Remember that movie with Jack Nicholson? That one where he plays the part of a famous writer that suffered from OCD and hated everybody in his building, but ends up adopting his gay neighbor and the neighbor’s dog, and falling in love with the waitress that worked at the restaurant he ritually visited every single day? At the end of the movie, he conquers many of his obsessions, such as washing hands frequently or stepping on cracks, but he then becomes obsessed with self improvement, and as he kisses the girl he says, “Wait, I bet I can do it even better!” 

Well, I certainly don’t suffer from OCD, but lately I find myself thinking precisely that: “I bet I can do this even better”.  I think it’s the only sad consequence of learning; the more you discover and the more you get into it, the more obsessed you become with getting it right, and the easier it is to identify your own mistakes and limitations, as well as those of others. It is sad because you are not as easily impressed as you were in the beginning, and, if you are like me, you may even dwell on it for a while or become obsessed with finding out how to do that what you don’t know how to do yet.  Even if you don’t know why, you will feel that it’s not quite right, and even if you don’t know how you could fix it, you’ll become obsessed with “making it even better”.  Have you ever felt this way?

I’ve been feeling a lot like that during this week. While going through stuff I’ve modeled since I started learning SolidWorks, looking for models that could provide interesting examples for rendering, I often find myself examining the features I used back then and feeling that, for some reason or another, the models are just not good enough, not accurate enough, or that I could’ve done better.  And I notice that I’m not only critical of my own work, but I’m likely to spot areas in need of improvement in the models made by other people, as well. And please, don’t take me wrong, because I don’t want to come across like someone who feels as she knows it all. No, nothing could be further from the truth. I still have lots to learn and I suspect I’m not even halfway there! It’s just that in the beginning it used to be good enough for me when I could get something that “looked like” whatever object I was trying to model, and now I’m more and more concerned with creating models that could actually be used to manufacture the object.

At times this is quite overwhelming, because it uncovers all the areas you are lacking in, like when you want to model some simple household item and you would like to make it as accurate and true to shape and functionality as possible, but you lack the knowledge about surfaces that you would require in order to do it, for instance. However, it is true that at times it can also be a boost to your self-esteem, like if you happen to run into a model full of errors that you know how to fix, or one that includes a hundred different features and you know a way to do the same with only ten.

I wonder if I’m the only one that feels like this… I might as well suffer from MOD (modeling obsessive disorder), because rather than saying “this is as good as it will get” or dwelling on my poor skills and thinking there’s nothing I can do about it, I’m becoming obsessed with finding ways to improve, with learning about new ways to do stuff in SolidWorks and even outside of the CAD, in the real world. And just like Jack Nicholson in the movie, I bet I can do this even better the next time.