{"id":686,"date":"2012-12-09T00:31:12","date_gmt":"2012-12-09T06:31:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/?p=686"},"modified":"2012-12-09T00:31:12","modified_gmt":"2012-12-09T06:31:12","slug":"never-delegate-passion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/archives\/686","title":{"rendered":"Never delegate passion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wnet\/americanmasters\/episodes\/charles-ray-eames-the-architect-and-the-painter\/watch-the-full-documentary-film\/1950\/\">a great documentary<\/a> about Charles and Ray Eames (people I had never thought to be interested in before I watched it), it was said that Charles said, &#8220;Never delegate understanding&#8221;. Great motto; one that, after I heard it, I realized is a big part of my approach to life. I&#8217;m happy to do extra work if it leads to extra understanding. I&#8217;m happier learning how to derive an equation from first principles than just memorizing it. I&#8217;m happier to chase a little detail through the eye of a needle than just assume that someone will take care of it.<\/p>\n<p>But enough about my approach to understanding, let&#8217;s talk about something else about me. Because I also realized lately that, while I could blame my aversion to corporate cubicle life on the idea that I&#8217;d rather not work for someone else&#8217;s profit, it&#8217;s more accurate to say that I don&#8217;t want to delegate passion. That&#8217;s kinda what you&#8217;re doing, as an employee*. You go and work on someone&#8217;s thing, without any significant concern about whether you&#8217;re really passionate about it, assuming that someone else will supply the passion and you can just do the work. And, well, that&#8217;s fine, too, of course. It&#8217;s a totally workable system. Just not for some of us. I&#8217;d say, &#8220;never delegate passion&#8221;, where &#8216;never&#8217; is defined as I always define it in my speech, as &#8216;never (unless you want to)&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>(Another, random, link about the Eameses: <a href=\"http:\/\/archive.org\/details\/InformationM\">The Information Machine<\/a>. Great if you love computers or 50&#8217;s modernist style cartoons, best if you love both.)<\/p>\n<p>* Unless you happen to be an employee whose passions really do align well with the mission of the corporation, in which case, you may stop reading.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a great documentary about Charles and Ray Eames (people I had never thought to be interested in before I watched it), it was said that Charles said, &#8220;Never delegate understanding&#8221;. Great motto; one that, after I heard it, I realized is a big part of my approach to life. I&#8217;m happy to do extra [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","author-admin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=686"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":687,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions\/687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}