Friday, February 29, 2008

When to change

I was thinking about a potential client who had told me basically "I don't have time to change my process or my relationship with my work."

I suppose that there are times when you just have to push through with what you know and what you can do, rather than trying to improve the way you go about things.
Obviously, if things are going well, there's little motivation to change. And if you need to finish something by tomorrow, or even by next week, you probably ought to continue striving within your current skill set. But the farther in the future your deadline, the better the opportunity to try to improve your process.

Maybe that's the almost the same as saying that we should be striving to improve ourselves as we go through life. After all, if your time frame for your project is six months or a year, that's a long time in which to insist that you can make no gains, especially if you're having trouble making gains at present.

Whatever difficulties we face, we always stand to make our life better if we can improve our abilities to deal with different situations.

This feels like obvious platitudes to me, I suppose. And yet, it's not really something you hear all that often.

Part of the issue at hand is how to evaluate the time in which it is possible to make changes. The more optimistic you are about your ability to change yourself, the more likely you are to try to make changes. I'm pretty optimistic about our ability to change.

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