I was like 17 or so and had a temp job as a housepainter for a couple weeks, and I was sinking time and energy into doing an excellent job and being really efficient with paint and ... kind of missing the forest for the trees. I was putting unnecessary care & excellence into a back wall and the wall was taking longer to prep than the whole-house job could afford. One of the old guys on site pulled me aside me and, in the eloquent terms above, pointed out that ... the real goal here is paint on the wall. We're doing a good job because we take pride in our work, but the outcome is significantly more important than the journey to everyone else. Doing a "good job" can't wind up as an obstacle to the job itself.
I was always a details person and perfectionist, and that one clear lesson about taking a step back from the details of a task to double-check what the actual goal is ... has always stuck with me.
Damn I should have gotten you to paint our house. Our painter just did a half assed job and started yelling at me when I pointed out lines that weren’t straight or paint splatters from the accent wall on the white wall. He also used the wrong gloss of paint in places and created these shiny patches throughout the house.
And I have to look at this every day until I decide to repaint again. Just a bit more care and effort on his part would have prevented me from being mildly annoyed every day for the next however many years.
(I ended up painting over the glossy stuff myself)
This is not a famous thing, it’s just that I’ve heard someone at a past workplace say this.
“Doing the same thing that got you here into this position will not make you successful in it, it may not even be enough for you to keep it.”
To be clear, he wasn’t saying it to me or anyone, he said it to himself as a life lesson he learned going through promotions and changing companies. The point was to stay humble and don’t expect your past accomplishments to get you through future challenges.
I have two that have stuck with me most my adult life-- and I find that they apply frequently.
I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.
-- Judge Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty Speech, 1944
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
It's funny because lately I have been applying that quote to people being terrified of "AI". (I hate that we use that word to describe stuff like LLMs, but that's another topic.)
There are countless points in history where a technological advance has rendered some human labor less or no longer needed. There's nothing to be done about it; that's how progress works-- it's why we're not mostly farmers anymore.
The solution to technology rendering human labor less or no longer needed is for society to divorce the need to work from living a comfortable life. It's certainly not to try and hold back or eliminate the technology solely to protect human labor.
But don’t you feel like this is the one that we’ve been warned about a lot? I’m not concerned about losing my job; I’m worried about being killed by M3gan.
That’s what I do, use uBlock Origin to filter the pop-up. Then most site disable scrolling and that can usually be countered by finding the “overflow: hidden;” and turning it into “overflow: visible;” (you can also use uBlock Origin to inject “overflow: visible !important;” into the page for it to stay persistent.
Time Bandits. Because of that move my childhood was plagued with nightmares about little people from out of time invading my room in the middle of the night.
There is only one way to make people talk more than they care to. Listen. Listen with hungry earnest attention to every word. In the intensity of your attention, make little nods of agreement, little sounds of approval. You can’t fake it. You have to really listen. In a posture of gratitude. And it is such a rare and startling experience for them, such a boon to ego, such a gratification of self, to find a genuine listener, that they want to prolong the experience. And the only way to do that is to keep talking. A good listener is far more rare than an adequate lover.
-Travis McGee
from Nightmare in Pink
by John D. McDonald
It’s just something I need to get much better at. I’ve come pretty far from where I used to be, but being a good listener is something I still struggle with sometimes.
Well, the only thing you can really do is identify the behavior and self-correct. As for whether or not people have mentioned it…yeah, they have in the past.
I don’t think you can get around that. What I do is that if the site requires a registration, or has a full-screen cookie banner, then I just close that tab. End of story.
If I can’t view it easily, then I will just not view it.
I’ve started doing a modified version of this too. If there’s any kind of roadblock in front of the content, I’ll ask myself to be honest about how important it’s likely to be to me… and maybe like seven or eight times out of ten I’ll just close it and move on, no regrets.
I apply this thinking to captchas as well, though my skip rate is probably a bit lower.
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