Motivated, motivating, or just plain muddled?
Posted by Mike Fahrion on Wed, Aug 17, 2011 @ 11:26 AM
What makes you successful?
I was doing some bike-seat philosophizing about what makes people successful (what is it that happens to your brain when exercising? More thoughts on that later).
No, I’m not writing a self-help book (it would be short). But a couple events caused me to stop and think about what makes people I know successful or not, and what traits or quirks do they have in common.
It’s not intelligence. An uber-IQ may qualify you for more advanced work, but it doesn’t correlate to success. In fact extreme intelligence without the right stuff might even be counterproductive and lead to a dark world of cynicism and sarcasm. That’s a purgatory I’ve seen some engineers create for themselves.
What about motivation? Highly motivated people are enviable (and occasionally annoying). They throw themselves with unfettered enthusiasm at whatever they set out to do. But just being highly motivated isn’t it at all. Not by a long shot.
Why not? Because success really isn’t about you. It’s about those that you know and influence. Understanding what motivates them is where the real magic happens. Face it - on your own you’re a labor force of one in a world of 7 billion. You and I are a wee spec in space and time. But what about those that understand the motivation of others? They have a lever - maybe it’s 100x, maybe 1000x or more. I don’t care how motivated you are on your own, if you don’t understand the motivation of others (and do something about it), you’ll struggle. Agree? Disagree?
So I’ve been doing a bit of bicycling lately. Not a lot by enthusiasts’ standards, but between the commute to work and some weekend rides, easily over 100 miles per week. It’s one of a handful of physical activities that combines exercise, outdoors, an elegant mechanical advantage and rhythm. That combo does something for my brain which is constantly chewing on something or another when I’m riding. I find it’s impossible to dwell on petty stuff and I’m able to digest bigger issues faster and with more clarity than when my butt is planted in a desk chair. Is there something you do that gives this same mental nudge?
Enough philosophizing and on to business. Here are a few intriguing problems we’ve been involved with here lately. Maybe they’ll get you thinking about interesting problems that you can solve on or off your bike seat.
Nothing drives spending (or shirking in fear) like regulatory requirements. Widespread in Europe, and led in the US by California, fuel stations have to do leak monitoring and vapor recovery for their fuel tanks. That leads to a small embedded system being installed with, of all things, an RS-232 serial port that allows remote data collection. Instead of sending an employee out every day with a clipboard major fuel stations want to get that data into their network and business system. We’ve solved this one in a couple ways for different customers depending on what the sites look like. If they don't have wiring in place they’ve taken a pair of our Zlinx wireless modems to create a wireless link back into the computer systems inside the station. If they’re lucky enough to have some Ethernet cable (or an available conduit), they’ve adopted our single port Ethernet serial server to allow access over their existing network.
Energy management is a hot topic that isn’t going away soon. There is a quite a push to get more comprehensive data down at a more discrete level; for example, how much energy a particular location, device, or process is consuming. It turns out that, in the US, our government has been at play here as well, requiring all government buildings of significant size to monitor electric meters. Those meters aren’t always installed in a convenient location, so an enterprising solutions provider put together a combo of our Ethernet Extenders and our compact Industrial Ethernet switch to provide Ethernet connectivity at the electric meters which could then be located great distances from the host system. This could easily be retrofitted using existing telephone cable, avoiding the expensive proposition of pulling fiber connections through an existing building.
You’ll be happy to know that there are pretty demanding standards in the medical field when it comes to isolating devices that might be connected to your important bits from the power lines. Nice to know that someone is looking out on your behalf, especially when you’re wired up on a hospital bed during a lightning storm. B&B has provided serial isolation products for years (decades even), but now some of those medical devices are USB. That created a demand for USB isolation, and once some of our medical customers started inquiring we went out and got our USB isolator -- UL approved to UL 60601-1 medical standards. It’s now used to isolate the connection between a piece of USB-connected instrumentation and the IT-class PC that is prevalent throughout medical facilities.
I’m giddy about the success stories rolling in about GhostBridge - our new high performance outdoor wireless Ethernet bridge. I talked with a customer last week that yanked out a 3 year old wireless link that cost him an arm and half a leg, and replaced it with GhostBridge. On the far end was a network of high end digital signs. The wireless link provided programming access to update the content of those signs. His old link and its troublesome external antennas were getting him a throughput of about 700 kbps, which was leading to a lot of downtime for the signs. With GhostBridge his throughput went instantly to over 40Mbps and installation took just minutes. Another customer quipped that installation was “as easy as hanging a picture.” Great performance, great value, outstanding ease of use. Makes me circle back to my motivation philosophizing – there’s a nice little success story that makes me think we did a nice job in understanding what motivates many of you.
What are your motivation success stories? Do you buy in to my thoughts or am I missing some other key ingredients - or do you think I’m altogether wacked?
Talk back...I’d love to hear from you
Happy Connections, Mike Fahrion