This site is kept open for archival purposes. There are lots of blog posts on everything from tech stuff to Scientology on this site. It will remain open for years to come.
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After 8 years of heading a recruitment company I wrote the Interview Handbook. After another two years of daily interviews, I quit the company in order to cater for my inner nerd.
I then did 12 years in the IT business before Brendan and I started the comapny “Å” (A-Circle.no) in 2012.
Everything got simpler. And simpler. And simpler. To the point where I can now revisit my 10 years in the recruitment business and boil everything down to one page. So here it is, The OnePageBook, Recruitment:
“Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for the love of it.” (Henry David Thoreau)
If you never ever clean your room, wash the dishes or your clothes, water the plants or make dinner, the gap between your skills and your mother’s skills in these areas will keep widening. Your skills will be handicapped by your mother’s empathy and care.
If you establish processes in an organization that is supposed to take care of issues and problems for the employees, it wil handicap their abilities to handle this themselves.
In the ITIL framework, you are supposed to establish some 27 processes to cater for every part of IT service delivery in an organization. One such process is Problem Management. The purpose of this process is to handle the underlying cause of one or more issues so that it doesn’t happen again. When this is turned into a process where a subset of employees gets to be experts at detecting problems, conduct root causes analysis and solve the problems, the gap between the skills of these guys and the rest keeps widening. The process will handicap the employees problem solving skills.
Problem solving should be a skill exercized by every employee. It should be part of the company’s culture, their DNA. Everyone should jump at the opportunity to solve problems they encounter. It will hone their skills and keep them valuable as efficient problem solvers. Those who encounter a specific problem has more initial data about it and can usually solve it quicker… if they have excellent problem solving skills.
Don’t relegate important skills sets to only certain processes. Help everyone exercize and fine-tune their skills in fire-fighting, problem solving, change management, customer handling, documentation and strategic thinking.
The one essential tip.
This OnePageBook™ will help boost your self confidence, productivity and quality of life.
“If there hadn’t been women we’d still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.” (Orson Welles)
Make your résumé really stand out.
This OnePageBook™ helps you write an outstanding Curriculum Vitae or Résumé.
“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” (Confucius)
What are you going to do about it?
This OnePageBook™ is about you taking responsibility for your life – past, present and future.
“I decided I can’t pay a person to rewind time, so I may as well get over it.” (Serena Williams)
“We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.” (Kenji Miyazawa)
“Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home… it’s your responsibility to love it, or change it.” (Chuck Palahniuk)
“You’re never served more than you can handle” (Anette Iren Isene)
Got rolling with podcasts. Brendan and I have done a few and released two so far. One is about mental training, the other about the benefits of failing. You can listen to both here: https://www.a-circle.no/podcasts
What do I do to help Mankind’s Plan B? What programming language would I save for posterity? How often do I cook dinner? Vegan much? What’s my worst side? Today Brendan decided to do one where he fired a long list of (revealing) questions at me. No preparations. Just quick answers from the top of my head, or deeper inside. You can listen to it here:
To perform at your best, you must own your actions. You must be fully responsible for what you do and accept the effects you create 100%. Any advice from others is only as good as you own them yourself. Any method, methodology, system of belief or guidance will only help you if you can fully own them. And to own an advice or method from another, you must prove its effectiveness by your own senses. Anything less will disparage your responsibility – your ability to perform will suffer to that degree because you will be less yourself.
Be careful when you accept an advice or adhere to a method. Take care to make it your own before you start to truly rely on them for your performance.
Where do you get your energy? Beyond air, food, sleep and basic securities, when do you get pumped up, how do you get on fire?
Accomplishments. It’s when you accomplish something you feel is worthwhile. When you progress toward your goals, you get energy. When you move away from your goals, you are drained.
But you need energy to get stuff done. And when you are energy depleted, it can be hard to even envision getting started on some tasks, much less accomplishing something worthwhile. Even when you are well rested and fed, you can still lack initiative.
That’s when you start small. Accomplish stuff through baby steps. You do one tiny semi-worthwhile step that give you a small drop of energy. You use that drop to do another, fractionally larger step to gain a bit more energy. And so on. As long as you accomplish what you can in the situation you are, you keep gaining energy. Keep the momentum going. And you will get pumped and on fire.
But be attentive. Whenever you feel an energy drain, stop and reconsider. Do something worthwhile instead.
You get to decide what is worthwhile. You get to decide what an accomplishment is. It could be anything from taking a short walk or painting a picture to helping a friend in trouble, earning money or salvaging a country. You decide the direction, you get to feel the effect of your steps – toward your goals or away from them.
Truth is what is real and factual. Application of logic yields new facts, new understanding of truth.
But logic breaks where emotions rule.
We see this easily in betting games. The term “pot committed” comes from poker. A person’s reasoning and logic goes out the window when he has committed so much money in the pot that he disregards his actual chances of winning and keeps throwing money into an already losing proposition.
We see this in science where a scientist can become so emotionally committed to a theory that no amound of contrary facts will sway him. Witness the late Fred Hoyle and his commitment to his Steady State theory. Regardless of how much evidence pointed to a Big Bang or similar theory, he kept on insisting that the universe was in a steady state.
We see this so often than in politics. People get so committed to a certain ideology that their intellect has taken a permanent leave of absence.
And of course religion. Forget the facts, the Earth is 6000 years old. Because an old book says so.
Science owns the realm of facts and truth. Politics and religion should be confined to areas where certainty is elusive – like what solutions to apply to global warming or praying for a loved one’s life. But when science comes up with a definite answer to how we should mitigate climate change, politics should step aside and let the factual solution be applied. And when the doctor with scientific certainty prescribes the medicine that will save your wife’s life, you can still pray – but you should not reject the medicine. Only when there are uncertainties regarding the medicine, then it boils down to judgement, ideology, religion or hunch. But when there is certainty, let facts and logic prevail.
Facebook discussions are rampant with emotions and virtually devoid of logic. And the way you can see this is the incessant display of logical fallacies; Straw Man, Argumentum Ad Hominem, No True Scotsman, Appeal to Authority or other Red Herrings. And the way you handle it is to keep calm, remain on the subject, observe the facts, listen carefully and stay with logic.
Logic: The science or art of exact reasoning, or of pure and formal thought, or of the laws according to which the processes of pure thinking should be conducted; the science of the formation and application of general notions; the science of generalization, judgment, classification, reasoning, and systematic arrangement; the science of correct reasoning. [1913 Webster]
Geir Isene - uncut 