If you had a pocket genie that gave you three wishes and endless advice -- would you mind if it ate half of everything you put on your plate?
Besides having a hungry pocket genie, life is full of other trade-offs. Some of them are more tolerable than others. When we're small we want to be grown-ups because they have all this freedom to do anything they want to do with their lives. Now that we're grown-ups (or appear to be at least) we recognize the trade-offs that come with the opportunity of choice -- responsibilities. And of course, you can avoid all of those things, but it also means that you can't really have a lot of the meaningful stuff.If you want a good partner, you need to take responsibility for being a good partner yourself. Invest in time and thoughts.
If you want a nice home, you need to take care of it regularly and spend money on keeping it tidy.
No responsibility means that there's nothing you're building. Not creating any accountability or history. We're memory creatures -- some people still miss their ex 10 years later. Not because the new people they're meeting are any worse -- they just have deep connections emotionally.
So to spin this into a work-related email -- the more we work in our roles, the deeper we are able to make connections. Why senior developers are better than juniors at their job. Why teamwork gets better with time. Why jobs get more interesting.
If I was skeptical at first of Elon Musk taking over Twitter, now I do think he has a good chance of succeeding. He has been a super-user for years, understanding the depths of the product. That knowledge has now been turned into a responsibility to pivot a very mature social network.
meow xoxo
— Gertrud