Red Squirrel Reflections Dave Hoover explores the psychology of software development

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Personal Mastery
Saturday, June 26, 2004

On my flight home from Detroit this week, I hit chapter 9 in The Fifth Discipline. This chapter is hitting home more than any other. The previous chapters were more descriptive and instructive. They provided me with a better understanding of systems thinking and the fundamental system archetypes. But "Personal Mastery" is not so much teaching me, as reminding me of how I want to live.

"Personal mastery...means approaching one's life as a creative work, living life from a creative viewpoint as opposed to a reactive viewpoint." (141)

The act of creating is deeply satisfying to me, and one reason I so much enjoy software development. I'm reminded of something Fred Brooks said in The Mythical Man Month:

"First is the the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God's delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake." (7)

For me, a fundamental part of the creative process is learning. Apparently, this is a fundamental part of Peter's understanding of personal mastery:

"People with a high level of personal mastery live in a continual learning mode. They never "arrive"...it is a process. It is a lifelong discipline. People with a high level of personal mastery are actually aware of their ignorance, their incompetence, their growth areas." (142)

This ties into my reaction to reading Unskilled and Unaware of It.

Replies: 1 Comment

My learning cycle dragged me through welding recently, but now I understand why, as it forces me to go back and re-learn the EE stuff I brushed past in college, so I can build my own TIG welder. Then I'm going to build a electric tractor to fart around in the yard with. (All of this will need a multitude of microcontrollers, so my years of software development are not a waste.) There's just too many lifetimes of cool stuff to do and to figure out. How people can settle down and watch life go by is a mystery to me.

Posted by Derek on 06/28/2004

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