From emv@umich.edu Fri May 14 02:34:44 1999 Date: Fri, 14 May 1999 02:06:18 -0400 (EDT) From: Edward Vielmetti To: vacuum@egroups.com Subject: [vacuum] creative problem solving; "joy of not working" Welcome to Vacuum! Especial welcome this issue to the various people who've stumbled across the new "weblog" version of Vacuum, at http://vacuum.mi.org/weblog.html which is where I've been capturing new links and other ephemera that are worth sharing but that I'm hesitant to just blast out to individual email boxes on the grounds that our inboxes are too full already. So if you want to see what's been in my inbox lately, check there when you get an issue. I'll save the mailing list for opinion & commentary & what not that I actually write. The changing world of work (continued) -------------------------------------- I'm trying to keep noticing how work is changing out from under us all. A few observations. If you make a concerted effort to work with and go into business ventures with friends, that's called networking. If other people do it and you're excluded, that's called cronyism. The fine line I guess is if you feel the sting of being turned down not because of anything you know or are capable of doing but just because your social network doesn't overlap properly with the person with the power to hire. It can take a substantial commitment of time and resources to build up a social network that turns out results in the form of opportunities, news, and insights into what all is going on. If your work is changing from week to week or from month to month you might never get a chance to build those kind of relationships and loyalties at work, even if you want to. Every time I go to Silicon Valley (I'm here now for another couple hours) I realize how weird a place it is, how much I like being here, and how much I like leaving once I've had my fill. I picked up a totally subversive book called "The Joy of Not Working", http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0898159148/tubed written by Ernie Zelinski, a happily unemployed fellow in Canada. He talks about how to make the best of your non-working hours, how to plan to quit your job if you don't like what it's doing to your life, and how to brainstorm ideas about what to do when you do have free time in a busy schedule. There's a "mind map" in the middle of the book as an exercise that I did on spending your free time: doing now - - used to like \ / leisure --- travel / \ want to start - - fitness Every so often I go through an exercise that says "if I were going to be doing something totally different that what I'm doing now, what would it be?" On the airplane here I started to worth through the notion of going into business selling used books, with the notion that I would specialize in one or two very narrow areas, assemble a great inventory of all the books anyone would possibly want to read in those fields, and then offer a lending library service so that people could read stuff without actually needing to buy it at full price. Can't even imagine making enough money doing it to live any kind of lifestyle, but it's an appealing notion at the moment. You can see the start of a reading list at http://vacuum.mi.org/books.html of course it's tiny beyond belief at the moment but as I have time and energy I'm trying to fill it in. Creative problem solving ------------------------ The latest book binge is on creativity. It's inspired by a very good web site and online conference that Right Brain Works http://www.gocreate.com is running, plus a small library of creative problem solving books and references I've been accumulating over the years. Can you teach people to be creative? Well, I'd hope so. Every indication is that schools with their narrow batteries of standardized tests don't do much to measure, reward, or foster creativity, and often times the creative impulse at work gets squashed by the need to follow procedures, fill quotas, or behave enough like your peers that you don't get singled out too much. So if you're going to learn creativity or have it taught to you it'll be necessary to pursue it outside of the mainstream of activities. I was lucky growing up to have several decades worth of old Scientific American magazines in the basement, in which I avidly read Martin Gardner's _Mathematical Games_ columns. The math curriculum is so heavily aimed at building basic arithmetic skills that it hardly finds any time for doing anything out of the ordinary, and reading about puzzles, strange geometries, paper folding exercises, and more other things that I can remember made for great fun. The columns have been collected into books - not quite the same as waiting a month or two for the answers, but still good - are somewhere hiding on some bookshelf in the U.P. I bet they're still there. (later) I wish I could give good examples of problems I've creatively solved recently. Alas I'm in need of working on some of those skills at the moment. The network engineering work that I do lends itself to the frontal assault approach and not as much the "Aha!" approach - too many gears and levers and wheels spinning, not enough words. (shrug) thanks Ed Edward Vielmetti / emv@umich.edu / evielmet@cisco.com Home office: +1 734 332 7868 (with answerphone that pages me) Vacuum: http://vacuum.mi.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------ @Backup - The #1 Online Backup Service Automatic, Safe, Reliable Backup and Restores. FREE for 30 Days. INSTALL Now and have a chance to win a Palm Pilot V! http://clickhere.egroups.com/click/218 eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/group/vacuum http://www.eGroups.com - Simplifying group communications