What X is about
Welcome. This will be a place of learning, of understanding, of study and research. This may not be for you. This is a part of my commitment to being a lifelong learner. I did not know it at first, and you may not as well, but learning and reading are addictive: when you understand something, you begin to see it in an entirely different light, you know the inner workings, the how and the why of it. Posts here will be of an eclectic variety- a post could be the breakdown of a #game, the interpretations of a song's #lyrics, or research on a #global issue with several perspectives and opinions.
I must give credit where credit is due. I was lucky to join a great company for my first job. Great not because of the products/solutions they built, not because of my fellow colleagues and certainly not because of any tangible work benefits or work culture, etc., but because of the overarching vision of the company's brilliant co-founder. The only constant in the world is change; therefore, learning is fundamental. Constant learning is essential for growth, not just in one's career, but also in one's personal life.
Learning used to be a professional requirement at the company. Employees were expected to do a certain amount of learning every week, through articles, podcasts, videos or assignments, and most importantly, discuss with each other what they learned during a small break from work once every week. The subject of learning can be anything, literally any random subject; it never needed to be anything related to work. Sadly, most employees do not truly care about / miss the point of this vision- they follow it begrudgingly because it is mandated. But this is a different matter.
This learning facet/culture of the company actually gave birth to a real Learning Management System (LMS) which they used to do all their learning in. Subsequently, this became a sort of dogfooding (something the company did for all of its products) as the LMS went beyond the organization. I do not work there anymore, but I will forever remember and personally uphold the pure vision of that co-founder: that learning is crucial for every human being in the world, among other lessons- which I will write about later.
Why X? X is usually the unknown (substitute this X with something known), the marked spot, a bearer of identity. These are just a few uses of the letter; there is a dizzying number of meanings for the letter X as I learned recently, many of which we know and often overlook. It is ubiquitous as a symbol.
The Art of X is an attempt to get to know or study about one specific X, one at a time with every post. Here's to learning about something, together, with the rest of the world.
— The author, Mukund Vijayaraghavan
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