"Your only limit is your imagination."

This is going to be very blunt:

It's not entirely about skill and time. It really is imagination, hard work, and dedication. If you lack any of these, you will fail.

If you're unimaginative, you can't create anything anyway; stick to being a consumer droid. If you're lazy and won't *make* time to do what you want, you will never succeed at anything in your life. If you're feckless, you won't stick with anything long enough to succeed. You can learn new skills if you put in some hard work and dedication. You can make time for things if you're determined.

Ed Wood was not a very good writer or director, but he had imagination, and put in the hard work and dedication to see his visions through, and was and is more of a success than most filmmakers.

No, I don't have a happy feel-good story for you. The whole "you're not responsible for being a loser, society/your parents/brain chemistry made you this way" hippy excuse for everything is nonsense. You may have chosen personal traits that will cause you to fail, and it *is* your own fault, if you don't choose to change those traits or work around them to something else.

Here's some more relevant Demotivators:

http://despair.com/potential.html
http://despair.com/los24x30prin.html
http://despair.com/incompetence.html
http://despair.com/fail24x30pri.html

Telling it like it is.

I wish I could claim you're my alt.

I'm not denying any of that.

What I'm objecting to is people who, on hearing that someone doesn't have what they want in SL, immedately attributes it to their "imagination" which, as you say, nothing can be done about.

The only limit to what you can do in SL are the limits you put on yourself.

If you look at the platform and think "wow, it sure sucks I can't do this stuff, they lied" as opposed to "omg I could do anything here if I just put my mind to it", then you might not have the creative fire you need to get you to the point you want to be at.

Creation takes imagination, but it also takes desire, practice and time. Just because you can think of something doesn't mean its gonna poof out of thin air for you.

If that's your complaint, why can't people say that the only limit is imagination? Clearly that statement is absolutely true.

Because as I said above - saying that "the only limit is imagination" implies that anyone who doesn't already have everything they wanted must have been prevented from having it by imagination, and since that can't be fixed, they "might as well become a consumer drone".

Acknowledging that they might just need to learn something, practice, or put in some more time, and that these could also be the "limit" they're having trouble with, at least gives them a course of action they can work on.

I'm not sure anyone would posit that there is nothing to learn, or that it takes no time. I would be interested in seeing a quote where someone suggested otherwise.

In any case, without imagination, you'll have no idea what to learn or where to go. Imagination is the compass and the map. Time and effort are the journey.

Why the hell should that need to be spelled out? Isn't it a generally understood fact that you will need to learn and practice a skill before you can apply it?

Well, here is the quote: "The only limit is imagination."

If you need to learn or spend time, then not doing those would be other limits, and thus imagination would not be the only one.

OK OK. How about they change it to "The only limit we put on you is your imagination. The limits you put on yourself are an entirely different story." Better?

A limit implies a point past which progress is not possible. By their very nature, skill, knowledge and time allocated are things which can be expanded upon almost, heh, without limit, given enough dedication.

In any case, saying something takes practice should be, and is, stating the obvious.

As Jeffrey said, it can also be taken to mean a point beyond which progress is not possible right now, and that the possibility of being surpassed in the future doesn't affect this.

Otherwise you get some very strange statements. Like, for example, if a company is successful now but was very small to begin with, you couldn't say it "started with limited finances" since you know they weren't actually limited since they expanded them.

In a related story I would like folgers to stop saying "the best part of waking up is folgers in your cup" - not only is it utter shite of coffee, but the best part of waking up for me is pulling the old "Kevin Spacey" in the shower.

Siggy.

Impressive. I urge you to incorporate this into common parlance.

Listen to my radio show later today then....

I have a very hard time refuting your many arguments, all of which seem to suggest "success is too hard!" mainly because I simply can't think this way.

Indeed, my mantra has always been "success is inevitable," and so success always has proven. I'm really not sure what to tell you, except that I really can't explain the means of success to someone who refuses to envision it.

But, hey, if you really, really want failure, it'll happen. I'm just not sure how many subscribers you'd get to a "Failure" newsletter. Accomplishment lies in aspiration, not in coming up with the myriad excuses and scenarios where failure is inesecapable.

Ok, let's see here.

a) I've had some success, in the "usual terms" (ie, bringing in L$) in SL. Not as much as some, but nonetheless a fair bit, and lots of potential for more.

b) In terms of my personal criteria for success and enjoyment, however, I haven't had so much - partly because it's not really possible to express your personality by scripting, unlike many of the other crafts of SL. The quote about "your only limit is your imagination" has come up when mentioning that to others, which is why I raised it. I certainly am not keen on claims that I "haven't done the work" when I've spent hours every night working on various scripting projects for myself and others.

c) Regardless of this, I believe that giving at least some measure of respect to those who are not successful, or do not wish to succeed, is necessary for SL to grow; people will be reluctant to stay in a society where they get little respect, and if they don't want to do that, all the outfits and items and games on the grid won't keep them in SL.

Oh, please. The response of an auto mechanic addressing a warranty issue in a car dealership.

