Most of my writings are not addressed to the people I know or any people at all whatsoever. It often happens that I get into trouble because someone reads something and considers it to be a result of our interaction specifically. The truth is that whatever I write is almost never an outcome of any immediate experience. Yes, there can be a trigger in the present, but an idea was certainly brewing for a while already if I decided to put it out. What happens in the moment usually just gives me a reason for picking up specifically one thought out of the whole bucket of abandoned ideas I carry around in my head. 

Instead, what I write is actually a message to myself and myself only. So, if I say “you” in writing it actually means “me, but down the road, later on”. Kinda like a reminder set for tomorrow. You see, the world always keeps spinning without waiting for any person to comprehend it really. And, - as Mike Tyson once beautifully put it, - everybody has a plan right until the moment they are punched into their face. In other words, you can be the most thoughtful and philosophical person on Earth back at home with a cup of coffee, when it is raining outside, and it is dark, and it is peaceful and there is no one around, especially no one threatening you. But as you experience the world in real time it is hard to apply your past thinking. How many times have you told yourself that you must take a pause before making a decision, especially under any kind of pressure, and then immediately went straight to the conclusions just to feel some relief? That’s where writing comes handy. What you wrote once really sticks to you, so there is a chance that it becomes a part of your second nature, your reflexes, and you can live your best life following your own preaching. Everything else is a byproduct of that goal.

In engineering, management and even just regular life I always had periods of high intense exposure, which were followed by some time of slow thinking and generalizing. In the early days I found this behavioral pattern really useful. You live and, as you live, you struggle. While you struggle, you gather experience. This experience accumulates and becomes overwhelming. And then you can take some time off and come up with a clever approach which helps you to move forward towards the goal. You observe. You simplify. You compress. And then you use the result of your thinking to see if what you came up with is really effective when you apply it on the go. What works stays and becomes a general principle. That way you grow.

Nowadays, the problem is that things are getting faster and faster, and, in addition, there is no real chance to put this experience machine to rest even for a second. Stuff just keeps flowing my way, and it doesn't matter if I’m ready or not. Sun is up - things go on. What I managed to compress and distill previously helps me to stay afloat and keep rowing. On that foundation I build up new sketchy solutions. But so very little portion of current events is getting any real quality attention! That shortage of slow thinking bothers me a lot. What concerns me even more is that I don’t see experience being effectively extracted and processed by others in my immediate surroundings. That keeps me wondering if there is a chance of winning this game at all. By default, people kinda just keep dancing and following the fast bit of reality without drawing any conclusions from what they have done so far. Rare person reads a book. Even fewer people share anything interesting they managed to understand and learn. And almost no one can be bothered to write things down for others. Basically, with a few exceptions, only thanks to the Internet, I absorb every single piece of wisdom I could find in texts, podcasts and other mediums. I melt it all into my own way of doing things when I have an hour or two to process stuff, usually during a daily running routine. And then I go out and try. Some ideas work. Some don’t.

It may seem like I’m complaining here. And, in some ways, yes, I am. Yo, I’m a human being! But somewhere deep inside I have a very clear understanding which tells me that only struggle gives one a challenge to really learn and structure things. If you don’t have a task to apply your theory then whatever you invented is pretty much useless. There is an irony in that. Wisdom of an ivory tower serves well to no one. In order to build up a useful idea you have to experience some pressure of real life. But because of that same pressure you most likely will never get a chance to apply your idea. New things just keep happening. And you must react. 

Just as an example of what I’m talking about, recently I made it through two intensive weeks of interviews with candidates for a backend position in our team. We had a 2 hour conversation scheduled every working day. Sometimes, multiple meetings a day.  As a result, I had enough cases to iterate rapidly and improve my approach over time. Perfect conditions for learning and drawing conclusions. Every next session went better than the previous one. But whatever I managed to understand about the hiring process so far will be really hard to apply in the future. Because there is some job which has to be done in order to prepare for it. And, most likely, I won’t have time to do this job due to other priorities which have already emerged. As I said, the world keeps spinning no matter what. Which means, the process we have will remain clumsy until the next time I’m forced to jump into this river. And nobody will make it any better while I’m busy away with other stuff. I could deliberately dedicate part of my time to trying some things up by pushing other things out, but most likely it won't serve my immediate endeavor sadly. Only future me will benefit from doing so, and it is in a way unfair to spend time and resources on it right now. What a sad truth about reality! 

If I look for a positive angle on that chaotic inconvenience which I call my daily life, I can rest assured that there is an almost unlimited set of interesting tasks and challenges I could get myself involved into. And even if I just stop right now, there is a long list of things I could wrestle with just based on what I’ve already seen and done. But I wish there was a way to organize some time gaps for analysis, thinking and making useful stuff. Resource constraint is pushing me forward though. My hope is that one day I have enough money to buy myself some time to build things I wanna build, test ideas I wanna check and write some stuff down to share what I've got. In other words, I guess, what I’m saying is that once I’m rich I’ll be finally really busy 😁 But only if I survive long enough to see another shore and catch that golden fleece.