I have been enjoying my work very much over the last little while. I am working on an interesting (hard) new problem that will take our product to the next level. I am quite pleased that they actually pay me to do this. It is a little more challenging with a nasty cold hanging on, but DayQuil Cold and Flu is amazingly effective at helping me work through the congestion and other symptoms. My only frustration is that there are not enough hours in the day to do all the things that interest me. The older I get, the sadder I am that I did not keep my nose to the grindstone more when I was younger, both as a student and as a young engineer.
Leonardo da Vinci said, “I have offended God and mankind because my work didn’t reach the quality it should have.” He also said, “I have wasted my hours.”
Even though what I am doing is trivial in comparison to the accomplishments of someone like da Vinci, I very much sympathize with the sentiments. The funny deal is that he really understood the life of an engineer. He lived from 1452 to 1519, but he precisely captured what I do for a living when he said, “Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.” What a great guy. It surely does not seem like he was too full of himself. I wish I could be more like that.