Why

I recently watched 180° South. You should, too. It will change, affect, do something to you. If anything, it made me less happy to sit at a desk and stare at a screen all day for the rest of my working life.

And the whole purpose of climbing something like Everest is to effect some sort of spiritual and physical gain, but if you compromise the process, you’re an asshole when you start out and you’re an asshole when you get back.
~ Yvon Chouinard, Founder of Patagonia Clothing (via thelongbrake.com)

I'm constantly asking "why". Doesn't make for the safest, most conflict-free lifestyle, but I don't know how else to do life. I have to know why. Maybe that makes me an asshole. I'm pretty sure some folks would associate my name with that title. But, I'm ok with that if it's for the right reason. And knowing why, or at least striving to get to the answer, is a good enough reason to earn that title, in my opinion.

Part of finding an answer to why is found in process. Take the metaphor of life as a journey, for example. Yes, life is a journey. But, why are you journeying? Or, to ask it in a less-specific way, why make certain choices or take certain actions along the journey. It's a comparative question. The comparison could be between the quality or consequence of choices. One is based on preference the other on self-preservation, in a way.

I've been a fan of the attributes of "process" like the grid, workflow methods and such, for the pragmatic value they bring to my working life. I understand the other side of it. The dry, lifeless side of process. But, I don't consider myself as vulnerable to veering off into the void of lifeless repetition of process based on policy or bureaucratic hierarchy. I've got plenty to give when it comes to improv, thinking on my feet, figuring things out as I go along. My interest lies in reducing reinvention by introducing process.

Process where it matters. Learning and innovating for everything else.

Establishing a process in UX/UI is laborious. It's intense. It requires sustained interest and meticulous interaction with ideas, human and machine behavior. Not to mention the implicit, simultaneous collaboration with humans, robots, and code. The tension, for me, rises when I sense the burden of this labor and hear the voice of compromise shushing my angst over IE bugs and promising sweet release through various hackeries. Moments like those where I'm being tempted to abandon the virtue of process and shoot from the hip are the formative moments in my career in technology.

Compromising the process, then, would be an attempt to botch things in my favor. The web is crowded with hucksters and rife with the stink of their piles of shortcuts. From crappy plug-n-play commerce apps written in even crappier PHP to SEO theories that guarantee millions within days. If you've been around, you've seen'em.

The goal is the same for both methods: the reward. The good way, we'll call it, the way of process, of learning and finding out why, is the way of discipline and of purpose and humility. The second way, let's call it the bad way, is the way of "who the hell cares as long as I get mine". It's the way of self-centeredness, of carelessness, of self-aggrandizement. It's the way of dictators, oppressors and greedy corporations.

Getting to the reward is the point. It is part of the motivation for knowing why. I'm learning that the "how" of getting to the "why" is equally important. The choice of means could leave me with less of a soul, or in the words of Yvon Chouinard, being "an asshole" after the fact. And that, I read, as being an asshole for the wrong reason.