Life by the lake.

Study is an important activity, an activity essential to our well-being and know how.

The are many topics to study. Some simple and straight forward, others more complex, requiring varying degrees of skill and even foreknowledge. The use of study to expand ones own understanding is key to finding the best solution to a problem or basically just to learn new things about a subject to broaden the level of understanding about that topic.

Study is interesting and can lead to many complex realizations about  many a topic, life, love, happiness, joy fulfillment, you get the picture. Books are the real treasures of the world, because the contain the secrets to success, and also contain the secrets to many other things.

Just ask a pencil artist about the complexities of 'seeing'. A pencil artist, will have to deal with forms, shapes, contrasts, rules of composition, color sometimes and even abstraction of the subject and all this is a process that is so complex, that it is just called an 'art'.

Indeed what is striking is not the complexities of work or study in this case, but rather the mental acuity of the individual to produce such works. An individuals mind can produce great things, all they need are the tools to do so.

The Art of making is indeed a complicated subject with competing subjects within, so complex that it is almost undefined.

Or so goes the logic.

In the time where I have put on salesman's glasses, I have seen many great things and also seen others which were not so great. Its very hard these days to put everything into a context, the volatility of the world makes it difficult to do so, yet context is often what is missing in those failed or not so great moments that I've seen. Often the lack of context was not just about being ill informed, but rather a deliberate and cold attempt at shutting out unwanted views and opinions. 'Context' was rejected.

For such is the difficulty in making proposals, we put up our best, hoping to get a responsive ear, but find that minds have been made up. Worse are all the doubting Thomases and curious coronadoes, that ask a barrage of questions, many of which are just reworded queries covering  previously answered points. There have been many times where we have seen this before.

Every time it gets no worse, we bring forth good things to be bought and sold, only to find that others dither at the point of decision and thus the 'deal' might not go as smoothly as planned, or so it seems.

The salesman's glasses are always just a means to an end.

The big question is where is all this narrative going?

You see it is easy to put these things out there but to conclude them isn't so easy. You could surmise that salesmanship is an art, but that is too easy and lazy almost. Why not do it the way BCA did, they put the art form in front of the whole enterprise, have few decision makers and work from a fixed decision made by 2 people?

It is impossible to reconcile the many competing ideas and notions. Limitations have be set in order for there to have any kind of rational decision making. Worse yet these limitations fix the solution to what will become in the end. It is called the design process and the design brief fixes all the characteristics we want, in a tangible and perhaps tentative form.

The design Enterprise that produced the Queen of our skies, is just such a thing, making light of complex situations so that goals could be set, such that engineers could go away and find the solutions to such problems. There were issues to be solved, things to be tested and ideas to be tried out. All of these works were constituted into a whole and produced the product we see today. Many man hours went into making the machine we know by those numbers, and it is a story that stands on its own 2 feet.

Perhaps the the bigger legend is not the machine or product, but the legend that made it, and made it First. It is the story of the Men and Women and the sacrifices made to bring that machine to the point where it would meet the sky. We will never have such an enterprise ever again, although there are other, similar or better. It was a new beginning in its time, and also an end of a very long, long journey and likewise, there will always be new beginnings, at new beginnings end.