When navigating the world and the issues it presents to you, various axioms exist to help understand some of the hurdles you may find and some of the ways to get past them. Here I will discuss some of the axioms that I’ve seen work well in the field. Please note this is written from the perspective of a technician working with customers and technology.
- “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” – unknown source.
- The relevance of this idea plays through when evaluating something in front of you where someone is creating something, or doing something that impacts others around them. It’s specifically important to note that the ‘perfect’ aspect here necessarily revokes any reasoning for the person doing what they’ve decided, but it is worth measuring what the loss is by implementing this type of decision making process. If something is ‘too perfect’ where it becomes ‘the enemy of the good’, then the created thing will be an ugly beast that hurts people who interact with it, but does work in a standardized way that follows certain principle. It’s OK on the otherhand, to have something that is not so ugly and not so perfect but allows humans to proceed with their work without being a painful process.
- An example would be a form that gathers a problem statement. While useful to have a huge set of fields, each asking pertinent information for a situation or work process at hand, overburdening the end user with details may prevent any work from being done. Not everyone has the same knowledge and information available at hand.
- “Respect, Responsibility, Integrity” – my dad
- It’s relevant to remember that work and processes go easier when you maintain respectability for the people involved. A youtuber describes this as well, the revered Natalie Wynn (@Contrapoints on youtube and X) has described this Respect aspect as “meet them where they are at” (Wynn). This encompasses an understanding and an implicit validation of the person’s current thought patterns surrounding the issue at hand. Without having respect of the people you are working with, you will find yourself marginalized.
- Responsibility is a reflection of one’s external behaviors, and consequently their opinions. If one finds a task too menial, it can be disrespectful for the system that created the task for it’s own maintenance and upkeep. There’s an aspect of our world that necessitates the members of it participating in the tasks that keep the small parts running.
- Integrity is a reflection of yourself and the roles you have in the process, the world, and the society at hand. One lacks integrity when they act without regard to the system, or without regard to “what is right”. It’s my opinion that a society is worse off when the constituent members do not regard themselves as part of the process.
- “Don’t be a dick” – many people greater and smarter than myself
- Find this in the 10 Commandments, or any set of religious theology.
- Personally I don’t need a stone tablet to describe this for me, and some stuff is self evident. Let your empathy and understanding of a person’s situation, to a degree, determine the extent of how much you are involved in a situation and let it define how you can help. Say for example, someone fucked up by doing something egregious that seems to have no recourse for fixing. There are two paths here, one to let them “sleep in their bed they’ve made” which can be a valid route, or one where you speak up and offer knowledge or solutions (and not blame). This second path is often the “high road”, and in my opinion, is worthwhile as it can make more friends and solve real world problems.
This is a brief posting, and I have more thoughts on this that I haven’t expanded on yet, but I think these three are exceptionally foundational.
Works Cited
Wynn, Natalie. “Transcripts / Are Traps Gay?” ContraPoints – Transcripts, 16 Jan. 2019, www.contrapoints.com/transcripts/are-traps-gay. Accessed 19 Dec. 2023.