Kendal posted the announcement yesterday that we opened the design content on 99designs. I’ve used the site before and it’s a decent system, typically get a logo for around $200 – and you get to pick from a lot of options. I know most of us are data people, but probably more than a few of us know Photoshop or the equivalent, or someone that does, which means it could be someone from the SQL community that designs the next really big PASS logo. Why not give it a try?

Victorious by Jack Campbell ($8 at Amazon) is the finale in the six part series about Black Jack Geary leading a space fleet back home from deep in enemy territory. I’ll try not to ruin it for you if you haven’t read them all yet!

The series is good, though I’ll admit to thinking it might have been done in five books or maybe even four. It’s naval battles set in space, with a lot of tactics in three dimensions. There is a bit of intrigue and politics, especially the latter in this last one. A big focus on honor and not descending to the level of opponents, stuff I largely agree with but is rarely so simple in real life, and the author manages to show some of that throughout the books.

The ending is reasonably happy, though parts of it feel rushed – a strange feeling given that overall the story was stretched too much. The villains end up feeling not quite as formidable as they seemed earlier on.

Still, I can easily recommend the series, and it’s always nice to know that when you read a book there are more to follow already done and waiting.

Over the past couple years our local library system has been under financial pressure, resulting in some changes, and maybe not all of them bad, but still frustrating. Hoping those of you reading today might offer some insight into your local library policies so I can decide whether to dig deeper or just live with it!

• All branches closed on Friday
• Cannot checkout any books if any unpaid fine
• Cannot renew a checked out book more than 4 times
• Fines only paid in cash/check

The Friday closing I get, definitely savings to close the office, though I wish they would leave one branch open. More than once I’ve wanted to go on a Friday and couldn’t. They’ve told me that the reason behind requiring all fines to be paid is to increase circulation, but I find fault with that argument. You can return all your books, owe $.10, and not be able to check out any books. I rarely carry cash and there is no ATM machine in the building. I would have no problem paying the merchant fee on top of the fines. This is supposed to happen eventually, but it’s not been funded yet that I can see.

The limit of 4 renewals – don’t know. They only let you renew if no one has a hold on it, but I can see that there should be a max, whether 4 or 14. This one annoyed me recently when I returned books and forgot one that I’d had for a while (about growing tomatoes) and actually remembered to bring cash with me, but I couldn’t renew the book, couldn’t pay the fine on it because it wouldn’t calculate until returned – leaving me the option of paying for the book plus a $10 fee (which I considered), or having them hold all the books I’d selected on a Thursday evening that I wanted for a rare Friday at at the beach.

So, I’m trying not to rant, yet I’m not sure those policies are all that customer friendly.

A bit of a silly title, but an interesting story. A few weeks back I posted a note about attending TechEd and how popcorn seemed to be a big hit when it was served one afternoon. Last week following the oPASS meeting one of our regulars – Bob Blaydes – asked if I’d like to have popcorn at SQLSaturday #49 this fall. Sure, of course! But what led to this fortuitous question? Turns out he had read the blog post and happened to own a professional quality popcorn machine.

 

It’s a small win, yet it’s a big win too. Here’s a case of my network working for me, and vice versa. Bob would have volunteered regardless to help out for #49, but now he gets to make a greater contribution for the same effort. We get popcorn at cost, and we’ll try to subsidize that by selling a ‘popcorn sponsorship’ complete with vendor logo on the popcorn bags!

It’s also a lesson to me that I still don’t always know how/when to use my network to best effect.I don’t think it would have been appropriate to send an email to my networking asking ‘do you know anyone that owns a popcorn machine?’, yet I could have mentioned it on the oPASS/SQLSaturday sites at the least. It’s a long shot that it works, yet it’s relatively cheap to ask. It’s also a good case for expanding your network, to increase the chances of finding that one connection.

I saw this post (please do read it) about introducing speakers and it reminded me that I wanted to write about it too. At the July oPASS meeting I did the introduction for Kendal Van Dyke, and it just felt like the right thing to do. We’ve been a little lax about it, and in fact this month we didn’t do it very well. I think it happens a lot because the meeting organizer has been communicating and/or knows the speaker and forgets that the rest of the attendees don’t have that background yet.

Most speakers include a slide of background/qualifications (which I agree with), but reading it is often awkward – feels like the presentation is about selling the speaker and not teaching the attendees. A good intro both helps the speaker build their brand (the most common reason for speaking) and gives them the best chance of success by helping the attendees learn about their qualifications from someone who is allowed to be openly enthusiastic about.

