New challenges are fun
A Link in the 4th edition
How’s it going?! Welcome to the 4th edition of Nuanced Experiments. Hope you’ve had an awesome week.
This week no new bees showed up at my door, but I did spend roughly 7-10 hours in the world of Hyrule. Any Zelda fans out there?
Here are this week’s learnings!
1. Tech Career Insight: Take, don’t wait
At times in your career it won’t be clear what’s the next priority to work on. Maybe your tech lead or manager are out or you finished work earlier than expected. Perhaps there are no tickets/expectations on your ticket tracking system at all.
What I would propose is, instead of waiting for someone to tell you what to do tomorrow, just take initiative and work on whatever messy, low-hanging fruit you can find.
Some ideas:
Add tests to parts of the code that need it
Fix that annoying bug that no one wants to fix
Refactor that small thing you did last month (when you were hopefully not rushing to ship)
Prototype a new feature that you’re interested in
Take a course or read a book about a tech skill you want to learn
Write tickets for things the team can work on next whenever this happens again
I truly believe that moving with this initiative will help you in your career no matter what path you choose.
Caveat: The idea is not to fill every minute of the day with work just because, but to fill every day of work with something meaningful to you.
2. Learning: Pursue challenges to make things fun
Like millions of others, I decided to buy the latest Zelda game last week. My short review: I love it. Starting it inspired me to share one idea that stood out.
Every time a new game comes out in this series, some of the progress of the last one is, in some way, lost. Without spoiling anything meaningful, this new game is not an exception. You learn quickly that you are not at 100% anymore. There is a new 100% to get to. And that’s… FUN.
This kind of “reset” is actually very common in games (See Bag Of Spilling Trope).
I believe that game designers are implicitly revealing an interesting human idea here:
Life can be more fun when you face new challenges
Outside of Hyrule, what is an area of your life that’s gotten easy, stale, or boring? Can you start over with a different goal in mind? Can you come up with new challenges to make things fun?
Caveat: There can be such a thing as too challenging. Trust your intuition and aim to find that sweet spot between boring/easy and too stressful/hard.
I highly recommend checking out the psychological idea of flow if you’re interested in learning more about this sweet spot.
Which brings us to the experiment for this week.
3. Nuanced Experiment of the Week
Take initiative on one small project that no one is expecting you to do. How does that feel? How does your team react?
Spend one week learning one new challenging micro skill you’ve been wanting to learn that’s not too hard, not too easy.
Thanks again for reading and see you on the next one!
🙏
X