🏝️ Is it the journey, or the destination?
Ep. 18: Stepping outside of your specialization, life lessons in hot yoga, and gas-seeking birds.
Happy Spring! Well, at least that’s how early January felt here in upstate New York. Winter’s back, though, just in time for this past weekend’s start of FLRC’s Winter Chill 5K series. It would have been incongruent to wear shorts, after all.
A Tip for the Modern Worker
Color outside the lines. You may have heard advice like "stay in your lane" or "stick to your knitting." Specialization can make you a star, depending on where you are. However, consider exploring areas peripheral or unrelated to your core mission. You might learn something that, when combined with your core work, creates a novel and magical thing. Go make magic.
This tip is one of 365 in my Handbook for the Modern Worker. I felt the pull to focus on user experience and front-end web design early in my career. Ironically, the field has exploded in complexity since the mid-90s, and you can now specialize further inside that specialty. So, I’ve become more of a generalist specialist (if that’s a thing), dabbling a bit in each of the areas. I’ve found that the combination is beneficial, especially when working with interdisciplinary teams.
Personally, I derive a lot of satisfaction from being creative, which pulls me in a lot of different directions. It’s really hard to consider going “all in” on any one thing, so I have a lot of irons in the fire. A new addition to my list of creative pursuits: cartooning. If you subscribe, you’ll see some new cartoons coming your way most weeks. It’s really fun!
#365DayDraw
I drew this and wrote the accompanying annotation as part of my #365DayDraw project 6 years ago today.
The journey
Ironic timing, this drawing. During last week’s hot yoga (which is a wonderful addition to our weekly workout routine), the instructor, Mark, talked about the journey being an important focus. I’m focused a lot on the destination most of the time, but yeah, he’s right: the journey is what really matters. It’s seldom straight and seldom as planned, but where you end up is where you end up. And that’s the destination.
Commentary
I periodically check out my Google Analytics on my scottpdawson.com website and thought I’d highlight one of the most-frequented posts for the year. It’s from 2020 and shows a brute-force solution for the Locker Prank (as written in Popular Mechanics). There’s an elegant mathematical solution, but the coded visual progression is delightful to watch.
Miscellanea
✂️ Do you copy and paste a lot on your computer? Sure you do! I’ve found it invaluable to know how to easily paste without formatting. Applications do this in subtly different ways, so check out this article for a decent roundup. I do this so often on my Mac I remapped my Command-V shortcut to always paste without formatting.
🪶 Score a point for the birds. I glanced out on my deck and saw that our gas fire pit cover was, well, shredded. At first, I thought the gas had come on and it had spontaneously combusted, but on closer inspection, my money’s on crows or turkey vultures. The valve is off and I can’t smell any natural gas, but I have a feeling that the warmer weather made some of the smell obvious under the cover. Could that be a thing? Regardless, I’ve ordered a gas detector to check it out more completely. See below for more details.
Their sense of smell is so good that Turkey Vultures have been used to locate natural gas leaks. It turns out that the chemical that gas companies add to natural gas so that people can smell it is the same one emitted by putrefying animal carcasses. It didn’t take long for the gas company workers to realize that Turkey Vultures were finding those hard-to-find leaks in their natural gas pipelines even before they did. — Audubon.org