Decisions, incisions

"Nurse, hand me that scalpel."

A decision may sometimes have life changing impact. The choice may show up unannounced, and it may suddenly demand all, or most, of your attention – to the point that not staring it in the eye will eat you alive. Or at least that's how it makes you feel – until you do decide. But how are you to decide? There's way too much at stake, here. Your future isn't just your future – it is intertwined with many other forward moving paths.

"Number 10. Hand me the number 10."

I'm pretty sure that the more monumental decisions would lead to multiverses that are rampantly different. But don't all decisions have life changing impact? I bet there's a parallel universe to all of them.

"At the junction of lateral one-third and medial two-third of the spinoumbilical line, we draw an oblique incision."

I have this theory about the 1º of change.

Imagine, on a graph, you deviate your path from the x-axis by 1º – initially, you won't even be able to distinguish your path from a perfectly horizontal line. But as you move forward, as you continue extending that line, the distance between the 1º deviant and the horizontal axis will not only become apparent, it'll keep increasing.

"You will be going home with sutures in place. You have to keep it clean, and it wouldn't harm to stay away from pets for a while. Don't take off the bandage for a day or so – you call me if there's anything about this that worries you."

A decision may sometimes have life changing impact, and even small decisions may lead to increasingly divergent paths. But incisions heal, sometimes, very quickly. Sometimes, they leave no scars behind, too. But they have to be made, in a very small pocket of time.

Time is of the essence, and even decisions come with an expiration date. An incision made a day later may have no impact at all. Would you want that, versus, say, life changing impact?

"Thanks, doc!"

Daybreak

I am, by no account, a morning person. I do wake up at a reasonable time (for myself) in the AM – but that's usually for class or work. However, the only acceptable measure of will is defined by what you do when no one's looking, and at that time, you'll see me wake up infinitesimally close to the afternoon.

I can stay up all night – that's very doable. But waking up at 7:30 in the morning to get a healthy start to the day? How about "just five more minutes of sleep?"

Regardless, however, I chance upon waking up early occasionally. I don't know how it happens, but I'll be up, and I'll throw my hand around on my bed in a hunt for my phone, and I'll take a quick look at the time before the screen's luminescence makes me wince the one eye that I'm looking with.

Post 4:00 AM, the read feels like quite a victory. Today, it was 4:25.

I derive a certain kind of pleasure from waking up in the wee hours of the morning. This kind of time, when the commotion is yet to start and the birds are yet to start chirping – this kind of time delivers so much peace.

I make sure to take a good look at what's happening outside, even though the world out there is still – just the way it was left at some point of the night. And then, I come back down into my blankets.

Laying in bed, with my thoughts covering the ceiling never otherwise feels so good.

It makes me question my morning-orientation, and makes me wonder why I don't wake up this early more often.

Time ceases to exist, and it makes me question the decisions I've made in my life, and the ones I'm yet to make. It makes me want to apologize to everyone I may have wronged. It makes me want to thank everyone who's ever made me smile. It makes me ponder upon the future. It makes me ponder upon the past.

It makes my eyelids the projector screen that the ceiling was. And I sway back to sleep.

In the distance, however, it is now 7:30 AM. Daily commute begins for someone who, perhaps, owns a motorboat and decides to manoeuvre it on concrete and asphalt. And I open my eyes to a ceiling that doesn't seem like it had ever been a projector screen for thoughts.

And it makes me wonder why I had ever thought of waking up early.

For now, just give me five more minutes.

"From Time"

"That's why 
you trust me— 
I know you been through 
more than most of us.

So what are you… 
What are you, what are you so afraid of? —
Darling you…
You give, 
but you cannot take love."

Research, redesign and parallel universes

The popular belief that a product must be thought of from the ground up while being conceptualized is absolutely correct. Popular belief often begs to be corrected, but in the aforementioned case, the practice that has come to be exercised over the years is fairly appropriate.

Usually, of course.

Such a practice, or any popular practice for that matter, becomes widely accepted over long term use, reuse, getting broken and shattered to pieces, and then getting taped up and glued together before being reused. Again.
Any thing that a person makes goes through multiple iterations of improvement upon improvement, evolution, to the point of quasi-saturation – a point where a product appears to lie in a popularly accepted status quo.

But that has hardly ever been the case.

Products change – inch by inch, or even at a molecular level, at varying speeds; from weeks to months to years to generations and further lapses of time. But they don't change because they're getting old, wrinkly and need medication. They change because we make them change. We shave off what we don't need, and do what was previously difficult or impossible to do so that we can consistently arrive at a better solution. Every iteration that was the best at its time gets succeeded by something even better.

All of this happens so naturally that we often find ourselves asking why we couldn't have thought of something so simple earlier.

But we couldn't have. In such a seemingly natural evolution, products follow a path of tackling a need or a problem that can be alleviated. We use the best resources available to us at the time and attempt to balance ease of development and its economic worth.

Consider, however, that all of these decisions and the evolution a product underwent happened only in one universe – the one that you're reading this in. Perhaps, in another parallel universe, maybe we approached the same product differently. We attempted to tackle the need and diminish the problem using an entirely different set of resources.
In that universe, the product would evolve differently, too.

Even though popular belief agrees to thinking of a product concept from the ground up, we often limit ourselves to thinking of current solutions when attempting to redesign something.

While that's somewhat of a good practice – it does let us explore what options we already have; helps us avoid re-inventing the wheel – it also tends to put us inside a box. The same materials. The same UI grids. The same patterns.

When the objective is to redesign the wheel, I believe it is more important to understand why the wheel exists as it does today. What made it evolve to what it has come to? What? Do we really want to put air inside the thing? Have you seen the roads? Oh man, that turn on exit 51 has some of the worst potholes in the history of forever.

So when you're thinking from the ground up, dig a little deeper and go a little under-ground. When you're redesigning, in the words of Mr. Einstein, be "passionately curious."