A little while back our friend John taught me a life lesson. We were in Yzerfontein and I was taking some photos with his camera. I decided to delete some of them and pushed the delete button and without thinking about it too much followed the same procedure as my camera…..except that starts to delete all the photos on the camera (and there were lots, including new born photos of his little girl).

I pressed cancel as soon as I realised what was happening, and I am not really sure if it did delete any photos, but I felt terrible and told John what had happened. His immediate reaction? “Oh, life’s like that,” and moved on with little concern.

I on the other hand tend to get a bit worked up (at least internally) about those kind of things, so last night I had to take a page out of the lesson book.

We assembled our Ultimaker 3D printer last night and I set up (and tested) a camera for taking a time lapse video. I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to do with the video, and then through chatting while building cam up with an even cleared idea – I could visualise exactly how the video was going to go and what the message of it would be. I was feeling very excited.

Everything was working well before the time and about half way through the evening I checked on the output to find that I had 4000 photographs of a box on the desk – somehow it had gotten stuck on the first photo, so half the video was gone. I was bleak. So I had to remind myself of John’s lesson: “life’s like that,” we can’t be too attached to some particular outcome. Eventually that attachment becomes a hinderance for moving forward.

So now we have half a time lapse video of the machine build 🙂

One side note: attachment and commitment mean totally different things. Being committed to an outcome plays a critical role in pushing through the challenges that need to be overcome to achieve a meaningful goal.