Every day we are faced with challenges. Some of these are trivial little things we quickly deal with then move on. Others consume us, tax our persistence, alienate our loved ones and test us to our limits. We live, work and play between these two extremes every day and no matter how trivial or how profound the problem we always seem to find a solution.
How often have you relied on wisdom from an unknown ally?
How often has Google found someone in a similar plight, someone who has taken the time to share their solution?
How often have you taken the time to give thanks?
How often have you taken the time to share your own solutions?
A recent experience
Over the last week I had been wrestling with a very narrow and niche problem of access control inside a Subversion repository using the ‘Ruby on Rails’ based Redmine application – a very obscure and very niche challenge! After a fair amount of Google searching I eventually found a very old piece of someone’s work which purported to solve my problem. Unfortunately the work was no longer directly applicable to the latest version of the application so I pulled it apart and merged it with the latest release. It did not solve my problem completely but was good enough for my needs.
I could have left it there as often I have done before, being too busy to even thank the original author (which is not an easy thing to do as it often requires registration on a site I may not want to be involved with). This time, however, I decided to show my thanks to the original author by contributing my work as well.
My contribution
I took the time to learn how to create a universally applicable patch of my work against the current release. I took the time to register on the site and to upload and present my work for anyone else. And that’s where I left it, feeling good about my effort and if nothing more having left documentation of my work somewhere I could find it in the future if I needed it. To my surprise, a few days later I was contacted by another organisation that had already taken my work and extended it with an invitation to continue being involved.
I have learned three important lessons from this experience:
Be grateful: It’s important to be grateful for the collective generosity of people who have contributed their time and effort to publicly share their solutions to their own challenges.
Share: The two best ways to show gratitude are to thank people personally for their contributions and to share our own solutions.
Create opportunity: You never know who out there in the big wide world needs that precious wisdom that only you can provide – and you never know where the sharing of it will take you.
Next time I am faced with problem or a challenge and find someone on-line has shared their solution I will make the effort to thank them. Next time I solve a problem or a challenge and can share my work with the on-line community, I will make the effort to publish it. Next time I feel that thanking or sharing is just too much effort, I will remind myself how important it is to create opportunity and re-think my attitude.
The amazing resource of people and the sharing of their knowledge on the internet is a testament to technology, ideas and the generosity of humanity and I am so grateful to be a part of it.
Robert Rath – http://www.innovation-mentor.com
