in reply to On waiting until a world becomes a better place...

It is interesting that you chose "wait" as the verb in your title question. Waiting is not a stance that I choose either by training or by instinct.

My training is as an engineer; where I was taught the mantra:

The further I progressed into my career the more I became adept at finding those other solutions. I also take the most pride in those cases where I was able to adapt solutions that others has created to fit a new application. But I am not, by nature, a patient man. I've never 'waited' for someone else to fix a problem. In fact, I do tend to jump into creating a fix without a lot of planning. The result is I have always had a lot of unfinished projects around me. I long ago lost any embarassment over this since all those little unfinished project bought me just as much happiness as the finished ones.

Don't be too hasty to judge the works of others; 'Templating toolkits' and the like. If they met the need of the author, great. If the published their work, thats great too. You just will never know if someone borrowed from that lesser work to create something better. That the way progress works, in fits and starts.

Now that I've aged some, and hopefully gained some wisdom, I start new projects with the question, "Is this a good fit to my talents?". If so, I'll probably find the work easy and progress will be swift. If not, someone else can probably do the task in much less time than I could and I'll look for that person.


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Re^2: On waiting until a world becomes a better place...
by Anonymous Monk on May 09, 2005 at 16:19 UTC
    Now that I've aged some, and hopefully gained some wisdom, I start new projects with the question, "Is this a good fit to my talents?". If so, I'll probably find the work easy and progress will be swift. If not, someone else can probably do the task in much less time than I could and I'll look for that person.

    Note one caveat: this philosophy works best with talented people. If you lack sufficient talents of your own, eventually you end up delegating everything to someone else. Eventually, you end up as a manager...
    --
    AC