Every once in a while one needs to make some important observations in order to be able to really progress. I guess it’s all part of the great learning experience that life is. It’s about change. One can actually change very little. Much less than we think.

Let’s start with a metaphore. Just look at XHTML, CSS, web standards and quality web development. One can learn all these techniques and live by them. After this learning experience one can build great websites that excel in beauty, usability, elegance and many other things that seem important to truly dedicated web developers.

However… we can’t change the web development world as a whole. A lot of people will never see the change, or even value it’s importance. A large part of the world won’t even take any advantage of the change because they keep using inferior browsers. They’ll never see a difference. In fact they might even think nothing at all changed.

The same thing is true for life. Again there’s surprisingly little we can change. Some people say ‘success is a choice‘, as if it’s up to oneself to be rich, famous, healthy and happy. Hard work! Work hard and you’ll be rewarded. Another misconception. so many people work hard. Very hard. In a factory. Right until their back gave up and they couldn’t do a thing anymore. It sure as hell doesn’t bring them very much except for enough money to survive and… a permanently damaged spinal cord. So screw the hard work thing in an attempt to change things. Some people get lucky, some don’t. Life isn’t fair. I’m sure people living in around here (africa nations) can tell you all about it.

Just like in web development, we can’t really change the way people look at us. Whether we’ve adopted all modern techniques and became a true ‘standardista’, most people won’t ever see the difference. I guess it’s time to realize that the only thing one can really change is himself. No matter what we try to tell people, no matter what we do, it’s not in our hands to change the way they look at us. In the very lucky case, something does change in the way people look at a person it can only mean one thing: It’s THOSE PEOPLE who made a change. It isn’t the person himself. If one would think he accomplished this himself he’d be fooling himself and giving himself way too much credit.

So here I am… life keeps showing me it’s futile to expect other people or anything in the world around me to notice the change. Hmmm… no.. that sounds too harsh. Some part of the world around us and the people around us will notice but to really see and feel the change requires some serious change on the side of the beholder.

So, here’s reality applied to life itself. We can screw things up in a split second which will take months, years or even forever to repair. Ask that Microsoft developer who applied the wrong box model to Internet Explorer’s rendering engine. We can’t change things on our own and we can’t change a thing about what people think of us. Not Joe Average on the street, not our friends, not our family and not even our loved ones. We can only change ourselves. And … I swear to God that’s what I’m doing.