Engineer2Entrepreneur

Grand Opening of the Ziggurat Math Store and Blog

It has come time to stop talking and start doing.
Our public school system is failing us in the United States. High Schools now have dozens of valedictorians but universities are replacing college math and English courses with remedial courses. And our students are falling behind in international math and science and programming competitions.

Something must be done and I am going to do something about it. I can't do everything but I can do one thing and that is to help parents teach their children mathematics.

I have launched a new blog called ZigguratMath.

I have written a book the first in a new series of books to help mothers teach their children the language of mathematics. Book one is all about teaching your children how to count. It is available as a downloadable ebook (.pdf) at the ZigguratMath Store.

A free report on why mathematics is important plus lesson 1 from the book is available there too.

For the grand opening the book is on sale at the ZigguratMath Store. This sales ends next Thursday.

Must resist.

Link: FrontPage - Mentat Wiki.

I haven't totally explored this wiki yet but it's fascinating so far.

I know I have to increase my memory, and I can't just pop in a stick of RAM so I have to do it the hard way. One of my projects is to work on my name and face recognition skills.

Trevor F. Smith: Exterior: Speed read your own text

Link: Trevor F. Smith: Exterior: Speed read your own text.

This is something amazing. It actually blows my mind. I can read at speeds up to about 2000 wpm, which is so fast it is kind of annoying, most books are over too quickly, I prefer trilogies or longer. I got to that level of speed reading through sheer repetition. I read a lot of books.

The thing of it is maybe we aren't teaching how to read in a way that supports speed reading. We teach kids to sound out syllables and force them to read dull and boring books in school. So they don't gain a love of reading.

This could be something that changes all that.

[Note to self, learn more about this.]

Engineers will disembowel the competition

Link: David Kirkpatrick - Is Engineering Uncool—or Just Unappreciated? - FORTUNE.

a Nobel Prize. But most of the letters were from American engineers who expressed their frustration that U.S. society no longer seems to them to value the study or practice of engineering and the hard sciences.

Readers questioned the sincerity of business leaders' hand-wringing over U.S. engineering skills and training; they said corporate America devalues engineers and doesn't pay them enough to encourage students to pursue these professions. But the heart of the problem, many say, is our culture, which prizes pop celebrities more than people who make contributions to society in less glamorous ways. The readers I heard from think interest in the sciences and engineering won't be revived any time soon. Frankly, I hope they're wrong. Many seem to be implying that the U.S. is exhibiting the classic overconfidence and self-indulgence of a declining empire. Here are

I think engineering is a great field of study. You learn how things actually work and get to make things that are useful.

So what if engineers aren't cool, they are bridges, and bridges while generally not cool are vitally important.

Engineers bridge the gap between scientists and consumers. Scientists ask "how does this work? and delve deep into the fountain of knowledge. Consumers ask "how does this make my life better?" Engineers ask "there's got to be a better way?"

I would highly recommend engineering as a course of study but, and this is a pretty big but, I would not set my job goal to be getting a corporate job.

Big Corporations just want cogs. Colleges even with their general education requirements still overspecialize their students. You need to take over your own education and go where the action is.

I would set my sights on creating my own business. Edison, Ford, Tesla, Gates, Jobs, Grove, Dell all made their money after starting their own businesses. The companies they were working for didn't want to try out their new ideas. Think about that.

If I was starting out in engineering school again, I would take more courses in world history and courses in entrepreneurship, management, marketing and accounting. These are different skills from engineering but not nearly as hard to learn. Accounting is easy after multivariate calculus.

I would network far more then I did. I would get to know as many people in the school, not just the college as possible. I would even set up a database to help me keep track of them all and then keep in touch with as many of them as possible. It's the people stupid.

Corporations want the customer to pay as much as possible and to pay their engineers, the whole staff really, as little as possible. Bypass all that and get paid by the customers. Is it easy, no. But it's better then the alternative.

So go ahead become an engineer, but become your own engineer not someone else's. Be like Edison, Ford, or Gates and disembowel your competition by creating something new that they can't deal with.

10 Things He Has Learned

Link: 10 Things I Have Learned .

1. YOU CAN ONLY WORK FOR PEOPLE THAT YOU LIKE.
2. IF YOU HAVE A CHOICE NEVER HAVE A JOB.
3. SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM.
4. PROFESSIONALISM IS NOT ENOUGH or THE GOOD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GREAT.
5. LESS IS NOT NECESSARILY MORE.
6. STYLE IS NOT TO BE TRUSTED.
7. HOW YOU LIVE CHANGES YOUR BRAIN.
8. DOUBT IS BETTER THAN CERTAINTY.
9. SOLVING THE PROBLEM IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN BEING RIGHT.
10. TELL THE TRUTH.

Keep learning.

Reading saves time.

