Back in College I was an English Lit major, but my real love was computers. I just came to them late. Starting my junior year pretty much all I cared about was programming and dating my future wife, Amy Peltonen. There was really only one comp-sci course that I stayed away from: Databases. Why? Because, in my mind, databases = business and I hated business.
The irony here goes much deeper, because if there was one aspect of business that I hated more than any other, it was sales. If the 20-year-old me knew that I was one day going to be president of a sales company, I’m not sure the current me would be alive to see it happen! Even more ironic, I met my wife in college. She was a marketing major and I constantly teased her about it. Now, she is a product manager and spends her time with developers, writing specs, and being technical. I now live my life in the world of business. The two businesses that I own focus on sales and marketing.
An interlude on relational databases
Once I graduated, I joined a technical consulting company and was sent on a long-term database project. I fell in love. I loved the puzzle of figuring out how to store information in a way that could be useful to as many people as possible. I loved thinking about set processing instead of processing individual items one by one. And, eventually, I learned that relational databases (the kinds of databases that were popular – and still are – when I was starting out), were self-referential. i.e., they used their own constructs to define themselves. For example, a relational database has a table called something like system_tables that stores a list of all the tables in the database, including system_tables. Self-referentiality is a beautifully elegant construct and one that spoke to my budding computer architect’s mind.
One key tenant of relational database design is figuring out how much to break up the data across different tables. For instance, in a database representing a company, employees are stored in a separate table from departments and customers are in a separate table than their orders. We call this process normalization. Normalization is great when you are building databases for transactional systems. You better believe that Amazon, for example, has highly structured and segmented data to run their website! However, if you are looking to report on and learn from the data, it is much more useful to bring the data back together in a few big tables instead of a bunch of distributed tables. We call this process denormalization.
On learning
At the end of 2021, I was doing my year in review and realized I spent over $500 on business books alone (some of which I actually read), and this doesn’t include the copious amount of library books I checked out or the fiction books I read. I’ve clearly been doing a great job at collecting information. I think prior to 2022, I was telling myself that collecting information = learning. Naïve and foolish!
Like most areas of my life, I was acting unconsciously and just doing what I’d been doing since grade school to gather information: Read and do my best to remember it on test day. It is clear to me upon reflection, that there is a broader scope to learning than just knowledge acquisition.
One of the things that I want to do this year is to define what learning means for me. In the meantime, one thing that I feel I can do to further my progress on the learning front is to start processing what I’m reading by finding the overlap between authors – many of whom are tapping into what I feel are universal principles of the human condition.
My goal
My goal with this blog is to denormalize all of the knowledge I have gained and continue to gain. I want to make connections between all of the brilliant authors, teachers, and mentors that I’ve experienced, write my observations down so that I process them more deeply, and record the results. While doing this, I hope to improve myself, the lives of entrepreneurs; the organizations to which I belong; and the relationships I share with those close to me, both personally and professionally. It would be an incredible bonus if you find this journey useful as well.
Besides, who wants to be normal?
Thanks for reading,
John
Photos from Boston College and Ondrej Bocek on Unsplash