A lesson in grammar, utterly clueless, and in the "I'll be dead is not a plan" department...
When we were building the first Loose Moose at the old Charles De Gaulle airport just outside Paris I noticed an interesting ailment that seemed to afflict my fellow boat builders from time to time...
target fixation.
As it happens, the first time I ever heard the phrase was when my dad was offering advice to a speaker building project a friend and I were embarking on and warning us not to fixate too much on the target and lose our perception of the big picture in the process. At the time it did not seem to apply but a couple of years later, in hindsight, well, I'll just say we really should have paid attention.
Boat building is a big picture enterprise but most people tend to see it as a collection of details to obsess or fixate on.
For instance, one guy at the hanger who was working on a META hull and deck (and had been working on it for the previous ten years) would go from one detail to the next obsessing on every little thing to the point where he hardly did any building at all. Finding the perfect sink for the galley or the ultimate varnish for the interior finish being a full time job and all.
The problem, of course, is that boat projects becomes seriously nuts whenever you decide to bring perfection into the equation.
To make it more interesting, there are so many projects within a boat building or rehab enterprise that it's hardly surprising that fixating or obsessing on a particular project may wreck havoc on already finished projects or create landmines in future endeavors.
I won't even go into what target fixation does to the whole budget thing as that's more the stuff of novel length tomes, grand tragedy, drooling insanity, and inlaying compass roses on chart tables.But more on that subject later...
Listening to Paul McDonald
So it goes...
