Timothy's Thoughts

S omeone once suggested that if a person would study a given topic for one hour a day, five days a week for five years, he could be a world renowned expert on the subject. When you think about it, it seems to be true. That doesn’t mean that you are an expert on everything you have been doing for five years, but if you were to deliberately study a subject—any subject—with the intent of becoming an expert, you could reach your goal. A working year is 2,000 hours. Five hours a week times five years is 1,300 hours. Just imagine if you could take on this task as your job. You would take up your work each day, looking for things you could learn about the subject that you hadn’t learned before. You would begin your time studying what others have written on the subject, but you would soon exhaust their work and you would start looking for new things. In a little more than half a year, you could be an expert. We see that happen all the time in the engineering world. An engineer is given a new ...

Fiction is harder to write than non-fiction, or it should be. When you write fiction, you have to make it up as you go. When a writer writes non-fiction, he should know his subject well enough that he doesn’t have to make anything up, he just has to figure out the best order for the information and find a way to get the point across to the reader. Let me show you what I mean. A college professor has spent years studying fish. One day the dean comes to him and says, “I want you to write a book. It will make the college look better.” Now the professor could decide to write about the history of Egypt. “That will give me a chance to learn about Egypt.” But he won’t do that. Instead, he will go to his files, pull out his work from the past several years and he will write about fish. In all likelihood, he could write much of the book from memory, but he will use his work and the work of others to insure the accuracy of his statements. That brings us back to the subject of platform. Our platf...