My Old Blog

I’m writing this from work on a Sunday. Without going into the boring details of my job, I will explain that I gave two folks a difficult project with an uncertain outcome but high potential for upside if it works out. It has been hard to provide guidance for them, because I don’t know the answer either. If I did I would certainly tell them how to do it.

I left them alone on it for the most part, since it doesn’t seem right to press on something you’re not sure can work in the first place…..but for about two weeks now they have made pretty much no progress.

I had a meeting with them last friday to talk about what they were doing, what approach they were taking, how they were organizing, what they’d learned, etc…….and found out they were pretty much defeated. They hung their heads while they were talking, had a pouty look on their face, and kept bringing up all the reasons it would never work. And then we would talk for a while about approaches to take but it always got back to them shrugging their shoulders and saying how fruitless the attempt was.

I truly don’t understand that attitude. I think its an interesting project…..anyone can do something that’s already been done, and there is a proven course to take. Its much funner to look at something and go, “What the fuck am I going to do next? I haven’t the slightest idea.” It is so rewarding when you finally do something that other people didn’t think was possible.

I remember the last summer I worked at camp there was this guy that would come and tell the kids this story about how he came to invent this strange game called Zoogle because of a disability that prevented him from playing the games other kids did. The gist is that you threw this padded tube back and forth and could only touch a certain part of it, and there was a scoring system to go along with it. It was actually a really fun, simple game.

Since he invented the game, he was obviously very good at it. In fact part of his story about Zoogle was that he’d never been beaten…ever. Then he would invite someone from the audience to play him in front of everyone and, of course, soundly whip them. He told of how he’d beaten Arnold Schwarzenegger, President Reagan, Shaquille O’Neal, etc, etc.

That sounded like a challenge to me. He came every summer and no one had ever beaten him. I was pretty good, so I played him once at the beginning of the summer and he won easily. That didn’t mean he couldn’t be beaten though. I just wasn’t good enough yet.

So I started training….literally. I told everyone at camp I was going to beat that chump when he came back. I dissected that game. I thought of all the different ways to throw, experimented with new techniques, developed a methodology…..turned the game into a sport. I would handicap myself by only playing with one hand, or playing hopping on one leg. I was a zoogle-ninja.

He also came second session a few weeks after he’d first beaten me and I refused to play him again, because I wasn’t ready yet….still training. I did go watch him make his speech to the kids though……so I could see him play and study what he did.

To make a long story short, I did win at the end of the summer. I beat the handicapped Zoogleman at a game he invented for no other reason except the challenge of doing what no one else had done.

So what does that have to do with anything?

Here I am back at office on a Sunday doing someone else’s work simply because they say it can’t be done. I think I need therapy.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 11th, 2006 at 8:44 am and is filed under Inside My Head. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.