Being the best

Originally posted on May 5th, 2010

How do you know if you’ve found ‘the best’ solution? Can it be directly attributed to hours spent pulling hair and rubbing the space between your eyes? Certainly time is an important factor when it comes to creating a quality solution, but it also no doubt must center on how you spend the time. I usually wake up as early as possible, get a good cup of coffee, and crank out ideas to get the most efficient use of time. But there’s always the thought in the back of my head that someone more talented than me is waking up earlier, getting better coffee, and cranking out better ideas with the same amount of time. I mean, with thoughts like that you just can’t win, and I guess a lot of that has to do with the fact that there will always be someone better, and better coffee somewhere… So what was my point again? I mean, did I come up with the best solution? If we go by the presumption that there is always someone better out there then I guess we can also say that if they happened to be ‘at the right place, at the right time’ and got the job instead of me, that they would have found the better solution right? And it’s not just me, I always look at ads, even really good ones and can’t help but wonder, what if they hired the person that was better than that person, and that person had better coffee? And I can’t help but think that, that would be the better solution, and then I just feel bad since the better person is probably doing another job that would be better suited for the person that’s doing the worst job than them on the particular piece that I’m looking at. It’s like, what if life was orchestrated in such an un-optimized use of talent on purpose, so that the best person for the job was never really utilized for it? Even more disturbing (and perhaps a more universal fear) what if the same were true for relationships? These are things we can never know, and doesn’t that just bug the hell out of you?!