Muted Vision

I’ve encountered an interesting attitude towards work in my travels, I suspect that many people feel this way: you work hard, you get the job done, your employer is happy, the customer is happy, you get paid. Go home, relax, do it all again tomorrow. Why strive for more, especially when there is no obvious or immediate benefit?

I always try to “stay hungry”, and this means that I am always looking for something better. I won’t allow myself to starve by refusing to eat what’s in front of me, but I also don’t take the easy way out by being satisfied by what I have. Life is too short, if I were to allow myself to grow fat and placid in my comfort I would be deeply dissatisfied. There is something in me that looks for difficulty to overcome and reaches for it.

I wasn’t really happy with university for a number of reasons, one of those was that it seemed to promote the bare minimum effort. I remember spending over 100 hours researching and working on a network-enabled painting application (custom GUI, tablet support, network support, custom painting engine) and getting 2% higher than another group who put in 10 hours on a basic application built on existing tech which checked for updates to software (connected to an existing online database and checked the registry, very simple). Another reason (enabled by the first) was that many people subscribed to the “good enough” belief, which I believe is detrimental to learning and growth.

The return on investment for caring about learning in an institution which is meant to promote growth is too low for any other successful strategy than passive indifference. This is the sad truth of university as an undergrad.

Time constraints are an important consideration in any task, I am not advocating that you over-extend yourself or allow perfectionism to creep in. I am also not suggesting you avoid shortcuts which may save time and money. The issue I am trying to get at here is that there is a point at which people seem to turn off their brains and accept an end result without question. This is really the crux of the issue. Even if you cannot invest time in looking into something, at least be aware it could be done better and do a quick mental evaluation of time considerations. You may be able to save time by approaching things a different way. Tradition is a dangerous beast.

This same attitude of indifference towards progress also means you never look for better solutions. When you stop striving for more you stop growing. It doesn’t really matter what the work is for, if you are making someone else money and are not content with your employment you change that, don’t ever stop caring about what you do because that is suicide. Why bother living if 8 hours of every day may as well have been flushed down the toilet? Take pride in your work if for no other reason than you may become a stronger person for it.

Really you should be taking pride in everything you do. You don’t have to be satisfied with the end result, but do be satisfied with the work you put into it. I’m not there yet, I’m human and there are some days when it’s hard to really put yourself into anything. Some impossible goals are still worth striving for.

Don’t give up to indifference.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 4:05 pm and is filed under Phase 2. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.