As I have said elsewhere, the early stage of getting to know a new job is similar in a lot of ways to the early stage of playing a video game. You’re getting to know the controls, but you’re also learning the basics of gameplay: in other words, it’s all about coming to terms with your own fallibility.
I’m old enough to remember a time when video games kept a player on rails — none of this “exploring the landscape” tomfoolery. When you played Galaxian or Space Invaders or Donkey Kong, your choices as a spaceship pilot or plumber were constrained. The game kept you on task. Sure, you could just stand somewhere jumping up and down, but is that really freedom (either in a game or in real life)?
In today’s world, players are liberated: you can play Minecraft in hundreds of different ways — it might even be more accurate to say you play “with” video games today, the way a kid plays with blocks or Legos.
The standard 9-to-5 jobs that most of us have are, obviously, neither as entertaining nor engaging as an MMORPG. That is why they call it work. But, at the same time, almost every job also has the potential for that thing that separates humans from ants: invention. Creativity. Exploration.
When you’ve been at a job for a while and you’ve built up some expertise, you reach the stage of…
