Category: Editorial

The other day, I asked my daughter if she wanted me to make her some eggs. She responded with a “Yes!” in text and came to sit up at the counter while I cooked for us both. We chatted a bit, and at one point she said, “Thanks for cooking, but it’s not that I can’t cook.”

I laughed a bit and responded with “this isn’t a can/can’t situation, it’s a do/don’t or will/won’t one.” I know my girl can cook; I made sure all my kids learned how to cook. It’s that they often choose not to, hunting for leftovers, going for takeout, or skipping meals.

I’ve never been one who likes to hear “can’t” from anyone. Even today, when I coach kids and one say “I can’t do that,” my response is “yet. You can’t yet.”

It’s easy to think that because you don’t know how to do something, or don’t have confidence, or you’ve not done it well (or right) in the past, that you can’t do it now. That could be true, but often I find people default to “can’t” when they really mean they don’t want to do something or won’t do something. Easy to confuse those, and easy to brainwash yourself when using the wrong words too often.

There are things I can’t do. For example, I can’t run a 10.0s 100m dash. I can’t dunk a basketball, though there was a time I could. However, on the ranch or at work, I rarely find that I can’t do something if I apply myself with a little curiosity, effort, and experimentation. I can learn most things and do them well enough to meet a goal. Someone else might do them better, but I can learndo them.

I see too few people in the world who aren’t curious at work, aren’t willing to put in extra effort to get a task completed, or don’t feel an urge to tackle tasks outside of their comfort zone. I see fewer people dedicated to making an effort to learn outside of work time, whether on their own or at an event like a SQL Saturday.

Most of the people I see succeed and thrive in jobs aren’t smarter than others. They just do the work. And if they don’t know something, they teach themselves what they need in order to get the job done. They drive themselves forward.

Life is hard, but it gets easier when you want to put in effort to make it better.

Steve Jones

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Most of you reading this work in technology, and I assume that you’ve had to learn something new on the job. Technology is constantly evolving, even on our existing platforms. On top of that, we are regularly given tasks that are outside of our current skill sets. Maybe not far outside, but to meet the changing demands of our jobs, we need to learn new things.

I ran across an interesting post (on a new site) from Brent Ozar. I think that guy writes as much as me, but he wrote this one: Why I Started Using Postgres (And You Might Too). It’s a little provocative, but there are good posts on the site about things Brent learned in PostgreSQL. I won’t go into whether learning PostgreSQL is a good idea.

The thing that struck me in this post is that Brent knew that this move was a risk. He was worried about moving to a new platform, despite all the reasons he had for doing making the change. I would bet a lot of us are in similar situations. It might not be PostgreSQL we are being asked to learn, but it could be Fabric, Databricks, Python, PowerShell, CosmosDB, or whatever other thing someone in our organization thinks is cool.

The best sentence in here is this: “I gambled that I’d be able to learn how to do performance tuning quickly enough, …, in time to head off issues.” That’s the attitude I’ve often had in my career when I get requests to do something new.

I’m willing to bet on myself.

You should be willing to do so as well. Not bet on me, but on yourself. I know you don’t want to work 80 hours a week to learn, or get stuck trying to solve problems every weekend with new tech. However, I hope you are willing to do that for a week or one weekend. You’re willing to do some reading at night or experimenting during lunch in order to make something work.

You’re going to have tough times. You’re going to question if you can make something work. Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable (for short periods) is how we grow and learn. It’s how we take leaps forward.

It’s how we take advantage of opportunities that are in front of us.

There are always opportunities to make a difference, to effect change, to build something you are proud of or that your organization values. Those stressful times when you drive to make something new succeed and have to learn a new skill in the process, these are the times when you can take advantage of an opportunity.

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Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.