How often do you get a project and start to build it against the patterns you already have in your brain? Or you start to review against the patterns that you have in your head that always worked before and should work now as well?
Too much?
All the time?
Never?
I don’t know if there is a balance, but I do know, to this day, whenever I start to work on a project that I have done more than twice (why twice, well I do it once to learn it, twice to perfect and thrice to contemplate the path I took) I start to wonder whether there is a better way.
Sometimes I have the opportunity to take a step back and look at something new, and sometimes I don’t, speed is of the essence and I choose to barrel forward doing what worked previously to make it happen overnight.
And yet that nagging feeling comes back to me – take the 3 – 5 hours and learn how to do it in a new way that challenges the old or go through the pattern of doing it the same old way again.
It’s a balance and the value it serves is to continually push me from the comfortable to the uncomfortable at every opportunity I can get.
