Advice

Wisdom Rot

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Remember that great advice you got ten years ago that is entirely irrelevant to your career and you wonder why you're still following it?  Remember that industry that would be perfect for your career that is now a smoking economic ruin of failed dreams, bad ideas, and lawsuits against the accounting firms?

Or do you remember that piece of advice that stuck with you since childhood?  That helpful concept that you got from someone much older than you that got it from some else?

We get experiences and advice that are useful for our lives, and useful at best for a limited time.  Some things are seemingly forever – some lessons are not.

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What IS a Fannish Project?

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I often talk about the fact that fandom is great because it lets people do projects and learn from them.  However, I want to take a bit of time to define just what a project IS – and its counterpart, the Continuing Effort.

The reason I want to do that is simple – if you can understand what a project is, you can't easily analyze your fannish activities to determine which one's you've done.  Without doing that it's harder to assess or build your skills and experiences.

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Perfection, geeks, fans

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The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good.  We hear this saying a lot, probably to the point that we miss the lesson – if you seek perfection you'll likely fail, and miss the chance to do things that are good.

We also are very familiar with people who lie to themselves and others about who they are.  They conceal interests, religious affiliations, sexual orientations, etc.  We know such people – or are such people – and know they're miserable.

You can't hide from yourself.  The perfect is the enemy of the good.  These two things go together in the hard fact that you can't be perfect – especially someone else's idea of perfect.

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