The car of Faith
There was a three car pile-up on the neurologic expressway over lunch today. There were three fatalities, my disappointment, my disdain and my depression. Following is the accident report.
The first vehicle was a large red and yellow SUV of disappointment. Let's call it the Dodge Dakota of Disappointment. It was being driven by a book, this book to be precise. I decided to visit my favorite "we got 100,000 books but only three you'll be interested in" store over lunch to look at said book. A good scanning of the table of contents and a quick reading of the first three pages of one of the chapter told me all I needed to know about it -- there was nothing here for me. It is a book of Do (the practice of a way,) not a book of Tao (the way.) That is sad, I thought, because I really hoped for better.
But I hate to leave this place empty handed because I'm sure someplace therein, there is Gold amongst the Granite. So I wandered around to the audio books and bought this. Now, yes, I've already been exposed -- no, converted -- to this philosophy many years ago when the thinking was fresh. At the end of the month, though, I'm scheduled to participate in an in-house training program for the seven habits. A pre-session refresher seems appropriate. Driving back to work, I slid the disc into the CD player. Dr. Covey started talking about the methodology of applying the Seven Habits. First, learn the habits, Second, teach the habits and finally, practice the habits. That seems askew, yes, I know. There's a method to the madness, though.
In an instant, I realized how deeply this concept has penetrated the Information Technology culture. It was like seeing the a large, older model car suddenly swerve into the same lane as the Dodge Dakota of Disappointment. If my purchase was driving a car, that car was a blue and rust Lincoln Town car of disdain. The Dodge Dakota of Disappointment was seriously tailgating it.
Why? As I looked at the 300 or so books on shelves of the computer section, I realized that many of them had been written exactly that way. An edition, eager to publish something -- anything -- scratched, hunted and scrapped until they came with an author (or a team of authors) that could spew enough words and pictures on a page to make a book. The editor handed them an assignment and the authors set out spew. Problem is and was, sometimes the authors don't have anything thing from their previous experiences with a product or technology to spew. So they have to quickly -- and I mean blisteringly quickly -- chew on a product until they have something they can spew onto the page. This is, in many ways, is the same as simply reading something and then starting to teach it. There is precious little, if any, using the product in meaningful ways before the deadline. Obviously, I am biased because in my own experiences, I did a lot of chewing and spewing for the old Wrox press. These products were far too new to have been used in meaningful production, let alone time for me to have any sense of underlying Tao of the product. My experiences simply don't apply to other authors, I'm sure. But it seems to still apply too frequently for my comfort. That's precisely why I'm being much slower with the topics I'm in pursuit of now. I do not merely want to explain the Do, I want to harmonize with the Tao.
With the Dakota of Disappointment all but riding on the bumper of the Town car of disdain, an accident was bound to happen. And it did. A small, fast and unnaturally clean little Peugeot T-Boned the Town car. The Dakota simply piled on. It wasn't a spectacular crash, but I keep seeing it over and over replay over and over again. The Peugeot rammed the towncar so hard that it penetrated straight through, escaping unscathed for the effort. The Peugeot was more like a lighting bolt issued from the hand of Zeus meant to obliterate the disdain I was feeling about the IT publishing business. I saw my that old Town car literally torn asunder. There will be no salvage, no repair of it. Its rusty body of years gone past is twisted beyond recognition. Its transmission case is shattered into millions of bygone words. Even the glass that I once thought I saw so clearly through is pulverized to dust. The Dakota of Disappointment is of no worth to me now either: I realize it never was to begin with.
Not writing is depressing to me, and not having the comfort of the old Wrox made that even more so. It became an excuse and when "the real job" became even more demanding, things became even more bleak. The driver of the Peugeot is telling me, without telling me, that its about damn time I get started on my own frigging book again. It can be done, and it can be done right. I need to shut up, sit down and just do it.
Before he impales me.
That clean little Peugeot -- I'll call it the car of faith -- seems to be being driven by Rory Blyth.