Not sure I said all that well, but hoping for the best. I’d like to see the SQL community really adopt this as a practice, from chapter meetings right up through the Summit.

We’ve had a few people in the SQL community find jobs lately and many of them attributable to their network. It’s good to have a network, good to be able to use it successfully, and I’m all in favor of growing your network. But…not all of us have a great network, and sometimes even the best network won’t come up with what you need. What is plan B?

It starts with a good resume. People with large networks will tell you that the resume comes second, but that presumes that you can have a conversation first and then send them the resume. In practice most potential employees will get their first look at you from your resume and then, maybe, you get to meet them and try to pitch your skills.

Short of trying to gain employment with a specific employer, I’m not a fan of sending resumes out blind. A better strategy is to select 3-4 staffing companies to work for you. Think of staffing professionals as your proxy network. Their job is to know people and what they try to do is tell the hiring manager about their great candidate and then send them the resume. In most cases they’ll send you a short note about job openings and ask ‘does this fit?’, so that they don’t waste time trying to place you some place you don’t want to go. Still, the resume matters. Sometimes it’s the only thing that matters.

This technique also works well when you’re working and want to find the next job. You can’t (and shouldn’t in most cases) just announce via Twitter and LinkedIn that you’re looking for work. You can selectively reach out to your network privately, but that rarely scales. If you message everyone in your network, it will filter back to work – that’s the nature of networks.

Especially for DBA’s most of us have the wrong network. We’re connected with other DBA’s and while they would happily let us know if a job comes up, that’s will reveal only a fraction of the jobs out there. Most of us are geographically centered, but our networks usually aren’t. For example I live in Orlando, yet a fairly small percentage of my network is in Orlando. Even attending the local PASS chapter meetings (which I do) only slightly increases that. If you really want to find work in your area start thinking about how to increase your local network.

You can still submit abstracts through midnight tonight for SQLSaturday #49 in Orlando on October 16, 2010. Great time of year to visit Florida, and it looks like we’ll have a great variety of speakers again this year. Here’s the list of submitted sessions so far:

 

