Wisdom can be found almost anywhere....if you're willing to look

Much of what we post on LinkedIn is business related and I need to say at the outset that what follows are my own thoughts and are not meant to represent those of my employer.

I watched an interesting confluence of thoughts parade through my head this morning and came to the conclusion which is the subject of this little essay. Some people have been described as a BB in a box car, when I get into these thought experiments in my head the process is more reminiscent of a ping pong ball in an SUV at the Dakar Rally so please bear with me here.

I was up today early and, in spite of the fact that I’ve been “that Linux guy” for the past 20+ years, wrote a how-to for my family on the latest ransomware afflicting Windows users. While doing so I used TeamViewer to in log into the family Windows machines I support around the US (yep, I’m the designated family geek) and was really pleased to see that ALL of them were patched up to date without any intervention on my part. Before I go on, full disclosure: I am the Linux guy who, in the late 90’s used to go to work in blue jeans, tennis shoes and a t-shirt that read “In a world without fences, who needs Gates?” Of course it was not long after that Steve Balmer declared Linux a cancer. Who started all of this? I’ll come back to that. This morning I found myself singing the praises of how far Microsoft has come in addressing real world security needs of their customers. Are there still vulnerabilities? Sure, but the way they are dealt with today deserves acknowledgement and respect. By the way, Satya Nadella has made clear that Microsoft also sees us, the Open Source folk, differently these days. Today Open Source is big business, Microsoft is still really big business and we are working together. Gates and Nadella are among the folks I follow on social media. How about that?

So to take this a little further I’m going to reference some sensitive topics and ask that we not get caught up in the very real problems they touch on, resolving them will take more time, space and wisdom that I have here and now, they are just a few of many examples that blew through my ping pong mind this morning.

James A Walsh, the grandfather of whom I have written here before, was an aide to Senator Ernest McFarland during World War II and spoke to us frequently of the workings of the US Senate in those days, decrying the partisan politics that have made our government so much weaker and less effective. Of course he was speaking in the 1970’s and 1980’s, I’m sure he would lose his mind if he could see the polarization of today. When we pounce on every minor inconsistency of “the others” we waste the bandwidth we could use for conversation that solves real problems. When we vilify our opponents rather than opening up to the possibility that they might see something we don’t or might see it in a way that opens up new possibilities we miss real opportunity.

Stephen Covey famously told us “Seek first to understand, then to be understood”. Any of us who knows everything (and at one time I knew everything) is incapable of learning anything. Open up, engage, converse with respect, you might learn something and in the process of learning, you just might teach something.

After an extended technical debate one of my favorite people once said to me “Well, I’m man enough to admit that you might not be wrong.” and this was the beginning of a wonderful and ongoing conversation that has made my life far richer.

So, before all of this rambling, I left a question hanging at the start of all of this that I’ll come back to now: “Who started all of this?” I covered a whole lot of “this” in past few paragraphs:

• Technology
• Business
• Government
• and by extension much more

and now I’m going to say that I don’t think “Who started all of this?” matters nearly as much as “Who will solve all of this?”.

“This” will take open and honest conversation, courage, humility, strength and more. “This” will vary depending on time and place. “This” will not be solved in one pass. “This” will take persistence and patience.

Will it be you?