I am not a fervent fan of Chinese medicine, I could be, but
Chinese medicine is so mysterious and so magical that often times I feel lost.
But then once in a while, I got to understand Chinese medicine a little bit
more, and my fervor with Chinese medicine rises a little higher.
My official job is about software development, now it seems
software development and Chinese medicine is very different, one is very
logical, the other, well, as we say in China, can only be understood through “悟”
(googled, couldn’t find English words that translate it well, it is sort of
“using your heart to feel”, not “using your brain to analyze”, Chinese culture
is full of this stuff, sometimes I feel they are just bullshit, but it is
bullshit that only a Chinese can understand). But I’ve found some interesting common
things between software development and Chinese medicine.
Think of the big picture
The biggest critique for the west medicine is that it “treats the head when the head aches, treats the foot when the foot
hurts”. With Chinese medicine, it is completely different, if your head
aches, it is very likely not because something is wrong with your head, it
could be that your Qi and blood is low, it could be your liver Yang (Yang of
Yin Yang) is high, it could be many many other things. A good Chinese medicine
practitioner is able to detect what is wrong with your body without the help of
so many modern sophisticated medical instruments. In Chinese medicine, that is
called “辨证”
(again, couldn’t find good English words to translate it, it is sort of “finding
out all relevant symptoms, figuring out possible causes, deciding on the true
or major causes, considering contributing factors, and working out a recipe to
treat the causes and contributing factors”)
As a software developer, you should also think of the big
picture. As a sometimes compulsive person, I want to make a feature perfect
before moving on to the next, and I have often regretted: the feature I spent
so much time perfecting turned out to be either wrong or not required any more.
I indulge my compulsion from time to time, but I always remind myself to look
at the big picture.
As a software manager, it is even more important to think of
the big picture – it has a more formal word in software management
“prioritization”. It is actually a very difficult thing to do. In order to prioritize
different agendas, you have to know how to gauge these agendas, which requires
you to have an understanding or educated estimation about their prospects, and
you need to have good negotiating skills to convince others to agree on the
prioritization. If you do not do prioritization, your team will be overwhelmed,
lose focus and lose morale.
It is not an easy thing to think of the big picture in
Chinese medicine either. If it was that easy, I should have opened up my little
clinic now. The art of “辨证” is very hard to grasp, and “feeling with heart” can be
very tiresome.
Step back and take a different look
Although I haven’t become a Chinese medicine expert, and it will
likely take the rest of my life to hone my skills, several years of self-study and
self-treating has yield one benefit: I am now more in tune with the signals my
body sends. When I feel more compulsive than usual, when I keep working on some
coding problem and can’t drag myself away after several hours of futile trying,
I know something is going wrong with my health. I used to think my body and my
brain were separate entities, when I felt my brain was a muddle (which was a
common experience several years ago), I thought I could sober it up with lots
of coffee. Now I know that it is because the moist in my body has accumulated,
risen up and clouded my brain – I realize that when I translate Chinese
medicine like this, you probably think I am crazy and Chinese medicine is just voodoo.
Studying Chinese medicine has enabled me to look at myself
and the world in a different way. Even with my little Chinese medicine knowledge, I
can see some symptoms from some people, and can’t help but feel sympathy for
them.
When coding, sometimes I trap myself into a corner, trying
to solve a problem using the same way again and again. Nowadays, I know that I should
get out for a walk or run, stop thinking about the problem, let it cool for a
while, pick it up and look at it in a different way. Sometimes I get
inspiration just by going for a walk.
Being a software manager it is very important to lead the
team to think from users’ point of view. Too many failures are caused because
software teams fail to think about users’ pain and impose their likings on
their “imaginary” users.
It is interesting to use two very different ways of
thinking: one is very logical and the other is “悟”. But sometimes when I feel blocked in learning
Chinese medicine, I think maybe I can write an application to help me analyze the
huge data of Chinese medicine knowledge and provide “辨证”. This is completely against "悟", so it is a bad idea ...
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