Tedium

(Photo by airpix at Flickr)

For reasons I’ll not go into, recently I am reminded that a lot of progress requires tedium. In fact, it seems the most important progress always requires tedium.

In the most elite software group I ever worked with, one of the bugs I was assigned to investigate had already been through a couple of years of scrutiny by two of my immediate superiors. Their experience and knowledge eclipsed mine, but they had not been able to crack the problem. They thought maybe fresh eyes could see how to fix it. I did. It took five months. I worked on other things most of the time, but whenever I had a moment, I stared at the page of source code that seemed to hold the gremlin. I wrote notes on it and drew lines on it. It swam around in my head. Five months of that… until at long last I realized a variable had a misleading name that lulled us into believing we knew what it did. That variable was the culprit.

For one of my current projects, I have a lot of keeping-track to do. It’s tedious. It can be boring. But it’s unavoidable if the team wants to complete the invention it has in mind and that invention is very much needed. We want to change the world, so I’m plodding through the dreary bits.

This is part of what going to school is about. It isn’t entirely about cramming knowledge into the minds of children. It isn’t entirely about making learning fun. It’s partly about developing the habits and patience to cope with tedium.

Many worthwhile things in life can only be achieved by slogging through the boring parts of the path.

College refines that patience and self-discipline. Like knowledge, you can get it without going to college, but you can get a dose in college that is more compressed and intense than what you can get in most other places.

In some circles it’s fashionable to try to make everything fun. There are schemes to “gamify” work, trying to make work feel like a game. But if you want to do something important or big, playing your way through it will not get you there. Somewhere along the way, you have to be patient, persistent, self-disciplined, even if you feel bored to tears…

NASA can spend years preparing for a single one or two week flight, or decades patiently tending to a long term exploratory mission with endless data to be analyzed. We spent immense time and effort doing tedious tests and rehearsals before the first Space Shuttle flight. I remember how much patience it took. Day by day, endlessly persistent and rigorous.

And I remember how it felt when she flew.

Moments like that are worth the tedium to get there.