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by linkel
2323 days ago
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After seeing your comment here yesterday, I started reading your book Initiative. I am in the middle of the first exercise and have some questions. Many of the examples in your book show people connecting these separate ideas that are reasonably understandable and applicable to the general population--the girl who recognized that many people have a fear of needles and sought to design a medical to device to help, or the student who liked going to festivals and thought about aligning attendee interests with the festivals' interests and waive attendance fees for attendees by having them volunteer at charities. It sounds like students in your class came up with relatable ideas by looking at problems in their lives that they noticed. Right now, I'm merely a year into my career as a software engineer (having switched careers last year) and I am very interested in learning about good software engineering practices. I like seeing great CI/CD pipelines and being able to deliver very quickly. I like the sound of good DevOps practices (currently reading slowly through Accelerate by Forsgren) and I so far have really enjoyed reading books on scalability and reliability (Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Kleppmann is frequently recommended and I got a lot out of the book). I'm vaguely interested in MLOps. I'm pretty happy being more of a cog in a machine right now so that I can see how an established company runs from the inside. I don't know that I'm immediately interested in a project that is more generalizable, the way your book examples are. But it does seem like an entrepreneurial mindset is still core to career progression since in the end a job is also about solving people's problems (where people may be inside or outside of the company). Thus I want to figure out how to use Initiative to iteratively improve my career. I am wondering if people found success applying your Method Initiative concepts to a narrower scope in a specific technical field, and whether you could share some of those stories. |
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The first time you do the exercises, you mostly develop skills. Sometimes a project of a lifetime emerges the first time, but more often, those skills lead you to see opportunity where you didn't before because your expectation of success increases. The next time you do it, or if you switch projects, I predict you'll say the technical aspect set the direction of your project but that you could do what you're doing in any field you wanted to.
Few people had identified problems before starting the exercises. A few did, but most of the problems they found came from the exercises. Even then, the first problems they identified, and likely yours, were only seeds for the next exercises, which refine them.
What you wrote above looks like the foundation of what would go in your first exercise. That exercise gives direction. The later exercises will have you move in that direction. They will lead you to find and solve problems and create working relationships with people in your areas of interest.
Does that help?