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Whoa, sigma, you never had any training in CS or programming, but you taught yourself?

Uhhh, that’s called training. You prove my point — targeted, focused training provides huge dividends. Huge!

When you talk about being creative, finding creative solutions — you are confronting something fewer than 1% of people even bother to do — THINK.

A lot of military training is about succession. The CO gets killed, the XO takes over. Also, you are confronted with a problem and required to solve it. There may be ten different solutions, but the one you need is the one you can do right now.

In the military at your basic course (and also at Ranger School), they play “what now, lieutenant” and you would be amazed at who is good and who is bad at it. There is a difference between being clever and being smart.

There are plenty of smart people. There are few clever people. Clever people often learn their cleverness from real life.

JLM

I’m a sole, solo founder, and that’s the best way now, but that’s not what I’m working for, and hiring some people has to be part of the future.

My startup is in information technology with the crucial core secret sauce some applied math I derived and exploiting current computing and the Internet.

So, my startup needs some software development. As a solo founder, I’ve designed and written the software that should be enough for production to about $2 million a year in revenue.

Then more software development will be needed, and then the issue of training will get to be important, and there I am uncertain of what to do. I don’t need an answer now, but if my project is anywhere near as successful as I intend then I will need an answer soon enough.

I notice two facts:

(1) I never had any training in computer science or programming. My serious academic training was in pure/applied math; for the computing, I just taught myself. I have taught computer science to others in college and graduate school. So, net, I am unsure about just how important training in computing will be.

I can see that we might have some expert guest speakers on narrow, advanced, technical subjects, make good videos of their presentations, and have those on-line. But I’m having a tough time seeing the high importance of training in the broad basics of computer science or practical computing. E.g., if someone needs to learn Microsoft’s ASP.NET (active server pages .NET), and some will, then I can suggest the materials I read as I learned and used that topic, show them some well documented, serious, production code, etc.

(2) To me, the challenging and most important parts of writing software are not very well formulated and, thus, not easy to teach.

(3) The crucial work is applied math; okay, that’s my job. Beyond math, the most serious contributions will be bright ideas, creativity, and it is very difficult to train people to do that.

I can develop a list of topics in computing for training, and likely they would help, but the most important material will be difficult to teach, learn, or even formulate.

Somehow I got to be creative in math; I had some success already in the 10th grade. There are some challenging texts in pure math with a lot of exercises, and if, don’t start to see how to be creative in math, then won’t be able to do the exercises at all! So, part of doing the exercises is working out how to do the creative parts. Later I did publishable, original research in applied math, etc. Just how I did that, I was never taught. The text exercises did help.

I did work up some techniques: (A) Broadly what could be true here? To make guesses from 50,000 feet, what are the main points, aspects, relevant definitions, and theorems, and what do they suggest about what might be true and, really, nearly as important, what might be false here?

(B) Next, look at some simple, special cases of the problem and see what is true or false there. So, if conjecture X is false for some simple, special case, then conjecture X can’t be true in general; so, don’t try to prove it in general!

(C) In more detail, could result X be true? Let’s see: If X were true, what else would be true? Could all that stuff be true? In general, would that be too much to hope for? Are there some specific consequences of X that are known to be false or at least, first-cut, look likely false? If so, then maybe X is false. Before giving up on X, can we find an actual, solid counterexample?

(D) But if X still looks like it might be true, then intuitively why? Is there a good intuitive reason why? Then what tools might we use?

Try to get some intuition about X, especially in or from simple cases.

Etc.

(A)-(D) are important, and much of that can be just thinking, looking for little models, and writing next to nothing.

Then as start to get some solid ideas, start to write them down and start to make solid math out of them, e.g., with theorems and proofs.

No one taught me any of that.

E.g., I had the central ideas of my Ph.D. research on an airplane ride where I wrote nothing at all. I turned that into a 50 page manuscript of okay math independently in my first summer in grad school. Later I finished and polished the work, wrote some corresponding software, did the writing and typing, stood for an oral exam, and graduated, all with essentially no faculty guidance at all. I did give a seminar on my work, and some other student used that as a seed for their Ph.D. research.

So, net, I don’t know how to train people to be creative.

But, Army Rangers have to go into situations of wide variety and find creative, original, first time ever solutions. So, how do the Rangers train for that?

You can learn by watching what the US Army Rangers do.

http://themusingsofthebigredcar.com/training/

Or you can sit back and do nothing. The call is yours.

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com

#training #rangers #ceo #entrepreneur #founder #crawlwalkrun #startup