Monday, July 6, 2009

A tainted view

When I form an opinion of something, I tend to wonder whether the opinion was based solely on the matter at hand, or whether unrecognized external factors may be confounding my perspective.

Consider an example: I am currently re-designing a local company's website layout. I have long been intersted in web design, and I still am, yet I'm recently finding myself disinterested with the work I'm doing.

A simple analysis might go like this: I'm doing work, I'm not enjoying the work I'm doing, therefore I don't like the given profession. Translating that to my particular example would be like saying that web design is merely something I thought I would enjoy, but that I lack passion when it comes to doing it as a job.

Yet I think that there are other factors at play causing me to dislike what I'm doing. Perhaps there is something about the work environment that is frustrating me, perhaps I am not sleeping enough and the tiredness is putting me in a bad mood. It could even be some form of malnutrition throwing off my mood. The source could be so disconnected and unrelated to work that I could have no good guess at what it is.

From personal experience, my best guess is that it's from insufficient sleep.

1 comment:

  1. I read part of the book "Mastery" the other day, and in this example you seem to be exhibiting the behavior of the "Dabbler" -- one who is initially very interested in a given subject, and absorbs as much information as possible about it, until the novelty wears off or the learning curve gets much steeper, and frustration or boredom sets in. The book promises solutions for breaking this habit, and might be worth checking out. Of course, as a dabbler myself, I didn't get that far.

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