Eating the Frogs
In terms of approaching projects, two things have come to mind today. The first is the use of the phrase ‘best practices.’ I hate that phrase. It implies that in order to do something, to accomplish a goal, to complete a task, one needs to take a particular approach. While this is indeed the case in many instances, and there IS a right way of doing things, it has also created a mentality where we have experts popping up left and right professing that the absolute best way to do something (the best practice) is the way they’ve outlined and/or endorsed. We lose a creative edge when we come up against this mentality. After all, how did we arrive at these best practices in the first place? Through analysis, refinement, development, testing, further refinement, and so on and so forth. It might even be fair to say that ‘best practices’ can only ever correspond to a point in time at which a level of optimization has been reached. So every time I encounter the phrase, I just find myse...