Ben Tilly said: > Greg, I really feel that if anyone is overreacting here, it is > you. I'll try once more, after which I'll stop responding to > you because you don't appear to be listening.
> Your message has been along the line of, "We just have to > try this and great things will happen." I'm pointing out that > what you want to see tried has already been tried with a > notable lack of the things that you want to see follow, > actually following. see, I'm not the only one who isn't listening. I never said we just have to try anything. I never promised anything great would happen. Did you ever get a cool idea for a problem and just dive into it, explore it, learn about it, try out different things, and play? Not that you know it would work, but you've got to try it out for yourself and see what happens. If nothing else, you leave with a deeper understanding than if you just have people tell you why it won't work. My message has simply been can I please play around with this idea with some like minded fools without having all the naysayers coming in and telling me why it won't work? One of the advantages of being a fool is that you're not bogged down with what is impossible. What a lot of people seem to be hearing that as is as a kind of magical thinking of the sorts of "if I just say it, it will come true". But that's not what I'm talking about, I'm talking about the way JFK was a damned fool for saying he wanted to put a man on the moon before the decade was out. completely impossible at the time he said it. His speechwriters didn't want him to go public wiht it because they figured there was a good chance it wouldn't happen, and then he'd look bad for saying something so foolish and not having it come true. So, my message has always been along the line of can I just play around with this idea foolishly, without all the reasons why it will never work? Somewhere in the middle of all this, I posted something that started out with "What if?". Something like "What if you had a way to do certification that was no cost to the programmer, but considered valuable by the corporate world?" "What if?" not "How?" My question got bulldozed with all the reasons why it isn't possible. All the reasons that the "How?" couldn't be done, therefore the "what if?" was a waste of time. Then I presented my message along the line of "brainstorming". And that got bulldozed as well. I think that was about the time that "stop talking about it and just do it" showed up. So, no, neither you nor anyone on this list ever listened along the lines of my message, along the lines of playing with an idea just for the sake of playing with it, of "What if it were possible?", along the lines of simple "brainstorming" for the sake of "brainstorming". Maybe there aren't any fools on teh list but me. I don't mind kicking something around and falling on my face. I don't mind playing with something and failing. I don't mind because if all else fails, I still end up learning something. And then I can use what I learn for the next success. I failed this time, that is clear. But I learned something about how I relate to people who relate to teh world as a list of what is impossible. I don't like being given a list of what is impossible when I'm trying to play. I didn't know that until this discussion. And I learned it because I got pulled into it and only at the end figured out what was going on. Hopefully, if nothing else good comes of all this, it will teach me not to get sucked into the "what is impossible" debate when I'm trying to come from what is possible, trying to come from play. No one ever heard the "What if?" they only heard "Why not?" oh well. Maybe next time. _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
