour tossing evangelists of the hearth, this girl included. About a year and a half ago, I wrote a post titled I Don’t Bake after making a disaster of a pumpkin pie and quickly began to assemble a collection of essays on other things I don’t do that are commonly considered to be in the wheelhouse of American women. Jim Lahey made a liar out of me and I couldn’t be happier about it. I’m now churning out bakery-quality breads from my tiny little hovel of a kitchen.
In the midst of my bread-baking frenzy, I started to reflect on what I’ve learned in this 18-month journey from non-baker to baker. There are a lot of lessons in the process, and most of them have nothing to do with the task at hand.
Have patience
It is something I used to have in short supply. By nature I am one of those people who wants everything yesterday. In the process of baking bread the Lahey way, it takes roughly 24 hours and most of that time I’m not doing a damn thing except giving the concoction of flour, water, yeast, and salt a chance to meet, mingle, and coalesce under the proper circumstances. The bread requires more patience than skill to bake up to its potential.
Do less
Adding on to the bit about patience, Lahey’s recipes require restraint. I am someone who likes to do things, but with bread baking I have to let go of that impulse. The more you do with this dough, the harder it is to create a crusty, delicious loaf. The trick is to do less, far less, than you think you need to.
Have the right tools
This is one piece of Lahey’s method that requires focus. You need a very hot, reliably calibrated oven and a hefty cast iron dutch oven with a lid that can withstand the heat. There are no compromises here. You can’t make do with a faulty oven and a different kind of pan. The right tools make everything easier.
Try, try, and try again
Your first loaf might not come out perfectly. Your 10th loaf might not come out perfectly either. Lahey is very honest about his bread brick road, and there were many bricks along the way. He’s not shy about dumping bread that isn’t up to his standards but he never lets that deter him on his journey.
Spend your life doing what you love
In Lahey’s book, My Bread, I found his personal story to be even more riveting than his recipes. He put in countless hours of training and experimenting to get where he is, many of them in Rome as an apprentice baker. At the center of all of his efforts is his great love of bread. His motivation is pure and his passion unabiding. These two ingredient are essential to good bread and a good life. Find what you love and keep doing it.
Have you learned lessons in the kitchen that have pervaded other areas of your life? If so, I’d love to hear them!
Beautiful: Taking My Time – My (Slow) Adventures as a Novice Computer Programmer
I have re-started my adventures in computer programming. I’ve worked on the business and user experience side of tech projects for 5 years, though I’ve never learned to program. I’ve had a couple of stops and starts over the past year or so. I’ve been working on acquiring basic HTML and CSS skills, and that’s been fairly easy to pick up. Now with MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses such as those on Coursera) and wonderful online services like Codecademy and Skillcrush, anyone can learn just about anything online and for free. This is particularly true for people like me who want to learn how to program.
After writing a review of a book about Python (a program language that is touted as bring especially friendly due to its plain-speaking syntax) by No Starch Press, I became interested in learning this powerful, yet approachable, programming language. I signed up for a Python program with Coursera. I really enjoyed the lectures, but when it came to completing the assignments, I couldn’t keep up. The lectures and resources from the course are fantastic but they move from one topic to the other much too quickly for me.
As any programmer will tell you, coding is a contact sport. You actually have to do it, not just read and hear about it, in order to really understand it. I needed to learn at a slower pace than what was possible with Coursera. I’m a beginner and this new learning adventure is tough for me. I need to take one step at a time at my own pace. The basics in any subject are important, and this is especially true for programming. If you don’t understand the basics, you literally can’t understand anything beyond the basics. It’s a brick-by-brick process. You need the foundation to be steady and stable before you can build your programming house. There’s no bs’ing it in programming. Either you can write code that returns the results you want, or you can’t. (There are certainly plenty of open source resources to copy from, but even with those you have to know what you’re looking for in order to find something that’s of value to you.)Â
I went back to my old standby, Codecademy, where I started learning basic HTML and CSS, and to my delight they have added Python and Ruby (another language I would like to learn) to their offering. Codecademy is just what I need. Practical, straight-forward exercises that give bite-size pieces of new knowledge that I can acquire at my own pace. Additionally, they have added a groups functionality to the site so users can join different groups based upon their interests and levels of experience in different programming languages.
I feel good about the decision to leave Coursera for later work and focus on getting through the Codecademy curriculum. As I did 6 years ago when I decided I wanted to learn how to write well, I’m making a commitment to do at least one small Codecademy lesson every day and periodically I’ll share what I’m learning with all of you. (Maybe some of you fearless souls would lIke to join me? If so, ping me!) A daily commitment did wonders for my writing and I now make a portion of my living from it. Why not do the same thing for programming? Copy, paste, success.
Christa Avampato 