Seeing that you are reading this post, there is a high probability that you are reading a number of other feeds and web pages as well. We are increasingly connected with more people, and there is a wealth of ideas floating around on the web related to just about anything. We are taught how to approach work – how to be in the flow, how to manage our tasks, how to have meetings, how to develop software, how to generate new ideas. It's basically everyone putting their experience, their stories on-line, teaching us how to do things.

From the market of ideas, the successful ones make it. How do we define a successful idea? It's perhaps one which is best „in tune“ with the largest number of readers. It's the one that readers feel as if it spells out what has been in the back of their mind, but they didn't have the occasion to give it conscious thought, let alone to formulate it coherently and express it to others. These ideas become extremely popularized through the Internet, then they are adopted by a subset of all the readers.

This is good and helps everyone become a better person, but I think more caution should be taken about which ideas to adopt. Take for example the statement „It's better to release early, and release often“. I first read about it from 37signals, who had a great deal of success while applying it, and I thought „What a great thing, it absolutely makes sense“. Well, it makes sense to them, but there are also stories where it didn't work. In fact, there could be any number of reasons for the 37s success. The „release early, release often“ may have indeed be one of them, but other factors may have affected the outcome. It's difficult to establish a correlation between the success and the release philosophy, let alone a causation one.

Take for another example „To be happy, your job has to be something you like“. The problem is this can be depressing for someone who doesn't like any work at all, or hasn't found their calling. I have yet to see the evidence for people who like their work being happier than others. On the other hand, as seen in the TED talk by Mike Rowe Celebrating dirty jobs, it seems that people can be happy even if they don't like their job. How about people who like their job but are unhappy? We have that too, because the way to happiness is not through work alone.

On the other hand, there exists another type of articles which are very well argued, with good evidence backing whatever idea they are suggesting. In the case of programming on the web, I should have an alarm set up, ringing whenever something sounds too good to be true, and I should also learn not to take things for granted.

POST#0063 2009-MAR-15

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