Comments on Nine Lies

I wrote a reasonably long comment to Nine lies, an entry on Re-educate Seattle. I thought it was reasonably introspective and interesting in general, so I’m posting it here for all y’all.

I really think I was the kind of kid that would’ve flourished at a school like PSCS.

I was and still am the kind of person who will go digging through a topic because it interests me. Learning it and regurgitating it for a test is something I suck at. But regurgitating something that I loved to research? Yikes you can’t shut me up! I can tell you loads of information about the airline business, elaborate how the federal budget works, and where we borrow that money from, or explain the structure and operation of a variety of Internet protocols. (and I can hold my own with professionals in those fields.)

This isn’t to say I didn’t go to a good school, by standard academic measures it’s probably the first or second best school in Ohio. But it’s awfully competitive, that combined with poor time and task management skills really made it tough for me to succeed. In some ways I came out of there thinking I was mediocre. In the last ten years or so I’ve come to realize that, in the words of my precalc teacher that I’m “smart, but a bit lazy for her tastes.”. Realistically she was describing a symptom, not the cause. I was stressed, poor at managing my time and motivating myself. (An aside, in that class the lessons were taught discovery style, it wasn’t about conveying information, it was more about guiding you to discover what is known.)

I’m now tackling that time management problem, but it’s tough shaking out 20 years of bad habits.

If anything, today is more about cooperation than competition. Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Mozilla all work together to improve the web. No company makes a product all on their own. They’re always working with partners, vendors, governmental authorities, and oh yeah their customers.

I don’t want the guy who is at the top of their class working for me, I want the guy who did well, but also took the time out to help out his classmates, will go research and learn something because he’s interested in it, and who will spread the success around.