I am a great fan of Aamir Khan, a fine actor in Indian cinema. But more than his acting prowess, what impressed me was his "own opinionated" view on movie making. His one little belief helped me realized a lot in my day-day activities. He has indicated that he believes in the process of film-making - the thrills, the sufferings, the enjoyment, the sacrifices, etc... more than the end result itself.
We do envision the end result, but a lot of us bury our minds in the end result so much that we don't enjoy the day-day process. For example, when we make software, we are so engrossed in meeting deadlines, living up to stakeholder expectations, daily status reports, that we forget to celebrate or appreciate the tiny successes like completing a unit of code without any bugs, writing a nice piece of documentation, being near your team member when he/she has a problem in her personal life, tuning a SQL query to less than 10 times its original running time. We lose all such fun events in the search of the end state, that even when we achieve the end state, it just doesn't taste that great. We pat our backs and are on-board the next "deadline train".
I am planning to introduce a "Success or Failure Celebration" event once a week in my projects going forward where people can celebrate their daily successes and failures. They get recognized for their daily successes. They can talk about their moments when they punched their fists. They can talk about the moments when their hands were there for their friends.
I will keep you posted on my results.
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