Chris’s Notes on All the Math You Need to Get Rich: Thinking with Numbers for Financial Success, Robert L. Hershey, Open Court Pub Co, 2001. I recommend this book for the basics it covers, the slim size, the exercises and the approachable text.

I graduated from high school with all kinds of wonderful math grades (I finished all of my high school math a year early and had to attend a calculus course at a nearby college in my senior year), but managed to get out without a firm grasp of some simple ideas. Specifically, I never learned why it is that when I make a fixed house payment, the actual amount that goes to the interest and to the principle varies each month. The reason this is (as I’m sure all of my readers already know) is because the interest is only paid against the outstanding principle that remains on the total loan each month. It’s just like compound interest in reverse (an idea that I always did understand).

I haven’t been reading this book cover to cover (I already know how fractions, scientific notation and fractions work), but this one fact alone makes this book worth the price. Plus, it makes a wonderful reference (this is where I got F=P(1+R)^N used in The “Average Return” Myth). The world needs more short, focused, well-written books.

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I was hanging out with Eric Promislow from ActiveState this week and he pointed me at his “Baconizer” web site, which will connect a path between any two books (or CDs or DVDs). For example, from "The Best of Martha Stewart Living : Weddings" to "Mastering Visual Studio .NET" is only 11 hops (and some time in prison). Hours of fun for the whole family.

The message board for the Applied XML Developer’s Conference is heating up a bit. I set it up for the audience to be able to communicate during the presentations, but folks are already using it to coordinate Dev.Conf.-related activites. Enjoy.

Jamie Cool's App Updater sample that keeps an installed WinForms application up to date with bits from a server has been updated and is now available as the Updater Application Block to be even more robust (although Jamie's sample code was used for all of the Terrarium code updates, which had huge usage). Recommended.

I have been in technical arguments many times where I knew I was right and used every once of my debate skills to convince the other person of their terrible wrongness. This can go four ways:

1. I’m right and they eventually agree
2. I’m wrong and I turn to their point of view
3. They get worn down and stop listening
4. I’m wrong, but they fail to convince me

Being right is fun, of course, as is finding someone that’s willing to change your mind (lots of folks don’t like to argue). Wearing a person down is no fun at all, but by far the worst is that I’m wrong and I stay wrong. Unfortunately, as a professional communicator for the better part of a decade, #4 is a real possibility and it’s something to really watch out for. Being right is easy. Recognizing that I’m wrong is easy when I’m arguing with someone with good communications skills. Recognizing that I’m wrong when the person I’m arguing with isn’t quite up to the task, that’s hard to detect and fix.

Of course, even harder is being wrong and having no one to tell you you’re wrong, but I can’t blame that on anyone but myself. : )

Sun, June 22, 2003

The most important thing that I’ve every learned is how to learn. I and a few other lucky souls gained this knowledge at the tutelage of one of my mentors, Don Box, during my tenure at DevelopMentor. Not only did I have an amazing thinker to learn from, but I had a enormously difficult topic to learn on: COM.

When I started learning COM in the early ’90s, only a few souls inside of MS really knew it. The only real book in the world on COM at the time was inscrutable and no one with the necessary communication skills and the time to teach COM had yet grokked it fully. Don had written a five-day short course entitled Essential OLE, but only given it a few times, so hadn’t really gotten over the hump (as evidenced by the title of the course). It was my job to become the second instructor on COM at DM.

I’ve always been one of those people that, when faced with a topic and the proper motivation, could almost always learn it easily. This skill helped me to get good grades, but didn’t teach me how to really learn; it was too natural for me to understand how I did it. Unfortunately, COM was too hard to learn “naturally” and there’s nothing like preparing to stand up in front of a group of people to motivate you to learn. In fact, the first time I’d had to teach COM, I was so nervous on the last day (when I was to teach the material I knew the least well), that five minutes before my first lecture of the day, I had to find an empty room to hyperventilate. I literally didn’t know what I was going to say.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the option of bailing at the last day of this class unless I was prepared to give up my job at DM. It wasn’t the bailing that was the issue; if somebody else that knew the material was available, I could’ve bailed (that’s how cool DM was). Unfortunately, only Don knew it and he was out of town. So, I had only one choice — fake it. I wasn’t proud, but public speaking is like any other form of entertainment and “the show must go on.”

