Figure It Out

There’s something magical about assuming responsibility for more of your life. When you learn how to make yourself the center of things good and bad, it helps you build new super powers. For example, the power of figuring things out. When I learn a new little trick or tweak or hack, I’m so excited! For instance, Liz Strauss told me that my blog template was a little screwy, and she pointed me in the basic direction where to look for info on how to fix it. I had to google around a bit, but when I found it and fixed the problem, I felt SO COOL!

Dive In

There are so many times in our life when we just don’t know what to do or how to do it. And yet, people every day just dive right in and start figuring it out. There are exceptions. You probably don’t want to just dive in to performing surgery. Don’t just jump into an airplane and take off. But other than that, what’s the worst that will happen.

I learned how to support a nationwide network of wireless telephony nodes by logging into computers remotely and proceeding to crash a few. I broke probably eight computers in two weeks of trying to learn. In almost every one of those cases, my company had to spend money flying someone out to manually restore the boxes I killed. It wasn’t cheap. But after a few weeks, I felt fearless with the computers and I knew more about how to break them, restore them, and grew from there.

The thing is, before that moment, I was afraid of doing anything with that network. It was different than messing with my desktop PC. And how would I do my job if I was afraid? So learning how to dive in and figure it out saved me.

But Don’t Smash Into Walls

One trick to figuring things out is knowing how long to toil by yourself versus get a helpful hint from others. I have a former coworker who’d work tirelessly (I’m talking WEEKS) on a problem with a system and then someone would say, “Oh, you’re using a comma where you should be using a semi-colon.” And he’d have wasted weeks of time.

Be willing to try new things on your own, without much or any guidance, but know that sometimes, it’s easiest to get some help and learn from there.

I did this recently with Christopher S. Penn. He taught me some basic text scripting tips and how to clean up messy data. Without Chris, I’d have been really eating cycles trying to fix up this data and would’ve really wasted time I didn’t have to waste. Know when to say when.

Small Victories

Small victories give us the confidence we need to achieve larger victories. Believe me, when I do something as simple as copy a piece of code into my blog, figure out how to tweak it just a little to meet my needs, I feel like a superhero. When Chris Penn and I figured out how to successful attain sponsorship for PodCamp, we felt great. In fact, every little thing we successfully accomplished on PodCamp brought us the confidence to do bigger and more audacious things.

What Can You Figure Out?

Are there things you’ve wanted to do but weren’t sure how to begin? Why not make today the day? Accept that you can fail. Accept that it might not turn out the way you wanted. Understand the boundaries of where you might want to call in a helper. And then go to it.

What’s YOUR thing you want to figure out? Tell us about it, and then dive in!

Photo credit, gisarah