The mixed feeling

I have been really busy with the developer summit event that happened at Adobe over yesterday and today. My team, which consists of mostly new members, took a very active part in it. Overall, we were amongst the top performers. We ended up winning good number of prizes, one in each of the team events. There was only one team who won more trophies than us. Now frankly I should be happy and I am but there is still some sense of loss. With the amount of effort that we had put into preparation, we should have won better prizes. I am not saying that we deserved better prizes, we didn’t the other team was better than us, but that we didn’t get output in line with our efforts. The area where we lacked was creativity. Now, creativity is hard to learn. After all, creativity  is about breaking the conventions to come up with interesting things. I love innovation and, at least I believe, that I am able to come up with innovative solutions to technical problems. But I don’t have the same creativity in arts, including of course performing arts. Some people are really good at it. When you require this kind of creativity then your best bet is to get hold of people who have this gift. You can try to be creative yourself, and occasionally you will see good results, but frankly a genuinely creative person has an unfair advantage over you. Your effort will simply not help that much. That is what I think at this point. Well, this is my first reaction so it might not be accurate but first reactions do carry some value and so I am expressing mine here.

 

Thankfully in my line of work creativity in arts isn’t that required or useful. What a stroke of luck! Somehow, I have ended up choosing a profession where my strong weakness is not a big handicap. I put this on luck because my choice of profession has not really been a very though out decision. I have sort of gone on with what I liked doing. When I passed out of college, software was a good option, it paid well and I liked computers a lot. It was one of the best available choices but it was also the only choice that I tried.

 

Anyway here I am, with mixed feelings. On one side, I feel overjoyed over the success that my team members have achieved. Not only in terms of trophies, which will give them immediate gratification, but also in terms of the experience that they have gained in working together and making things happen, which they won’t realize for a long time but benefit from implicitly. I also feel that I have let them down a bit. It would have been great if I were this creative guy who wins them the first prizes, but I am not.

 

At the end of day you have to take life with a pinch of salt and say to yourself, “All is well”.