June 2013

No stoplight ever actually stopped a driver. It’s just a light, after all, and it’s all the way up there in the air. You can literally drive right under it and it won’t do anything except maybe glare at you with extra red as you pass by. (Unless you have a very tall car, I mean.)

Brick walls, on the other hand, tend to be fairly substantial and have no qualms about JACKING YOU UP if you try to drive through them.

It’s not unusual for us to find ourselves confronted by a few stoplights when we’re trying to do something new. They can be useful indicators of when we need to slow down, or when we need to take a break.

But sometimes it’s tempting to pretend a stoplight is a brick wall. Because it makes it easier to quit.

It’s not my fault! I tried my hardest, but darn it I got there and the light was red and it just stayed red AND I WAITED SO LONG, so what was I supposed to do besides turn right on red and drive all the way to some other place I didn’t want to be? IT WAS RED. WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?

Well … sometimes running a red light might not be such a bad idea. You slowed down. You checked all directions. There were no cars coming. There’s definitely not a police officer sitting behind you. Go ahead. Run the light. It’s just a light, after all. Use that sentence fragment! Mix those two colors that are so outdated! Take that sentimental picture! Write that story that’s “just genre fiction”!

(That’s a metaphorical red light, of course. I absolutely do not suggest, recommend, or endorse the violation of traffic laws at any point in time ever at all, Mr. Officer, sir.)

But brick walls? Usually the faster you charge at them to take them down, the more you’ll end up damaging yourself. Brick walls require us to change course. Sometimes we just need to take a detour to go around and approach our destination from a different direction. Sometimes, along the way we find a new, better destination.

As tough as it may be to admit, there are things in life that will never work out no matter how hard we work at them. Or worse, they will kind of limp along in a broken and increasingly frustrating state for as long as we’re willing to give them our time and attention. And they might be things that we really and truly want. And usually they are things that we really and truly aren’t built to do.

It’s a hard truth that most of us can’t actually be WILDLY SUCCESSFUL at anything we put our minds to.

I could study quantum physics for the rest of my life, and no matter how much I applied myself, I would never be as good a quantum physicist as the people that are naturally wired to understand that particular field. Which is why I think we can all agree that quantum physics is stupid and only for nerds!

The trick is learning to tell the difference between stoplights and brick walls. The sooner you can recognize which one you’re facing, the quicker you can adapt your strategy for overcoming it.

And once you are WILDLY SUCCESSFUL, you can totally waggle your various accolades in the faces of all those quantum physicists and make them spill their juice on their pants because nerds!

(I actually think quantum physicists are incredible people.)

(Because I’m a nerd.)

The great thing about All The Social Medias is that you have access to way more people’s opinions than ever before in all of history. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, even the comment section of your local grocer’s weekly specials site, all provide you with tons of insightful analysis and helpful information about the quality of any number of things, like current movies, or latest technologies, or critically important national policy debates (sometimes in 140 characters or less!).

If you’re putting Something Out There, like a new vacuum, or book, or blog post about the lack of female protagonists in video games, there’s a very good chance that someone, somewhere is going to have an opinion about it. And they will probably express it.

Occasionally it can be useful to go See What People Are Saying.

But before you do that, there a couple of things to know:

1) NEVER DO THAT.

Okay, actually it’s okay to do it if you have to. But it’s important to keep in mind that:

2) People often make sweeping authoritative declarations about quality such as:

This is terrible!

Easily the worst thing ever in the history of mankind!

If I had to choose between going back in time to shoot Hitler or the creator of this, it wouldn’t even be a choice … Hitler lives every time. IT’S THAT BAD!

I used to make this mistake all the time. And I still do it occasionally, but I’ve been working on it.

It’s very easy to confuse your own personal distaste for something with an objective and authoritative judgment that It Is Bad.

Some things really ARE bad. Like that curry chicken and egg salad with extra mayonnaise sandwich that you left out on the counter overnight. DO NOT EAT THAT. IT IS LITERALLY BAD.

But there are a number of authors out there whose material I don’t particularly care for, and whose writing I used to look at and scoff and say “This is so bad! This is awful! It’s TERRIBLE!!!” and I’m not even one who usually uses exclamation points all that often, so that was getting pretty emphatic.

But many of those authors are selling literally millions of copies of their work. Clearly they’re Doing Work that other people find value in (or, in which other people find value).

I’m not their target audience. And that’s okay. It is, in fact, good!

It’s great that those authors have found an audience and have connected with their audience and even though I want them to only create things that I like because my whole world revolves around ME BY GOLLY, it’s REALLY OKAY. Something something about not pleasing everybody.

Whatever you create, some people will hate it. Hate it. (Sometimes it won’t even have anything to do with you … lots of people hate things just because other people like them.)

It can be helpful to remember that “This is HORRIBLE” is usually just code for “I don’t like it”.

(Also, never read the comments.)

(Feel free to post comments below. I will read them.)

(Probably.)

(I rarely take my own advice.)

Stoplights and Brick Walls

It’s Bad vs. I Don’t Like It

Archives for June 2013