| I found this advice to be useful and inspiring. It reminds me of when i first started out in my present business. We originally started as an IT support company. My IT skills were just average while my business partner was very highly skilled in IT. Often, we would have issues with client servers, and i would spend hours trying to find the root cause of the problem, with not too much luck. When i would pass the job onto him, he'd figure out the cause of the problem in a much shorter amount of time, and therefore come to conclusion for a possible solution very quickly and with some conviction. I always thought he was a complete genius, and wish that i was as clever and intelligent as him, and felt a little cheated by the universe that i hadnt been blessed with such great IT skills, especially since i had great passion for IT. Its only after much frustration, that i learned that the only thing that differed between he and i was his approach. Whereas i would check the virus state, and processor usage and look for anything suspect on the desktop, he would check the event logs and then look up the error codes at the microsoft knowledgebase. One i started taking the same approach as he, i found myself fixing problems even faster than him and coming up with even better solutions to the problem (all the while experiencing much lesser stress). When i decided to learn programming , i observed the same thing. His approach to attacking programming problems was different to mine, and now i am learning to assess the problems in the same way as him. I've also seen this in my cousin. He starts a project, and takes one step at a time, and breaks the larger problem done, all the while telling himself that there is an answer for each component problem he faces. I am trying to foster the same mindset now, and this blog post is an inspiration for that.
Bottom line is, the approach is more important than existing skill set. |