Shorts
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What I Learnt From Soap
As a user, it is your job to understand how something works if your goal is to use it. Today, we harp on about simplicity, simple interfaces, usability and such. Everything that says “You don’t need to spend time understanding how to do something; you just do”. Unfortunately, “just do”-ing doesn’t result in efficiency. What’s natural doesn’t usually mean efficient. Walking to the local grocery store is natural, but cycling or driving is efficient.
If you spend five minutes actually understanding how your tool works, you will end up using it a lot more efficiently which will pay for those five minutes over and over again. And this isn’t about big things either. Take small, everyday things. Like soap. How many people know how soap really works? As a child, I was taught to rub the soap in my hands and then use the foam on myself. It was a lot later that I realised that that way was a lot less efficient because it didn’t really clean anything. The reasoning behind using it like that was obvious though: you use a lot less soap, which makes it cost-effective because it lasts longer. We weren’t the richest of people back then, but more importantly, this is probably how my parents were taught to use soap by their parents, who were taught by their parents, and so on. The chain of knowledge establishes itself, and you can see how people never take the effort to understand if how they do something is really the best way to do it .
Take a look around you. Take one thing everyday, and find out whatever you can about it. With the Internet, that doesn’t take long in ‘11. If you don’t learn anything new, you can rest happy that you’re using it the best way it can be. If you do learn something new, well, you’ve just improved your life by that much.
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