Rui CarmoIt's amazing how much creative energy evaporated during my first week back at work. I have done absolutely zilch at home other than browse through news and type up a few notes, and portions of my brain are crying out for rest, recuperation and a chance to churn through tech stuff.
There has been a lot going on (lots of work, PMI training, traffic jams galore, late dinners, etc., etc.), and to round it off we just went to our first Mandarin class today, so there has been fairly little time to do more than rest, flip through The Economist (which, incidentally, has a killer survey piece this week).
Anyway, two things regarding the stuff I'm learning:
- PMI isn't learning per se, but formalizing what I've been doing for years now. Being extremely leery of anything that smacks of "certification" (which, every time I've met a "certified" consultant on anything, meant I was paying for a label applied to goods of dubious quality), I find that I dove easily into portions of the lexicon and methodology - too easily for my own comfort. Still, stepping through the basics and making sure I understand why things are structured that way is a nice way to strip away the prejudice and accept I have to re-learn the other bits.
- Mandarin is a lesson in humility. After all, to get started on it in earnest you have to accept you have to re-learn everything you know about language (both written and spoken), even if it is, in fact, easier for Portuguese speakers to pin down all the vowels first time around.
So, I'm starting all over in two different fronts. Let's see what comes up next...