Great Talk: Amy Cuddy’s Power Poses

I find it really interesting how our body language shapes how other people perceive us and how we perceive ourselves. Amy Cuddy explains in this TED talk how testosterone levels rise and cortisol levels drop when we stand in what she calls powerful poses. Remember this at your next job interview, presentation, or at the car salesman etc.:

The 10,000 Hour Rule and Bill Joy

After finishing Seth Godin’s great book Tribes I started on Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers – The Story of Success. So far there have been a lot of very surprising conclusions and as a computer scientist my favorite story was about Bill Joy and how he got his 10,000 hours of coding.

The 10,000 hour rule is that to become an expert of something you have to do it for somewhere around 10,000 hours. Bill Joy got a lot of his 10,000 hours at a time-share terminal at the University of Michigan. He didn’t apply to Michigan because of the recently build datacenter, but got into programming when he tried it. And then he moved on to write BSD Unix (part of the most advanced OS today: Mac OSX), the vi editor, the c shell, and co-founded Sun Microsystems.

I hadn’t programmed for real until I started at the University of Linköping and the first programming course in Ada. Since then I have been programming in everything from assembler to Obejctive-C and I am on my way to my 10,000 hours.

How do you plan to get your 10,000 hours in the thing you feel motivated to do? How do you become an expert in your field? How do you contribute to EXCELLENCE?

Don’t Manage – Lead

As I wrote a couple of days ago I’m currently reading Seth Godin’s Tribes and what Godin argues is that it is very important to lead not manage and that there is no easy shortcut to leading a tribe. The following quote can be found on page 108 of Tribes and I just love it:

I’ve been waiting for you to ask for the shortcut, the error-free, failure-free way to get people to do what you want, to make change happen without risk or fear, to magically alter the status quo. That, after all, is the best way to sell you on the ideas here. If I could just give you the answer, you’d be leading a tribe right now.

The honest answer is: There isn’t an easy way. It isn’t easy for middle managers or CEOs or heretics. The truth is that they appear to risk everything, but in fact, the risk isn’t so bad. The downsides are pretty small because few of us are likely to get burned at the stake.

The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there.

People will follow.

Be Flexible

It is always nice to really master something. Know every detail of a programming language, be the Usain Bolt of a sport or just do something else that really is perfection in some form.

The sad fact is that you may never be the best at anything and if you try to aim for perfection in several areas you are almost certain to fail in all of them.

So you can start by prioritising your time and resources to a limited area of expertise that will enhance your abilities on this particular field of interest or you can embrace your flexibility.

More and more often you have to think out of the box to solve complex problems – may it be a work situation, study problem or something else. These problems demand flexibility, the ability to take the problem to another context and perspective.

Although I know and love a Unix based machine with an emacs application running as the primary editor I will always know that my time working on a PC with Windows won’t be a waste because of the flexibility I earn.

Another example is a Mac laptop which got a US keyboard. This is very convenient for many purposes but still a bit hard to get used to. It gets even worse when I use my external keyboard which is completely different by design and I get headaches every time I shift keyboard strategy. Even though we know that we are probably not as productive without our favourite configurations, just try to be flexible. It will pay off in the long run.

A Good Gift

When I returned back home to Denmark today Anders had sent a belated birthday present. He had sent two books from Amazon: Tribes by Seth Godin and Branding Yourself by Deckers and Lacy. Giving a book is different from giving any other gift. By giving a book you give the receiver a possibility to learn something for life. And that beats everything.

Express Yourself Without Ambiguity

At the department of Computer Science we are developing a compiler for a subset of the grant java-language.
One of the phases that a compiler should pass through is parsing the input from the user.
When parsing, the input must be unambiguous, which means that you have to create grammar that can resolve the input.

Unless you make the right adjustments to the grammar of arithmetics, the expressions can easily lead to ambiguity:

1 + 4 / 5 can generate two results 1 and 9/5, unless you have actually implemented precedence of division and factorization. (syntax diagram for arithmetic expressions).

So what is the point here: Well, we’ve got this fine grammar describing the language that we are speaking, writing and reading.

The problem is that the expressions we use contains ambiguity. Even a single misplaced comma can alter a sentence to mean something completely different.

You create expressions all the time in your mails, instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook etc.

Just the other day I recieved a mail from a client that capitalized every other sentence and had a heavy use of exclamation marks. The mail was written in a calm and polite tone, but I could not help myself feeling shouted at every time I read a capitalized sentence or exclamation mark.

Use the grammar and express yourself in a language with care especially if you are communicating with strangers. They don’t know you and your nature. Use the grammar, the common communication platform to take the communication to the next level.

Memories and Stories

I am going to my 10th year public school reunion this evening. And I am really looking forward to sharing memories and hearing all the other’s stories. A lot has happened in 10 years. I’ve went to three different schools since then (boarding school (efterskole), high school, and university). I’ve learned to code entire systems at the same time as learning to stand on my own two legs. Especially the last five years in Sweden at LiU have taught me a lot about solving problems, acquiring experiences with different tools, that help solve problems more easily, and gained the maturity and confidence to start my own business together with Anders. I am really proud and pleased to have come this far in 10 short years. I look forward to tonight and sharing my story and listening interested to the other stories and learn how their experiences have formed their lives. And then in 15 years time we will probably be able to share even more stories and memories.

Lectures and C++

Guest Speaker today at Aarhus University was Peyman Afshani. Well known for his research on computational geometry. This was indeed a very motivating talk giving me plenty of opportunities to apply my newly gained knowledge in algebra in a discrete world of floats and doubles. Many of the problems was very easy to understand and to solve with math using the real numbers. But suddenly when you want to calculate on computers the using float arithmetics basic operations like =,+,- suddenly becomes nontrivial.

However, when using computational geometry one of the main parts was linear programming (used fx in optimization problems) we could suddenly exploit the fact that a plane and a point is actually the same representation in a computer. The point is (x,y) and a plane Y=aX+b. Computers just store the structures (x,y) and (a,b). This property is indeed very useful and closely related to the principle of duality. The point is that working in many dimensions demands a lot of computer power, but exploiting this principle actually means that you can calculate everything as it was in 2 dimensions.

The lecture ended with a nice surprise. It was announced that in about two weeks one of the great danish scientists Bjarne Stroustrup is visiting our university and will give a lecture about his programming language C++.

This journey is 1 percent finished!?

After a whole lot of algebra and working with matrices in the math department I found time to squeeze in a lecture about Facebook. During the one-hour talk two missionaries from Facebook tried to preach about the great company. I was not surprised to hear about the flat structure of the company and the environment which, according to the two speakers, was very irreverent and relaxed supporting innovative thoughts and creative ideas. Another great thing about Facebook is the openness. The speakers proclaimed that all members sat in one big open room working on the projects and discussing their work. Even Marc Zuckerbergs own conference room had glass walls which enables every other coworker to see what was going on at the meetings. No secrets. This kind of company structure transparency is indeed a great property and it is even more outspoken when they are unveiling balance sheets like this one.

Facebook tries to convince everybody that they are only one percent finish. I think they know that they have to get more innovative and creative in order to keep the market share and that is why they turn to the universities to find the bright, young men and women. But is it too late? Maybe Facebook is 99 percent done and they already had their era and new communication applications will take over.

Anyway, the lecture ended with the speakers offering a link to a puzzle that you should solve in order to qualify to the internship this summer. You get 60 minutes to prepare a solution on a completely unknown problem and upload it. I will do it this weekend just for the fun of it and see what kind of skills it takes to be a part of one of the biggest companies in the world that is only one percent finished?