Why Alexander the Great really won (it wasn't strength)

if you're not getting results in your
life you might want to consider adding a
dose of pragmatism to your life and I've
seen it time and time again in the
corporate world as well as just regular
life where people sweat the details and
don't get the results that they want so
pragmatism comes stems from the Greek
word word pragma which means to take
action towards uh well to take action to
strengthen your narrative so your
narrative is your life so taking action
to strengthen it is being pragmatic so
you're getting results the results that
you want in your life to pretty much
bolster your own
narrative whenever you fail to do things
then you're doing the opposite of being
pragmatic and you're weakening your
narrative so what is a a great
historical example of being pragmatic is
I think my favorite one is uh Alexander
the Great so there's this story about
the gordian KN so gordia or this gordian
location was some uh ancient maybe
mythological area
where uh it housed this famous knot so
this knot it was
basically a very complex difficult to
untie not pretty much no no one could
untie it and it stood there for
centuries and it was prophesized that
whoever could untie this knot would rule
over all of Asia so Alexander the Great
um went to this knot and people thought
that he would sit there for hours days
whatever to conquer this knot to untie
it and basically foretell that he will
um conquer all of Asia well he did
something unexpected he just slashed the
knot with his sword and this kind this
symbolizes pragmatism because he didn't
follow the rules he went for the result
so The
Logical like point A to point B straight
line here would be to just get rid of
the um the KN sorry I got a phone
call so
in the corporate world in especially
software engineering I see this all the
time people will try to follow playbooks
uh run books just to the line and they
end up not getting the result that they
that they want they end up getting stuck
or even worse like for example they'll
try to run a script or a a program and
at the first debug message they'll be
like oh well this didn't work this is
impossible now I'm blocked whenever they
could have for example read the error
message and unblocked themselves
but I mean not everyone has the concept
of being pragmatic and it really
incorporates this into their life I've
told a story before about someone who
didn't realize the end goal of the
apprenticeship at IBM was to just start
contributing to the bottom line start
making the company money and their focus
was on amassing a bunch of badges just a
bunch of Superfluous um certificates and
things like that and yeah the those
kinds of actions keep you busy but they
don't actually deliver any impact and
impact the buzzword of I guess this the
decade is just super important in not
only software engineering but every
industry if you can deliver impact
you've created value for the company and
you have become an asset so that's your
daily dose of pragmatism so I'll see you
next time