Inspiration vs. implementation

2020-09-03

There's a difference between being inspired by something to make changes to the way you work, and implementing or using a certain approach. The former is always possible (and a good idea), while the latter is very limited.

For example, you may read something about Taoism one day, and suddenly get an interesting idea from it that can help your projects. Good. Well done! However, you must be careful about two things:

1. Never say that you're using Taoism to manage your projects, because it wasn't an implementation of Taoism, but an implementation of your own idea which happened to be inspired by what you read. It may not even be compatible with Taoism, which was mainly just a trigger for your interesting idea.
2. Never even attribute the source of the idea to Taoism, because Taoism may not be the original source of that initial idea. Maybe Taoists have borrowed it from Confucianists, or maybe it's just an old idea that exists in many schools of thought but that no one knows the origin of.

Unfortunately, most people love using labels and prefer to say that they have found a way to use Taoism in running their projects rather than saying they've had some great ideas of their own, inspired by lots of reading. The first version simply sells better.

So, for example, Agile is not usable in every project, meaning that you can't implement an Agile methodology in any type of project. However, you can still learn about Agile methods and come up with very interesting ideas for improving the way you run your projects. Just remember not to call your project Agile because of that.

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