Hello friends,
I've been grappling with the idea lately of just doing. Not thinking, doing.
I have a tendency, ok, more like habit, ok, disease where I over think and over analyze things when I have time to think. When it comes to snap decisions, I'm a rock star, but when there is time for the thought or idea to marinate in my brain, I let doubt creep in take root.
Since I was laid off in February, I wondered what would be next on my job path. Sure, I have a small business, but I'm not seeing enough clients to make that a full time deal, yet.
I sent out several resumes to tech postings looking for IT work, be it setting up computers in an office or doing lower level networking. I had a couple of interviews, but nothing materialized.
My friend Curtis mention to me that the company he works for was looking for "data monkeys." Basically, learn the web-based software they use to display their products online for quotation purposes.
I was skeptical; I'm not a web guy, I'm a hardware guy. Curtis told me to throw my name in the hat and just try it.
We, that being two other guys and myself, were given a week's training in Downtown Milwaukee at the software company's headquarters, and after that we are at the New Berlin location of the company I am temping for. We were provided with laptops and a room of our own to work in.
Initially, it was very tense, as we were trying to learn the software AND learn the products we were going to be modeling. After the second week, I had serious doubts about my ability to do the job.
I let doubt creep in and poison my thought process: the cycle wasn't "How can I accomplish this", it was "can I do this".
One day, Ben, one of the other two guys, was working on his product line and was a bit stumped. I asked him to flesh out his process to me so I could help him see any gaps. When we finished, he says "OH! That's it!!".
To which I replied "Stop trying to hit me and hit me", refering to the fight scene in The Matrix where Neo is fighting Morpheus, and Morpheus is trying to convince Neo that Neo can indeed, hit Morpheus.
Ben's a friend of mine and we were roommates for a year, so he looks at me and sticks his tongue out at me.
what I learned from that, in helping Ben, was that I needed to stop worrying about IF I could do it, and JUST DO IT.
Friday, before the holiday weekend, Ben and I met with the Product Manager for our product lines we are working on, to show him what the online configurator would look like. He was very pleased with what we showed him.
After that meeting, I felt so much better about my ability to learn what I'm doing in a new situation and carry on and do my best with what I've been given.
