I’ll note that many forms of it are selectively edited out of narrative building, both in people’s self-narratives and in ones that are intentionally crafted for public consumption.
I’m comfortable with talking about my own: I generally start the business/career talk as if I came out fully formed out of Zeus’ forehead in the Japanese countryside, generally eliding a 15 year effort by myself and my family to get the education that gave me Java and Japanese.
And when I talk to (other?) PR pros, I get the well-meaning advice to strip down and simplify the formative years to “I was a startup CEO for a while then...”
Which I think is injurious to the truth (by omission), but it does flow better for some purposes.
You’ll see a lot of this in early company histories, too. Much like other forms of history, they get progressively rewritten over time, and divisions and side alleys that were really important in year 3 (now year -2 sometimes) get de emphasized.
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A thing not widely understood by either consumers or even most people working in finance: the standard US checking account is a credit product.
(Even if overdrafts are turned off.)
“Why?”
The holder of a checking account gets constructive access to money from their bank while there is some risk that the bank will not itself durably receive that payment.
That creates credit risk.
“Diagram that out for me in practice.”
Day 0: Bank balance of $5k. Receive $10k ACH push.
Day 2: Bank updates available balance to $15k.
Day 12: wire $7k out to buy a car. Available balance $8k.
Day 37: Bank receives ACH return saying the ACH push was not authorized. Balance -2k
If you enjoy action roguelikes at all, Hades is, oh my Greek gods, a work of art. Beautiful, well-acted and voiced, with intriguing progression mechanics, and a satisfying just-one-more-run core game loop.
Also its fascinating that we're still telling new stories about the Greek gods, isn't it? And that they can be really good stories.
Trust me, you might never have had a hole in your life for millennial ironic California dude surfer Poseidon but he's amazing.
This has thoroughly eaten a weekend and the *sheer depth* of the game is so amazing. The self-referential in game nods to the power increase happening both via stats and skill. How some powers essentially transform it into a different game instantly. The tradeoffs in builds.
So imagine you’re an industrial designer of milk cartons in Japan.
You design a carton with a weird shape which is 100% full on packaging. The carton intentionally deforms when the user breaks the vacuum seal.
Some users report this as a production quality issue. So what do you do? Roll back to the previous standard carton design?
No, you write a brief and simplified explanation on how air is the enemy of milk taste and the carton deforms because the vacuum that you were extremely intentional about putting in has been broken.
I think this rounds to true and will change over time, largely as the preferences (and professional backgrounds) of the customer base for the high end changes.
An underremarked feature of the world: simple capability to ship user-facing software which was Actually Not Awful was an extremely limited skill set until quite recently.
Maybe ten firms worldwide could do it in 2000 and none of them were doing it in finance.
That’s increasingly “Look, if it is a priority to you, books balance at the end of the quarter. If it is a priority for you, the mobile app is Basically Fine.” sort of capability in finance.
This is in the category of “things which I have long believed which, on substantial experience, I believe I was underrating in importance for decades.”
Particularly the bit about raising the ambitions of folks who are new to things versus merely encouraging them.
(Or “not discouraging them.” Crikey our societal bar is so low.)
What’s difference? “I believe that if you work hard and apply yourself you can learn to program eventually” versus “You could write a compiler six weeks from now if you wanted one. Want to hear how?”
We have a weird cultural superposition in the U.S. of being extremely, extremely supportive of ambition in the abstract (“You can be whatever you want to be!”) and viciously critical of ambition in the concrete.