Thought of the Day 06.10.10

When I used to work at Blockbuster Video, there was one job which I particularly hated: cleaning all the movies and shelves every week. For a fidgety, easily bored guy like me, such monotony was grinding, a pain made all the more awful by a firm belief that we could have done it once a month and no one would have noticed the difference. Thus, boring and pointless reinforced each other for great misery in me.

However, I recently realized a hidden benefit of cleaning all those movies over and over: seeing them so many times caused me to know them. This meant that whenever someone asked me about a movie, I would already know whether we had it and where it was. And I can’t imagine an equally effective way to have produced that knowledge other than as the indirect effect of all that ridiculous cleaning. Studying a list of titles, for example, would have been pointless by comparison.

So, do I believe this weird bit of highly effective training was by design? No. Does that mean it was therefore less effective? Not in the least. Sometimes unintended consequences can be benefits.

No comments: