There’s an old saying that goes something along the lines of “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man“. As someone who had lived much of his life trying to learn the rules of the world so I could work within them the notion that being unreasonable about something would be the catalyst for progress was initially met with harsh scepticism. However I began to notice that the ones who actually managed to enact change were in fact those who were making unreasonable demands, not just of others but also of themselves. They also seemed to flourish within boundaries, seeming to be far more capable working with some kind artificial constraint than they were with completely open ended problems.
I really started to believe in this whole progress comes from being unreasonable idea when I started working on my own projects and I started running up against things that people had never come across before. Now for us .NET developers it’s pretty much guaranteed that you’re not the first one to run up against a certain problem since there are so many people out there developing with it. However following on from that idea you’ll tend to find then that if people can’t find a solution to particular issue they’ll instead find some other way of achieving the same goal that’s been done before. This is the double edged sword of Microsoft’s black magic and it definitely traps the wise programmers in the loop of adapting themselves instead of trying to make changes to the world they’re operating in.
I had this recently when I was working on my latest project. I was working with an ASP.NET MVC 3 site and I had set up the web site to make multiple calls back to the server in order to retrieve the data it needed. Now this worked well to get it off the ground but anyone looking to optimize a website will tell you reducing the number of calls to your server will lead to much better performance, for both the client and your server. Eliminating all these calls and wrapping them up into the @Model of the view for this part of the website would do that, but I had no idea of how to get the same results as I had done with the multiple requests. After searching, hacking and testing several different things I eventually found myself with a very workable solution and I was left for many more ideas for improvements to the site.
Now had I been more reasonable with my expectations I would’ve instead just kept on doing what I had been doing (since it was functional) and wouldn’t have dared to consider changing. Indeed I sat on the whole idea for a day before pulling the trigger on it, precisely because of the amount of rework that was involved in doing so. However the changes I made will make it far more easier going forward since it allows me to work in the areas I’m much more comfortable with rather than fooling around with technologies I’m still in the process of understanding. Sure going the other way might have been a better learning experience but I’ve learnt quite a lot in the process of overcoming the goal I set myself, perhaps more than I would have should I have continued down the same path.
Having unreasonable expectations frees you from being constrained by perceived limitations, allowing you to push to the very limits of what is possible. Arbitrary boundaries help to limit the problem space considerably enabling you to focus more clearly on the ultimate goal rather than getting stuck in the multitude of minutia. Combining these two ideas has helped me push past my own limitations in many aspects of my life, from coding to fitness and even to unlocking my hidden creative self. So I put it to you to start being more unreasonable in your expectations and using arbitrary limitations as enablers rather than blockers to progress.
