Wisdom comes from many different places. I’m fairly certain that anything and everything can be a source of wisdom, if we’re open to receive it. Early in the morning, I finished reading Sandro Mancuso’s The Software Crafter, which constantly repeats a simple premise along its pages.
Being a Crafter is a lifelong effort of self actualization and inner reflection. Craft is not about the code we write at any given point in time. It is about our behaviour as professionals who happen to write code.
I find this to be really interesting, because the author places more importance on the qualities of the person behind the keyboard than on the quality of the code itself. I believe this to be of much higher value than a set of rules or patterns on clean code writing, and it’s my main takeaway from the book. The constant focus on our actions towards both ourselves and the community is what impacted me the most. I’ll surely write a longer, more detailed review of the book in the following days.
Self Actualization
After our daily Kata (triangles), Wolfram posted this article. It’s about a set of letters that Bruce Lee wrote to himself during the last years of his life. What really shook me while reading it is the way he talked about the human condition. For him, we are an ever evolving set of emotions, ideas and potential. And he differentiates between self actualization and the actualization of an image we make of ourselves. We’re constantly busy projecting to the outside world what we think we should be, instead of focusing on what we actually are and want to be. For me, this directly correlates with the idea of Craft, which also promotes a good deal of learning, evolution, self reflection and the act of sharing.
I am happy because I am daily growing and honestly not knowing where the limit will yet lie. To be certain, every day can be a revelation or a new discovery. However, the most satisfaction is yet to come to hear another human being say, “Hey, here is something real.”
For him, real is something that’s not projected, something that comes from our core as human beings and in this case, from external sources. I believe that, no matter how much we update ourselves, we can’t achieve realness alone. It’s in our community efforts and interactions with others that we can really do something that expands beyond ourselves.
I deeply admire those who have the ability to teach. Some of the most influential people in my life have been teachers and mentors. After today, I’m more convinced than ever of the fact that all the learning opportunities I’ve had and keep on having put me in a position of privilege that must be used to empower others. Fortunately one of the pillars of the Apprenticeship Program is on learning and sharing knowledge 🙌, which means I'm empowered to do just what I feel I should be doing right now. And to it I will.