I often like to work alone. I like to do the task or project in solitude. Only after it is done, I present my shiny implementation to the customer. This part of my nature was very well suited to school, especially math and science. Given a problem, I could steal away to my study. I could lose myself, dissolve myself, fully reconstruct myself in a problem. This is safe. I can be wrong alone. I can take my time. I only have to contend with one perspective. I can doing it perfectly.

I recently wrapped a software project. Without talking to the customer of the software, I worked for 6 months on what I thought the problems were. To no one’s surprise but my own, many of the things that I found weren’t on anyone’s radar. One customer didn’t even know they were problems. In trying to doing to doing it perfectly with no help, I succeeded in doing plenty of work that no asked for or needed.

More recently, I have been writing about marrying my girlfriend. I find marriage to be a big and important decision. As such, I want it to be very considered. So, I’ve spent the past month writing various prenuptial essays. After I had written a few of them, I felt angry with her for being less engaged with what I had been writing. But after talking with her about it, what avenues did I give her for engaging with the work. True to habit I stole away to my study to make sure that my girlfriend and I should get married.

What’s more, wouldn’t you know that she felt like I was procrastinating the proposal. In her defense, I think I was toward the end. But far and away from a legal argument about how I technically wasn’t putting it off, I certainly secluded myself with a singular self-derived view of a task and worked through it asking for now input. This resulted in my most important customer being underserved.

So, going forward, I need to bring the proverbial car out from behind closed doors. Starting a project is very different from getting a homework assignment. A homework assignment is fully done before it is given to you. The answer already exists. To make something new, you have to go into uncharted territory. I want to stop trying to pridefully do that alone.