It is more than a little difficult to believe that the year is almost over. It has been busier than I expected, and it has gone faster than I can imagine. It has been a year of successes and challenges, for me and others. What I’ve done, what I hope to do, and what I hope for everyone else.
Doing The Work We Were Meant To Do
We want to do good work. We aspire to do amazing, transcendent work. That doesn’t happen very often. When it does happen, it is very good indeed. What is critical is recognizing what allows us to actually do it.
First, Do No Harm
We shape our own existence, and we define our own experience. While that might not be a popular sentiment, it’s no less real nor true. The biggest challenge is that we are often fundamentally aware of the underlying beliefs that create our experience. If we want to make a difference in the world, we may first need to make a difference in ourselves.
Cognitively Curious
When most of us think about artificial intelligence or machine learning, it’s in the context of computers taking over. There’s a very different view, that puts us in the driver’s seat. Insights from the bleeding edge of cognitive computing.
Constructive Feedback & Choosing To Be Better
Feedback and criticism are generally seen as negative. We don’t like it, we get defensive and we very often resist it. That deflection is often our brains looking for the easy way out. And it’s arguably keeping us from doing our best work.
Simple Is Hard. It Is Also Essential.
How we deal with complex problems is challenging. Our minds evolved to take shortcuts and make things easy. There is a lot of danger in doing so when we confront truly difficult situations. We need to find simple—but not simplistic—ways of communicating complex and complicated relationships and information.