I cannot tell you how often I have spent time, be it seconds, minutes, hours, and - heaven forbid - days of work (seldom, thankfully) only to have my work go up in virtual smoke.
Fortunately, there are things that autosave - Like my blog posts. Google sheets. And I'm sure there are others. But not everything is so convenient. Or sometimes the internet connection is unreliable & the automatic backup just doesn't happen, or your laptop falls off your lap onto the floor, turns itself off & everything goes kerplop. Unless you have never created anything, you've probably had this experience or some variation thereon.
I had a professor of Music Theory at the University of Idaho who, interestingly enough, was named of Murphy. He helped to drive home the idea of "Click Save." Murphy's law applies doubly so. Back in the stone age when he was writing his dissertation to become Doctor Murphy, he was attending the University of Kansas in tornado season. As he rigorously typed & retyped his hundreds of pages long musical analysis of something-or-other, every night he would put it the freezer. Because apparently in a tornado, freezers are okay. Proto-click-save.
I haven't had something disappear into digital ether for at least a few weeks, fortunately, but I had a close call last week that made me stop & think about what goes through my head at a time like that.
Click save, stupid!
But fortunately, my mind was in a pretty good place, so I thought, "Click Save, Genius." Of course it was fairly sarcastic, but again, because I my mind was in a pretty good place, I remembered back about 20 years ago when I listened to the book on tape "What to Say When You Talk to Yourself" by Shad Helmstetter, (Not on audible, but this more updated one is) and realized, maybe I should make it sincere.
Click save, Genius!
You might just have written or recorded something brilliant! Remember that next time you're working on some new creation.
And if your coffee spills on your computer, or your art studio burns down, or aliens steal the new recipe you've created from your brain while you sleep, you're still a genius & can create something at least as good as what you lost.
Now go create something amazing, you genius!
