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I'm not sure if I'm seeing the logic here. Say I want to develop a game. The easy option is to use an existing engine. The hard option is to build your own engi

I'm not sure if I'm seeing the logic here. Say I want to develop a game. The easy option is to use an existing engine. The hard option is to build your own engine. The latter is quite often the wrong choice. > If the easy option was also the right one, you wouldn’t even be thinking about it. Ironically, significant cultural pressure to glorify grit and choosing the hard option often means that the easy option looks automatically bad, in a "too good to be true" kind of way, and you may have to go back and convince yourself that it's OK to take the easy option. This is compounded by the fact that availability of easier options may often be very random and "unfair".

laurentl 8y ago
It’s hard to articulate, and my post was probably too pithy. I’m referring to the fact that we make most decisions in “self-driving” mode, without thinking too much about it. But sometimes you run into a situation where you find yourself thinking “well, I could just do this, but...”. In other words, there’s something bugging you about the obvious solution and a suggestion of a harder, more difficult decision hiding behind the “but”. In that case, in my experience the difficult solution is the right one. If you consciously notice you’re about to cut corners, that means that something (conscience, instinct, whatever) is trying really hard to warn you about it. Getting back to your example, there’s no “but” attached to choosing an existing engine, so you probably wouldn’t have a nagging thought pushing you to look at building your own. So I guess what I’m really saying is “don’t cut corners”. You know you’re about to cut one when the little angel pops up on your shoulder and whispers “are you sure about this?”