Discipline

It looks like the discipline is starting to pay off.  Although it doesn’t seem like it now, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and that light is not a train.  I’m on day two of waking up at 5:45, and making progress through the ICND 2 book.  I need to get me a new set of headphones and microphones so I can go back to my recording.  But that’s not going to happen right now.  I’m not broke, but I’m not going to push the envelope with useless purchases.  Anything I get right now either has a need right now or it doesn’t get purchased. 

On the plus side, I won’t have Internet at the house until the first.  How can that be a plus side?  Simple… very few distractions.  If you have no distractions, you get done what you need to do unless your brain is just jumping through crazy that day.  I’ve had those days.  But with a lack of TV and Internet, it hasn’t been as bad.  I guess I feel less stressed when I don’t have either.  Kind of cool, actually. 

I’ve always wanted to learn a new language, so I’ve started on that as well.  I think maybe my brain wants to do eighteen different things, and if I ignore it for too long, it becomes obsessive about whatever it is I’m trying to ignore.  So what I’m going to do is simply give it what it wants the first 20 minutes of my day.  I’m probably looking at 20 minutes a day, 5 days a week, for 20 weeks.  We’ll see how far I’ve made it then.  Could be amazing.  Could be nothing.  I have also found that something with interaction first thing in the morning works a lot better than reading dense material about PVST+ or other mind-bogglingly wonderful concepts.  Sure, Spanning Tree Protocol is awesome in practice, but reading about it is about as interesting as pulling teeth. 

I still keep looking into methods to learn faster and retain information better.  I haven’t made any progress, as I’ve not really bought any books as of late.  But I’m starting to look.  I think it was Jim Quick who said “There’s no such thing as a good learner and a bad learner.  There is only a trained and untrained mind.”  And that resonated with me fairly deeply, as I’ve spent a lot of time studying to not remember a single bit of what I studied. 

So what I know is that what I’m doing isn’t working, yet I’m continuing to do the same thing, over and over again.  

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting to get a different result. 

It’s about time to jump off the insanity treadmill.

Changes in scenery

I was going to write something about "The Millionaire Next Door", but I'm not going to do that.  I don't know what to say that hasn't already been said.   At the moment, I'm going to write about "Man of Valor" by Richard Exlev.   And I think before I fall off a cliff again, I'm going to go back to something I was doing that seemed to be helping me, despite the anger from my wife. 

I think I need to relearn discipline, because it seems to be slipping back and forth and in and out, and I'm not achieving what I want to achieve.  The subtle spastic-ness that always jumped into my life is returning, and I'm skipping between subjects like a squirrel on crack.   Five minutes on this subject, two minutes on this other one.   A minute here.  A minute there.   A start to this project, and an attempt to learn that subject.  

But in the end, it's all been spent time without anything gained.  No real jump in knowledge or intelligence.  No true growth.   As I was saying, I've been reading "Man of Valor" as a chapter a day devotional with the knowledge that my life needs something that I'm missing.  I don't know what, but I know where to look.  I'm just not spending the time and doing the looking in the way that I should. 

We moved from our old one bedroom apartment to a three bedroom duplex separated by the car port.  We have our own yard, and space for everyone.  We still have no Internet, as that hasn't been set up yet.  I would have expected better service as I told someone on Monday when we were moving Friday.  But the person I told was on vacation.  So it has been almost a week long respite from the normal cares of day to day life.  The only connection to the outside world right now is my iPhone and our various trips into town.   I say "into town" because we're about 10 miles outside of town on old military base housing.  It's actually kind of a neat neighborhood, if you aren't quite ready to buy.

Day by day, "Man of Valor" is providing a different way of looking at life.  And one of things it talks about that I know I'm missing right now is discipline.  Discipline is the key to all of it, and I should have learned that in the military.  It was always the basis of everything we did.  There was no "other thing" unless there was first discipline.  But how hard is it to do any of it?  None at all.  It just has to be done. 

"The Millionaire Next Door" also talks about discipline, but as a means of a case study.  The people in the book were described as disciplined and fearless.  The only fears the entrepreneur seemed to have was of things they couldn't control.  But isn't that my real problem: a degree of fear?  Because I'm pushing myself towards an end goal with the hope that something will break and change, but is that really what's going to happen?  Are my fears justified: I can see what just two or three months of hard discipline is going to produce, but do I want to do it?  Am I going to have to take this road alone, or can I drag my wife, kicking and screaming, down the path with me. 

Because I'm really tired of going it alone and having to drag people along. 

Victory (for a while)

After months and months of fighting, it seems like things are starting to turn around.  Long term following of the budget has cleared a path and led to growth.  Everything I have asked for has been received, and moving is going to be a pleasure and not a risk.   

It’s a difference, when the fight seems all but won.  But it’s not over yet.  Just a brief reprieve.  There will be more fight later.  But not quite yet.  It’s time for an easy fight.  Congratulations on your success, but don’t rest on your laurels.  The fight will continue again…  just wait.  

edumacation

Let’s ignore the busyness for a bit.  Let’s talk about learning again.  I could complain about working 60 hours a week, but that is a waste of time.  It sounds like the petulant griping of a two year old.  So let’s ignore that.   I got distracted this morning before work by this Forbes article.    Or more appropriately, I was distracted by the implications.  I find my problem isn’t the ability to read quickly, it’s the ability recall what I have read.   But my definition of “quickness” is pathetic in comparison.  I’ve spent a decent amount of time learning how to augment my memory using technology because I’m operating off a false premise. 

