The One Thing You Can Do to Get Good at Something Fast
Recognize you have control of this, if nothing else —
I remember a time I was recommended for a project I had absolutely zero qualifications for.
There
I was, sitting at my boss’ office, looking at a screen with dozens of
unexciting lines in small print. Listening to what needed to be done. It
was just after lunch time.
As
he scrolled through a 50+ page pdf, he was saying something about
finding duplicate entries, verifying the rate charged, a weird thing
about Wednesdays —
— I had no idea what he was talking about.
When
I left, all I could tell — from the spreadsheets sent to my email — was
that thousands of lines of service charges needed to be verified for
accuracy. It was potentially costing the company thousands of dollars
per year.
Thousands of lines to verify.
Per week.
Indefinitely.
“Do you think you’ll have something ready by tomorrow?”
For some reason, I said: “Yes.”
At
this point, some of you might TL;DR the whole experience because you’d
know that a cross-utilization of MS Excel and Visual Basic could give a
rudimentary way of making this work.
But when I took the assignment? The fanciest trick I knew on Excel was to highlight.
By the next day, I had an automated system ready to go.
How?
To note, this is not the first time I’ve put myself in that situation.
At some point, somewhere, I learned that the most effective way to learn something quickly is to discover your reason to like it.
And
a reason to like it isn’t ‘Because my boss would find it impressive’ or
‘I could make more money if — ’. Neither of those are a direct
connection between you and what you need to learn.
I’m talking about a reason you could enjoy and appreciate it, even without recognition or priority.
This is not something that only some people can do because ‘You’re like that, I’m not.’
If
there’s one thing we all have control of when given a challenge, it’s
how we respond to it. I can choose to dislike the situation, or search
for the reason why it would be interesting.
Because, after all, there are people who already do find it interesting. So the question is:
Why?
Before even typing the first letter of a search to related to my immediate problem, that’s what I needed to know.
Going back to that day, at around 1 o’clock. I started looking for places where people love data. Trolling r/dataisbeautiful, I came across a random comment with the term ‘excel guru’.
So I hit up YouTube and typed in ‘excel guru’.
When
you listen to someone talk about why they’re so passionate about
something, it can be infectious. When needing to learn something new,
you need to catch that bug.
After
some digging, I came across videos showing crazy problems involving
long lists of data, and people figuring out simplified solutions for
their unique problem.
One
of them made a passing comment about the history of it — searching
through repeated hours of tedious data, now possible in seconds. Now that is a life skill I’d want to have.
All the while, taking notes. Learning how to recognize the jargon. Identifying whatever pieces might apply to my situation:
Converting external files into spreadsheets? Yup. Pivot tables? Heck yes. Converting data into charts that are simpler to understand? Not really.
Anything on cross referencing? Uh oh… nope. At least, nothing specific to my problem.
It’s
4:30. Now, I could take this as a dead end, and accept that tomorrow
I’ll be completely cooked. Or, I can take this as a chance to add
something of my own and apply what I’m learning here —
—
fortunately, with excel, all you need to do is create the right
formula. And in excel, the formulas are open to interpretation.
And
that’s how, in hours, what started with highlighting skills & a
reddit troll ended with importing pdf spreadsheets > formatted data
> organization optimzation > convert to pivot table > repeat
for cross reference > highlight discrepancies > reconciliation tab
summary.
While
I went through that, I thought I might as well have YT autoplay in the
background, since something might stand out. At some point, I heard
something about ‘recording macros’. That seemed valuable enough to stop
for a moment —
— I’m glad I did. Because now, all this stuff could be automated.
Granted,
I did take this work home. But by the time it came to that point, I was
charged up with the infectious passion that people already had for this
kind of thing.
And
there was the added bonus of knowing that if this was done the right
way, a tedious task taking hours each week could end up being done
instantly.
It
wasn’t until midnight that I turned in. But I was comfortable enough to
get a good night’s sleep. What’s more, as my confidence grew, I was
able to take breaks from the effort while doing it, and also have dinner
with the fam.
A few more tweaks the next day, and 24 hours after yesterday’s meeting, I had an .xlsx file ready to go.
Thanks primarily to knowing that for anything, a reason to enjoy it can be found.
Looking
back, I was fortunate to be in a fast-paced environment that allowed
for opportunities like that. To be able to exercise the ‘find a reason
to like it’ skill.
I had people around me who trusted my little quirk, and found opportunities to give it a chance.
Data
crunching isn’t an example that would apply to everyone, but we’ve all
been in a place where we were stuck having to learn something, and our
initial response was to imagine how dreadful it’ll be, looking forward
to when we’ll finally be done.
But
in your own life, whatever the circumstance, know that when it comes to
figuring out anything new, there’s one thing you have control of. One
thing that takes out the stress, anxiety, and pressure that might come —
— and that’s discovering your own personal reason to enjoy it.
Source: Medium
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