Dream Job

Kyle’s Dream Job
And other philosophical ramblings

My personal mission statement reads: “To Learn, To Create, To Teach, To Empower in Art, Science, & Stewardship.” That’s not a job description, but it does provide me with a guiding framework for choosing a job. My dream job must encompass the following elements:

Learning
I am a knowledge addict. Lifelong learning is a passion. I am a Knowledge Capitalist. Give me knowledge that is both broad and deep. Only interdisciplinary knowledge can solve major problems in an increasingly-connected, tangled, complex, exponentially-growing world of people and information.

Creating
Knowledge, to dispute a common aphorism, is not power. Knowledge is simply a tool, and it must be wielded in the correct manner if goals are to be achieved. We may know that, given a sufficient lever, we may indeed move the world, but resources, procurement, staging and assembly/testing are other matters entirely. I see creating as a divine process; I arose from stardust, and it is my duty to continue this process of assembly and emergence, to make the whole indeed greater than the sum of its parts.

Teaching
Personal learning is investing in a public future only if that knowledge can be shared successfully. A creation sitting in a closet, literally or figuratively, is an evolutionary dead-end. No information will be transmitted; no further mutations (changes) will occur. Only in sharing knowledge is knowledge challenged, honed, proven, and applied to significant problems. Plus the teacher always learns more than the students (q.v., Learning). Critical thinking skills are essential in both the learning and transmission of knowledge.

Empowering
Knowledge may be value-less but its application is not. Value-driven personal leadership, planning and goals are essential to know if we are answering the right questions in the right way. I believe that we have many moral and ethical obligations to each other and to our planet. We must not deprive one another (or future generations) of the ability to live, love, learn, and create. One important goal of this whole learn-create-teach cycle is to not just impart knowledge but to bequeath power – here defined as the ability to apply knowledge in correct ways to achieve beneficial change.

My personal “funky business” might include, but not be limited to, the following broad categories of interest arranged alphabetically from the increasingly convoluted mind-map that is me: animals, art, blogs, books, castles, catastrophe theory, caves, caving, chaos theory, complexity theory, computers, conservation, DBMS, desktop publishing, dragons, ecology, economics, education, emergence, environmental science, fantasy, folklore, fractals, game theory, games, gardening, gargoyles, GIS, ghosts, graphics, green investing, hauntings, hiking, history, horror, horseback riding, information theory, IT, leadership, micro loans, mind maps, monsters, movies, music, mythology, philosophy, plants, policy analysis, project management, public administration, racquetball, religion, remote sensing, saving the planet, sci-fi, science, statistics, urban planning, and writing.