As you may have noticed I haven’t been very good with getting posts out this year yet. It’s been weird because it hasn’t been writer’s block that has kept me from it, it’s been in part that my current perspective doesn’t match what I’ve written about for years. I’ve been focused on things outside of my normal.
Here’s what’s fascinating to me – the more I’ve focused on other things and gotten to understand them deeply, the more those things suddenly fit in with everything else I knew. It is like taking different pre-req classes in college that have nothing to do with each other and then 3 semesters later the topics magically merge and what you thought was disparate knowledge suddenly lines up perfectly.
It’s not that my perspective on things has actually changed it’s that I’m becoming better at new skills that I once thought were independent. As I learn to manage I figure out new aspects of UI/UX for software. As I learn to navigate corporate politics (or as I am more likely to do – understand but avoid corporate politics) I discover new reasoning behind how clients view our services. As I discover more management types above me I better understand the fragmented nature of some of what we do.
I’m not going to fall back on the cliche that life is a giant puzzle with the pieces waiting to come together. But I am rediscovering that the way we individually experience the world builds upon past experience and knowledge. There is no such thing as independent experiences because the past always influences the future. There is no way of compartmentalizing what’s going on in life.
This is the primary reason why business and personal are the same and why work/life balance is important. Without one you can’t have the other and the fact that both exist impacts behavior within each. Perspectives never really change, just the eyes that are experiencing.