Malcolm Gladwell credits the source of genius in large part to the love of (or obsession with) one’s craft. That is precisely why I will never be a genius at web design and related endeavors. I detest them.
But others seem to have far more tolerance of, if not love for, them. I have some of those folks to thank for solving the RSS problem I described in a post this weekend. TFB and Zack Grossbart both contributed to the solution. Thank you! The former is the smartest blogger on personal finance I know (go see for yourself). The latter has co-authored my favorite WordPress plug-in (he’s doing lots of other things too–go see).
Aaron did the grunt work. He’ll say it wasn’t that big a deal. To me it was. I’ll happily wrestle for weeks with an identification problem in an econometric analysis of the effect of insurance generosity on outcomes. I’ll slave for months over a paper describing my latest research. I’ll log hours, day after day, at the computer writing blog posts about our health system. I may not be a genius at any of these things, but I am at least obsessed.
But, when it comes to fixing the pesky technical problems that accompany running a blog, I have little patience. No obsession there! So, I’m grateful for the help.
