Justin Love

Not much feedback during the meeting – a few compliments, but of course that makes it harder to find things to improve. Ah-counter (checking for ‘ah’, ‘um’ and so on) did a very fuzzy report, and I didn’t hear my name. Timekeeper also didn’t report times, and I wasn’t sure if the grammarian was complementing or criticizing. Most of it was a few gems in the individual feedback slips that get handed around after the meeting.

• The closing was too abrupt. Most of my practice runs were cutting the time close – by the time the meeting was approaching, I was seeing the time go down, and as usual it went faster while I was ‘on stage’ I did say that it was going on the shortest yet (even though time feedback is extremely coarse grained) and should have added one of the extra lines on the book from the ‘cutting room floor’
• Watching breathing – more specifically, make breaths less obvious. This will take some serious paying attention to even spot.
• Watch pacing. I think I was using a breath as a pause, and considering that part of the flow. I’m going to have to figure out how to have a pause without just standing there.
• Some words get clumped together. Back to talking too fast. This was one comment I also during the actual meeting. It’s kind of a known problem – I think faster than I type or talk, so it’s always a challenge to keep myself operating at the speed of the output device.

Of course given the volume of the feedback there were a few outliers as well

• Needs more organization. Examples please? I had an opening where I stated the five things I was going to talk about, talked about them using the state, restate, example, state suggested by the manual, and then briefly reviewed the topics again. Far more people said I had great organization, so I’m going to have to treat this as an outlier until I get more concrete advice.
• Missed the intended topic. Really? This wasn’t exactly a book review. I talked about what I am, not just what I do. I suppose you wanted to hear where I work, where I went to school, and what I named my pet fish in the fifth grade?

This was my “icebreaker” speech at Fox Valley Toastmasters. Since I don’t have the same time constraints, I’ve put back in a few asides that got cut out of early drafts.

Hello, I am Justin Love. This talk will be about me, and about a book called Now, Discover Your Strengths. The premise of the book is that for maximum success and happiness, we should focus on our strengths rather than trying to remediate our weaknesses. It includes a code for an online survey, that will attempt give you your five biggest strengths that one should focus on. For me, those five strengths were Input, Restorative, Intellection, Ideation, and Analytical.

Input is learning. I am always learning – I don’t read as many books as I might like to, but I have audiobooks, podcasts, internet news feeds, and I am constantly learning new programming languages and technologies. So, it might not be too surprising that when I started to think “You know, I really ought to get out of the house and get a little exercise”, I signed up for a martial arts class. Martial arts is something I’ve always been curious about, and it gives me the opportunity to be constantly learning new forms and techniques. Input is always learning.

Restorative is fixing and improving things. When I see something that was working and now isn’t, I get a little bothered. When I see something and think “I know how to make it better”, there is a note of dissonance in the world. Which might explain how I ended up on my condominium board. You see, the board is supposed to have five members. If it has less than five members, it could be considered a little bit broken. I’ve found, and I believe, that there often is no point in whining about something, when you can just do it yourself. Never mind that I wasn’t even in the state when I was first put on the board, but that is a story in and of itself. Restorative is fixing and improving things.

Intellection is thinking about things. Sitting and noodeling on them – what are the implications? the contingencies? Where doe it lead, and what does it all mean? So, it might not be too surprising that one of my favorite childhood toys were Lego bricks, which can be constantly combined and recombined, trying out theories of form or function, and just taking it apart if things didn’t work out. Unfortunately, sitting and thinking does tend towards sitting alone, so I have to force myself to get out now and then with things like Toastmasters, martial arts, conferences and user groups. Intellection is thinking about things.

Ideation means thinking about big ideas – or small clear concepts that take a bunch of messy stuff and distill it down to something you can easily grasp. It is looking for the best explanation for the most events. This might explain my attraction to things like Now, Discover Your Strengths, which distills a bunch of messy human aptitude down to a couple dozen strengths. Ideation is big ideas and powerful concepts.

Analytical literally means dividing into parts. Looking for the joints of nature where one take two things and set them apart, mostly disregarding their interactions. This is something I use a lot in software. You are probably familiar with software – either it’s not doing something you want, or it is doing something you don’t want, and I’m the kind of person who gets called in to make it behave. Often times I find that I am actually more comfortable dealing with software and computers because you can analyze it – form a theory about what should happen, see what did happen and use that to narrow the cause down and down and down, until you get to a bit – true or false, yes or no – facts and data. People and politics are not always so accommodating. Analytical is dividing things down to facts and data.

Everybody has their particular strengths. The things that they do well and enjoy doing. For me some of those things are constantly learning so that I can fix and improve things, really thinking about big ideas and powerful concepts in order to break things down to real facts and data.