Tales from the jar side: Emptying the ocean with a spoon
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of July 7 - 14, 2019. This week I taught several online classes and spent some time talking about modern Java with some "bootcamp" students in downtown Hartford. I'd like to begin this newsletter, however, with an old story that has a couple different endings.
One day a young violinist went to a master (usually in the retelling it's Paganini, but that's not important) and says, "I really love playing the violin, and I would like to do it for a living, but I don't know if I'm good enough to make it. Could you listen to me play and tell me what you think? If you believe I have enough talent, I'll dedicate my life to the violin. If not, I won't waste any more time."
The master agrees and listens to the student play for a few minutes.
There are two separate versions of the story. In one, the master replies, "I'm sorry, but no, you'll never amount to anything." The student goes away saddened, but takes some solace in knowing they avoided years of practice for nothing.
The master's colleague then asks the master, "how could you tell all that from a few minutes of playing?"
The master says, "I couldn't. I tell every student that. If they really have the drive necessary to be successful, they won't listen."
In the other version of the story, the master says, "you absolutely have what it takes. Best of luck to you and I hope to meet you again in concert when you're successful." The student leaves beaming, confident that they are ready to work hard and become a star.
When the master's friend asks the same question this time, the master replies, "I have no idea how they'll do. I tell every student that. Who am I to discourage them?"
As you might expect, I fall very much into the second camp. My job is to help people learn new skills and improve, regardless of their ability. Of course, some start with more skills than others, but I like to believe anyone can learn more than they currently know.
The real problem in the story above is the definition of "success". If the goal is simply to be better than you currently are, then putting in the work always seems like a good idea. Once a journalist asked the famous cellist Pablo Casals, who was over 90 at the time, why he continued to practice the cello for several hours each day.
He replied, "I think I'm improving'.
In every field, the issue of talent versus perseverance comes up. Is success largely a matter of talent, or does hard work and dedication win the day? I like to think your talent level sets the boundaries of what you can accomplish, while focused practice helps you maximize what you have. Basic gifts are certainly important, but they're not everything. I can practice basketball all I want, but I'll never beat LeBron James, who has such physical gifts he would succeed in the NBA on any team in any era. He also has spent years improving himself and his abilities, and as a result he is always in the conversation about the best player in NBA history. Steph Curry, on the other hand, doesn't have the same physical abilities as LeBron and has been underestimated his entire career. He's small (for an NBA player) and slim, and neither the fastest, the quickest, nor the most durable player around, but he combines an incredible work ethic with arguably the greatest shooting eye in NBA history. Put him on the right team, and he's a two-time MVP.
In my Mental Bookmarks and the Fractal Nature of Success talk, I refer to this article about the role of luck in success. The authors define success as the combination of available opportunities to succeed along with the ability to convert those opportunities into successes. The "ability to convert" is where talent, hard work, persistence, dedication, and all the other factors that a person can control come into play. The existence of opportunities is tougher. You can try to maximize them by going where they are, like an actor moving to Los Angeles or New York, or a developer moving to Silicon Valley (or London, or Bangalore, Chennai, or Hyderabad, ...), but even there opportunities are not uniformly distributed, nor are they given out to everyone equally.
Incidentally, practice by itself isn't enough. I once had a golf instructor* tell me that "practice makes permanent; perfect practice makes perfect". There's a whole literature on directed, productive practice focused on the challenging and important parts of whatever you want to learn.
*I've taken two golf lessons in my life. Both helped until they didn't. My level of golf is that if I find as many balls as I lose, I put that round in the win column.
There is so much more I could say about all these issues -- as I say, I have an entire 90 minute talk based on these ideas -- but rather than turn this week's newsletter into a 10,000 word slog, I'll save the rest for later. Instead, I'll mention what reminded me of the subject this week.
I had multiple classes this week. I taught a one-day Reactive Spring course, a one-day What's New In Java course, and a two-day Kotlin for Android course, all online at Safari (the O'Reilly Learning Platform). But in addition to that, I spent two afternoons helping a group of students in Hartford going through a "bootcamp" -- a twelve-week series of courses for career changers, covering everything from front-end development with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to back-end technologies like Java and Spring.
I wasn't formally part of the program, but I wanted to drop by for a couple of reasons. First, I'm probably going to be involved with teaching the next cohort of students, some of whom are in this group now. Second, I met a few of them and the group organizer when I last spoke at the Hartford Java Users Group and was impressed with both the company and how engaged the students were. Next, I discovered that while Java training was part of their program, they weren't covering the functional features, like lambdas, streams, and method references, introduced in Java 8, and I thought that was a mistake. I knew I could cover much of that material in two half-days.
Finally, I have a lot of empathy for career changers. I'm one myself, having switched from engineering research involving math and Fortran to my current Java-based teaching career back in the late 90s. But more than that, every person in my family was a career changer. My father left pharmacy in the military and went to medical school. My mother was a secretary and business major and eventually became a nurse. My sister switched from business to becoming a physical terrorist (her words -- physical therapists have an odd relationship to pain). Even my wife went back to school to become a lawyer. And so it goes.
Kids don't necessarily realize the benefits of continued practice. When you're growing both physically and mentally every year, the gains from that often outweigh any improvements from hard work. It's when you're an adult, and the only way to improve is to work at it, that you start to see how much it helps to keep plugging away at something every day.
I often compare it to emptying the ocean with a spoon. It seems impossible, but if you keep doing it every day, eventually the ocean becomes a lake, and then a pond, and finally a puddle. It can take a long time, but the process works.
Or maybe I'm just all wet (rimshot). I'll let you know the next time I beat LeBron in basketball.
Last week:
Reactive Spring online at Safari
What's New In Java online at Safari
Kotlin for Android online at Safari
The new version of my Kotlin Cookbook finally went live on Safari
This week: