I do a lot of different things. The trouble is that most of them are largely mutually exclusive: doctor of economics, logistics analytics manager, teaching, game design, moral philosophy, medieval martial arts, painting tiny soldiers, etc. I am not sure the career that ties all that together exists yet. There is a common thread, maybe “interest in what humans do”, but admittedly that is a thread rather broadly defined.
Better to look at what I need a blog for.
Firstly, I need a place to write down ideas I teach and new ideas I want to use in teaching, and that place needs to not be a post-it note with what appears to be a fax number written in hieroglyphics written upon it.
Secondly, I need a place to talk through more complicated ideas. My wife and kids only have so much patience for engaging questions of organizational scale within a distributional model of approbation. Writing allows me to more easily synchronize when I have an idea I want to bang around a bit with people’s interest in listening to the resulting clamor.
Thirdly, I need a place that demands a little accountability. Writing an idea out to Word and nestling the file into a crevice in my hard drive is about as useful as writing on that post-it note and nestling it under the layers of sediment on my desk. Both are only slightly better than thinking about the idea for a while then getting some ice cream and watching a video on how to create plasma in your microwave. Having a relationship where I write and some people read creates a reason to get those ideas worked out, written down, and shared where they might serve some good. If only as a cautionary tale.
That’s about the long and the short of it. Thanks for joining me.