Things I Learned This Week #1

I learned lots of things this week. Here's a list outlining some of the more important ones.

• Strangely enough, I learned a little bit more about human nature by writing about programming. I wrote about this in a post titled "Coding By Dogma". The post was an attempt to put my finger on why developers take sides. Even though the revelation was prompted by an example taken from the computer programming world, I believe that the ideas I talked about in the post can be applied to any situation where people people take sides and stick to their guns.
  
• I learned that people can become even more unfair and nasty when someone gently points out they are being unfair and nasty.
• I learned that the most important question you can ask yourself is: Are you here to make meaning or are you here to make money? I plan to blog a lot about this next week because this question is so important that once I answered it, things became a lot clearer for me.
• I learned that you can manipulate Google's search ranking with an extremely clever tactic. I love clever tactics, and this one is so clever and obvious I feel like laughing, crying and being sick at the same time.
  
• I learned that controversy is never a bad thing. As John from http://www.agilekiwi.com/ pointed out in an email to me, I got lucky with all the traffic and controversy my blog post. generated. When the hate mail poured in I was completely overwhelmed and a little angry that I was getting such a terrible response to something I thought was great. But as the saying goes, any coverage is good coverage. In the end, I'm still glad I wrote the article and I'm grateful I got a chance to learn more about what makes people tick.

Next week, I'm going to post about making meaning and making money. I hope you'll come back and join the discussion because I think it's the most important one we can have.

Thanks for reading