How do you dream big
At some point in my corporate journey, I stopped dreaming big. After years of just facing resistance and general drudgery, I haven’t had many wild ideas in a long time. I sometimes have an idea and just think about how exhausting and awful that undertaking is. I’m not sure if I’ve matured as an engineer or just given up but I do miss the giddy feeling of being excited again. How do you do it, HN?
2 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 14.0 ms ] threadIt creates enormous tension but letting in distrust of the corporate org, letting oneself believe in untapped possibilities all about us helps. The org is all to often slow, bad at adopting & amplifying individual insight & inspiration, but still the muses talk through us. More keeps shining through somehow. I think of the better worlds always coming through. "Go then, there are other world than these."
We here in technology are so amazingly uninhibited, so free to fork or start new things, so ultra-well equipped to go venture wherever our minds might take us. To visit & connect to these other spaces.
A huge part of of dreaming is having principles. Which often begets vision; it creates a "what if" mode in which to dream. One's principles are a habitat that shapes all of their experiences.
I personally have been hugely inspired by Douglas Engelbart's conception of Augmenting Human Intellect: building not just better processes but seeing Computing as a broader tool for though, believing in a co-reinforcing constructionist human-computer symbiosis. Convceiving of computing as one of the highest most dynamic most malleable forms of holistic technology [2] aligns my thoughts, orients me towards a promising to me vision of computing, that opens lines of inquiry, where I want to pry in the cracks of the drab & dry industrialist world & spring forth new exciting human potentials, that hint at the grand and sweeping & vast potentials we are both so far from, and so very close to.
[1] https://gist.github.com/cornchz/3313150
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...
You gotta keep the kid inside alive and the kid hates it when you mention adult things such as how long and hard sth might take, making money, etc. Remember the days when you used to play and not think about how hard things might be climbing trees or making sth out of legos.
I use the dream to keep going long term and small steps to keep making progress everyday.