Link: Talking Story with Say Leadership Coaching: A Dozen Myths about Reading..

Reading actually saves time: I’m not about to experiment from scratch with something I can read about first to skate up my learning curve.

It just takes far too long to have all the thoughts and do all the experiments that billions of people have already done.

Yes, some books are junk, most books are mediocre but there are some books that are just amazing, read those.

Change your Mind, Change your Life

Link: InstantGuruBlog » "A Chance Encounter Leads To A Mind Blowing Insight About Unleashing Our Personal Power: From Two Strangers On A Cruise Ship".

Bill Whittle on Confidence

Faith is a principle of action.

Faith proceeds the miracle.

You aren't even going to get out of bed without faith, why would you you didn't have the confidence within yourself that today will be a different day from the day before.

The reason that prisoners and other make tally marks to count days is to make each day a little different. We are not prisoners, we are free to change our minds and thus our circumstances completely.

Viktor Frankl was a Holocaust survivor, because he realized that in his own mind he was not a prisoner he could be anywhere and with anyone he wanted to be.

If you believe you can do something, you probably can, maybe not right away, some things do take time to learn, like climbing a mountain or running in a marathon or becoming a doctor.

When I started out as an engineer I had a dream of working on big things like the Space Program, and in my first job ended up doing just that. Since then I have hit many of my major Life Goals

It is too easy to let someone else decide your level of self-confidence. We were trained that way in school, if you got good grades you were smart if not then you were dumb, but that never took into account how easy and simple the classes were for some and hard for others. Too often the key to an entire class was some small little topic that I found in a book in a few minutes and the rest of the class was daydream time.

At work it is much the same. The boss tells you if you can feel good about yourself or not. Even if he is not talking to you. What does he know? Not you. Your work is different from your life and don't ever confuse the two.

Too often we tell ourselves, "You can't do that" or "Who are you to try saying that" or simplest of all, "Yeah, but..."

Don't hold yourself back. God believes in you so can you.

What do I want my children to know when they at 18?

Link: Seth's Blog: The top 1,000 things to know.

Too bad it is only 20 items long, but that is besides the point.

I have been thinking about this for a little while since I have a daughter who will need to learn things. While I have an extensive list that isn't the point.

What do I think she needs to know by the time she is 18, in no particular order?
1. How to buy, cook and store food.
2. How to drive and maintain a car.
3. How to keep house.
4. How to learn quickly and continuously.
5. How to read, comprehend and leverage material quickly.
6. How to manage her time, her life really, effectively and efficiently.
7. How to manage a project.
8. How to write, clearly and succinctly.
9. How to play a musical instrument.
10. How Physics, Chemistry and Biology are a major part of everyday life.
11. How history is tied together and shapes us today.
12. Enough math to understand how statistics are used and abused.
13. How to have charity, I'm still working on this.
14. How money works for and against you.
15. How to run a small business.
16. Learn another language: foreign or computer.
17. That life is all about helping people become better.
18. That truth is independent of the sphere that it has been placed in.
19. To have a personal relationship with God.
20. That being free is about being able to make the wrong choices and not making them, and that bondage is about not being able to make the right choices even if you want to.
21. To have joy.

Learning and Unlearning

Today is Thomas Edison's birthday.

He was a great inventor who tested the envelope by asking just one question, "Why?" That was the same question that got Socrates into trouble and any parent can tell you that a child who has learned that word will drive you crazy using it, because it ends up showing you your ignorance.

Too often we don't know why are do certain things and it embarrasses us to admit that and often makes us angry at the person who shows us our ignorance. We aren't omniscient so not knowing things is okay, but that doesn't excuse us from not learning new things.

There are many unknown-unknowns out there and as they are revealed to us we have the chance to learn something new.

The things that can make us most angry about the question 'why?' is when we find something that we do and maybe even cherish and we find that there is on good reason for doing it and that it is even bad for us to do that thing.

"The unexamined life is not worth living." Socrates said. And the only way to examine your life is to ask yourself, "Why?" Why am I doing this? Why did I do that? Why did that work? Why did that fail? Why?

"Why?" is the key question to making a difference. Drilling down through all the reasons why will lead to a thorough examination of what is important and what is not.

"Why?" is the key question to unlearning as well.

The test is "Does it still work for us?" Things are changing rapidly in the world nowadays and the only way to see if something is working is to test it. You need to drill down and find out if it is working or not.

RobertHeinlein wrote, "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

While we need to be specialists in our work but that does not we should be specialists in our lives. One of the reasons a warning didn't get out sooner for the tsunami was that the earthquake specialist didn't realize that a tsunami occurs when an earthquake occurs underwater, which can hurt people.

My greatest breakthroughs have occurred when I am not thinking about the problem in the context of my specialty but when I am doing or studying something quite different.

That is why reading from a diverse library is important. And reading quickly is even better.