As I was giving the slides that morning on COM structured storage (a particularly nasty topic in COM), I found myself learning how it it worked as I told the story to my audience. All the studying and experimentation I’d done had given me the foundation, but not the insights. The insights I gained as I explained the technology. It was like fireworks. I went from through those topics in a state of bliss  as all of what was really going on underneath exploded in my head. That moment taught me the value of teaching as a way of learning that I’ve used since. Now, I always explain stuff as a way to gain insight into whatever I’m struggling with, whether it’s through speaking or writing. For me, and for lots of others, story telling is where real insight comes from.

Still, teaching without the foundation of knowledge isn’t effective. How do I gain that foundation of knowledge? I consume the available material and ask “why” a lot. If I look at a class hierarchy and it’s design isn’t immediately obvious to me, I ask why it was built that way and why was that way chosen over another. And to the answers to those questions, I keep asking why ’til I get to something I know already or until I get to a human reason. The reason for not stopping ’til I get to something I know is that I believe that all learning is only as affective as well as it can be tied to what you already know. How easily it is to learn something is directly related to how much you already know about related topics, so the more you know, the easier it is to learn more. However, when humans are involved, aesthetics take over, e.g. the reason that C++ has member initialization lists and Java doesn’t is that Stroustrup liked that feature and Gosling didn’t.

The process and benefit of asking why is described well in a novel I’m reading: “It put me in contact with military planners from a dozen nations, and more and more they began to come to me with questions well beyond those of military strategy. … I didn’t think my answers were particularly wise, I simply said whatever seemed obvious to me, or when nothing was clear, I asked questions until clarity emerged.”

What made this process so amazing with Don was that we were both doing the same thing: experimenting and telling each other how it worked, which made for a very tight feedback loop. The loop got better as we added more people, like Tim and Keith, both of whom are also amazing thinkers. Audiences are good because of the feedback that they can provide, but optimized feedback like this got us all leapfrogged very quickly into deep COM thinkers.

The goal of all learning is clarity. My own method involves taking in the available material, asking a bunch of “why” questions and then telling somebody else ’til clarity emerges. After COM, I’ve successfully applied that method to learning how all kinds of other technologies work, how to run a business, how to write, how to manage, how to lose weight (50 pounds and holding) and, most recently, how Microsoft works. Thanks, COM (and Don and Tim and Keith and every audience I’ve every had : ).

Chris’s Notes on Cashflow Quadrant: Rich Dad’s Guide to Financial Freedom, Robert T. Kiyosaki and Sharon L. Lechter, Warner Books, April, 2000. I recommend this book for the way it twisted my head around.

There aren’t any “how to” details in this book, but it still had some pretty valuable ideas in it that really changed my thinking and inspired me about what’s possible:

• There are four main ways to make money: as an employee, being self-employed, running a business and investing.
• Our society has trained the middle and lower classes that success looks like getting a good job and being a good little consumer. I’d long recognized the cycle of get into college->get a good job->save for your kids’ college education->they do it all over again for their kids, but I didn’t know what alternative I had.
• The alternatives, according to this book, are running a business and/or investing. Specifically, this book really pushed running a business to fund investments, mostly for the tax benefits. My own thoughts are that having a business to fund investments is the absolute right thing to do. However, having a business that generates extra money to invest is easier said than done. If that’s your plan, you should go away and do that first, then figure out the investing thing later in your leisure by the pool.
• Folks that run their own business or invest have a reasonable chance for financial independence, whereas employees and the self-employed do not.
• Financial independence has a specific definition: having more passive monthly income than your monthly expenses. Only when’s it’s passive income, i.e. you don’t have to do the work to generate the income, do your finances allow you to pursue whatever activities you want, regardless of their income generating abilities, e.g. write a novel or home school your kids.

In general, I really like the way that Kiyosaki writes, although it’s very marketing-style, so it turns me on and off at the same time. What I like is that he writes in a very personal way, talking about his two fathers, one trapped in the rat race like most of us and the other who’d learned how to become financially independent. He uses examples of his fathers’ behavior to illustrate his points and talks a lot about how be changed his own thinking to break himself out of the cycle.

On the other hand, it seems like his major business is selling financial education-related materials to fuel his own wealth, so right away you have to suspect his motives. Also, his books are light on details, although he’s happy to use them to point you at other produces that he or his partners have produced for more information. That’s not a business model that respects the needs or intelligence of his audience. Still, if you ignore that and look for the ideas, I find his writing useful.