I recently read Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (very good book) and one of the things it talks about is “The Curse of Knowledge” basically what this means is that once you know (understand) something it becomes very hard to imagine not knowing and it is very difficult to explain to other people. So your own knowledge will prevent you from being able to communicate effectively.
A few days ago I realized something. Some years ago I used to work on the Services department in my company (implemented solutions for our clients) and as such as I was primary contact with the client, when ever a customer reported a bug in our software I would go an determine if the problem was with our implementation (developed by my team) or with the core product (developed by the product team). If the problem was on our side we would fix it if not typically we would pass it on the development team to get a fix.
Every once in a while the development team was too busy to respond quickly so I would step in and debug in order to get a quicker turn around on the fix. And what we noticed was that I was able to find and fix bugs quicker than the development team. Eventually when the development team would get stuck on an obscure bug they would ask me to look at it and more often than not I was able to figure where the problem was happening.
I believe that the reason why I think I was able to fix the bugs quicker was not that I was a better programmer than the development team, but that I was not as familiar as they were with the code so I did not have any preconceptions as to what the code actually did, in order to find the bug I would have to step into and take a close looks at each line of code, which gave me better coverage.
The guys on the development team on the other hand would usually skip over huge chunks of code because they knew the code and had preconceived ideas as to where to bug was. They would do this several times until they would start questioning their assumptions as to how things worked. Meanwhile I not being burdened with the knowledge of how things were supposed to work would find have to figure it out from scratch. So instead of assuming how it was supposed to work I would see how it actually worked and that made all the difference.
Another strange phenomenon that probably most programmers are familiar with is spending hours (or days) looking at the same 10 lines of code only to have some one glance over our shoulder and instantly point out the problem I can’t help but wonder if this is also due to the “Curse of Knowledge”.
I guess the moral of the story is that is too easy to fall into the “Curse of Knowledge” so we should try to abandon our preconceptions and attack each problem with an open (ignorant) mind.
Another one of the points that they made in the book is that a story is stickier (more memorable) than just the facts. I hope this story helps the point “stick”
Here are a few interesting links
The official Made to Stick site.
An interview with the authors at Guy Kawasaki’s blog.
View Made to Stick on FORA.tv Chip Heat (one of the Authors of the book) talking about the book
Written by Carlos on May 11th, 2007 with 1 comment.
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A friend send me link to this a very interesting presentation by Steve Wozniak, he was talks about his book iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. I have to get a copy.
Written by Carlos on April 24th, 2007 with no comments.
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I’ve been a fan of Guy Kawasaki for along time, I remember reading about him in the late 80’s while he was at Apple, I friend gave me a copy of The Macintosh Way and have fond memories of the book (no idea what happened to my copy). I should mention that i have never owned a Mac (or any Apple product for that matter) but have always liked Apple, it seems they are always up to something.
Guy is now a managing director at Garage Technology Ventures a Technology VC. I daily read his blog, it has been consistently a good source of interesting information. Reading his blog took me to TED which is now one of my favorite sites.
I recently re read How to Drive Your Competition Crazy: Creating Disruption for Fun and Profit and it seems that each time I read it I pick up a something I had previously missed.
Here is a Google video on The Art of the Start it is very good presentation and it has lot of tips for entrepreneurs (I have not read the The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything book yet but it is on my list).
Written by Carlos on April 23rd, 2007 with no comments.
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I just started reading Stupid, Ugly, Unlucky and Rich: Spike’s Guide to Success, very good reading so far, The author, Richard St. John did over 500 interviews asking successful people what helped them become successful. After all the interviews he came up with a list of the top 8 factors that can help you achieve success.
The top 8 Factors are
- Passion love what you do
- Work work Hard to achieve your goals
- Focus Concentrate on one thing
- Push Sometimes you need a little push
- Ideas all it takes is one good idea.
- Improve always keep improving
- Serve provide others with a service they require.
- Persist don’t give up, keep trying.
Here is a video presentation at TED where Richard St. John describes the 8 factors in 3 minutes http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/70 strangely enough I ran into this video a couple of days after I ordered the book.
Written by Carlos on April 22nd, 2007 with no comments.
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I’ve been looking for a new project to try on my spare time. And I figured a blog would be a good idea. It would give me an opportunity to share some ideas, keep in touch with friends (and maybe even release a little steam).
The other day I was having dinner with my wife at Red Robin and I mentioned that I was having a hard time coming up with name for this site, and how excited I was to actually start doing. She said “Don’t worry, You’ll think of something”,
As we were leaving the restaurant I saw a sign that said “our word is Unbridled”, I quickly realized the name I what I looking for.
My Unbridled Enthusiasm
I hope this will be good start.
Written by Carlos on April 21st, 2007 with no comments.
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