Thursday 14 July 2011

Your job and your mission

Are you doing your job or fulfilling your mission? My job is to support software, but my mission is to get robust, easy-to-use software into the hands of people that need it, when and how they need it. If I sometimes need to spend my time at the office rewriting something shoddy instead of just patching it up and hoping for the best, then I should do that. Long-term, that's a winning strategy, even though it might look like a loss in the short term. The strategy of "just patch it and get on with the next patch" looks like winning in the short term, but will eventually lose because we're not going anywhere. We're running in place, struggling to keep just barely ahead of total collapse. By the time we're "finished" with that strategy, we will have been far outpaced by the competition and won't have accomplished anything worthwhile. And that's assuming we can keep our clients that long.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'd like to be doing more of my mission.
PPS - That might mean doing a different job.

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