Isabel has a great post up on her blog about the power of orthogonal thinking. (She takes the idea from a post by Russ Nelson, but one love at a time.) Her post leads me to consider:
1) All of this blogging about who we love, powered by the power of the network just might mean that some day everyone will love everybody. And what's so bad about that? Not only that but:
2) Yeah, why do "orthogonal thinkers" get such a bad rap? In my experience, more often than not when watching the brain trust flounder leads me to make a comment along the lines of "Why can't we just do X," that, in turn, invariably leads someone to reply along the lines of "You have to understand something..."
That reply that follows has never once lead to either increasing my understanding, or actually revealing something I do, indeed, need to understand. (I'll understand if you post a comment telling me there's something I need to understand about not writing sentences like that last one.)
And then what happens?
Six months later the thing that couldn't be done magically pops out of someone else's mouth, and because that person usually happens to be higher up on the ladder than me, far less orthogonal, or both, it passes for forward thinking. Which I love, but but also hate, if you know what I mean.
But that's not why I love Isabel Hilborn.
Why I love Isabel Hilborn is because she did come up with a way to suggest, in the sweetest possible way (you'll notice my use of the word "hate" in a previous paragraph), that it just might not be all that bad.
If I make a fortune selling "Be Orthogonal®" T-Shirts and bumper stickers, she surely gets a generous cut. Hopefully then I'll be free of my own battle between love and hate.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment