the corner office

And so it's 2014. I won't be bothering with New Year's Resolutions this year (I never floss as often as I should), and anyway, New Year's Resolutions are too easily turned around to be Old Year's Failures. Who needs that kind of negativity?

Still, it's the passing of another calendar year, with all that means. I came across the following the other night, which is sobering, but possibly also a little inspiring:

I have a pair of vases that I use to remind myself that my days are not limitless ... There are exactly 3652 beads of each color: one for each day of a decade ... the beads in the smaller jar represent all the days that I have left to finish everything that I want to do in my life. Each morning, I take one bead from the smaller jar and place it in the larger jar, telling myself not to waste this day. As you can see, I have already expended most of my beads; they are behind me. There aren't that many beads left.

That's from a blog post by Chris Crawford, an influential if slightly eccentric games developer from the 80s, via a lengthy article about what he's been up to since. If the beads are one lesson, then the article provides another: sadly for Crawford, he's devoted the past 20 years to the idea of redefining gaming by designing more social, interactive games, and admits his life's work has thus far been a failure.

I'm not entirely sure what the second lesson is, though, and I suspect it's a lesson one could look back on one day and interpret entirely differently.