Title Speaker A Broad look at securing your organization Tim Beamer A Developer Guide to Execution Plans Steve Simon A Test Abstract Andy Warren Advanced TSQL Solutions Kevin Boles An Introductory Look at Execution Plans Eric Wisdahl As a DBA, Where Do I Start?! Mike Walsh Automate Login Administration & Compliance Reports Ronald Dameron Automating Routine Maintenance Ken Simmons Beautiful events always recur Steve Simon BI Pivot Tables & Charts, Not a 1 Tool Exercise Michael Antonovich Building a Comprehensive Professional Development Andy Warren Change Data Capture a tool for BI,DR,Audit & more Jose Chinchilla Choosing Indexes For Performance Jeff Garbus Collecting and Analyzing File & Wait Statistics Kevin Boles Common SQL Programming Mistakes Plamen Ratchev Configuration Domination: Taking Control of SQL Ken Simmons Data Access Layers: A Cornucopia Steve Simon Data Access Layers: A Cornucopia Pt 2 Steve Simon Data Access Layers: A Cornucopia Pt 3 Steve Simon Data Encryption and Key Management in SQL Said Salomon Data Mining.. Making $mart financial decisions Steve Simon Data Warehousing with SQL Server 2008 Wes Dumey Database Design Fundamentals Louis Davidson Database Design Patterns Louis Davidson DBA Script Thumb 2010 Rodney Landrum Designing a highly available SQL Environment Tim Beamer Developing Applications with SQL Azure Scott Klein Don’t Be Trigger Happy: Safe Use of Triggers Jack Corbett Enforcing Compliance With Policy-Based Management Ken Simmons ETL with PowerShell Chad Miller Everything you wanted to know about IDENTITY colum Jonathon Moorman Getting familiar with Query Optimizer Dmitri Korotkevitch Getting familiar with SQL Server Storage Engine Dmitri Korotkevitch Handling data anomalies with Data Profiling Tasks. Steve Simon Indexing for Join Optimization Jeff Garbus Introduction to Analysis Services Devin Knight Introduction to Data Warehousing Devin Knight Introduction to Execution Plans Nathan Heaivilin Introduction to SQL Server Statistics Andy Warren Introduction to the Sql Server Profiler Jonathon Moorman Introduction to Transactional Replication Troy Gallant ITIL V3 for the Database Administrator Timothy McAliley Learning SSIS under 1 hour Jose Chinchilla Locking and Blocking for Developers Dmitri Korotkevitch Log Shipping vs. Replication; the Great Debate Troy Gallant Making SQL Server and WPF work for you!! Steve Simon Managing Database Schemas With VS201 DB projects Rafael Salas Multi-Server Management with SQL Server 2008+ Argenis Fernandez Optimize Resources with MAP Kathi Kellenberger Parts of Facebook: Cassandra and MapReduce Patrick Thompson Planning your ETL architecture with SSIS Rafael Salas Policy-Based Management in a Nutshell Jorge Segarra PowerShell 2.0 Beyond the Dirty Dozen Aaron Nelson Profiling: It’s Okay in SQL Server Jack Corbett R2 Reporting Services, The New Stuff Mike Davis Refactoring SQL for Performance Plamen Ratchev Response Time Analysis of SQL Server Performance Dean Richards Revive your code Dmitri Korotkevitch Securing your Data Warehouse Michael Mollenhour Social and Not so Social Networking for the DBA Andy Warren Spatial Queries in SQL 2008 Michael Stark SQL and SEO – Making Money with SQL Server Jared Nielsen SQL Backups & Recovery Brandie Tarvin SQL Security – The Basics Brandie Tarvin SQL Server Memory Deep Dive Kevin Boles SQL Server Partitioning from A to Z Kevin Boles SQL University 101: Starting the SQL Journey Jorge Segarra SQL University 201: Managing a SQL Server pt 2 Jorge Segarra SSIS – Data Flow Buffer Breakdown Eric Wisdahl SSIS 2008 – Profiling Your Data Eric Wisdahl SSIS Configurations, Expressions and Constraints Eric Wisdahl The Art of Indexing Ken Simmons The Dirty Dozen: 12 ways to write poor queries Steve Simon The Dirty Dozen: PowerShell Scripts for Busy DBAs Aaron Nelson The Nitty Gritty of Database Backups Brandie Tarvin Using Parameters in SQL Server Reporting Service Mike Davis Using PowerShell with SQL Server Agent Maximo Trinidad Using Sql to Generate Sql (pt1) Jonathon Moorman Using Sql to Generate Sql (pt2) Jonathon Moorman What’s New with Reporting Services? Kathi Kellenberger Working with SQL Server – SQLPS Maximo Trinidad XML 101 for the SQL Developer Michael Antonovich XML 201 for the SQL Developer Michael Antonovich You Can Improve Your Own SQL Code Mike Walsh Zen and the Art of Writing SQL Query – Part 1 Plamen Ratchev Zen and the Art of Writing SQL Query – Part 2 Plamen Ratchev

I recently read Rework by Jason Fried of 37 Signals ($13 @ Amazon) and it talks about a lot of philosophy and lessons learned from their business. Some of it I found interesting, some I agreed with – for example, his views on running a small business being ok, not having to have a 100 employees before you can hold your head up. Some I didn’t agree with – I’ve found remote workers to be very hard to collaborate with compared to those that are in the office each day.

I think the part I like best is that it really teaches the importance of having a philosophy about how you want to run and grow your business. Not anything as obvious as ethics, more complex stuff like how big do you really want to be, how will you react to customer service failures, and whether you’re building it to sell or hold.

It’s an easy read. I wouldn’t call it a how-to book. Instead, I’d say this is a book to read before you start a business, and then one to re-read a year after you’ve started the business and learned some lessons about what works for you.

I’ve had variations of this conversation a couple of times lately and thought it was worth writing down some thoughts. The essence of the problem is that people are often frustrated that an early decision ‘boxes them in’. Absolutely it does, and that’s why it’s important to figure out which decisions to make early, because they shape everything else.

For instance, say you’re building a house. You can wait quite a while to decide on the color, but you have to make and stick to a decision about the size and composition of the foundation early, I think for obvious reasons! Can you change it later? Sure, but it’s expensive, and in all but the most extreme cases not a viable option.

Or say you’re planning a family vacation. You probably have some time restrictions based on available vacation days, school calendar, and other life events. You probably also have to set a spending budget. Those decisions then shape what you do and for how long on your vacation. Here it’s a little more flexible, maybe you find out that your dream cruise is 1 day longer and $200 more than planned, you take a hard look if you can do it. But you don’t spend a lot of time looking at vacation packages that are twice as long or twice as expensive as your budget.

The further you go on building the house or living your vacation, the fewer choices you have left, running out of time and money, but you can make lots of smaller decisions. What color to paint the rooms, carpet, where to eat dinner, what dinner show to attend.

I call that narrowing the funnel. At the beginning anything was possible, you could literally go in any direction. Two or three decisions later you’ll find that you’ve gone from infinity to much smaller tactical decisions because the course has been set. It may seem like an annoyance to hit constraints, but in reality it’s valuable – you commit to a goal and set some fences, and then you start executing. You can’t keep rethinking (well, I guess you can) your original decision points, you just adjust as you can and capture lessons for the next time.

That’s why for any big decision it’s worth understanding the limits that picking a choice imposes.

We’ve got 6 days left before the call for nominations for the 2010 PASS election closes and I want to make a last push to try to encourage more of you to participate. Jeremiah and Joe  both have some great points about the benefits and I probably can’t top them, so I’ll just ask you to do one thing as a member of the SQL community:

Email the links above to someone that you think would be a good Board member, tell them why you think so. No sales pitch, no coaxing, just tell them that you believe in them.

What about me, will I run for re-election?

I’ve put a lot of time and effort into PASS, sometimes in places that mattered, sometimes in places that didn’t. Learned some good lessons, learned – again – that culture change is hard, seen PASS grow in some respects, not in others. It has at times been very frustrating.

As I’ve considered the decision, I’ve tried to be measured, taking time to discuss it with many trusted friends. Took a while to sort through it, and that was worth doing.

There’s still stuff I want to do and change, so I’m going to run again. I’ll be changing my approach a little, focusing hard on transparency, strategy, governance, and I’ve got to manage my time investment better. Maybe not 2 hours a week, but not 5-10 either. If I’m re-elected I’ll hand over the reins of oPASS and SQLSaturday Orlando to Jack Corbett, still helping out by not owning them.

I’ll write more in the next few weeks about some lessons learned and the goals I’ll going to set.

Short notes this time, but wanted to get a few thing written down:

• Attendance was about 20, lower than expected for a good perf tuning presentation. Talked to Jack afterward, think we’re static or declining, need to revisit our chapter plan soon.
• Nice presentation from David Pless from MS, good audience participation
• Meeting sponsored by Red Gate (thanks!), Jack Corbett did the demo of their source control product, but the script didn’t explain/show how to rollback from history. Seems pretty easy to implement overall.
• Good discussion after meeting about working with staffing companies, some frustration from those who get ‘hey how ya been’ emails from someone that last contacted them 2 years ago!

Our regular monthly meeting is tonight featuring David Pless from Microsoft. Here are some notes about his presentation:

This discussion will continue to cover how to troubleshoot performance issues on SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008. In this discussion I cover performance impact analysis using DMVs, SET options in SQL Server, and Profiler and perfmon analysis. In this discussion I will cover SQLNexus, PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs), RML Utilities, SQLDiag, and other tools. Finally I discuss reading query plans graphically and what you can learn from reading the XML plans.

Free pizza, good networking, learn some stuff – hope to see you there!

Our regular monthly meeting is tonight featuring David Pless from Microsoft. Here are some notes about his presentation:

This discussion will continue to cover how to troubleshoot performance issues on SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008. In this discussion I cover performance impact analysis using DMVs, SET options in SQL Server, and Profiler and perfmon analysis. In this discussion I will cover SQLNexus, PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs), RML Utilities, SQLDiag, and other tools. Finally I discuss reading query plans graphically and what you can learn from reading the XML plans.

Free pizza, good networking, learn some stuff – hope to see you there!

Here’s another one that I’ve run into when linking to a SQL Server table that has a bit column. Maybe there’s a cleaner fix, in the past I’ve just changed the table to a tinyint with a check constraint. Bits are useful things, should just work.

 

As a child did you have a place that was your ‘thing’, something that just the mention of it would throw you into an enthusiastic frenzy of ‘lets go lets go’? A place where the name got mangled a little, part child naming, part inside joke?

