I’ve felt this only a couple of times in my professional, productive life. (Being married to the most amazing husband provides a source of daily joy and excitement for me, but I’ll be speaking to self-inflicted feelings here.) Once, I spent about 6 months designing, building and configuring an entirely new network and telecommunications infrastructure for a company. Come move-in day, out of the 200+ workstations, the only reported problems were two non-functional telephones. Knowing just how perfectly I nailed that large, complex job is the best I’ve ever felt professionally. There have been other moments when I have felt tinges of this – basically any time I complete a project there’s a solid, positive cocktail of feelings present, but this was the only time I have felt so high, so energetic, so proud of my work.

I have been thinking a lot about how to generate that feeling in my life. What to do to feel a perpetual excitement in my daily efforts but, importantly, to access that truly amazing feeling of elation that comes with a job well done. I think the key is to do whatever it is that I choose to do to the absolute best of my abilities. No skimping, no cutting corners, no shortcuts. Everything I do should be the best I can make it if I expect to capture what I want from the experience.
(This is not to say that every thing I do will always be done the best I can possibly do it, as practicality and reason must be considered. But “practical” and “reasonable” projects, almost by definition, are unlikely to ever bring me the feelings I seek anyway!)

I don’t think that my realization of the simple equation “hard work = satisfaction” is something very recent or new, but there is a key to following it that I have strongly resisted for many years, but one which, I think, I’m ready to embrace. I must look at failure in an entirely new way. To do one’s best at something is to simultaneously remove excuses if that thing is not successful. If I pull my punches and execute something only “good enough” then I have a litany of reasons as to why it didn’t turn out the way I really wanted. If I had done this as well as I could have, or if I wouldn’t have rushed that, then it would be good. To execute fully, to the best of my abilities, means to embrace failure along the way. And, I suspect, the failures will outnumber the home-runs easily.

But just as most performers I’ve spoken to remember only a handful of their shows – the very best and the very worst – I suspect that the projects I will come to remember will be the ones I did well and which brought me elation right alongside the ones which flopped and did not live up to their promise. The key is to remember the failures as lessons, not as negative experiences. Failures, even small ones, bring with them a set of feelings that can be much stronger and more visceral than the elation I seek, and they could sabotage a my desire to really put forward my best for fear of additional failures. Social psychologists have studied the phenomenon that we humans share of over-remembering the bad and forgetting the good, but overcoming that tendency is not impossible, even if I suspect it will be difficult at times. I must focus on the positive aspects of failure, learn, move on, and keep creating. It is easy to write those words, but I suspect it will take more effort to follow them.

So, as I change gears in my life and begin to re-embrace the rich past of art and craft, design and creation in which I grew up, I commit to changing the way I execute my personal projects. No longer will I stop when they get hard, cut corners when they are taking too long, or throw them in a box when they get frustrating. If I believe a project is worth doing then I will do it right, and it will fail if it must, but then I will learn. And if it succeeds, then I will live.

Is that wrong?

There are several pre-existing eBook readers for iPhone. Bookshelf (which has a great sync service with Baen Webscriptions and could support others, $5.99), and Stanza (my go-to most of the time, $Free) are the stand-outs.  They both have good interfaces with the important bits – text size, options for tap- or swipe- to-advance, bookmarks, library management, etc. Most importantly, they also offer landscape reading.

Kindle for iPhone has an unsurpassed syncing model with what I think is the largest eBook provider out there: Amazon. It’s slick, although, like Webscriptions, not integrated. You must purchase the books via Amazon’s Kindle Store from a web browser (mobile Safari reportedly works) but then the titles are automatically sync’d to your iPhone the next time you run the Kindle app. It also supports bookmarks (which reportedly sync to your physical Kindle device if you have one), text size, and other basic features. However, it does not have a landscape mode! (At least not one I could find)

Granted, a portrait reading mode is more “book-like” in that it mimics the orientation of most printed pages, but at sensible text sizes, you get 5-8 words across the screen. That’s, maybe, half a sentence for the most part and often less. So here’s why that’s a problem – for me at least, and others I’m sure. To read a book on Kindle for iPhone, your eyes flick back-and-forth, back-and-forth, a LOT. (About 18 times/page)  Then, as with anything featuring a relatively small screen, your eyes flick up to the top of the page every time you advance. In a landscape mode, you still have the same number of page turns since you have roughly the same number of words on the page, but you have the back-and-forth eye movement only 10 or 11 times per page, and only half the distance to flick back up to the top of the page on advances. Really, it makes a difference to me (40% less eye flick!) and I found my eyes becoming fatigued much faster in portrait mode – just like I did when I was originally trying Stanza and Bookshelf and the reason I very quickly moved to landscape mode exclusively.

This, for me, is a fatal flaw in an otherwise great app. (Though they also need tap-to-advance instead of the silly swipe-only they have now.) Now, I would like to think that they did some usability testing around this app, and maybe they have good reasons for not offering landscape mode, but until they do, I’ll be sticking with Stanza and Bookshelf and not buying any Kindle content.