TechWorkRamblings

by Mike Kalvas

202304041619 Keep the whole in mind

Hamming said in 202205092134 The Art of Doing Science and Engineering something along the lines of "If you asked a professor what they were doing in their next class, they would say something like 'teaching topic X' instead of 'I am going to educate the students and prepare them for their future careers'."1 This causes a "missing the forest for the trees" issue.

Most of the time each person is immersed in the details of one special part of the whole and does not think of how what they are doing relates to the larger picture.1

We must keep the whole in mind as we navigate our day-to-day. It's a bit trivial in a sense because many people would think that the whole is there implicitly, but by keeping it explicitly in mind, we can guide 202205231312 A Career and more broadly 202304031317 A Life. To be truly successful in retrospect at the end of our lives, we need to keep a larger view. One attempt at keeping that larger view is to adhere to 202203210833 Systems thinking, even though there is no single larger picture, but many.


  1. Hamming, R. W. (2020). The art of doing science and engineering: Learning to learn. Stripe Press. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53349431-the-art-of-doing-science-and-engineering 2