Regarding this thread, let's see how many ways we can restate ancient cliches supporting the tired, forty-years-out-of-date ideology of the "American Dream". The OP had a good point: How can you maximize community and individual creativity when so many people don't have enough time for the "perspiration" and interesting platform like SL deserves - perhaps because they're too busy pursuing the "American Dream" in real life? Are there individual strategies and platform redesigns that might facilitate more creativity by more "casual" users?

That's the question.

I think someone's generalizing.

What is this, exactly? I don't think I understand its relevance.

Now, there have been a few folks - a decidedly tiny minority - who've called folks like you describe "tourists" or similar. But by-and-large I've not seen anything to suggest that basic human respect isn't given to those who are not here to build, script, or otherwise provide content.

As far as I can tell, your basic problem with the statement about imagination stems from taking a generalization literally. I'd like to think that everyone in SL understands that most basic "fact of life": we must work within our true limits. All the statement has ever meant is that SL does not deliberatly place limits on us (thoguh anyone who has ever built or scripted knows damn well there are real limits there, again that's just how life is).

So, please (and I mean this as stated and without sarcasm or irony) help me understand what the real problem here is.

There is no golden skill that will make you successful in Second Life. For me to attain my own measure of success, I needed to learn how to build, how to texture, how to script and how to test product for bugs and functionality. Others have different focuses, but succeed through their own blend of all the skillsets at play. When a particular blind spot is reached, collaboration is necessary. My early work all depended on my having an idea and contracting a scripter to make it into a reality. At no point did "impossible" enter my mind, only "possible, given my ability to manage certain things."



I'm not sure what disrespect you're implying happens.

However, if you want someone who has not distinguished themselves through contribution to the community to be given the same sort of respect and admiration as someone who has achieved success by working at things for months or years, I don't think that's going to happen. Nor should it.

"Success was free to everyone but me!"

It's a familiar refrain.

Its a damn good question. Let's break it down into the big "what I can create in SL" activities.

1. Building - when I first started it took me a few weeks to get the hang of the building tools. Honestly, I think as far as ease of use coupled with flexibility is concerned, the building tools are as easy to use as they're going to get. Although I'd love to see other people's ideas on how to change the UI around into something more intuitive.
   
2. Designing/texturing/clothing - that's all done on third party software and then imported. Unless LL wants to devote time to develop an inworld graphics program, there's really nothing that can be done on this one. I don't see it happening.
   
3. Animations - again, third party software. Cristiano once likened Poser to me as akin to cutting yourself repeatedly with small shards of glass, so I won't touch this one.
   
4. Scripting - Depends on your affinity for programming language. My guy can script his ass off and he taught himself from the Wiki, and has virtually no previous scripting experience. Enabran already volunteered he slogged his way through learning to script and he's pretty good now. I, myself, break scripts by looking at them funny. Not sure how scripting could be made easier besides an entire overhaul - I'll leave that discussion for the brains that know something about it.
   

In general - I've found that the more simplistic and easy to digest you make something, the more inherent limitations you have to put on it to make it functional for the larger group. Kinda the lowest-common-denominator thing. ("simplistic" is not the same thing as being well-designed - Photoshop to me is a well-designed program, but its not something you can just jump in cold and create a masterpiece with either).

Does SL need more simplistic tools and options so everyone can be the same level of awesome? Or should the ability to create something awesome be inherent in the system but require skill, talent, and hard work to achieve?

Building can be improved, absolutely! I'm not sure what you call this UI element, but check out these little blue lines on the right:



This is from the app in which I do all of my iconing, UI and other vector-based work, OmniGraffle. Whenever I drag a shape around, it gives me dynamic alignment-snapping options, based upon the current positions of other objects that the app guesses I am trying to arrange around.

It's really, really intuitive, then, to lay out a bunch of shapes and have them perfectly aligned relative to everything else I'm working on. If we could get a similar kind of thing in SL, I think it would be very helpful both to power users and newbies alike.

edit: The awesome thing about this is, I never have to manually edit or compare the coords of a given object in OmniGraffle. SL should be exactly the same -- I should be able to produce well-aligned objects without even having to glance at their numbers.

The constant influx of people on to these forums making the same observations as Yumi suggests otherwise. There have been literally hundreds and hundreds since I joined early this year. And in nearly every instance they've been answered in the same basic way. Most gave up; some have stayed on for a while to endure the barbs and mischaracterizations of their arguments.

Perhaps it has to do with an idea that people who spend money on Second Life - a voluntary and recreational world, after all (kind of like "TSO-Las Vegas" - expect something more than "basic human respect". Which they can aspire to and sometimes get in real life, anyway. Perhaps they dare to expect to find a way to achieve good things, given their own skill levels and amount of resources (including time) they can reasonably give to the game. Not an unreasonable or whiney desire, IMO.

The way to weed the whiners from the genuine point-makers is to discuss the questions I've suggested above - programmatically and professionally, and not defensively, or with some sort of virtual "ideological" agenda in mind.

on edit: As Corey and Enabran just did.