Initiative

The professor of my computer architecture class talked about “career-defining moments.” A career-defining moment is when someone in charge points out a need and asks you to do it without making it a requirement, and you say no. It’s not insubordination, but I think his point is that it marks you as someone who is not the go-to person for that thing, which by extension means that when they need something else done, they won’t go to you for that either. You avoid work but also lose out on an opportunity to be seen as someone who adds value to the company. (Of course, if you decline with an explanation that you have a higher-priority thing you need to get done, that’s a different matter, because in theory you are showing that you are doing something even more valuable than what was being suggested.) Anyway, the imagery stuck with me.

A while ago I was mowing the lawn and for some reason I started thinking about the concept, and I came up with a set of categories that rank the ways people tend to approach work. In the interest of saving myself the trouble of having to re-think the matter during a future lawn mowing, I’m writing them down. Note that these apply to pretty much any organization you can think of: family life, careers, church callings, volunteer organizations, whatever.

1.       Initiative. Everyone will love you if you proactively find things that need to be done and then do the work without being asked.

2.       Volunteering. This is when someone else points out a need, and you offer to do it without having to be individually asked. This is almost as good, especially if the leader already has a clear set of goals. The other good thing about this is that if you’re in the habit of volunteering for stuff, you won’t look like a slacker if you keep quiet about an assignment you’d rather avoid : )

3.       Cheerful compliance. This is when a leader gives you a specific assignment, and you agree to do it without causing any trouble. I’m thinking here about my time in an elder’s quorum (that’s a group of men who hold the priesthood). There are lots of assignments that the quorum gets, and various programs you need to implement. You wish people would just volunteer when they were able to do something so you wouldn’t have to go inconvenience people, but that just doesn’t happen. Still, if people would just say yes when given an assignment, leaders wouldn’t really have any room to complain.

4.       Reluctant compliance. This is when you have to be guilted or incessantly reminded before you will follow through on an assignment. No one likes this.

5.       Rebellion. Of course, this is asking for trouble, assuming that the person making the assignment has valid authority in the matter.

So anyway, I have definitely found that the higher levels have more satisfying results, even though they might result in work that you wouldn’t exactly seek out. And if nothing else, I think I’ve managed to avoid any “career-defining moments.”

Video Game Legacy – Crash Course

Due to various factors like getting married and stuff, my relationship with video games has changed a lot in the last several years. I have to carefully prioritize which new games are “must play”, and replaying old ones pretty much doesn’t happen. I haven’t introduced my kids to them, largely because I want them to develop their own imaginations and learn to manage time and stuff first. But I kind of hope they eventually discover the awesomeness of classic video games. The thing is, the games of today just aren’t the same. Even the cool additions to the classic series don’t necessarily capture the nostalgia of the originals.

So how does one introduce a new generation (or interested parties in the current generation) to the legacy of where video games came from? The most straightforward method would be to sit someone down and have him or her play one game after another. But there’s a problem with that, even if you ignore the time it would take and the modern standard for graphics and sound quality: those old games were hard! There’s no way to save in Mario 3, for example. (Of course, there’s the All Stars version, but then you miss out on the old graphics.)

So I had this great idea: I’ll set out a set of “tasks” that someone can go through to get a taste of the stuff that made me love these games, without devoting days of effort and without the frustration of getting past the really hard parts.

The list is on my SkyDrive site. Take a look if you need some cultural enlightenment!

Heroes

I have a quick Easter message. If you think about what it means to be a “hero”, there are a few definitions that come to mind:

1. Someone who displays exemplary qualities.
2. Someone who singlehandedly defeats a universal enemy. This is extremely common in fiction and almost non-existent in real life.
3. The original, Greek definition: Someone with one mortal parent and one immortal one.

The first definition is the most commonly used one, but it’s only meaningful because of the image we have in our minds about the other two. If you try to think of someone who fits all three definitions, you will quickly see that there has only ever been one Hero: Jesus Christ. He possesses all virtues and no faults; He overcame death and hell, alone; and He is the Son of God. What’s even more impressive is that His sacrifice was motivated not just by a sense of what is right, but by a personal concern for each person, individually. It’s really pretty amazing.

Fortune Cookie Morality

For Valentine’s Day at work there was a morale event where they served, among other things, fortune cookies with white frosting and sprinkles. This in itself is a very strange idea, since fortune cookies don’t actually taste good. But what was even more disturbing was the “fortune” I got:

The value lies not within any particular thing, but in the desire placed on that thing.

Okay, first of all, that’s not a fortune. But no fortune cookies have “fortunes” anymore, presumably because they don’t want to get sued by people who follow them. That’s not what’s annoying.

I assume that what they were trying to say was that the amount of value we place on things isn’t necessarily tied to its intrinsic worth – for instance, a diamond ring can’t keep you alive, while food can, but we put more value on the ring.

