Posted on 15 Aug 2023
In the last few years I’ve realised how wonderful it is to see others win.
It can sometimes be natural to feel a touch of jealousy when a friend or acquaintance shares photos of their lovely new house, posts about their promotion or tells you about an upcoming trip they are excited for. The feeling might also seem stronger when we don’t know these people personally.
There’s a well-known phrase credited to Theodore Roosevelt - “Comparison is the thief of joy” that I dare think many disagree with. I have friends that have moved abroad for work and seemingly love every minute, and it was not difficult to feel a sense of joy for them. Seeing others succeed can not only be energising and motivating, but also a way to live vicariously if you let it.
I know a guy who has recently been away on a polar expedition at sea, sharing photos of huge icebergs and footage of the seabed with creatures I won't ever see in person. I have to say I don’t know him all that well, but the nature of the trip looks to be highly scientific and research-based (plus unsurprisingly cold), so as a result it is unlikely a trip I will ever make. When I reached out to him he told me he felt privileged to be there and recognised that not many people would get to see what he has.
As far as I see, when people around us win, we win too.
What I’ve been up to
I spent most of Monday last week making some enhancements to my website. The biggest change I made was going from card-style navigation to scrollable sections to show the different types of work I produce. If you didn’t come in via the homepage, go take a look, try it for yourself and let me know what you think.
As the week passed I made minor tweaks here and there, including to the CMS I have set up to manage the content of this blog.
After last week’s blog post, I had a few people point me to Simon Sinek content so I took the opportunity to get away from my screen(s) and listen to an episode of the High Performance Podcast. I’m glad I did - the vision of “a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning inspired, feel safe wherever they are and end the day fulfilled by the work that they do” is one I align with, strive for in myself, and am certainly not alone in.
Continuing with my efforts to learn SwiftUI through Hacking with Swift I covered Complex Data Types including Arrays, Dictionaries, Enums and Type annotations then Conditions. On the agenda for today is Loops and I already feel like I need some revision..
Lastly I jumped into Blender and started to play around with creating fabrics.
Above is a sheet being dropped onto a slope - this was actually super simple to do. Though the jitters on the top right show this isn’t perfect, it was a good exercise to introduce me to material physics and collisions which I’ve not had much exposure to previously.
In addition to that I used Nodes to start experimenting with different textures on materials to see how it changes their appearance. There is a lot I plan to do this week but sticking with Blender and seeing what else I can create is on the list for sure.
Thanks for reading!
Ste