I grew up in a semi-rural area, not much in the way of stores close by, the only one being a small mom and pop convenience store with a name…well, I have to say I have no idea. Somewhere along the way when I was 6 or 7 or 8, they had a big (bigger than me anyway) plastic cow outside on a trailer as a promotion. I don’t know how it happened next, but it became ‘the Cow store’ ever after. I still think of it that way when I happen to pass by. Life was simple then, each Friday our god father and next door neighbor would take us to the store and give us enough money to get a drink (Frostie root beer usually for me), a candy bar, and a comic book, or some similar combination.

So far my oldest daughter has done the naming, deciding at an early age that McDonalds was ‘Old MacDonalds’ and bouncing with excitement about a trip to the ‘pencil store’ (Sam Flax). Fun to watch how children identify places and what sticks, on a recent trip to Jacksonville we rode a small toy train and not only do they remember, they’ve got it flagged to do again so that they can ride a train car with a different color than the last time!

Lot’s of life lessons included in all that, but maybe that’s a post for another day.

We’re pleased to announce that Louis Davidson will be our pre-con speaker this year at SQLSaturday #49 in Orlando. Louis will be presenting a one day seminar on database design, a worthy topic and one about which Louis is both knowledgeable and passionate, looking forward to attending it myself!

The competition was definitely fierce, all the proposed seminars received some votes, and thanks to all that were interesting in participating.

Full details and registration link at http://www.sqlsaturday.com/49/eventhome.aspx.

We had our monthly Board of Directors call on July 8th and as is fairly common, the call went smooth. Unusually though, I had two items on the agenda, the budget for the ‘spring event’ and the SQL Server Standard.

The budget went through a number of revisions, starting with a super minimalist version in my original proposal and over the course of the process ballooned up to a no profit budget. I think it’s natural to go through that, looking for places where the corners were cut too sharply and fixing them, thinking of places where you want to do nice things. As we got close to final I really felt like we had gone too far, and started looking for things to cross out of the budget. We went back and made some spending items conditional on hitting certain attendance numbers, took some things out, and ended up with a budget that should deliver a modest profit back to the organization if all goes well. Profit is important. It makes us manage to a budget, makes us make hard decisions, and hopefully gives us another small but interesting revenue stream that can in turn help support other activities. The event budget was approved and that really helps get things moving, and I’m glad to be done with that task!

The second part was the discussion of the Standard. This has been part of my portfolio since last year, relaunched in single article PDF format to try to continue the great work my friend Steve Jones did in the years when we owned the print magazine. Grant Fritchey took on the role of editor and so far we’ve produced 7 issues of great content. Yet, when I did a recent review of the project, the click through rate was pretty low, and even with much better marketing it didn’t seem like that we could generate enough content to create the traffic flow to justify creating the content. Chicken and the egg scenario. I thought about it some and early this week sent  a note to Rushabh Mehta recommending that we would probably be best served by closing down this project.

About the same time we found that we needed to revise our recently completed FY 2011 budget to account for about $50k less than expected revenue. For Rushabh and the rest of the Board (and me), it wasn’t a hard call to pull about $10k of that from the Standard budget. We voted yesterday to end the SQL Server Standard project, and to look at funding other writing projects on a case by case basis out of the special projects budget.

On content and workflow I think we got a lot of things right:

• Set up Grant Fritchey as the editor with a focus just on finding/managing the content
• Engaged volunteers to do the tech edits
• PASS HQ handled author payments, workflow, copy edit assignments

Grant Fritchey, Brad McGehee and the rest of the volunteers did a a great job on the project, so why did it fail?  Without trying to make excuses, here are things I think were involved:

• Written content is a mature market. Not impossible to create a new niche in that market, but was going to take the combination of good pay (which we had at $500/article) and good exposure for right writing, which we weren’t able to provide. That added up to not being hugely attractive to authors.
• We set the bar pretty high for authors. I think this was the right thing to do, we wanted something longer and better than a blog post. Not that blog posts don’t have value, but we wanted something of high qualify for the PASS web site. We also wanted to challenge the authors, give them a writing credit that might help them land a book deal.
• We marketed it poorly. We mentioned it in the Connector and on the PASS web site, but many told me that they didn’t even realize we were publishing the articles. Definitely there is remedial work we could (and should) have done, but it should have been done better from the beginning. Too much focus on content, not enough on the rest.
• We required a login to view the articles. Another decision I believe was good, but we just didn’t have enough content to make a new reader invest the time in setting up a login.
• Lack of deeper involvment from me in areas that could have used help; finding authors and marketing.

