The Secret to Life

From Computer World's Shark Tank Blog
http://blogs.computerworld.com/19786/infinite_loop

Flashback to the 1990s, when this new-to-IT pilot fish is trying to perform a calculation in Visual Basic as part of a database query -- and he's not having much luck getting it to work.

But he has an idea. "I had served on a committee with an older colleague who had betrayed a knowledge of such things and a willingness to help out a neophyte, so I wrote to him with a code sample and explanation of what I was trying to accomplish," fish says.

"After about 30 minutes, a reply came back -- I suspect he hadn't read my email for 25 minutes after I sent it -- and he provided an altered code snippet which, of course, worked perfectly.

"I wrote back to thank him and I asked, 'How do you know all this programming stuff?'

"His reply: 'It's very simple. You make mistakes. You learn from your mistakes. You repeat for 30 years.'

"As I was only 28 years or so behind him, I was much heartened by this statement."

 I was really struck by this simple story. One of the reasons I don't play online games with others is the hatred others have for a new player, who hasn't learned all the conventions of play. The same is true in industry, the veterans often maintain their place by pointing out all the mistakes made by the new guys, and how useless their training is, they should know all this stuff.

The problem is that as we gain experience, we forget what it was like to be a newbie. We are all newbies in one way or another, and veterans in others. As a technician, I deal almost exclusively with people who just don't know computers very well. My clients often apologize for their lack of knowledge, to which my question is almost always "What do/did you do for a living?"

One client replied "I used to build roads and bridges". I have never done that kind of work, and if I found myself on a road crew I wouldn't know the first thing to do. I would be a safety hazard and be getting in the way of everyone else. BUT as I learned I would become a better teammate, and if a member of crew took some time to show me how things worked, that learning would be sped up dramatically.

Below is my (slightly edited) comment from that Shark Tank Entry. I think it sums up the key to happiness in any profession:

while (!dead) {
  trySomething(new);
  make(Mistake);
  askForHelp(fromSomeone);
  learnFrom(Mistake);
  teach(someoneElse);
  beHappy(); 

  succeed();
}