Do it anyway
(I fear and loathe Nike for more reasons than one, but a not inconsiderable one is their unstoppable cooptation of the highly useful phrase “Just do it.” Too late to salvage it now; I shall simply have to express myself in another fashion.)
I read with interest Caterina Fake’s advice on misbehaving.net about how to speak in public, and earn more public-speaking gigs. At roughly the same time, I got a horrified email from a friend of mine in response to my brief hey-I-want-this-job post to the effect of “Are you sure that one’s techie enough?”
I have in some circles a couple of truly fearsome reputations, as techie and as wholly unflappable public persona. Anybody who’s read CavLec for a while knows both that I’m not all that techie (sorry, J.M. Tyree, it’s true) and that I am in fact quite easily flapped. So how’d I get these reputations, not to mention the skills (such as they are) underlying them? I do things anyway. Sheer bloodymindedness. Really as simple as that.
You want reputations like mine? Read on, and I’ll tell you how I got them, because I’m like that.
Caterina expressed one part of my personal creed very well: “Becoming a confident speaker is not about eliminating mistakes and nervousness but about recovering gracefully from inevitable mistakes and nervousness.” I would add that the grace of the recovery isn’t necessarily overly salient. What matters is the fact of the recovery. Sure, go hide in a corner and whimper a bit if you need to—but come out of that corner swinging, not cringing.
For instance, when I was giving my tutorial in Montreal, for some not-adequately-explored reason I couldn’t come up with the phrase “MARC indicator.” Knew what it was, explained it just fine, couldn’t for the life of me remember what the hell it was called. Felt like an idiot. Didn’t let it stop me. (And surely won’t forget again!)
Because, honestly, not a big deal. The folks at my tutorial will run into the phrase at some time or another, and thanks to me will understand quite quickly what it refers to. Certainly my inability to recall one phrase detracts very little from the overall quality and usefulness of that tutorial. So why worry? Especially why let it stop me from getting back out there?
On the techie side, I do stupid things like letting overzealous PHP error-reporting stand for weeks because I can’t remember setting things up that way. But, come on, people who never do things like that do everything on their desktop machines in Linux without ever leaving the command line—and who the heck does that and why should we take her as a role model?
Yes, when you start out doing something unfamiliar you will suck at it. You may, in fact, continue to suck at it; no guarantees in this world. Nobody would hire me as a production Python programmer, because four years or so of writing Python and let me tell you I still suck at it. I suck less than I did four years ago, certainly, but that doesn’t erase the fact of my basic suckitude.
CSS? I know my way around the spec, but nobody would hire me to design a site, because I suck at site design. Guess what? I still teach CSS to people. I shouldn’t wonder if some of the people I teach turn out to be better than I am, eventually.
Here’s the thing, though: you don’t have to be wildly good at something to be useful at it. Am I the world’s greatest public speaker? No, but I don’t have to be. Am I the world’s greatest markup-language expert? Hell no; I didn’t even know about SGML CONCUR until Extreme. But I can still make myself useful with the little I do know. Am I the world’s greatest librarian? Leaving aside that I’m not a librarian yet, no, and I doubt I ever will be. If I thought that mattered, I’d not be eighteen credits away from an MLS.
Here’s the other thing: Somebody out there is always worse at what you do than you are. Somebody else is better. You’re always going to hear comparisons in both directions. Don’t let them go to your head either way. One way, you get arrogant. The other way, you get scared. Learn from the substantive feedback; leave the ratings be. (Likert has a lot to answer for, in my blatantly biased opinion.)
Whatever it is, if it needs to be done and is worth doing, do it. Never mind if you’re inefficient or not the world’s best, or you screw it up the first time. Do it anyway. It’s not just the only way to learn; I think it’s the only way to live, myself.