The Joy of Perfect Gnocchi

Somewhere on earth, at this very moment, a slumped figure is running a hand over gritty eyes, turning around with a satisfied sigh and exclaiming to their colleague, their spouse, or their dog, “Look!” They’ll point to a solved math problem, a 3-D printed baby Yoda, or a perfectly cooked gnocchi with the same unabashed grin and a glint in their eyes: progress.

Humans love to make things better. We love to think about making things better, we love to plan how to make things better, and we even love (though we won’t always admit it) to toil and struggle in pursuit of making things better, as long as at the end we get that moment of “Look!”

When I was 22, I felt that call. I was working at my first programming job and doing the sort of intro project given to new coders to suss out their skills while limiting the damage they can inflict. Undeterred by my limited scope of impact (or the scope of the project, for that matter), I daydreamed of creating something special, something that people would notice in a good way.

I should back up. Today, everyone knows what user experience is and knows that it’s important for technology to provide not only a solution to a technical problem but a positive experience for the user. But in the early 2000s, the prevailing attitude was closer to “Do it in a way that’s easier to code, and the users ought to be grateful for what they get.”

Users were not, in fact, always grateful.

And this, of course, created an opportunity to make things better. One that I caught the scent of that day in my manager’s office when he gave me the lofty assignment to “Print a simple report with this data.” I took this charter with all the gravity of a knight setting out to slay a dragon and set to work, ruthlessly twisting the scope and bending it to my will to create a SUPER COOL REPORT LIVE PREVIEW THING.

With a grin, I walked into my manager’s office. “Look!”

He looked. He saw. He was mildly interested. He said, “That’s kind of cool, but don’t show it to our clients because they’ll want it.”

I was undaunted. The thing about the drive to make things better is it persists even when there’s not much encouragement: people strive to make things better even when it doesn’t make them money, garner fame, or elicit cheers from those around them. This is what we in the user experience world refer to as an intrinsic motivator: it comes from within. And because it comes from within, it’s fairly impervious to outside forces. Simply put, we just do it because it lights us up a little inside, and not much can get in a person’s way once they’re on the trail of something they can make better.

There’s no better front seat to this phenomenon than working in tech. I’ve watched our team members rewrite a tedious procedure for the joy of making the code cleaner. I’ve seen people spend hours perfecting animations that weren’t promised because they liked the way it looked. I’ve been an eyewitness to someone rewriting something that worked just fine into something that works amazingly (and the client will probably never notice).

And on each person’s face: pure joy. “Look!”

That spark is what makes it possible for people to push through against great odds, to persevere when things aren’t easy. It’s what makes it so rewarding when things go right and it all comes together. This time of year can be busy. But it can also be restorative.

There’s something about the earlier nights and the big sky of winter that makes me come back to the idea of wonder. I like to think of wonder as a moment where the horizon gets larger and what’s come before gets smaller. Wonder is what keeps us going when we’re in pursuit of making things better. It’s a little door, maybe open no more than a crack, that allows us to glimpse something more expansive than the walls around us, to believe that the possibilities are limitless.

If your spark has grown dim, this is a gentle reminder to nurture it, give it the air it needs to flourish and sustain you this winter. If you’ve lost it entirely, maybe it’s time to open that door a bit wider, to feel the swirling wind of the wide black night, open and waiting. Maybe it’s time to step out and gaze upward toward that vast glittering expanse and fill your lungs with the promise of undiscovered breakthroughs.

“Look!”