Tag: goals

Published 2021/09/26

Oh, How Your Goals Will Change

There are a few things that have become rote at certain events in our lives.

These events are not guaranteed for every person. However, they have become so embedded in our culture to have becomes almost cliched caricatures of the original meaning and intent. They are as embedded as decorating a tree at Christmas and finding candy-filled eggs at Easter.

Yet when it comes to jobs, making money, and being a professional there are also some tried and true customs.

These aren’t your familial holiday traditions.

100 Posts In: Lessons Learned In Blogging, Engineering, & Life

Published 2021/07/19

100 Posts In: Lessons Learned In Blogging, Engineering, & Life

Ideas are awesome. Ideas are great.

However, ideas don’t pay the bills. Ideas don’t manifest themselves out of thin air, hopes, and dreams.

How often do we have ideas?

MDIs are great. MDI stands for Million Dollar Ideas.

How often do we find ourselves sitting around and some amazing and practical thought worms its way from the back of our heads to a shining spotlight position of prominence right up front?

This would be the type of idea that you find yourself coming back to while sitting around bored. The one that rents space in the back and pops up early and often.

The one that, if implemented and turned into reality, could easily net you at least a million dollars.

How I Read 136 Books In 2019

Published 2020/02/02

How I Read 136 Books In 2019

That is not a typo. Last year I read 136 books throughout the calendar year. This post is not a humble brag. The fact is, reading is an incredibly important skill and should be a part of every human’s daily routine. This is not a statement intended to elicit motivation, or to shame you into reading more. There is only one simple goal with this messaging: Anyone can find the time to squeeze in a little reading every day. The amount that you want or choose to read is up to you. Reading give numerous benefits in cognitive function, mental stimulation, vocabulary and memory improvements, and sometimes you learn a thing or two while doing it. Unfortunately, people are doing less reading now than in the past. An oft-cited study from 2014 states the following: “…young people read less than ever, apparently, with people ages 25 to 34 reading eight…

Blog Updates – Curation & Metrics Edition

Published 2019/12/01

Blog Updates – Curation & Metrics Edition

These past few days have been very exciting for me in regards to the blog and I wanted to comment on some of the things that have been happening for the sake of posterity. The first exciting thing that has happened is that while cross posting some of the posts from the blog on Medium, two of the posts have now been curated on that site! The following screenshots commemorate these posts: The amazing thing about these posts is that I wasn’t trying to be curated or have them highlights on different areas of the site. This is my 41st post on this blog and I am still working on getting my feet under me. I really am not sure that I have this whole thing figured out yet, but as of creating this post I have 335 views across the 9 stories that I have posted to Medium.com. That…

Published 2019/10/24

My 25th Post

Wow – 25 posts already? And not just random junk thrown up. I am happy and proud of each post and the thought and effort that went into each one. So at this point I think it is time to set some more goals! However, my life has changed drastically over the past few weeks and I feel the need to talk about that for a moment. Please bear with me. I would like to take a quick aside from the goals portion for a minute to write something really difficult to write. I have not written much in the past few weeks because I lost my father. This was a sudden even for my entire family and it has been a very rough ride. He always wanted me to be happy. Writing this blog makes me happy. Therefore, I am going to continue writing and building and getting better…

Published 2019/09/27

It’s Project Time!! #Project-WPC

Let’s get this ball rolling. I want to start learning something new, so it is time to create my first project! For some reason when I started thinking about this post this morning the old school Batman TV show (WPC Score: 24) theme song popped into my head. So just because I can, here are the lyrics: Batman, Batman, Batman, Batman!Batman, Batman, Batman!Batman, Batman, Batman, Batman!Batman, Batman, Batman!Batman, Batman, Batman!Batman, Batman, Batman!Batman, Batman, Batman!Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, naBatman! source: https://www.lyricsondemand.com/tvthemes/batmanlyrics.html I would love to know that this has now caused the hopefully dozens of people that might read this to get that tune stuck in their heads… but let’s be realistic here. I am getting old and the population of people that might get this reference is shrinking. *sigh* Oh well – let’s get to the project. This will be the first project…

Published 2019/09/25

#EngineeringMgmt

The next topic to tackle from a post category standpoint is in regards to Engineer Management. This is an important topic for me as it describes what I do every day. My current role has a title of “Director of Engineering”. As someone who leads and manages others, especially Engineers, the role can be fun, exciting, challenging, and sometimes frustrating. I would like to use posts in this category to talk about this role, the methods used, and most likely the many ways that I get things wrong. While looking on Unsplash for a good image to use for this post I came across the puzzle picture above and it jumped out at me as a good talking point. Sometimes managing people and projects can feel like you are trying to complete a puzzle while blindfolded in a dark room and the pile in front of you contains a dozen…

Published 2019/09/23

Patience. Success Takes Time.

This post is being started on Sept 22, 2019. I don’t know when it will be posted live to the site. The idea for this post came to me because I hit a significant milestone this morning. Someone else checked out the blog! At this point, things have been live for just over a full week and in that time I have written and posted 10 posts. Already the process of writing feels easier to me. Part of my process is also to create as many post topics as I can so that I always have some runway for choosing something to think and write about. Be warned – there is no method to this madness and the posts are wide ranging and varied and there is no master plan for targeting some posts and topics above others. In fact, one of the ways that I am trying to set…

Published 2019/09/17

#philosophy, #goals & the Wikipedia Philosophy Challenge

Quick post! I just wrapped up talking about the category tags and realized that I have already created two of them! Therefore I needed a quick post calling them out so that I don’t mess up my goals before I even get going with them. So here we are. As this is a quick post, I will quickly try and define why each of these categories is important to me: #philosophy – these posts are intended to present my philosophy and ideas in a logical manner that explains what they are and why they are important to me. #goals – this posts are a way of calling myself out to hit some targets and expectations in the future. If I am doing this right, then each goal is like a single pass/fail metric that I can revisit and evaluate the outcome in the future. There – short and sweet –…

Published 2019/09/15

Welcome to my Blog!

Welcome, welcome, welcome to the last blog that you will ever want to read! Just kidding, hopefully it is not the last one – maybe it should fall somewhere in the middle somewhere. This is a blog dedicated to Engineering in all shapes, forms, and struts. This is a personal endeavor that I am creating with a few goals in mind. As of September, 2019 these goals include: Learning more about web technologies. This isn’t a diary – blogs by definition are on the web so just by creating it I am building up my own knowledge around web tech. This will allow me to test technology and build, learn, and grow in an area that I want to learn more about Building a professional voice. I am at the point in my career where I have had some wonderful opportunities and worked with some amazing people to create some…