At the end of high school, most graduating seniors are given their diplomas with a heaping side of platitudes, many of them patently preposterous. Such as, “If you can dream it, you can do it.” Or “You can be anything you want to be.” And especially, “With grit and determination, there’s nothing you can’t do."
People early in their career should learn from computer science: meander some in your walk (especially early on), randomly drop yourself into new parts of the terrain, and when you find the highest hill, don’t waste any more time on the current hill no matter how much better the next step up might appear .
If your experience consisted entirely of being privileged, pampered, and recurringly rewarded in the greatest period of wealth creation in human history, you'd be upbeat too. You'd defer to authority. You'd think that the universe is benign and human nature is fundamentally wonderful.
Information moves, or we move to it. Moving to it has rarely been popular and is growing unfashionable; nowadays we demand that the information come to us. This can be accomplished in three basic ways: 1) moving physical media around, 2) broadcasting radiation through space, and 3) sending signals through wires. This article is about what will, for... See more