Follow your guide

It looks like progress on the assistive technology front with Google's Project Guideline, "an artificial intelligence system designed to help blind and vision-impaired people to run races by themselves." 

Main point: It's "an attempt to give those people more independence. They wouldn't necessarily need to rely on a tethered human guide or a guide dog to help them around a course."

Things to know:

• "...a runner attaches an Android phone to a Google-designed harness that goes around their waist."
• "...use the phone's camera to track a guideline that's been laid down on a course."
• "...audio cues to bone-conducting headphones when a runner veers away from the line."
• "...doesn't need an internet connection to work, and it can account for a number of lighting and weather conditions."

Points to ponder:

• An external system using one's smartphone.
• Someone will need to lay a line on the road to track.
• Lane control for runners could be another way to look at it.
• Entirely on the smartphone, so less vulnerable to Internet glitches at the wrong moments.

Learning from the movers and "shapers"

 It takes one to know one. I saw an article where Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, shared some things he learned from getting to know top movers and shakers like Elon Musk and Bill Gates.

Main point: "Dalio often sees common threads in these leaders’ personalities."

Things to consider:

• "'Quite often, you have people with imagination who are not practical, and people who are practical with not much imagination,' Dalio said. People like Musk and Gates 'had both of those things.'"
• “They were passionately, unwaveringly committed — so that it’s a high — to make discoveries,”
• "...their real advantages come from knowing how to deal with what they don’t know more than anything they know"

What he concluded:

• "Dalio calls these standout leaders 'shapers.' A shaper is 'someone who comes up with unique and valuable visions and builds them out beautifully, typically over the doubts and opposition of others.'"
• "Those people with leadership qualities are often 'simultaneously creative, systematic and practical. They are assertive, open-minded at the same time.'”
• "...shapers often display a passionate creativity and are not afraid to stand their ground, as they are 'independent thinkers who do not let anything or anyone stand in the way of achieving their audacious goals.'”

One challenge for our own personal development is how to identify the tangible things we can do to become shapers in our own right. Some thoughts that came to mind:

• I wonder if we can weave those threads our own calling.
• Determining our own capacity takes honest self-reflection.
• A singular focus helps avoid discouragement.
• Knowing what to do when you're in uncharted waters.
• Brings sculptors and other artists to mind.
• Artists use the right tools to realize their vision.
• Living in the paradox of being open and unyielding at the same time.