Creating things is rarely as simple a process as you ever hope it is. Even the simplest of tasks can get complicated and they only complete 1% of your overall tasks, so how the hell do you ever get to 100%. Well maybe you don’t and maybe you press the go button at 80% and take a flyer in the hope that it’s easier to build on it live than wait another decade to get to 100%. Creativity that knows no bounds needs some boundaries.
Then there’s freeing up mental bandwidth. The modern computer defragmenter or the old game of Tetris where you need to pack your things more tightly to make room for other things.
Let’s say your dishwasher has just decided to no longer work. What do you do? Well the time-poor exec will probably just check the websites of Kogan, Harvey Norman or The Good Guys maybe filter by deals/discounts and choose one quickly without too much further research in the hope that the problem is now solved. Taking the old one away may be assumed. So the delivery takes place after much toing and froing about “when will you be there”, “what access do you have” and other finer details. The delivery people do a magnificent job of navigating it into place with their trolley, plumbing it into your water pipes and electric plug and they tear off the protective sellophane and “voila” there is your brand new beautiful dishwasher gleaming back at you.
Problem #1 – None of the buttons make any sense to you.
Problem #2 – The instruction booklet is 42 pages long and the idea of reading 10% of it makes you groan and prefer to stick pins in your eyes.
Problem #3 – You’ve found the part of the instructions that are relevant to getting you going but you read it over and over and just can’t understand one of the key points.
Problem #4 – You are now mentally exhausted, “COMPUTER SAYS THERE IS NO MORE MENTAL BANDWIDTH” it’s been a long day, you’ve had to sacrifice this and that and maybe lunch to fit in with the dishwasher delivery and now you are resolving that you need a PHD and a proper english translation not verbatim from the chinese original, to be able to work this thing out.
Problem #5 – a week goes by without using it. You prefer to manually wash dishes as you go and have taken to eating take-away more often. You just can’t bring yourself to focus on it and you know if you start on the “Customer service” road the journey will take a whole other detour, so you follow the path of least resistance – fairy liquid and take-aways.
Problem #6 – your friends or parents drop round and commend you on your investment, but then look forlorn when you tell them you haven’t used it yet because you can’t work it out. Your nerdy mate or your dad go looking for the instructions and put their thinking cap on to try and resolve this problem for you.
Problem #7 – in order for them to fix it they need to rack your brain because the same stumbling block in the instructions is stopping them and apparently ypu shuld know the answer, tempers are frayed.
Solution #1 – After they have gone you wonder by sheer fluke if you have been looking at the instructions in a certain way when you should have been considering part 15b in a different way. By sheer fluke your thought turns out to be the solution.
Now when you are creating something, as we have been publishing and creating for several years on this publication, and every 1% of progress involves headaches, depression, lost battles, trying things that don’t work, feeling your lifespan will never be long enough to complete this, and “this” is only 1% of the overall invention or project……….the road ahead looks full of potholes, land mines and fallen trees. In fact the road ahead is not a road it’s more like an obstacle course that not even the best pogo stick rider could bound through, badoing-badoing-badoing.
Yes that’s how it’s felt, dear reader, the journey that has had to be undertaken to get to writing, publishing and syndicating this very first column, it’s been far too long and fraught, but as they say “you wouldn’t want it any other way”.
This column was the inaugural publishing via a brand new system installed to offer column syndication, to interesting authors, it was written on the fly by the Editor-in-chief of Brisbane Suburbs Online News.