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EE 011: Someone Should Have Renamed It As Wisdom Protocol Instead

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EE 011: Someone Should Have Renamed It As Wisdom Protocol Instead

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KimSia Sim
Dec 17, 2022
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EE 011: Someone Should Have Renamed It As Wisdom Protocol Instead

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Calvin’s version of the Serenity Prayer is typically gung-ho American :)

The Serenity Prayer is not a great name. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it goes like this:

God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
and Wisdom to know the difference

My engineering brain would have refactored it into the following pseudocode:

Acquire Wisdom

Use Wisdom to determine if X is changeable

If X is changeable, apply Courage to change X

If X is not changeable, apply Serenity to accept X

In fact, I would go as far as to argue, if I had perfect wisdom to tell whether something is changeable or not, I wouldn’t even need courage or serenity.

My self-talk would go something like this:

It’s changeable? Duh, change it.

It’s not changeable? Too bad, suck it in, my man.

Occam’s razor would dictate I should rename it as the Wisdom Protocol.

Growing Spirally

Speaking of change and acceptance, we’re into December 2022 — the time of the year when it’s normal to take stock. Reflect how it has been for you this year and what you would try to change for the coming new year. I’ve done one round of that during this newsletter hiatus. I will do another one towards the end of the year. I haven’t worked out the full details. But, I like how Carl Jung talks about growth:

The spiral in psychology means that when you make a spiral you always come over the same point where you have been before, but never really the same, it is above or below, inside, outside, so it means growth

macro photography of green leaves
Photo by Bogomil Mihaylov on Unsplash

We don’t have to have different goals for every year. We can be pursuing the same one year after year. But, we need to experiment. Change our methods or accept our constraints and work within them. And there’s nothing that says you cannot do both at the same time. 😉

So long as we make these efforts of changing and accepting, even if results seem a bit slow, even if it seems like we’re running on a treadmill, we’re still growing. You may just be on a spiral revisiting the same challenge at a different level. And as Jung said, grow in a spiral way.

I’m keeping this mental image of climbing up a mountain in a spiral manner as I stew on my next steps during the Christmas and New Year break.


One Change I Made

One thing I did try to change during the hiatus is that I went to do deadlifts in public. First time ever.

I did it as an easy slow-ramp towards eventually doing it in competitions. I get sweaty palms easily when I’m nervous. Sweaty palms are no-good for deadlifts, as you can imagine.

Twitter avatar for @KimStacks
KimSia Sim (I tweet business & software stuff) @KimStacks
Tried deadlifts in front of crowd to get used to noise & environment Only matched personal best 🤷🏻‍♂️ But I did surprise myself trying 21 pull ups and collect 100 dollar voucher for groceries Hey, if a man can't beat his personal best, at least beat inflation, amirite? 😆
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9:18 AM ∙ Nov 27, 2022

One Constraint I Accepted

One thing I came to accept during the break is how I would always view the world from a very engineering-centric lens. I would almost always take concrete real-life examples and try to make abstractions out of them. It’s a weakness of mine as too much abstraction confuses people.

Which is why, initially, I chose to name my rebooted SubStack “The Specific” as a reminder not to be too abstract with my observations and end up failing to connect with people.

Now, I realize every person’s greatest strength is often their greatest weakness. And vice versa. The key is to modulate the strength either by choosing the right arena for the trait, or fortifying it somehow.

I reckon I still need to learn to be more specific with examples, stories, and case studies. Just like how Razuvaev taught Waitzkin to learn Karpov from Kasparov, I need to learn how to imbue in great personal stories without losing my strengths in thinking abstractly.

Speaking of great personal stories, I really like this one by Jen Widerberg recently where she linked a personal childhood lesson in softball and doing well in interviews. Better yet, the lesson extends beyond softball and interviews as it teaches how to influence other people’s decisions through your expectations and body language.

Twitter avatar for @jenwiderberg
Your Favorite Tech Recruiter @jenwiderberg
My Dad taught me the importance of selling through softball. In 1 game, there was a close call at third base. I tagged the runner coming in and waited for the umpire's call. Safe or Out?
1:54 PM ∙ Dec 11, 2022

Next issue before my next hiatus is on Christmas Eve. I’ll see you again then 👋


Elsewhere on the Internet

Speaking of spiral,

Louie Bacaj
pointed me to this helix by Balaji S. I like to think that Carl Jung and Balaji are great minds who think alike :)

Twitter avatar for @balajis
Balaji @balajis
The helix may be the best analogy for civilization. Looked at from one angle, it appears we're just going in circles, in cycles. But looked at from another, we are gradually ascending. All progress is along the z-axis.
Image
1:50 PM ∙ Sep 15, 2021
833Likes98Retweets

Recently, there’s a lot of news about AI. Here’s my favorite recent example of how AI helps us humans make decisions by

Vic Vijayakumar
.

Twitter avatar for @VicVijayakumar
Vic 🌮 @VicVijayakumar
AI driven decision-making will be the default in the future.
Picture of water saving flush in a public restroom:

“This new Water Saving Device can be activated Manually by depressing the buttons as illustrated above or Automatically. The Dual-Flush Technology is built into the sensor and will automatically flush the proper amount of water based on time spent in the stall.”
10:57 PM ∙ Dec 13, 2022

I want to thank

Chris Wong
,
Andrew Edstrom
,
Sairam Sundaresan
, Alvin T of
Below the Surface
,
Louie Bacaj
, Jen Widerberg of
Engineers’ Gate
for reading drafts of this.

P.S. you can respond directly to this email. I read every reply. I'd love to hear from you.

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EE 011: Someone Should Have Renamed It As Wisdom Protocol Instead

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2 Comments
Requira
Writes The Forcing Function
Dec 17, 2022Liked by KimSia Sim

Great to see you writing again. Especially like the spiral metaphor - perspective matters.

I did not know that public deadlifts was a thing!

And well done on the 21 pull ups though am a little surprised that the engineer in you didn’t do the more efficient target of 20 that was needed for the prize. 😉

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