kchalk

Mental health work I'm doing right now focuses on defining identity through values. As a first draft, I can say that I value the following:

• Honesty and transparency

  • This means not lying, but it also means not withholding pertinent information. ​

  • I'm a Sagittarius, which means at very least that I have been told since childhood that the biggest flaw of my personality type is bluntness. I guess I understand how it's important to cushion the blow when delivering disappointing information, but otherwise I never really understood this to be a flaw. I won't lie to you, and I may tell you things you don't want to hear.

  • I've tried to be a different person many times over the years. Speaking up less in class, not warning people I think are making mistakes, but just letting it go -- I'm really bad at not being me. Whatever you get when we interact, you're safe to assume that whatever I'm communicating is genuine.

• Craftsmanship​

  • I don't want to do things poorly. Sure the customer doesn't have high standards, sure we have a limited timeframe, but it won't take that much work to do it right, so can we? ​

  • Have you heard the phrase crawl/walk/run? Managers say it when you're asking them to do something well and they want to "crawl before we run". This phrase is the bane of my working life. Let's compromise by walking with good form and make sure we write down what it would take to start running in the backlog so we don't forget where we'd like to go. 

  • Let's plan before we do. Let's brainstorm and get all the possible solutions on the page, and figure out how we can combine the best of everything. Let's design carefully and execute with precision.

• Flexible thinking

  • Don't start by telling others they are wrong, start by asking them why their perspective is different than yours. You will probably learn something.​

  • I play board games and tabletop RPGs. I'm a theoretical linguist and linguistic machine learning specialist. When I grow up and don't want to make any money any more I'll see about editing fantasy novels for a living. I like thinking in different shapes. It's literally what I do for fun, and it's also the foundation of how I chose my career.

  • Interdisciplinary work is fun because you practice thinking in particular patterns in one discipline, and then look at a new field from that perspective, and whether the pattern fits well or not, the comparison contains insight.