Parallelisms and projection

I think I may have mentioned in an earlier blog entry all the parallelisms that I see between my personal and my professional life.

Now, I realize that in fact, there is something else going on: it is not so much that there are parallelism, it is my own brain, projecting elements from my professional life (which after all accounts for a significant portion of my activities) onto my private life. Knowing (or at least suspecting) that I was going to be appointed project manager of a small project, for example, I read some books on project management, and suddenly, I started seeing everything around me, including my kids, my hobbies, my social life, and even my life as a whole as projects, with a specific scope, objectives and time-frame.

Next, I started researching databases, to be able to converse with our database designers without looking like a complete idiot. And suddenly, I am at my home computer, happily creating a relational database, standardized to the 3rd normal form (and wishing I could go to the sixth) with the names, addresses, telephone numbers and family ties of my friends and family. And just this week, I went on a management course, and suddenly, I see my kids as staff members, in need of Belbin analysis, and who need to be coached and motivated.

Now some people might accuse me of "having a one-track mind" or of "taking my work home". I am much kinder to myself. I think this is simply my way of processing information. I discovered a long time ago that I learn much better not by trying to memorize abstract concepts or rules, but by applying what I learnt as quickly as possible and/or linking it up to my daily situation, which often means applying it in places other than where was originally intended. And doing this also helps me around another (admittedly slightly strange) hurdle, namely the fact that awareness of the learning process can actually make it impossible for me to learn anything. When I was trying to improve my French, I had to get books that I wanted to read anyway. Getting a book purely for the purpose of improving my French would have defeated the purpose.

The problem, of course, with getting books that I wanted to read is that on the whole, they are a bit more difficult than the book you might choose to improve your language skills. But I persist, and I have good hope that soon (that is to say, within the next five years or so) I will have finished the French book that I chose to improve my French skills.

BTW I have another defense against the accusation that I take my work home: I also "take my home to work" by which I mean that I also export skills and knowledge from my personal life to the office. Settling arguments between my kids, for example, has taught me how to remain calm and keep perspective when everyone else is upset and/or unreasonable, a very useful quality in meetings.

Enough for today. I am a bit tired.