I’m not terribly good at memorizing.  Facts, figures, numbers… all lost to me.  But those are what I need.  And if I recalled 1/3 of what I read the first time, I wouldn’t wake up early in order to learn more to move on and do better.   I’d be spending the time sleeping, and enjoying myself.  So I think my next educational thought is not what I need to learn.  It’s to learn how to learn.  And at 33, it’s about damn time I learned how to learn. 

Store Production

Back to working on building another store.  What we've got here is a behind the cash register look.  

Note the shelf sitting in there.  That's where all the magic happens, really.   Those shelves are added after market, and are generally set to just slightly lower than the height of a receipt printer.  We're tied to VeriFone point of sale equipment so we know the printer height isn't going to change any time soon.   If the shelf wasn't in there, the customer display wouldn't be tall enough to look over the barricade, and things would end up looking really ghetto.  Non-vertical customer displays look like crap. 

The silver bracket there will be to prevent the cashier from shoving the cash drawer back into my nice, zip tied collection of wires.  I'll fit the power brick and pin pad multiport adapter back there as well for easy access by the cashier if they need to reboot anything.  It's a whole lot easier to say "it's behind the register" than having them dig through a cabinet that has been filled with crap. 

There are limits to what the cashier can do when they can't move the cash drawer back.  If the cashier had the ability to move the cash drawer back, the shelf wouldn't be viable and you'd have an ungainly mess of junk.  The receipt printer would end up sitting somewhere uncomfortable and would end up falling off, causing havoc and destroying speed of service.   As it is, it's at a great height for quick access.

And the final product is here.

The end result is a nice, clean, professional looking checkout area.   Sun was sitting at the right spot, so the picture came out a little darker than I would have liked.  But, it shows off the intended effect really well.  There are a good 10-15 wires all cleanly shoved and zip-tied behind the cash drawer, out of sight and mind.  But there is plenty of slack on each wire to slide the whole apparatus, cash drawer and all, out away from the spacing it is set in. 



And to think I signed up to be IT.   

HAH!

No, really I am IT.  I just happen to work on point of sale systems as well.  To get to the point where I can set all this up, I had to program the site controller, a router and switch, and wire a couple of dumb switches.  Ran wires to everything else, and then get it all talking.  Once the cash registers are done, it's time to move on to the back office PC.

Oh yeah, and use an angle grinder to cut chunks out of the cabinet bottoms for my wires to come up through the floor.   

End of a week.

I said I was going to try and spend time this week, but I have to say I haven’t done very well.   I’ve had a busy week, but I’ve also had time to work on things I wanted to work on.  Haven’t done it.  I’ve spent time watching b-movies (Iron Sky), and I’ve visited few areas around here.   I really haven’t put the effort in that I should have.   And now it’s Wednesday, and my time to take advantage of this time is quickly disappearing.  There isn’t the time to do what I’ve wanted to do because I’ve wasted the time.  Looks like I lost the discipline I needed before.  

I can’t really call this a vacation, but that’s what it seems like.  I have had more time off this week  than I know what to do with, and yet I still haven’t accomplished anything I wanted to do.  I will pass this course with little effort, so I should have been spending time working on things that are difficult.  I should have spent time working on CCENT/CCNA stuff. 

But I haven’t .  About the only thing I’ve done is get up and eat breakfast.  I’ve succeeded in doing well at class, but that’s about it. 

Now, the week is over and I’m back at the airport waiting to fly home.  I said I was going to get more written, so I would have a back-log of stuff to post.  But I didn’t do that, either.  I did well at class, and that’s about all I did.  Didn’t spend any time doing touristy stuff.    I’m thinking my original plan fell through to sleeping in relaxing. 

What I really did notice is once I got off at a reasonable time, I didn’t know what to do with myself.  I didn’t have kids to play with or dishes to do, or any sort of housework.   It was different to say the least.  I think it shows the normal I’ve been experiencing is not what the rest of the world would call normal.  Yet I’ve been doing it for I don’t know how long.  Like I said, it’s “normal” for me. 

Maybe the real answer here lies in the question and observation.  I’ve often heard people say they want to hire hard workers.   Or they describe themselves as a “hard worker”.  I think that person is missing the point.  The world doesn’t need more hard workers.  The world needs more smart workers.  And the big problem is that everyone is taught to be a “hard worker” not a “smart worker”. 

So how does one transition from a “hard worker” to a “smart worker”?  Because working hard just isn’t cutting it.   And this week break makes me realize just how much it’s not working.  I think automation is one part of it, but at the moment there is so much to learn about automation because it’s just not taught.  It’s assumed to be important, but no one teaches how to do it.  

Therein lies the big problem.  Most of the stuff we should know, we have to learn from those who have already learned.  They never codify their knowledge or understanding.  So how do I do that?   I think it’s time to go back to programming.  Then it’s a matter of figuring out what can be automated and what can’t.