Inspiration From a Hobby

On Monday I met with our company lawyers to start the application process for another patent. This will be my second with my current company. I can't really go into the idea as it will take some time to get the application completed and it is best not to say anything about it until that point.

I can write about the inspiration for my idea though and where it came from. At the start of my career I took a class titled, "Thinking Outside the Box." There were a lot of people with many different careers and so it was kind of fun to find out what other people did and why they were there. During the course of the class we all talked about our hobbies. Our instructor mentioned that we might find solutions to our work problems from other sources, including our hobbies. For some reason, that idea stuck with me. I still can't figure out how to get good ideas from skiing, but the idea for my patent came from another hobby: ham radio.

I have been given a new project at work and started thinking about how to break up a really large task into smaller ones. In working with machine learning (ML), one needs a large training data set. So before you can really do anything with ML, you need to gather data. While thinking about how to get this information for my project I started thinking about the data gathering process and realized that something I do with ham radio could be used to help with my project. I immediately sat down with one of our patent agents who agreed my solution could be used to solve a number of problems and so he set up an appointment with our lawyers.

I used to think that the best way to get ahead with my career was to focus on computers and even make it my hobby. After 30 years in the computer industry, I can say that is a recipe for career burnout. Instead take the time to pick up a hobby or two. You never know when it will be the source for a brilliant idea.