Writing Portfolio & Blog

Yesterday Brad Feld communicated on his blog that he and his wife Amy are huge believers in empathy, in response to also having watched the video I talked about in my last post . But then, there was a comment from a software engineer / musician with a PhD degree —a clearly intelligent and thoughtful individual — which I though was intriguing. It said: “I use the term ‘empathy’ when I have actual personal experience with whatever the other individual is going through. I don’t think there’s really any other justification to be able to claim that you are feeling or experiencing what they are. I use the term ‘sympathy’ otherwise. I really don’t like this presentation of her views of these words. She’s adding semantic to the words which is overloading the definitions. And the presentation makes it sound like sympathy is bad and empathy is good. These are fairly precise terms and some of the implications she mentions are beyond their definitions. For example, she focuses on the ‘conn

The central reason why I wanted to create PreAcquaint.com was to create more empathy in the world through inspiring stories from real people which share what a particular set of experiences is or was like. Today, I came across this video while reading the comments section on my favorite blog .   It is the most awesome explanation I’ve ever come across of what empathy truly is. As human beings, we all have our share of challenges to be dealing with, whether we’re transparent or opaque about our respective situations. If we could get ourselves outside of our shells long enough to sense and come in contact with what others are also feeling, we could thereby dramatically bolster the quality of our lives, as well as others’. Technology currently offers a lot a promises to take humanity to a higher place. But materialism is still way too prevalent. Unless we can break down the barriers between one human to another, we’ll be leaving on the table many opportunities to feel t

 Some people have never liked school. I’m going to guess they often are of the rebellious type. It reminds me of the 1975 Pink Floyd song, Welcome to the Machine: “You bought a guitar to punish your ma And you didn’t like school and you know you’re nobody’s fool” I am of that archetype. Definitely I wasn't fond of school. I’ve bought plenty of guitars — 23 to be exact. Some are long gone. I currently own 14. I was definitely going “against the grain” in many ways. But I was a fool, as I’ve ended up working just as hard being an autodidact as if I had gone through college — no shortcut whatsoever there. I’ve been pondering for some time now as to where we’re heading as a society. It’s all moving so fast now. Not long ago it seemed, a school dropout like myself, if they were lucky enough or sufficiently resourceful, could inch themselves up from mid-middle class status to the upper-middle class (or even higher) by turning their trade into a business — that ma