From the excellent Presentation Zen blog (which is always filled with immediately useful advice on delivering compelling presentations), here’s a post that references the concept of “the beginner’s mind,” a term that was unfamiliar to me until now, but one that describes an approach that seems to be common among people I most enjoy working with (especially when coupled with the ability and determination to execute on ideas):

Zen teachings often speak to the idea of the “beginner’s mind.” Like a child, one who approaches life with a “beginner’s mind” is fresh, enthusiastic in approach and open to the vast possibilities before them. One who possesses a “beginner’s mind” is not burdened by old habits or obsessed about “the way things are done around here” or with the way things could have or should have been. When we approach new challenges as true “beginners” (even if we are seasoned adults) we need not be saddled with fear of failure or of making mistakes. As children, Tiger Woods and Yo Yo Ma (and many others less known) made thousands of mistakes along their path to greatness. With an open mind and childlike optimism about what we can become, learning and improvement can be quite remarkable.

I work with a lot of people who fit this description these days — it’s a great way to live.

Updated a dead link from this article in the archives – 12/09/2010

Every now and then, I wonder to myself, “How in the world did I go from being an English major with PhD aspirations to a total computer geek who enjoys writing code, toying with Apache configs, etc?” In those moments of self-reflection, I’m always reminded of Thomas Scoville’s excellent essay, “The Elements of Style: Unix as Literature.” In the essay, Scoville explains why in his experience, a surprising proportion of Unix geeks have literary backgrounds of some sort (and read the whole thing — this is just a small quote. There are also some nice digs at Microsoft.):

The common thread was wordsmithing; a suspiciously high proportion of my UNIX colleagues had already developed, in some prior career, a comfort and fluency with text and printed words. They were adept readers and writers, and UNIX played handily to those strengths. UNIX was, in some sense, literature to them. Suddenly the overrepresentation of polyglots, liberal-arts types, and voracious readers in the UNIX community didn’t seem so mysterious, and pointed the way to a deeper issue: in a world increasingly dominated by image culture (TV, movies, .jpg files), UNIX remains rooted in the culture of the word.

This makes some sense to me. I wasn’t always a “technologist,” though I’ve always been handy with computers. My brother and I ran a successful lawn mowing business when we were kids, and we used a computerized billing system on a Kaypro my dad bought us in the early 80s. Our clients were pretty blown away that two neighborhood kids delivered such sophisticated monthly statements.

From the lawn-mowing geek period, fast forward to the summer of 1993. I was an English major at Duke coming off a really successful semester. I had published an article in a campus journal (with a dense title something like “Shakespeare’s Cleopatra and the Creation of a Subversive Moral Universe” — I actually scanned the letter they sent me (PDF) several years ago) and had placed in the annual English department writing contest for a paper I had written about Kingsley Amis‘ novel Lucky Jim and a relatively obscure novel of the same period, Hurry on Down by John Wain. I was already picking out the appropriate tweed jackets and preparing myself for a career in the ivory tower. Anything related to computers was the furthest thing from my mind. I graduated in December 1993 and went to work in the research library at a newspaper that happened to be a really early arrival on the web (back when Yahoo! could be found at http://akebono.stanford.edu!).

By the spring of 1994, you would have found me neck-deep in Unix books, writing Perl code, cranking out HTML, running a gopher, and hanging out on USENET. It wasn’t long before I was writing Sybase database-backed web apps using sybperl (before the Perl DBI made it unnecessary). I went through a brief period of writing apps with Tcl/Tk, too. I dumped the idea of the literature PhD, and never looked back (which means I can read, but not have to write papers about it).

The post from Joyce Park in the O’Reilly Radar “Burn In” series of posts really resonated with me. Though marriage had nothing to do with it in my case, I followed a similar path from relative disengagement with computers to total immersion. I think Thomas Scoville’s essay gives us some hints as to how that happens (and I’m glad it did!)