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“Well stolen is half-finished.”
If I could remember who first told me that, I’d buy that person a drink. It’s been some of the most valuable advice I’ve ever received. Once I started using it, in my professional life, things suddenly became orders-of-magnitude easier…
Well Stolen
One of the things that frustrate me in the corporate world is the “invention” something that already exists. I’ve done this in the past, then realized I wasted my time because whatever I did was, at best, incrementally better and instead I could have used the time to teach myself something new or found a way to distinguish myself by spending my time on something that would stand out (instead of something that was a copy of another person’s work).
I mean…Recreating a spreadsheet with the hope that your true genius will be recognized, based upon your skillful use of pivot tables or conditional formatting? Silly.
Today, if something already exists I use it without shame and clearly attribute the person who blazed the trail.
When people on my team ask “do you think I can use this or should I start from scratch” my answer is always “use it.”
Note: I’m not talking about copyright infringement here…just re-using the kind of documents and other artifacts that circulate through any company, large or small.
Half-Finished
I think that it’s our schooling that makes us think we have to start from scratch every time. After all, if you take a spreadsheet that somebody else created…or a report, a paper or whatever…you are plagiarizing.
From a pedagogical standpoint, this is necessary. You have to do original work at school or you won’t learn the subject material. Transcription is not education.
From an academic standpoint, this is necessary. Scholarship needs to be original work for it to be valuable or useful, for it to be a contribution to human knowledge. Transcription is not scholarship.
From a business standpoint, this is unnecessary. Using something that already exists is efficient. If you aren’t being judged by your creativity but instead by your profitability, re-use (as long as it isn’t theft) is the way to go.
When I run into something that somebody “created from scratch” when that effort was clearly unnecessary…well, I just feel weary. I have that “here we go, again” feeling that makes me want to go outside, find a nice shady tree and take a nap. Some weeks, I feel like napping all day, every day.
4 Comments
So, good advice led you to the realization that using something already created is more efficient - and who knows how long you lived before you received that advice?
My own laziness led me to the exact same conclusion, only I have had this knowledge SINCE BIRTH!
Funny world, huh?
One the most important things I learned in school was the adage, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” Especially given the weight and emotion conveyed by canonical images - a variation on a theme or different perspective can often be more powerful that the thing itself.
Even now as a grant writer, I find other grants, other descriptions of arts education, other program evaluations INVALUABLE to my work.
Standing on the shoulders of giants….
Christopher: Actually, I’m 99% sure I first heard that phrase in a context related to computer programming that said something like “A lazy programmer is the best programmer because they’ll only want to do the job once…then re-use the same code as often as possible.”
I prefer, “If you want to find a quicker way to do something, give it to a lazy man.”
I myself prefer to do as little original work as possible because the problems I often have to solve have been solved, resolved, re-resolved, and then debated in committee before being re-engineered when the new CTO comes around.
I’ve often wanted to actually get into research-type work where you are actually doing original or truly ground-breaking work, but NASA turned me down and once I quite crying myself to sleep at night, I realized that I’m not enough of a genius to write code that will end world hunger and prevent communism from invading the world.
I think that’s why I enjoy trouble-shooting more. At last it’s always an emergency and there is a definable driving factor behind whatever you are trying to troubleshoot.
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