As you can imagine, this whole website is about me. If you’ve had a chance to look around I’m sure you’ve gotten a picture for who I am and what is important to me. I hope that this post sheds a little more light on me and who I am and what is valuable and important to me. As I prepare this post (the initial post) I find that there is a lot I can say, but i want to distill the content here down to a few guiding principles.
- Help others without being overbearing or burdening
- Use technology to make the lives of myself and others better
- Solve problems with meaningful change
- Influence the world around me for the better
Helping Others
These guiding principles are core to who I am in many aspects of life. These guiding principles influence my professional life, personal life, relationships, mental space, and all aspects of who I am. I like to help others but I don’t want to be overbearing. This means that when I provide some sort of advice, thoughts, or ideas, I intend these to inform your decisions and your life but not to tell you what to do. I also don’t want to overwhelm anyone with more than what they can handle. I want to provide principles and ideas that can help without causing them to feel overwhelmed. If you’re ever interacting with me or with any of my content I’ll never be offended if you say “Woah, slow down”. I understand different people work at different paces and in different ways.
Technology
I love technology and I want to use technology to make the lives of myself and others better. I love the advancement of mobile technology, voice assistants, and other smart technologies which make our lives a little easier. A common miss-conception, however, is that I am not one who always likes “new and shiny”. The computer on which this is being written and the server on which this is hosted (as of the original authoring) is at least 5 years old. In the life of technology that is ancient. I believe wholeheartedly in using things until they no longer have any use/value, I try to be responsible like that. I do understand that sometimes items need to be “refreshed” because their age is causing more problems then it’s solving. In business I believe that assets have natural lifecycles, an expensive asset may hold value for 36 or 60 months, however, it will still be useful into 72 months or longer. Wisdom is preparing to refresh items before they become useless to the user. My technology is not useless (yet) and so I will keep driving it, but I’m aware that someday (and someday soon) it may give up the ghost.
Solve Problems with Meaningful Change
I am always looking to solve problems, I also love to see meaningful, positive, and developmental change when it is driving good results. I know that too many organizations and people (perhaps of a bygone era) lived in a world by which it was said: “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. This is not my way of thinking of things, if there is a way to solve a problem, make it better, add value, and improve things, then it should be changed (even broken) to make it better. I’ve learned (of late) that the more things remain the same the more they get “stale” and “outdated”. By making changes, this (often invisible) problem can be solved. Your friends, family, customers, and colleagues will lose interest pretty quickly once something becomes stale. I’ve observed in business the “new hardware phenomenon”, in which a new piece of equipment (no matter how similar to the last) will cause a small and temporary excitement and cause increased attention (sales, traffic, etc.). Keeping things fresh ensures that you, your organization, your family, and whomever you interact with are always on the latest trends to ensure that you aren’t left behind and you remain relevant to the world around.
Influence
Lastly I believe that all of these things lead to influence. This is a tricky one, as if you’re not careful, this could be perceived as arrogance. Influence is not intended to be something that I say “others must follow me” or “what I’m doing is special and all must do what I do”, merely, influence is that I appreciate looking around the areas in which I operate and seeing how they are better because I was there. This is to see how those that I interact with are making changes that have made their lives better (happier, more at peace, kinder, more successful, etc.). I like to see the lives of friends, family, individuals, departments, teams, and organizations become better and whether I am directly or indirectly connected to this I am pleased to see this. I want to be able to look back (or others look back) and see how the time during which I was involved with a project, team, organization, or just a friend resulted in their lives getting better.
I hope that you enjoyed this post and got to know a little more about me as a person as well as some of my intentions behind writing. Please check back over time and hopefully there will be new content for you to digest and enjoy.
Sincerely,
Lucas