April 20, 2004

Learning

I used to think that I only learned by writting. I always thought that the act of copying down what someone said to me was the means by which I would remember what they said. But lately, I've begun to rethink this hypothesis, and I think that I've had it all wrong for the past several years.

I now think that for me, learning is by comparing. I learned a lot about myself over the weekend by making comparisons to basic business concepts. I know that I wrote in the past about "Business Processes" - where I began to realize that if I don't change the process, how do I expect to change the outcome. But other things that I learned this weekend related to concepts such as "Value Add", "Competetive Advantage" and "Core Competency". I learned that my core competency is in being an engineer (or whatever my current position can be described as) - in that doing things such as selling tickets was actually hurting me (I bought some tickets to some events, hoping to learn the art of closing a sale by selling the tickets - but I soon realized that the effort that would have to be sunk into learning how to sell tickets was actually going to take away from my ability to perform at my current job - I began to realize that my core competency is being an engineer, and not a sales person.

Anyways, I found the concept of learning more about myself by looking at myself as a business somewhat interesting - I think that it allows me to compensate for the lack of time spent understanding myself with my previous over abundance of time spent trying to understand business.

Posted by Brice at 09:38 PM | Comments (420)

April 12, 2004

Let's Go Fly a Kite (Correction)

As one of my friends kindly pointed out:

Technically I have never flown a kite. That is not to say that I have never had a kite, nor ran around a Motel parking lot when I was 6 trying to fly it. Needless to say, I don't think that it counts as flying when the kite spends the entire time lower to the ground then you stand tall. (As a six year old, how was I supposed to know that the 2 story buildings that made up the Motel also made up a pretty good wind barrier).

So, long story short, Yes, I have never flown a Kite.

Posted by Brice at 02:18 PM | Comments (450)

April 11, 2004

*Sniff* - New All Time Low

I thought that it was bad a few monts back, when I checked my website statistics, and I was responsible for the highest amount of hits.

I now realize how low I can go, when a search engine has replaced me as the largest source of page hits. =(

(at least someone... well... something... is reading this) =)

Posted by Brice at 09:49 PM | Comments (428)

Let's Go Fly a Kite

Why? Because I have never done it.

Plus, I just fixed my website counter! (not that it was all that difficult. aparently my domain host changed the formating of the picture that represents the webcounter without telling anyone).

Posted by Brice at 09:41 PM | Comments (509)

Does it Ever Get Easier

I took my first "Mental Health Day" on Friday, and the irony was that I spent most of the day trying to be productive to avoid feeling guilty for doing nothing on that day... We at least being productive on Friday meant going to the driving range, droping of my dry cleaning, and taking care of my taxes... speaking of which...

I'm begining to realize that life, much like work, never gets easier - or rather, if it does, that probably isn't a good sign. As work progresses for me, I find myself trying to accomplish more work - with about the same amount of time to get the work done. More responsibility translates into more complexity. As life progresses for me, I find that I am trying to get more accomplished - also with about the same amount of time... 401K(s)... IRA(s)... EPSP(s)... argh!

I suppose the opposite would be what my life was like a mere 8 years ago - when the only piece of plastic was the Wegmen's (Supermarket) Shoppers Club card (back then, even my college ID wasn't plastic). Back then, I was only making $4.75 an hour, and the only thing that I ever got for filling out a credit card form was a t-shirt (wait. somethings never change).

Anyways, I suppose all of this complexity is actually a good thing. Since it probably only will get harder from here - and I might as well get used to it.

Happy Easter Everyone! (not that I believe in religion, but it was kinda hard not to notice the holiday as even Wal-Mart was closed. along with Costco, Target and Fry's to say the least... Can you tell that I really -really- really wanted to spend money today)

- Brice

Posted by Brice at 09:29 PM | Comments (432)