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two hundred and fifty
There are many ways to approach a problem, but by far my steady go-to approach has long been incrementalism.
A little over a year ago I started writing a novel.
This is actually a complex and confusing anecdote about sitting down to write a trilogy of novels, nearly finishing the first one, deciding that it was actually not a trilogy but just one great big story, then reopening what I thought was a climactic conclusion of my book to instead trudge into the effort of writing another entire novel-worth of story to finish the plot in a meaningful and interesting way.
The first half took me two months. The second half is approaching a year worth of effort.
Of course, in that time life has got in the way. I’ve been working, parenting, going back to school, and coding a video game—but I digress.
The point is that I have been incrementally working towards finishing the novel. I have been writing it two hundred and fifty words at a time. Little steps. Inching closer to completion. Trudging ever forward.
Is this the ideal approach?
Heck, I don’t know. I’d like to tell you that I have stumbled onto some great secret of success, but the reality is that slow and steady progress is such an old piece of advice that it literally has it’s own spirit animal in the tortoise.
Each day I sit down and write (at least) 250 words, one word at a time, one keyboard stroke at a go, all to add onto my novel. Each day I incrementally move slighty closer to the end. Each day I am 250 words closer to being done.
My point is that some problems and projects are just big and there is no quick and easy fix.
My fix, neither quick nor easy, is to write two hundred and fifty words each day. Like a tortoise in a foot race.
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only reading
Used to be that when I bought a new piece of technology I wanted to push it to the limits to see what it could do. But earlier this week I bought myself a new e-reader and I’m approaching it with a completely different tactic: I’m using it solely as an e-reader.
Let me elaborate.
A decade ago when I bought myself a similiar piece of technology, my first instinct would have been to dig into it and see how I could use it beyond reading books. I may not have gone as far as hacking the firmware, say, but I certainly would have connected it up to a computer within the first day, dug into the file system, tried loading other media types, experimented with connecting things to the bluetooth, attempted to use it as a game device of some kind, certainly dabbled in using it to write if that was any way possible. Played. Pushed. Nudged. Forced the single-function device to bend to my will.
Today? I bought one of those new colour Kobo readers to replace my Kindle and continue moving away from my Amazon dependency. And I’m using it as a book. I’m going to read books on it. I’ve hooked it up to the accounts it suggested, linked it with my public libary card, and I downloaded a half dozen books. That’s it—and I have been reading.
Only reading.
And while I would like to emphasize that this does not necessarily signal a shift away from my inquisitive and exploratory nature, it may indicate that I’ve quenched that need to “multi-purpose” everything in my life.
A decade ago I found joy in making simple things do complex things.
Today I find joy in using simple things closer to and merely in the way they were intended. And I’m good with that.
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down by the bay
I was lamenting the latest stage of the long, slow collapse of Hudsons Bay Company, once a literal icon of the Canadian retail landscape.
The very history of this country is tangled up in the complex colonialist role played by this company in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and if for no other reason than that I’m sure there are justified cheers at the karmic collapse of this once epic company. Still, the collapse of the modern Hudsons Bay retail enterprise is nothing to celebrate, what with the scope and variety of employment it offered in many communities, its status as a signature anchor tenant in many shopping centres, and too, as one of the last historic holdouts against the dominance of Amazon and such.
I could probably write for pages on this complex role it played in communities, its decline and now complete disappearance from many cities, including my own. But instead, I woke up in the middle of the night and was tossing and turning in bed thinking about—I kid you not—the customer experience at The Bay.
Maybe it was tradition. Maybe it was money. Maybe it was stubbornness. But the experience at that store never seemed to adapt to the modern retail world. From the ancient point of sale systems to an online experience that, on the three occasions I made use of it, revealed the reason Amazon holds a place of utter dominance in this domain. It was slow and cumbersome, like so much at The Bay.
But my strangest late night insight was in an unfair comparison to Ikea.
We all laugh at the maze-like design of the furniture retailer, but the truth is the user experience in that store does two things very well. First, it gives the customer a little mini-adventure upon each visit. There are shortcuts, true, but I suspect many or even most shoppers walk the Ikea mile dutifully. Second, the maze walks you past virtually every product the store sells. The net result of this is that I, even mediocre consumer that I am, rarely leave without at least one purchase.
The only thing that The Bay ever coerced any customer to walk past was the fragrance department, and the only adventure I got from that was testing my ability to hold my breath.
I have no great insight upon this sad and seeming final chapter of a once-proud Canadian retailer, at least nothing that countless other online commentators haven’t already written on, save for maybe that even corporations get old and senile. And maybe that’s the lesson we should take from it, that everything has a time and place, and we should remember fondly the good times rather than shaking our heads at some analysis of a business failure, and rather accept that nature and the passage of time can take its toll on most anything.