This is the second post in my monthly challenge. The idea is to help explain what I’m doing with these monthly challenges by blogging about it — which is a monthly challenge in itself. Meta, yes. Confusing? Perhaps.
This blogpost will center around frameworks. Or, more specifically, one framework. One I seek to pull out of these monthly challenges by the end of 2015.
In layman’s speak, “framework” is defined simply as “an essential supporting structure of a building, or object”. In the programming world, where frameworks have become quite common, it gets a little more complex.
Here’s how one site explains a framework (again, in the scope of computer programming):
In the longer term, a framework ensures the longevity of your applications. If a development team works as they please, only that particular team will be able to maintain and upgrade the application with ease. The way that a publisher supports a proprietary solution.
On the other hand, the structure that a framework provides for the application makes it possible to avoid this pitfall altogether and it gives any developer – whether they participated in its development or not – the ability to easily “adopt” an application, to maintain it over time and to upgrade it both quickly and neatly, whenever necessary….
I’d like to take this idea and spin it into my life. In this quote, the author lays out the benefit of a framework. It’s a way to share something across the board without the pains of sharing, or the extreme pain of starting from scratch each time. I won’t necessarily be using it to help different people (or take my hands off and into the hands of someone else), but I will be using a framework across several disciplines. In this sense, I’m the new person coming in and trying to pick something up with ease. And, for that, a framework can be quite helpful.
The idea is I can pick up a goal, a large goal: write a novel, or squat 350lbs, and eventually achieve that goal. It’s a self-success framework — one that does not reinvent the process for achievement with each new goal, just adapting its parts to fit the application (and remember the metaphor of an application from my previous post). This is what I’m after.
What can I use, time after time, to ensure success? We’ve seen people do this. Accomplish goals across different disciplines, different plains of thought and different schools. My theory is that they, explicitly or unconsciously, have a self-success framework that empowers them to success. This can simply be: put your head down and work. That’s a self-success framework. A simple one, but it’s certainly a structure around which you can build, or achieve, or progress. What I seek might be as simple as that, but I won’t know until I find it.
You can think of a framework as an umbrella. It should encompass everything that fits under it. If something doesn’t fit under it, it’s either been misclassified, or the framework is limited. Or both. One framework that everyone knows is the scientific method. This framework fits into every unit of science — from geology to neurobiology — and allows scientists to use it as a structure to frame research. It provides consistency and, having been refined or just made amazingly, accomplishes what it sets out to do: either proving research hypotheses or disproving. Either way, no scientist can truly publish work without utilizing this framework – and this it retains its umbrella status.
I’ll save the whole “why” question for another blogpost — thought I kind of did answer it in this one. The truth is, I see this as being the safest road to self-success and self-advancement. Safe not in the opposite of danger, but safe in the sense of reliability. Maybe that’s the better way to say it: this is the most the reliable method.
And so, I seek a framework. One I can use in any challenge. How will I get this? Examining myself and my success through a series of monthly challenges — testing different facets and achievements. What is consistent across these int terms of success? What is a surefire trigger for failure? The collective understanding of these will help to build that framework.
Or at least that’s the idea.
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