I wrote a basic information security policy at work and figured the public might get something out of how to protect themselves using a minimum of effort.
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I wrote a basic information security policy at work and figured the public might get something out of how to protect themselves using a minimum of effort.
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(Short posts are small pieces of info that resemble, you know, what blogging was supposed to be like.)
Diversity (of all forms) is valuable for a lot of reasons both locally (disrupting status quo) and globally (equality), but I’d like to quickly note one reason I think diversity is important that goes underappreciated.
If you are a master at Task X and someone else in your company is also a master at Task X, you might think that is redundant, and it is. But what isn’t redundant are the paths you took to get to there, most likely, and the further divergent they are, the more value you can extract.
Example: In most things in my career, I am informally educated. I studied mostly economics and philosophy formally in college; everything else I learned on my own through self-study, on-the-job learning, mentorship, and so forth.
This is not true about many people I hire. Many of them took engineering, biomechanics, and kinesiology classes in college. Some of them took biomechanics classes and worked in a lab, so they understand both the theory and the practice behind motion capture and reporting behind it.
However, I built my own lab years ago and assembled my current one with zero college education on the topic. How I got to the same understanding as people who work under me took a much different path, and when we run into roadblocks, our differing viewpoints on how we got there allow us a diverse set of ways to attack the problem.
If everyone learned how to become a master at Task X using the same roadmap, it would be hard to find people that stood out as problem-solvers in unknown situations. It would be randomly distributed according to some nebulous problem-solving ability; perhaps IQ would play a role here.
But if you have people who do similar things but in diverse ways, people naturally think about the problem differently, which enables you many pathways to solve problems.
I can speak for myself and my company: Having a good spread of classically educated people in addition to self-starters with little formal education has been a major boon to our productivity and creativity, as people can learn from each other on why they think differently, and incorporate a little from each side themselves.
The same is true about socioeconomic backgrounds, experiences in life, etc, etc, which can all map to racial diversity, gender diversity, and many other types of diversity. Your upbringing forms much of how you think about the world, learn, and attack problems, and having a swiss army knife of variable tools is far more valuable than a homogenous set of screwdrivers.
Common wisdom before acting is to listen to everyone, to gather feedback, and take it all in since all voices matter. There’s only one real problem with this.
Nothing you do will be enough to silence every critic.
The Criticism Waterfall is when the same group of people or different groups continue to lob critiques of who you are and how you go about your business no matter what incremental improvements you make.
I’ll give two examples.
#1: Driveline Baseball and our training methodologies.
And on, and on, and on. It simply doesn’t matter what you do, there will always be detractors.
Another example.
#2: Trevor Bauer’s MLB Career, circa 2013
It simply doesn’t matter what you accomplish.
So, what can you do about it?
Educated people say things like:
The issue is that all of that takes time, effort, and resources. All which are better spent on work, rather than confusing yourself.
I suggest you do what many of the greatest thinkers do, which is to develop strategies and theories based around First Principles and to ignore 99% of criticism and feedback. When you can design a system and see your goals based from the ground up, you know what it should look like and the path you must take to get there.
Example: Elon Musk likes this strategy for helping to design and develop propulsion for SpaceX. What do we really know about the physics of this world? What will it take to escape gravity? How do we do it now? Why do we do it that way? What steps can be optimized given advances in technology and knowledge? Etc, etc.
You ask questions over and over, questions to yourself that you must be exhaustively analytical about, brutally honest on, and think deeply while documenting it somewhere.
And once you have truly tested yourself and analyzed things from the ground up, you have a path to start. Alone. [0]
From there, it’s pretty simple. Perhaps Richard Feynman’s best and most applicable formula was designed to put this kind of thinking into action once you have passed the First Principles stage:
Richard wasn’t joking when he said this. If you take it to heart, you might realize the inherent power in the simple three steps he outlines.
Ultimate confidence comes from knowing you are right because you are your worst opponent when you need to be. Listening to people who will never amount to anything and will die nameless is a waste of your time, and only serves to seed doubt in your mind.
Be convicted in your decisions. Act with confidence. This cannot come from taking advice from others who have no skin in the game. It can only come from within.
[0]: This is not to say that having a partner is bad. Almost all good entrepreneurs agree you need one to call bullshit and to help you. But you do not need crowd-sourced ideas. Most of the time, your mom doesn’t have anything to help you with your business idea unless you are having a crisis of character. In which case, talk to your mom. Most other times, though, just know what you need to do. And when you need to know something, unreliable narrators (people) generally only serve to confuse you.A fitting rebirth to the blog.
Let’s start off with what Driveline Baseball is not.
Driveline Baseball is not
No, it’s both more complex and more simple.
Driveline Baseball is a company that seeks to employ a diverse staff full of misfits, has-beens, sufficiently angry, creative, and stubborn people who are simply tired of the status quo and want to pursue excellence in everything we do.
All we want to do is to pursue excellence in everything baseball at the highest level.
I think we will do it. We are already well on our way to the goals above.
I know we will do everything we can to get there, and bring people on who want that and only that.
The future of Driveline Baseball belongs to the motivated individuals who have the deep, slow-burning fire inside them that can only be created with enough exposure to the inefficiencies and stupidity of the game as it is constructed, and wants to join a staff full of like-minded individuals who have a major goal in their life that also coincides with the goals of the company.
Oh yeah, and we compete fiercely internally and externally.
That’s who we are. If that’s you, we’re always looking for new people to bring on if they meet the continually-raising standard of employment here. Just because someone earned a job title doesn’t give them the right to keep it forever. There is no garbage time at Driveline Baseball. We will find the right role for you and work our asses off to fit you into the right spot to make you productive.
But we won’t tolerate average work.
I’m looking for above-average workers and I’m willing to overlook all the things that corporate America deems important [0] to get it.
So let’s do this thing.
[0]: Sense of style, deference to authority, proper etiquette, and other eyewash things that simply don’t define who a productive employee, manager, or partner can be.