What we have here is an equivocation – in the literal sense of trying to use two definitions for a word at the same time. The word “value” here carries two different connotations – “perceived value”, or the amount that people value a thing, and “actual value”, the potential benefit a thing can have.

If by “value” the cookie makers mean “perceived value”, then they are not really saying anything at all; they are just stating the definition of “perceived value” – they are saying that perceived value is based on how people perceive something. Duh. That’s so obvious that even fortune cookie designers wouldn’t bother writing it down. So that’s probably not what they meant.

But the only other thing I can imagine they meant was for “value” to mean “actual value”. But then if we use that definition, then what they are actually saying is that perceived value determines actual value. If you believe that, then a car that everyone likes has more worth (actual value) than a person that nobody likes. So with this ostensibly “feel-good” message, you actually end up with an argument that could be used to justify all sorts of horrible acts. And while I don’t think anyone would actually base a moral code on a close inspection of a fortune cookie message, this mentality is actually not that foreign to a lot of modern thinking. You know, the notion that believing something is right makes it right for you.

So who knows – maybe this fortune cookie really is part of a worldwide plot to undermine the moral integrity of humanity. Just in case, please think twice before making a decision based on anything you read in a cheap dessert.

Pluto

When I first heard about Pluto not being called a planet, I didn’t care much, but it did seem like an instance of scientists getting overly picky about technical terms for colloquial concepts. (This happens all the time in biology – like trying to distinguish between “true spiders” and other spiders. Like it matters – they’re all evil monsters [or as my brother would say, “pure darkness”].) But after listening to the professor in one of the introductory astronomy classes I took in college, I’m convinced. It’s not a planet. It shouldn’t be called a planet.

The beginning of the argument is that there are all sorts of icy rocks like Pluto orbiting the sun beyond Neptune (or crossing its path like Pluto does). They have weird orbits and sometimes become comets. Pluto is the biggest of these Kuiper belt objects, but that’s not really that special. What really convinced me, though, is the matter of Ceres. Have you ever heard of the planet Ceres? I didn’t think so. See, a while ago they discovered a big rock between Mars and Jupiter, roughly spherical and maybe even with some atmosphere. They named it Ceres and classified it as a planet. Then they discovered another rock. Then another one. Then another one. And pretty soon it became clear that Ceres didn’t count as a planet because it shared its orbit with all sorts of random little rocks. The fact that Ceres is bigger than the other rocks doesn’t make us want to call it a planet. It has hydrostatic equilibrium (an awesome way of saying that is has enough mass to smash itself into a sphere), but it hasn’t cleared its orbit of similarly-sized objects. So we don’t call it a planet.

The thing is, Pluto is just like Ceres, only a little bigger and a lot farther away. Yes, it has a moon, but so do some asteroids. So unless you want to lobby for calling asteroids “planets”, you pretty much have to accept that Kuiper belt objects don’t count either.

Fun Size

I have recently had an epiphany about fun size candy bars. To my shock, they may not be as bad as they seem.

Of course, like probably every kid who ever had the privilege of eating candy, I was not swayed by the obvious propaganda of calling smaller packaging “fun size.” Not only do you get less candy per package, but you also have thinner chocolate walls on the candy bars. This was of particular interest to me, since I tend to eat candy bars in pieces, isolating as much chocolate as I can, leaving the inner layers to also be eaten separately. (Of course, on some bites I’ll get all layers at once, for variety.)

My wife, on the other hand, prefers the fun or even mini size of certain candy bars, due to the proportions. And I’m starting to see her point. They’re definitely not just smaller; they really do have significantly different proportions of chocolate, caramel, nougat, etc. And if you think about it, the question never was about amount per package. If someone gives you a “fun size” candy bar, it’s not like they were going to give you a bigger one and then just changed their mind. If it wasn’t the fun size candy bar, it would have been some other small thing, or nothing at all. And if you are buying a package, you can get a few large items or many small ones. It’s about amount per volume, or per dollar, not per package.

So to my shock, I suppose I must admit that the term “fun size” might be more than just blatant propaganda. (It’s blatant propaganda also, of course. But maybe not just that.)

The Christmas [Blank]

You know how there are a zillion Christmas movies, books, and TV specials with titles like “The Christmas” plus something else? It occurred to the authors that the formulas used in these stories could probably be applied – or shattered – using just about any noun in a title like that. So we came up with a new tradition.

The rules are simple:

1. Open a Christmas book and point to a random spot on a random page.
2. Scan along the text until you come to a noun.
3. Write that story.

So a few of us did this last December, and I finally have them formatted and published as a free e-book.

This collection currently contains three entries:
* The Christmas File: a pseudo-romantic pseudo-drama
* The Christmas Hamburger: a children's story
* The Christmas Head: A brilliantly weird picture book... I don't know how else to describe it.