elfs | Here's what I do, and I do it well.

I play.

I was leading Larry Winget's It's Called Work for a Reason the other day, one of the many business books that I read from time-to-time, but it's the title that kinda stuck in my craw. Sure, it's work.

Henry Jenkins, on the other hand, points out that when the world is as complicated as it is now, it is not just the capacity to work that is critical: the capacity to play is vital. Jescribes "play" as "the capacity to experiment with one's surroundings as a form of problem-solving."

I was working with Omaha on fixing a printer problem, and she asked me, "Tell me what would you do?"

I told her, "I would just sorta play around with different settings, trying stuff out. I'd keep a backup so if I broke anything, I could just delete the configuration and start over. Then I'd mess with it until it worked, or something broke."

She didn't like that answer. The idea that I might "break" something in her precious Mac was too much to take.

But that's beside the point. It's being able to play with the stuff I have that makes the job worthwhile and succesful. I know what I want to do, I have a vague idea of how to do it and a clear idea of where to get more information. A couple of iterations and eventually I hit on a solution, and a couple more (some with breakage, some without) and I've got a streamlined solution.

It's this unwillingness to break stuff that makes people ineffective developers and designers (and writers, for that matter). You can't make the world suck less (as Jenkins puts it) until you learn to live with your own suck, embrace your suck, understand what sucks, and finally understand that if something sucks, maybe you need to get off the couch and deal with it.