Isaac Strack
Design Technologist and all-around mediocre soccer player.
BIG THOUGHTS
SMALL ACTS
@istrack
Isaac Strack
Our whole life is solving puzzles.
If you are curious, you'll find the puzzles around you. If you are determined, you will solve them.
- ERNO RUBIK
IT'S NOT A EUREKA MOMENT
IT'S A SLOW HUNCH
-STEVEN JOHNSON (HOW WE GOT TO NOW)
URQUHART CASTLE
STUMBLE FORWARD
HAPPY / NOT HAPPY
HAVE A PURPOSE
(do something important)
Johannes Gutenberg (1454)
Aaron Lufkin Dennison (1861)
- DOUGLAS ENGELBART
The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.
If you don't think that your career will be important or world-changing...
you're right.
HAVE PRINCIPLES
PRINCIPLES == VALUES
CHAMBERLEN FORCEPS
SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCED MORTALITY RATES
INVENTED: LATE 1500s
KEPT AS A TRADE SECRET
FOR 150 YEARS
PRINCIPLE = CAUSE
The activist lifestyle is not just for social activism. As a technologist, you can recognize a wrong in the world. You can have a vision for what a better world could be, and you can dedicate yourself to fighting for a principle.
- Bret Victor
When I see ideas dying, it hurts.
To me it feels like a moral wrong. An injustice.
Most of us wouldn't witness a civil rights violation and say "oh good! An opportunity!"
It's not an opportunity--it's a responsibility.
God suffers in the multitude of souls whom His word can not reach.
Religious truth is imprisoned in a small number of manuscript books which confine instead of spread the public treasure.
Let us break the seal which seals up holy things and give wings to Truth in order that she may win every soul that comes into the world by her word no longer written at great expense by hands easily palsied, but multiplied like the wind by an untiring machine.
- JOHANNES GUTENBERG
[Dennison] created the first production line for mass-produced watches. Cost of the watch? $13.00.
Hundreds of thousands of these were sold during the Civil War. Common soldiers and farmers could now afford their own pocket watch. For the first time in history, precise time-keeping wasn’t just for aristocrats and the well-to-do.
Until Dennison, a mass-produced pocket watch was never even a consideration–too many tiny parts were required, too much precision craftsmanship was necessary. Yet, he kept asking questions, tinkering, learning and asking more questions until he had created something never thought possible.
My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and their homes. To do this we are putting the greatest share of our profits back in the business.
- HENRY FORD
MISTAKES WERE MADE...
FUST SUES GUTENBERG
DENNISON BANKRUPT
DODGE V. FORD
PRINCIPLES & PROFITS
PIERRE OMIDYAR
MISTAKES WERE MADE...
DON'T HAVE SEX FOR MONEY
Hugh Macleod
Ignore Everybody (2009)
KNOW WHAT YOU ARE
(You are cattle)
BE OKAY WITH THAT
PLAY THE GAME
IN-BETWEEN TIME BELONGS TO YOU
FULFILLMENT DOESN'T COME WITH A CUBICLE
TEACH
THOSE WHO CAN
DO
THOSE WHO CAN'T
TEACH
THOSE WHO CAN
SHOULDN'T
SHOULD
THOSE WHO CAN'T
TEACH
GOOD TEACHING IS A RARE COMMODITY
Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the 'naturals', the ones who somehow know how to teach.
- PETER DRUCKER
You can really learn a lot that way.
It will change you in the middle of the day...
A MOMENT OF CLARITY
- NEIL YOUNG
...After some deep soul searching, we realized that Pluralsight exists to democratize professional technology training for people around the world.
The premise of “democratizing” something is to make it available to all people. Technology education, however, has long been reserved for only a few. We aim to change that, not only in the U.S. but everywhere. We want anyone, at any life stage, to be able to take control of their learning and pursue technology as a passion and a career.
- AARON SKONNARD, CEO
This is what gets me most excited every day. We are improving lives by giving them access to opportunity. The world is inherently unfair. Although brilliance may be evenly distributed, opportunity is not.
We are changing that.
- AARON SKONNARD
DON'T WAIT FOR PERMISSION
People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
- THE CULT OF DONE MANIFESTO
The best way to complain is to make things.
- JAMES MURPHY
MAKE ONE THING GREAT
DON'T FEAR FREEDOM
- SETH GODIN
WHAT TO DO WHEN IT'S YOUR TURN
(and it's always your turn)
We willfully create the illusion that we have no choice because it's frightening to be free.
But the deeper we look, the more we realize just how much choice we actually have. The choice of which roads to take and, more profoundly, which ones we choose not to take.
YOU'RE NEVER READY
DO IT
IS HE WRONG?
(or not profound?)
- Soren Kierkegaard
Do it or do not do it -
you will regret both.
To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.
PURITY OF HEART IS TO WILL ONE THING
PURITY OF FLOW IS TO DO ONE THING
Think big, act Small: 2016 UVU Talk by Isaac Strack
By Isaac Strack
