The Nicolas Cage Effect

First off, in my real life, I sell myself off as a programmer, mostly because it would be too hard to self my real skills most any other way.  But I often find that people do not really think of programmers as real people, but merely as interchangeable cogs in a semantic way.  Here is my latest way to explain it:

Image you are a producer or director of movies.  A hot new script has landed on your lap - it is a recently found Shakespearean play and you own the rights!  Who is the first person you think to cast in it?  Nicolas Cage?  Probably not - probably a well known Shakespearean actor, even if you had to dig one up.

A second hot script lands on your lap - this one is an action movie with a quirky main character...  Nicolas Cage and you have a blockbuster on your hands, my friend.

So, say you have Nic's contract in your hot little hands, what do you do with him?  You know he is the only one for certain roles - you can see it in your mind's eye.  If you image casting him in other less Nic-like movies, you can also image not being successful in the movie industry and being drummed out of town like a common pygmy.  If you casted Nic in the Shakespearean movie and it bombed, would you blame Nic?  No, he is an expert at being Nicolas Cage in movies, so you would be the fool for miscasting.

Now, apply this to programmers.  I'm an expert in my field.  People see my resume and want me on their team.  Once hired, they try to cast me as a generic programmer, "It is code, why can not any programmer knock any piece of code out of the park, monkey boy?  And being a name in the industry, we expect you to excel at any piece of code we throw at you - you are The Edward!"  But really, it is the Nicolas Cage Effect.

Just because one is very good at something, extrapolating that something out to the most generic definition just screams of General Semantic errors.  It is like call certain things "junk food", the word "food" is there, so therefore I can use it as a substitute for the general class of foods.  If you are looking for Nicolas Cage and need Nicolas Cage and use him in a Nicolas Cage kind of way, I smell the sound of success!  If not...  doom!

The Edward

More than you can imagine...

There is a song that I enjoy listening to (adding my list of favorite videos on the right side of this blog got me thinking about music) called Less Talk More Rokk by Freezepop.  Very cool song that was featured in Guitar Hero.  Every time I hear the song though, I have to laugh because of this line "We're dancing like we've never danced before."

I'm never quite sure what they mean in that line:  1) the music was so motivating that the skill level displayed in their dancing had so far exceeded their past performances that it was worthy of mentioning, or 2) the music was so kick-ass that it stunned them, frying their brains to the point that their motions were that of someone trying to dance for the first time in their lives ever only to flail around looking like idiots.  I picture the second one, hence the laugh... though, since I already had stated that I laughed, the second one was probably implied.  Or maybe I was laughing at the dual nature of the sentence, in general?

Which leads to having more fun than you can imagine.  Does this new sentence imply that I am having so much fun that it is overwhelming to others, or that everyone else would perceive me as having a small amount of fun but your lack of imagination is so great is it more than you could possibly fit into your head?

Today is the greatest day of your life!  It implies that today will be better than any other day you have experienced so far.  But most people also assume it implies better than any future days as well, hence "best".  But, it could also mean not only will today be the best so far, you will also die today, therefore making it the best, not just "the best so far."

I hope all your dreams come true!

The Edward

Wrong Map

I started reading "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" the other day, something I've put off for 20-ish years, and found something interesting.  Lately, I've become very frustrated with aspects of my Life, but I couldn't come up with a "Why".  The more I ventured out, the more I saw what was wrong with The World, so the more I wanted to stay inside and avoid it.  But within the first few chapters of the book, the author talked about inward vs outward focus, which caused me to change the way I see the world - I realized that I had the wrong map!  And all it took was someone outside of me to tell me that!

As I am fond of thinking of saying, "The map is not the territory."  I would look around me all day long and ask myself "Why?", though usually with more exclamation points.  "Why did that person cut me off on the highway, couldn't they see that if they made some minor change, all of us could have gotten to our destinations faster?"  "Why did that person just do X, when clearly doing Y would have helped not only themselves, but everyone else involved?", would be a good summary.  Why, why, why - that was my day.  I wasn't get any answers, and it was getting very frustrating, because I love answers.  I mean, who doesn't?  Answers tell us everything!

After reading the part of the book I've read so far, I understood the source of my frustration - the wrong map.  In my mind, I had a Perfect Map.  If everyone behaved logically and for the best interest of all involved, things would go this way or that, but things didn't go that way.  As perfect as I thought my map was, it didn't show me reality, only what I wanted reality to be - my perfect version of it.  Kind of the point of this blog - things I do not understand about the world around me, because I couldn't match it to a place on my map.  My map was like an RPG vs real life - very clean and pristine vs dirty and ugly, kind of how I view The World vs the world.

When driving down the streets to "work", I used to notice all of the idiotic maneuvers of cars around me, because my map had these events highlighted as Points of Interest.  People who were rude to me, people who cut me off in line, the power going out in my house, my furnace not work - all of these things were labelled on my map as "Come See the Exciting Roadside Dinner - everything you want to see is right here!  Now with Extra Gravy!"

So, now I see The World differently!  I realize that there are two ways to go from here:  1) change my map to better match reality, or 2) get a bulldozer and take reality to task, remold the world to be what my map says it should be.  All of these choices that I suddenly have!

So far, I've been trying out step one - removing things from my map, change it to better match my surroundings, etc, and it has been working.  I can drive to work and still be happy.  The question is, will I continue down this path, or try out path two - I do love a good experiment...

The Edward