Frustration

Posted on October 1, 2002

Did you ever have one of those days when you felt like you could just take the world by the scruff of the neck and SWING, and you just KNEW you’d throw it farther and faster than anyone ever had before, but you weren’t allowed to do it? Man. I HATE that feeling. I feel like a ball of energy, like a catapult pulled all the way back, ready to LET FLY with a giant boulder that would SMASH the hell out of something way off in the distance.

Robert X. Cringely once wrote that really creative people do something really unusual — they do things that are so creative that they literally blow away an entire field of work like cobwebs in the corner. The old ways just aren’t competitive anymore. In Cringely’s words, they “turn creativity into a destructive act.”

That’s how I feel right now. I want to DESTROY something. I want to do something so insanely amazing that it makes the earth shake and the heavens quake. I want to deal lightning from my fingertips. I want to drive down a two lane road at ninety miles an hour and flip some bucktoothed donut-eating cop the bird.

But then I come back to earth, where clients aren’t paying for Insanely Amazing solutions (at least not anymore) and bucktoothed cops sock you with fat speeding tickets whether or not you flip them off. And I’m left to wonder, where is the Autobahn of the soul? Where can we put the top down and push the pedal to the floor and wring out every ounce of potential from ourselves? What makes us the best we can possibly be?

Who knows, I’m no philosopher. All I know is, I ain’t finding it today. (sigh)