I’m enjoying writing Thinkies. Usually I carefully craft what I write as a tradeoff. I often dig deep into “why it works”. My experience is that some people will thoughtlessly copy what I (and others) say, then come back later & blame me for their results. Test-Driven Development is prone to that—”I tried what you said & it made me fail. I wrote the tests after, not before. And I designed the whole thing up front because I had to. And it takes me 30 hours to run the tests. But your advice is BAD & you should feel BAD & you’re the reason I’m single & homeless!”
Not with Thinkies. See this pattern? Try this thing. Judge the result. The responsibility for evaluation & execution is clearly, entirely on you. Oh, it didn’t work? That’s because it usually doesn’t work.
I know I’ll still get blamed because hey people are people. But for the moment I just don’t care. And that makes writing so much more fun.
(It’s also safer to write here because it’s only for paid subscribers & y’all are per definition smarter & more responsible than average.)
Today’s project Thinkie is Abundance.
Pattern: You’re cutting corners because you have too much to do/not enough time.
Transformation: What would you do if you had enough time?
Some of the activities you come up with you may not be able to do for now. Others may actually be cheap & pay off quickly enough that they put you in a better place.
As a member of the supposed “smarter and more reasonable” group, I am a bit embarrassed to admit that I am short-circuited by this Thinkie: if I had more time, I would do more things... without changing how much I cut corners on each. (And I keep coming back to that no matter how hard I try).
Does this mean that I am not cutting enough counters (this can’t possibly be true!) and if I did I could do more/better today? Or does it mean that I am afraid to lose the excuse of not having enough time? I really don’t know (yet). In either case my hat is off to you for this delightful Thinkie (how do you come up with these?!) as it is already prompting some much needed reflections.
Being an "authority" seems to mean that you must now be the fount of unassailable truths and can never make a mistake. It looks like what you've done here is to give yourself permission to be wrong, and to acknowledge that is always a possibility, and that you're OK with it. What would it feel like if you can do that everywhere and not just here? (Also, I suppose this annoys people who want YOU to be the source of truth so THEY don't have to do the work of testing the ideas).