Don't change. Adapt

All of us are constantly changing things. We’re changing the things we interact with, we’re changing the environment we live in, we’re changing our thoughts, we’re changing ourselves. In countless other ways possible, it would not be wrong to say that we change a lot of things everyday.

I find myself trying to change a lot of things, particularly, my thoughts go somewhat like: “keep changing until it’s perfect”, which admittedly ends up in a lot of wasted time. I end up changing more than what is required.

Let’s take an example. I recently decided to ditch my current online identity, including email and all my online accounts, and tried to port it over to a new username (this is my 4th time doing it, so I am pretty experienced). Though this time, instead of porting every single account simultaneously, I decided to wait and do it one at a time. I chose to adapt when I required to use the account, instead of changing because I had to.

This taught me a fundamental behaviour of mine. I’ve always been trying to change, but hardly ever trying to adapt.

Another example would be when I started learning VIM. Instead of trying to learn as we go, I took out a week and read a billion guides and tutorials, tried 1000’s of configurations until I reached what I thought was perfect. This lead to a lot of vim fatigue and I just ended up giving up on it after a few months of use. I tried the opposite approach when I started with emacs. I didn’t cold turkey on my previous editor atom, and so I am still using both of them simultaneously. I learn a little bit of emacs everyday and it’s pleasant. I get things done. I don’t waste a lot of time on configs and still manage to retain a lot of the tips and tricks into my long term memory.

Although these examples would hardly be relevant for the average reader, it’s something to think about. I, for one, will constantly try to adapt from now on, because that is the smarter thing to do.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.