Growing and improving as a web designer is all about being honest with yourself. Oliver Reichenstein presents his unique take on the questions we should all be asking
Drink less wine; eat less chocolate; stop smoking. No more ham. Exercise regularly. Call your mother every week. Listen more carefully. Respect other people. Don’t make big promises unless you’re sure that you will keep them. And, if you’re a designer: work harder, work smarter, chose your clients carefully and charge them double.
These are all good resolutions, but if they’re taken on 1 January, they’re poison. We’ve all been there and … not done that. New Year’s resolutions don’t work. New Year’s resolutions are a moralist trap we jump into, and that lead to the same end: before the end of the first week we inevitably hit the ground of reality and wake up into our old weak self. New Year’s wishes are a worldly form of self-flagellation. Why do we start the New Year again and again with a boring guilt trip, when we know that it won’t help anyone? What if the resolution itself is the reason why we fail? We have the funny trait that we do what we shouldn’t do with more motivation, pleasure and esprit than what we should.
So, in order to trick ourselves, how about taking the resolution to not be a better person or designer, but a worse one. Like Jerry Seinfeld said to George Costanza: “If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.”
How about trying to be a bad bad boy, bad bad girl, bad bad man, bad bad woman, a very very bad bad person? Will that get us a better start?
Obviously, we need to find good reasons to be bad. That is logically and rhetorically not as straightforward as finding good reasons to be good. So I hope that you’ll forgive me some logical and rhetorical tricks in the following five minutes of diabolical advocacy of the ultimate evil: a praise of the seven deadly sins.
By Oliver Reichenstein for .net Magazine, 02 Jan 2013
