idea map

Sometimes when it is hard to define what you do, acronyms are a useful way of condensing language. Poetry is another option, but it takes longer to get right, and I happen to have a strange fascination with acronyms. Why? They evoke a sense of the arcane, like sigils with meaning known only to their creators.

The term 'idea map' is one that I came up with during a moment of reflection, asking myself "what the hell do I do all day?" There is a secret underground of go-betweens and negotiators who sometimes look with envy at people with actual skills. I find myself forever in roles like broker, adviser, analyst, agent, but rarely "lead super-tech-master". Sometimes at 2:47AM in the morning on a Saturday, when I can not sleep and feel like Friday never ended, I find myself wishing that I could define my profession as exactly as… the ideal professional whose knowledge is crucial, well-defined, concrete, exact, and pertinent to the current state of business. Does that person exist?

Alas, we probably all feel this way at some time. It is part of the hiraedd that smites us at times of uncertainty and transition. But a person can not be defined until they are dead, and as long as I am alive and breathing (each, I am told, is a prerequisite of the other) I will gain new knowledge and come upon new interests. I am doomed to non-specialization. If you are the type of person who digs through these pages, then I suspect you have diverse interests as well. What does that make us? Too many interests make us generalists, leaving no time for the incredible specialization that some people seem capable of. Perhaps they too have many interests, and we are only viewing one dimension of the true "other."

With this in mind, in that moment of reflection at 2:47AM in the morning on Saturday when it felt like Friday had never ended, I came up with my one-billionth idea. I am not a big fan of ideas, and I believe they should be limited to those that we actually plan to implement; otherwise, we succumb to ideas for their own sake and become beings without focus.

I listed the things that I know and do and have been, then condensed them as much as possible. My hope was to come up with a heuristic for dynamic self-definition, and at the same time record a balance sheet reflecting my current wealth in the currency of knowledge. Here is what I came up with:

All the build-up just for that? Sorry. I find it useful to limit myself to the things I am pretty sure are significant to my greater purpose. Purpose is what drives us; to the extent that we can define ourselves in this life, we should define ourselves according to purpose.

The unordered list above is significant mostly for me. Your list will be most significant for you. The exercise helps to keep us accelerating in the direction we have chosen.

In summary, the whole exercise I went through at 2:[oh-God-what-time-is-it-now] in the morning distills to this: idea map, an acronym, a sigil representing R.B. in a nutshell. Not perfect, and not everything I will choose to define myself by before I'm done, but it works presently. 'idea map' can not take into account the dynamic nature of the self, but at least it provides a placeholder that I can refer back to and build upon. How else do we avoid becoming lost? If you have ever asked yourself the same questions, you may want to see what 'idea map' you come up with. If nothing else, it defines a term that you can secretly, internally assign to yourself. And that provides focus in a culture where knowledge disintegrates into the confused ether of electronically archived information. Focus is a unique talent among generalists. Let me know what you come up with.