Choice Over Fear: Shepherds, Wolves, and Jobs

A mutual friend introduced me to a great blog entry and I had to pass it on. It's from another North Carolina resident, but we've never (to my knowledge) met.

Denilson's blog entry is titled Layoffs, sheep, shepherds, and wolves and deals with the choices we all face. It's a long entry, but I'd encourage you to read it through.

Here are a few excerpts.

Behaving like a sheep is about making as few choices as possible, settling into a stable situation and hoping things will not change. Sheep intentionally put their fates at hand of shepherds and unknowingly at the mercy of wolves. Time after time, sheep seek seemingly safe settings and stay there until the inexorable dangers of political and economical instability surround them again. Sheep regard being outside a wolf’s stomach to be a good life, and being inside the wolf’s stomach the result of random and cruel chance.

......

At the root of sheepish thought is the belief that we cannot influence the events around us. That is partly true, but we do have control over our preparedness to face those events.

....

If we wait until disaster hits to start making choices, we may find out that there are only bad and worse choices.

.....
A botched project will not be followed by another chance, but by a round of layoffs.

If you enjoyed reading Career 2.0, I think you'll enjoy The RTP Scrolls as well.

Career 2.0 Facebook Group

For those of you who spend time on Facebook, a friend created a Facebook group and passed on control to me. (Thanks Shawn!)

I've added a number of links to reviews of my Career 2.0 talk and the book. I'm hoping it turns out to be a useful resource.

http://tinyurl.com/djm99y


http://www.facebook.com/pages/Career-20/56836381471?ref=ts

Enjoy!

What's Your Language This Year?

LOTY. Learn a new language each year. This has been a persistent theme for several years... I first heard of this reading The Pragmatic Programmer a decade ago. It's golden advice if you take it... I haven't as much as I should have!

Today you have an opportunity to put the advice to use and learn one of the new JVM languages. Venkat Subramaniam's new Scala book just went into beta! (link). This means you can read it now, and offer feedback on the parts you don't understand or have trouble wrapping your head around. And Venkat can fix the book before it goes to press.

In other words, you can get Venkat to write the book you want to read. ;) It's not quite that cut and dried, but it's a great start. If you're considering Scala as your next Language of the Year, this would be a great way to begin.

Programming Scala