Unquiet

When it comes to personal projects, my difficulties often don’t lie in my technical abilities or understanding of the challenges I’ve set for myself. I’m more than ready to learn whenever I hit a stumbling point in my knowledge - it’s helped me rapidly familiarize myself with PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, Applescript and other computer languages, for example. But often, somewhere along the line, I lose focus. I want to know why.

In a [comment on Michal’s site][comment] (who runs the wonderful [Cornerhost][corner]), I mentioned my weakness for wanting to do **the best** at everything I attempt, rather than **my best**, and for wanting to be *first*- a leader, not a follower. Perfectionism pushes me to do quality work, even when it’s just for myself, but it also leads to several related problems:

* Endless development processes
* Feature creep
* Anxiety over competing projects

This presents a major problem, for example, in my current project, because similar efforts have already been launched. I _almost_ scrapped the project entirely, and instead began fresh despite being at a fairly functional point in the initial project. I’m still ambivalent; the new code is arguably better designed and more scalable, but the old code is more functional _right now_. So which do I go with?

I’ve grown to firmly believe that part of the lesson we learn as humans is to accept the true limitations of our existence so that we know where our strengths and weaknesses lie, and so that we know more truly where we have boundless ability. So I’ve started to acknowledge that I’m not so much an inventor or an innovator as I am an **integrator**, a synthesist of different ideas. This explains why I’m so good at explaining highly technical subjects to non-technical people, why I often see trends before they’re fully realized, how I’m able to intuit people’s thoughts and emotions at a fairly accurate level, and why, much to my chagrin, my personal projects _nearly always_ begin development in parallel with similar efforts from others, without either knowing of the other.

Synthesists aren’t followers in the true sense of the word, nor are they leaders; they are creations of the time and space in which they exist. Without the hard work and background of others, the innovations that synthesists create wouldn’t be possible. We can innovate through the integration of disparate ideas, which is where our creativity is strongest, but we can’t pull a rabbit out of a hat.

My [post on tagging][tags] is a perfect example - in it, I build on the work of others (the idea of metadata tags and of the computer address book) to dream up something that seems so simple but really hadn’t been explored deeply (as far as I know); quickly, however, I heard from others who’d thought along the same lines at about the same time.

It’s an interesting place to be: sometimes I feel like a Jack-of-all-trades, master of none… I remember many days at prior jobs where I spent time making usability suggestions to graphic designers, designing coding standards for developers, teaching maintainable, clear HTML styles to producers, and then sitting back down to do the work I got paid for, which at the time was writing HTML. What’s amazing to me is that I could focus on the big picture enough to see how all these different elements could fit together, and yet sometimes I have the most difficult time remembering where I left my keys.

It’s time, though, to recognize my weakness: I’m not going to invent something astoundingly new and without precedent, and if I’ve had an idea, there are other bright individuals out there who have doubtless experienced a similar brainstorm; as a result, no matter what I do, I’ll probably be doing it with company.

Now - it’s time to allow myself the freedom just to develop my projects fully without concern or care for their commercial viability; if someone else gets to market first, good for them. I needn’t put competition with others so high on my list of values, nor do I need to place perfection at the top.

As I said on Michal’s blog, I need to ‘do my best, and *then* do it better.’

Now to put it all together!

[comment]: http://sabren.com/index.php?p=61
[corner]: http://cornerhost.com/
[tags]: http://blog.unquiet.net/archives/2005/02/16/tag-youre-it-when-people-tag-people/