18 Aug 2002
Sun, 18 Aug 2002
The Experience Epiphany
After a couple hours of sitting here drinking coffee and staring into this LCD, I had an epiphany this morning. I've been thinking about changing the tagline on this blog to read, "Experience is everything". Ugo Cei got me started on this after seeing my tagline, "Perspective is everything" on a commercial site somewhere. Of course, virtually no three word sentence is original anymore, let alone one that's not nonsensical. Anyhow, in this epiphany I realized two things.
First, successful blogs generally blog about experience and that experience goes beyond staring into an LCD. Second, I've stared into an LCD way too much this summer and while that's been mildly amusing, it's indicative of larger problems. The beauty of epiphany is how the entire universe makes sense for an instant, however fleeting the instant, kind of like an old friend describing his experiments with drugs in the sixties. While I wish that I had the constitution to put it all down in writing like this person, I don't. Instead, I wind up resembling Ray Ozzie's story. Yes, as my wife would say, "I resemble that remark". Which gives me even more reason to get up and commune with nature right here, right now.
Have you ever known a successful software engineer that wasn't at least mildly obsessive? I find it interesting that pieces like Ray Ozzie's and even Dave Winer's pay homage to this, at least indirectly.
One final observation, I've had a lot of what I would describe as trains-of-thought lately. What I mean is that I'm improvising a conversation in my head on a particular topic, say this experience manifesto, where the thought goes over several days and resembles the thread of a newsgroup in terms of it's undulation from positive to negative and everything in between. If you have a term for this, by all means, please comment. Thanks!
Posted at: 11:37 | permalink
