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From Antoine de Saint-Exupery:
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
I come back to this quote often at work. I think of it when I find myself fixing things. I feel discouraged at the thought that I can’t fix all of the slow, broken, inconsistent code in our codebase. I try to remember that no matter how much I fix, it’ll never be enough, and what I instead need is to convince those around me to yearn for fast, functional, consistent code, so I won’t need to fix it all. Changing the goals of the system, or at least of those operating on the system, is pretty high up on Donna Meadows’ twelve leverage points to intervene in a system. Trying to individually make up for perceived flaws in a system doesn’t even make the list.