everything is catching, yes, everything is catching on fire.
I was on my lunch break this afternoon, eating a chicken chopped salad from Rubio's, when for no conscious reason, I began to think about how increasingly stressful life has become recently (mainly due to work, I must say), and I started to think back to a rather inocuous conversation I had with rYdot a few days back.
[computer geek stuff]
We were looking at his cell phone, which is a handspring treo PDA with a phone built-in. In passing, while we were talking about other technology relating things, he mentioned how cool it would be to be able to add a small hard drive (like those found in iPods) to his phone.
[/computer geek stuff]
It IS a cool idea. a GREAT idea, maybe. And yet the first things that started popping into my head were reasons why it would be a BAD idea to make. I think I said something along the lines of, "No way.. it'd be too heavy, battery life would be dismal, and the phone would take too much shock for the hard drive to last very long."
And rY said, matter-of-factly, "So? Make it better."
"Think outside the box", he says.
'Thinking outside the box' to me is a buzzword cliche... something you'd hear dilbert's boss talk about during a staff meeting. So I didn't really think about it, and it didn't really strike me until this afternoon:
When did I begin to think about reasons to make things NOT happen, instead of creating new ways of thinking to get around a difficult problem? When I was younger, I would always doodle in class, trying to think up an idea for THE next great invention, and it never came... but I still kept drawing...straining my imagination, trying to figure out how the things I see everyday actually work.. trying to conceptualize what a car's engine is actually doing; trying to figure out how they make the odometer and spedometer reflect the actual state of motion..
Really trying to think of anything to take my mind off of...anything.
I don't really take the time to do that very often, now... and that sense of loss hit me in a wave at lunchtime today. I feel like I've gone from trying to puzzle out solutions, to trying to find excuses as to why something won't work.
If the task is insurmountable in your mind, it will be insurmountable in your reality.
I know I'm the same person I was before.. the same curiosities, the same motivation, the same willpower, and the same creativity, but in the drudgery and monotony and stress of the daily commute and ridiculously busy workday, the box seems bigger, and it's much simpler at the end of the day to rest against the inside edge of the box than to try to think outside it.
In the workplace, I'm asked to come up with solutions to computer problems, but in coming up with an answer, I'm typically told that I can't implement it, for whatever reason. Resources, Time, Budgets, etc.., and I believe I've begun to take that attitude home with me.
This is the wall I'm pushing against.
[computer geek stuff]
We were looking at his cell phone, which is a handspring treo PDA with a phone built-in. In passing, while we were talking about other technology relating things, he mentioned how cool it would be to be able to add a small hard drive (like those found in iPods) to his phone.
[/computer geek stuff]
It IS a cool idea. a GREAT idea, maybe. And yet the first things that started popping into my head were reasons why it would be a BAD idea to make. I think I said something along the lines of, "No way.. it'd be too heavy, battery life would be dismal, and the phone would take too much shock for the hard drive to last very long."
And rY said, matter-of-factly, "So? Make it better."
"Think outside the box", he says.
'Thinking outside the box' to me is a buzzword cliche... something you'd hear dilbert's boss talk about during a staff meeting. So I didn't really think about it, and it didn't really strike me until this afternoon:
When did I begin to think about reasons to make things NOT happen, instead of creating new ways of thinking to get around a difficult problem? When I was younger, I would always doodle in class, trying to think up an idea for THE next great invention, and it never came... but I still kept drawing...straining my imagination, trying to figure out how the things I see everyday actually work.. trying to conceptualize what a car's engine is actually doing; trying to figure out how they make the odometer and spedometer reflect the actual state of motion..
Really trying to think of anything to take my mind off of...anything.
I don't really take the time to do that very often, now... and that sense of loss hit me in a wave at lunchtime today. I feel like I've gone from trying to puzzle out solutions, to trying to find excuses as to why something won't work.
If the task is insurmountable in your mind, it will be insurmountable in your reality.
I know I'm the same person I was before.. the same curiosities, the same motivation, the same willpower, and the same creativity, but in the drudgery and monotony and stress of the daily commute and ridiculously busy workday, the box seems bigger, and it's much simpler at the end of the day to rest against the inside edge of the box than to try to think outside it.
In the workplace, I'm asked to come up with solutions to computer problems, but in coming up with an answer, I'm typically told that I can't implement it, for whatever reason. Resources, Time, Budgets, etc.., and I believe I've begun to take that attitude home with me.
This is the wall I'm pushing against.