Information as a tool

I feel a need to share some of my trade secrets.  I don't mean secrets of my trade, as I like my job and want to continue to be allowed to do it.  I mean things that I do that help me be successful. It was pointed out to me recently that for being under 30, I'm in a pretty good position in my career.  Some of that is being in the right place at the right time.  I have taken some time to reflect on how I came to be here or the things that I do that help me succeed.

I think that a lot of credit has to go to my dad and how I was raised. Growing up in a single parent household as an only child, I had to become remarkably self reliant and independent.  No one was going to hold my hand and baby me through life.  That's not to say that dad wasn't there for me or anything, it's just that with the responsibility of providing for both of us and our futures there were times when I had to learn to entertain myself.  Also, if dad wanted to watch or do something I generally had to come along for the ride.  Again, that's not to say I didn't enjoy it. I love spending time with my dad and Tracey will tell you that I talk about the things we did together all the time.  I feel, though, that I was exposed to things that may not have been deemed age appropriate by societal standards. For example, I saw Cliffhanger in the theaters at the tender age of 11.  If you haven't seen the movie, it's John Lithgow vs Sylvester Stallone. Get your hands on this movie and watch it for all it's cheesy 90's glory, damn it.  Also, there is gratuitous violence and swearing.  Again, not what society would consider appropriate, but I personally don't have a problem with how I was raised in that regard.

I wasn't sheltered. The world wasn't hidden from me.  My dad trusted me to explore the world at my own pace and to ask questions when I had them.  I was encouraged to read anything on his reading shelf and there was always a dictionary handy.  Dad enjoys science fiction books and some of those are not generally targeted at younger audiences, but I dove into them with reckless abandon.

One of those books was called Time Enough for Love which is a book that is sort of a memoir of a character who has been live for 2000 years or so.  There's a story that he is relating about a person he knew. The story was called "The Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail."  From Wikipedia: This story concerns a 20th-century United States Navy cadet who rises in the ranks while avoiding any semblance of real work by applying himself wholeheartedly to the principle of "constructive laziness". After the Naval Academy, the protagonist becomes rich by taking advantage of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which paid farmers not to farm their land. 


This story really stuck with me through the years.  When I was in college one of my instructors was fond of saying "Engineering is the science of being constructively lazy."  This further reinforced my belief in this principle.  My life and my job revolves around doing everything I can to be constructively lazy.  Some people will read this and think that I'm talking about just not giving a crap about the quality of work that I do.  That's not what I mean at all.  What I try to do in all of my tasks, is to never have to do that task again and to do it in the most efficient means possible.  This is where using information as a tool comes in handy. 


One of my old bosses used to say that anything you learn to do can be used as a tool to do something else.  Once you learn how to do a task you can stick that in your tool bag and pull it out again later.  Most people tend to think of information or skills as specialized tools.  Most people know that there are several different kinds of knives, right?  They all have specialized purposes and are used for different things. Sometimes, though all you need to be able to do is just cut something.  All you need is a knife that's strong enough to do the job.  It doesn't really matter what it's "intended use" is, as long as it gets the job done.


I'm going to use computer skills here as an example,  but take a minute to think of what you do on a daily basis and the problems that you run across and see if you can come up with your own examples of things that you do that can be applied to other tasks.  Excel has a function that will take two columns side by side as a look up list, meaning the value in column A corresponds to the value on the same line in column B.  You can then give it a third list in any order of some of the values in column A and it will automatically spit out the corresponding values in column B.   The first time I learned how to use this was for a simple translation.  I had a table full of I think zip codes and cities and also had a list of specific zip codes that i needed to know the cities for.  Someone showed me this function in Excel and it was like magic.  A month later I ran into a problem where I had  Identifiers and file names in one database (200,000 records) and then filenames and document titles in another database and someone wanted a list of identifiers and document titles for a small (100 or so) selection.  I thought back to this translation tool and figured out a way to get what I needed even though it was a completely different scenario.  This time it wasn't a simple translation from one to the other, but was two different translations.  


A lot of people I know would just write it off as a lost cause exploring that avenue and would go about getting what they need in a more convoluted fashion, but because I treat my knowledge like a toolbox, I was able to pull out this specialized tool and use it for something different.  I had someone else that was doing the same task on a different set of data and their way took about 45 minutes.  My way took 5.  I saved myself 40 minutes and had time to move on to other things.  I took the knowledge that I had and used it as a tool to use the least amount of work, effort and time possible to get solid results.  I try to do this in everything I do.  If I have places I need to go on the weekend for example, I try to map out ahead of time the most time efficient route to get to all of the places I need to go.  It leaves me more time to do the things I actually want to do rather than the things I have to do.


I would challenge you to try and find ways in your everyday routines to look at your activities or situations from a different angle and see if there's a better way to do it.  Find a way to get things done and out of your hair so you can spend time doing the things you want to do.  I enjoy spending time with my family, for example, so I try to get my laundry done during the week, maybe one load a day so that I don't have to worry about it and be tied to the house on the weekends.


Peace,