This post is a nice reminder of something I realize and forget often. Any achievement I manage to accomplish seems to be the result of unlikely related actions I make in parallel to the pursuit of said goal, but more in the pursuit of getting better at unrelated simple, but important tasks, at least unrelated before having the benefit of hindsight. Forgetting that lesson is a trap I often fall into due to my tendency to focus on only what I think leads to the end goal.
But how do you find what's your place in the world? Is it an innate calling? How do you listen to it? Does it only come after having grown as a person? How can you grow as a person if you don't follow your call? Or do all roads lead to Rome?
I have no clue, but I also try not to dwell on any of that stuff and just do what I think might be good, while avoiding things I don't think are right, probably a leap of faith into thinking all roads lead to Rome. Pondering those questions seems both futile and useful to me, as I'm more concerned with the practicalities of the present time and whether I get some fun out of it at some point, but I'm also worried I will not find the spark that will anything I do worthwhile retroactively and it was all just a meaningless waste of time.
To draw a parallel with merc, maybe fixing myself would also fix, or improve, my designs. I consider engineering designs to be also a form of artistic expression, as there are so many unknowns that it's up to the designer to come up with a satisfactory solution in the end. Optimization, formulas and best practices only get you so far.
It is still a bit easier to come up with responsibilities I would have as a designer, at least in order people won't die as a result of following it or the product of the realized design. Would you say writers don't have that responsibility towards their audience in their creations? Or is it just so hard to quantify the unintended consequences of a piece of writing, compared to an engineering design, that they just turn a blind eye to the negligence?