Saturday, November 15, 2008

Twitter Account

I decided to set myself up on Twitter today. My account is bradtalk. My name is not available, but it does not appear to be used, so perhaps I can change it to just bradandrews in the future.

For now, it remains http://www.twitter.com/bradtalk

Let the banality begin!

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Keeping Your Focus

One thing I really struggle with in life is to stay focused on just one thing. One the one hand, this ability to jump between things enables me to keep many things going at the same time. On the other hand, it can be really hard when a dedicated focus is required.

My life sometimes reminds me of the people who would spin plates on top of poles on a TV variety show. Things worked well when everything started up, but it would continually fall into peril as plate after plate started slowing down and wobbling, threatening to fall on the ground and make a serious mess. In spite of this threat, the spinner would somehow manage to always get back to the plate just before it fell, saving the day.

This often feels like my life, applying spin to another plate to keep from making a huge mess. While energizing at times (and boy can it be energizing), it can also seem quite discouraging at times, when the end of spinning plates never comes. While that is not accurate, it often seems that way things can run in life, at least for those of us with the ability to focus on many things. This ability to focus on many things often leads us to focus on "just one more thing" before being satisfied.

I am not sure what the complete solution is here. Just saying to "focus on fewer things" is nice in theory, but is highly unlikely to happen. Perhaps I will figure it out someday, though I expect I will be spinning plates until I am no longer able to do so. Not doing so would be far more frustrating anyway!

Brad

Saturday, November 01, 2008

Instilling a Love of Learning in Others

One of my biggest "failures" with my own children is that none of them seems to have the passion for learning I have. While I can be a big slacker at times, I am constantly trying to learn something new. Right now I am putting a lot of effort into learning topics related to my career in information security, but I am also trying to learn more about project management, low carb and low glycemic cooking, business in the area, etc.

Unfortunately, I only have so many hours in the day. And I am the only one pushing it, so I can't even feed off others in my family. Sure, they think they know it all, but they need to do some research to validate things and complement their existing knowledge.

This is a mixed post and is not coming out as easy as I thought. I wanted to pose the general question of how to motivate others, but I also wanted to share the frustration of wanting to know more than is possible.

We really need a way to hook people like this up. I would have loved to have someone who would have stirred me on when I was a teen myself (at least I think so). While I did some things well (Eagle Scout, etc.), I didn't have anyone pushing me on in academics. I often wonder if I could have excelled more if someone had taken that level of interest.

This makes me wonder if we could hook such people up. Perhaps such a system exists already, but if I never found out about it, how many others are missing it?

Brad