Shit happens. Yes it does. You will not get the job that you always wanted to. You will get reprimanded by your boss. Yes your spouse will fight with you for no reason and then blame it on you. Your colleagues will try to sabotage your career. Your pet will die. Shit will happen. But it happens for a reason. Not to make your life miserable, that is just an effect, but to prepare you for even harder challenges in life. Any problem of any field, any time or any scope comes with a lesson. Every bad experience goes away trying to teach you something. This is what the proverbial silver lining is all about. It is always up to you to rise above the problem and find a resolution and to make sure that any lesson or experience that came with the problem was absorbed and understood. Assess the problem, assess why it came, what you could have done to avoid it and what you would do to fix it. Once it is fixed, look back. What you can take from it. How it changed your life, temporarily or permanently? What you can remember so that it does not happen again and if it does you know how to tackle. Look into the finer details as all big issue are made up of smaller problems. If you are able to do all this and come out with a learning then that becomes a successful problem. A failed interview prepares for the next. A bug fix today will take you a long way. A betrayal today will improve your ability to judge people. A fight today with your spouse will be more love tomorrow. Try to make the most of the problem because the life is unfair and it will keep throwing more hurdles at you. The best you can do is dodge the ones that you can remember and try to identify the new ones. This will work. This always has and this always will.
And if all this fails stand up, dust yourself and smile because somewhere someone is having an even worse day for sure.
Shit Happens. And it happens for good.
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I agree altogether. Shit happens. You know, this article reminded me of a movie called “How to rob a bank”. There were 10 rules. I don’t remember all of them, but rule no 8 was :
Shit Happens.
Rule 9 was:
Remember, shit happens.
You don’t wanna forger what shit has happened to you in past when you did certain something.
Great read, enjoyed it thoroughly.
Cheers,
Chirag.
Thanks a lot Chirag.
Smart people know how to avoid “shit happening” in the first place. They don’t have to experience it to know how to avoid it.
Let me give you an example. A couple of years ago, my software development team was starting on a new project. It would have to scale to billions of transactions per day. One of my team members suggested we use Ruby on Rails and Redis.
Although I had never used Ruby on Rails or Redis, I read about them and it became clear that if we used them, “shit would happen”. So we did the smart thing, and used Scala and PostgreSQL instead. And you know what? “Shit” didn’t happen. Our system works wonderfully, on much less hardware than was originally expected, and with much better performance than the system it replaced.
With a little bit of intelligence, it’s easy to avoid “shit happening”, almost all of the time.
Hi Mordechai, I completely agree with you and you are right when you say that with a little bit of intelligence a lot of “shit” can be avoided. But i am sure you will also agree with me that life is unfair and it will keep throwing shit towards you no matter what. This is the shit that i am addressing. Also as a fellow developer i totally support your decision of sticking with the technologies that you are comfortable with. I am all up for learning new stuff but when it comes to building something critical i always try to stay in my comfort zone as well.
“Yes your spouse will fight with you for no reason [...] But it happens for a reason.”
So, simply I put it forward as..
Don’t say, Shit happens.. like you were not involved, when it was happening, you were a part of it in its planning and execution at some point..