At the end we have to call this a modest failure. We could have kept going, I think the right choice to stop. Definitely not exciting to blog about about ending one of my project. I was reminded on the budget call that it’s ok to fail sometimes, and that’s logic I agree with – to make gains you have to take some risks. Still, not fun to fail.

Excited to get the email yesterday that two of my sessions were accepted, Introduction to SQL Server Statistics and Building a Comprehensive Professional Development Plan. I’ve done both presentations before, but definitely still some practice to do prior to November. Looking forward to seeing the full and final schedule.

Also saw my friend Don Gabor had one accepted on the professional development track, Effective Communication with Non-Technical Colleagues. Congrats to Don, this is his first time on the schedule!

During a recent call I was talking with someone about achieving a career goal (coaching in itself, though unplanned) and I suggested that someone we both knew would be an excellent coach towards achieving that goal. Finding a coach that has the expertise is usually hard, in this case I could easily name someone.

Which led to the questions “why would they coach me?” and “how do I go about asking them?”. Those aren’t trivial questions, at all, yet the answers might be simpler than you think.

Starting with the first one of “why”, for most people it’s a combination of:

• Being flattered to be asked for their help
• Wanting to invest in the ‘next generation’ of doers and leaders
• Wanting to improve their own coaching skills

The being flattered option is obvious and human, but what about the other two? As I think about  my own career I’ve always thought that with the right coach at a few different times, I’d be much further along than I am now. A coach can’t replace experience, but often they can show you opportunities and help you work through challenges that are much harder to do on your own. It would have actually required a relatively small effort on both sides to make what I believe would have been a big difference.

The other part is improving coaching skills. Coaching is part of the suite of communication skills we need to move to bigger things. Do we have the ability to take someone with talent and help them accomplish a goal? That happens more often than you might think in business, where it’s business and there is often no personal investment. It’s not a common skill among managers, and strangely, not much in the way of coaching on how to be a coach!

So maybe that explains why, but the really hard question is asking them to do it. It certainly helps to have some existing relationship, but the relationship doesn’t need to be that deep to make asking possible and reasonable. At this point, just like asking for a date, you have to take the leap. I’d suggest email rather than a phone call, it’s not urgent, it removes the potential social awkwardness if they say no, and it gives them time to think about their current workload (and other factors) before arriving at a decision. Explain briefly what you need help with and the scope of what you think that looks like. Doesn’t have to be perfect. Does require diligence and thought.

if they say yes, good! If they say no, you might ask for recommendations on other coaches or directions.

This is one of the lessons you don’t want to hear when you’re 18, or the newest member of a team stuck with all the miserable tasks, but it is, for me, one of the more simple truths in life. I’ve watched a lot of people spend time trying to avoid paying their dues, and while maybe some of them did, I bet eventually they had to learn the lessons anyway. I’ve always thought it was just simpler and more effective to cheerfully take on the task of learning the new stuff, enjoying the journey and proving to your soon to be peers that you respect their experience.

That’s not to say that you always have to start at the bottom. Life experience counts, sometimes. I’ve never been an Oracle DBA and I bet it would take months to get comfortable, and a couple years to get to a place similar to where I am now (heck, maybe more!), but I’d building on a lot of years of experience with a relational databases, HA and DR concepts, challenges of working with business leaders and developers, and also a really good sense of things I would need to re-learn (translate). I wouldn’t go into that claiming to be a superstar/expert, but I understand the path and am willing to make the investment.

I’d equally be willing to bet that if I chose to, I could be a network engineer, Java developer, or business analyst, but for all of those my life experience counts for less. Maturity, communication skills, understanding how to learn are still valuable, but compared to raw technical knowledge it just doesn’t balance the scales enough. Of course if you are willing to backup to a entry level position, then all of a sudden the scales tip the other way, your life experience enabling you in most cases to further faster.

Repetition doesn’t always equal experience, but you can’t get experience without repetition. For example, I’m an enthusiastic wood worker that devotes relatively little time to the hobby, and what time I spend, I usually am trying something new with all the resulting challenges. On a recent project (almost done!) I was building a 8 foot long cabinet for my garage workshop and though I understand all the concepts and techniques, executing them…well, let’s say there’s been more than one mistake made! But it was also a tremendous learning experience and if I built something similar it will go a little faster and a little better.

A different part of this is that no one is proud (or should be at least) of doing easy things. We’re proud of doing hard things, getting through times when it was hard enough that we thought about quitting.