Quote:
Originally Posted by Dan.Linehan  A diverse array of skillsets helps too. There are plenty of skilled programmers who are completely unable to make a worthwhile product, mainly because they don't have any background in any other industry.
They end up creating products that have been done a million times before. Like Pownce. Send messages, files, links, and events to your friends. Create a network of friends and share stuff. It's free and easy…
Wow, welcome to e-mail.
A programmer who has never worked in restaurant management wouldn't understand the need for logistics planning applications between farmers and restaurant owners. |
I find this very true in my experience.
Usually only with a bit of understanding of how something works, I'm able to make more effective decisions. What has helped me tremendously is to not compartmentalise things. Once you don't compartmentalise--which seems more intuitive for me anyway--you start to see relationships and connections between things.
And if I need more effectiveness in a certain "supporting" area that I have only a basic understanding of, I always have the opportunity of deepening my depth of understanding in a specific field. When you do this, you experience exponential improvements in your understanding since one understanding reinforces every other understanding. It's extremely high leverage.
Amusingly, often when I write something and I liken a certain idea to an example, people say "you can't say X has anything to do with Y." What that person is really saying is "I don't have the talent themes that let me see the world like you do, so I don't believe you." Unfortunately that's not all that helpful. What's really helpful is interaction with people who have an understanding of talents, especially their own.
That said, even if you have vastly different talents to other people, you can still communicate effectively. The key factor is your ability to be clear. If you can remove the need for the other person to see the world like you do and be explicitly clear, you part the
I can almost guarantee Steve did this with his book, and many will say, "how does he know or figure out this stuff?!"
Steve doesn't do this so well in his blog and forum posts, however, and that's why you see follow up posts like Sam's where Sam disagrees with Steve. Steve is drawing on things that he can clearly see, but Sam can't, so they tend to argue semantics back and forth, not really understanding the very subjective behind the terms each of them are using.
Life become much easier for me when I realised that very few people speak using actual language and instead draw on their own conceptual definitions. They may use the same words you are using when you speak with them, but unless you understand their conceptual definitions, they're effectively speaking another language in the guise of English.
And hehe @ the programmer/email story.
I find almost anybody who designs something does a similar thing. They create something as experts in one field, then question why it isn't successful. Meantime, they've completely ignored the other factors at play that require experts in other fields. I find usability and inclusivity are most commonly overlooked. The lesson is that we're all specialists, and we are more effective when we make use of the specialty of other people and acknowledge that trying to become "well rounded" is extremely counter productive in terms of utilising human potential and effectiveness. We're much more effective if we acknowledge our specialist focus and sharpen and make use of that intense focus.
Unfortunately people don't see the uniqueness in people. That's why most of our current systems standardise people, damning them to ineffectiveness instead of exponential progression.