Everything is hard when you don't know how

Quitting is tempting, but keep going

If you follow technology news, you might have heard the term “enshitification.”

It refers to the pattern of decreasing quality observed in online services and products. Platforms (like Google, for instance) that initially provided useful services shift their focus at the expense of user experience.

In Google’s case, they changed their algorithm so that when you type in a query, you get:

1. Paid ads

2. An AI-generated answer to your query… which is probably wrong or unhelpful

3. Links to websites from major corporations that don’t help you

The small websites that existed solely to create helpful how-to’s and targeted listicles are now getting downranked into oblivion, which is bad for them and bad for us.

It’s making it harder to do things ourselves and accomplish our goals. It’s making it harder to sort out good sources from bad ones. It’s all just getting harder.

I found this out in the last week as I desperately tried to share an Outlook mailbox with my staff. This should have been easy. But Google insisted on showing me unhelpful forum posts from Microsoft, ranging from 2003 to 2013. As we all know, the entire interface of Outlook has changed since then.

I finally had to figure it out on my own by hitting every button in existence until it did what I wanted.

Pushing Through

The funny thing was that once I knew the steps, it was simple. “Why didn’t I figure it out earlier? Why did this take me days? Am I stupid?”

This is why teaching is a skill. If you already know how to do something, it seems easy, especially if you learned how to do it a long time ago. But for someone who DOESN’T know, figuring out the steps to take is hard.

Then frustration kicks in. It’s taking so long. You don’t have time for this. So you just give up, moving on to something else.

A lot of goals and a lot of dreams have been tossed to the side because we are too stubborn to ask someone for help, or the help we seek out ends up being useless.

Have you ever bought an online course on writing or marketing, only to find the content was just stuff you already knew?

It can be so frustrating and for most of us, makes us want to give up.

I’m something of a natural quitter, and both my parents spent a lot of my childhood and adolescence trying to break me of it. Though they weren’t entirely successful.

What finally rid me of the “Screw this, I’m out” tendency was the drug-like high I experienced when I was put in charge of getting a massive (physical and digital) filing system inspection-ready while I was in the Marines. No one had done it before.

No one in my office even knew the criteria to successfully pass the inspection.

I had to find all of the regulations myself and implement them.

I had to ask senior admin staff in other departments what they knew and get their input.

I had to walk five miles to another office to ask a civilian with specialized knowledge on the subject (we weren’t allowed cars on Okinawa and the man INSISTED he had to show me and he couldn’t tell me over the phone).

It took weeks of constant work and frustrated roadblocks. But I did it. We passed the inspection, and we were the only office in the General’s building that did.

Once you feel that, quitting never becomes an option again.

So if you’re staring at that rough draft and not sure you can finish it, or your plans for starting your own business have been put on hold because you’re tired of banging your head against a wall…

Keep going. You’ll be glad you did.