Month: October 2015

“We do hard things”

This morning at the breakfast table, my eldest daughter “needed” help with her food. We helped her get started, but for finishing the challenging task of stirring her oatmeal, her mom encouraged her: “We do hard things.”

Without premeditation, we’ve started using this phrase recently in our family. It may not be as hardcore as Sara Blakely’s “What did you fail at today?” question, but it’s a lovely phrase. It encourages a growth mindset: “hard” is good, not bad. It makes it a part of our daughters’ identity, much like saying “I don’t” instead of “I can’t” re-wires the brain to help with goals. And it builds a shared identity–we, the Iwashige family, do hard things!

Project Euler: Programming skills through play

I recently learned about Project Euler, and have found it addictive. It’s a wonderful site for learning programming. It’s not powerful tools that make it great. The site’s design looks ancient; it has no programming editors; it doesn’t even have any tutorials. But it has wonder, and a series of progressively harder challenges, and lets you discover what you need to learn in order to solve those challenges. Basically, it’s a site to support exploratory learning–learning of the sort that happens when you start a new job, a new business, or a new hobby. Learning of the kind that delights when you figure out the problem, learning that sticks. Learning that happens when you dive in, get your hands dirty, and learn what you need to know along the way.

James Somers wrote a good article about Project Euler at The Atlantic. I’m still in the first dozen or so problems out of over 500, but if you want to follow my progress, my profile is here and my friend key is 858072_k8PHIvJ2fpmYfHwCObWWZ59Ql4jckfYS.

The use of incoherent fragments

When I started this blog, it was a tentative thing–a platform whose significance I downplayed, but one through which I secretly hoped I’d accomplish something world-changing. I didn’t know what, but after all…who really needs just another “data dump” made public? I wanted to write valuable things, important things, things that earned respect.

Writing content that’s worth reading is a great idea. Unfortunately, this idea has translated into my writing very little. At the same time, I’ve gained appreciation for “simmers” of ideas: experiences like watching a dozen TED talks at a time, reading Alex Steffens’s Worldchanging book, or reading half a dozen books on related topics in a weekend. In this simmer, ideas collide, interact, and combine in wonderful ways. Ideas don’t need to be long; they don’t need to be fully developed to be useful. They just need to interact productively with other ideas. A tornado of index cards might have more value than a well-organized essay–even though the former looks like chaos, and is unlikely to win any literary prizes.

So…I’m going back to the origin of “blogging”. “Blog”, of course, is a contraction of “weblog”–in my interpretation, a stream of brief thoughts released to the Web. It may be that something grand emerges, but I’m not planning on it. What I am planning is that I’ll once again write to help order my understanding of the world. And sometimes, I’ll just share with little comment the small, delightful morsels that I’ve found on my experiential plate.