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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Mark Des Cotes, this past weekend I made a huge bonfire and burned the lumber from the treehouse I talked about last week and I believe if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share the lesson I learned while stopped at a roadblock.
Friday Forum
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My story is a bit shorter this week so I want to take a moment to talk to you about Lynda.com. As you may or may not know, I’m a graphic designer. If you want to know the fun story of how I became a graphic designer you can listen to Stuff I Learned Yesterday episode 10. When I took the graphic design course there was no web design involved. Heck, I don’t even know if web design was a thing in 1992. A few years later I started designing websites using WYSIWYG software (WYSIWYG stands for what you see is what you get). Meaning whatever you saw on screen was how it would turn out. This was great because I didn’t need to know how to code to create websites, the software did the code for me. However I quickly learned that the software had limitations and it didn’t produce the best code. So to learn HTML and CSS, the coding languages I needed, I first turned to those yellow and black Dummy books. It was slow going and for some reason I had a hard time getting it to sink in. I then discovered Lynda.com. Back then you couldn’t watch videos on their website. Instead I had to purchase CDs of the video courses. Watching those videos made everything I had read in the Dummy book click in and in no time I was coding websites from scratch. Several years later I wanted to learn PHP and MySQL, two more languages used in website design. I turned to Lynda.com again. Today by business consists more of web design than traditional graphic design and I thank Lynda.com for my success. I’m a visual learner and I find it so much easier seeing someone performing the task than reading it in a book. Over the years I’ve used Lynda.com to quickly learn other software and skills as well. I encourage you to give it a try. If you go to https://www.goldenspiralmedia.com/lynda, that’s Lynda with a Y you’ll get a free 7 day trial that gives you unlimited access to all their courses. That’s more than 100,000 professionally produced video tutorials. If you decide to continue it’s only $25 per month. Think about it, you could learn a whole new skill for much cheaper than enrolling in a traditional course and you’re still learning from professionals. Give the free trial a go, you have nothing to loose.
What I Learned Yesterday:
With all the snow that has fallen in North America lately I through this would be a fun little story to share with you. Here goes…
I like to say I’m an only child with two older brothers. You see I was a “happy accident,” or since my birthday is September 26th I always teased my parents that I was the product of a wild Christmas celebration. Either way I wasn’t planned. There’s 15 years difference between me and my middle brother and another 2 years to my oldest brother. Both had moved out by the time I was 4 years old so as far back as I can remember I was the only child living at home. This had its benefits as I was a momma’s boy and received special treatment that my older brothers never had. But that’s not what this story is about.
My oldest brother moved to Vancouver British Columbia when I was 8 or 9 years old and I didn’t get to see him much since I lived with my parents in Cornwall, Ontario. For those of you unfamiliar with Canadian geography, that’s roughly 4,500 KM or 2800 miles. I did make the trip when I was 10 years old and again at 15. The latter of these two is where my story takes place.
My brother was getting married on December 27th, 1984 and my parents and I made the trip to Vancouver for the wedding. I remember it was 1984 because for Christmas my brother gave me a cassette tape by some dude I had never heard of before called Bruce Springsteen. I remember being confused when I opened it and wondering why would I, a Canadian, want a cassette titled “Born In The U.S.A.” although I do admit, there were a few catchy tunes on it.
Anyway, we had a great Christmas, the wedding was beautiful and then my brother and new sister in law were off for a few days of honeymooning before returning on New Year’s Eve.
Now, My grandmother and uncle lived in Victoria BC which is on Vancouver Island. They had moved there a few years earlier and we hadn’t seen them since. Nanny wasn’t well enough to attend the wedding so we made arrangements to visit them while the newlyweds were away. Vancouver Island is accessible only by air or water and since my dad had rented a car for our stay, we decided to take the ferry. Shortly after debarking on the island we encountered stoppage in traffic.
Now let me debunk a stereotype of Canada. We are referred to, as The Great White North and we’re proud of the moniker. However that doesn’t mean the whole country is constantly covered in snow. We have four distinct seasons and I’ve often seen the summer weather report indicating that we we’re the warmest location in all North America. When winter rolls around not all of the country has to deal with the snow that is synonym with our grate nation. In fact other than it’s Olympic grade mountains, British Columbia rarely sees any accumulation of snow in the winter.
So my parents and I were on Vancouver Island stuck in a line of cars. A police officer came to our window and told my dad that the highway to Victoria was closed due to an unexpected snowfall. The plow used to clear the roads had broken down and it would be a couple of hours until one could arrive from another part of the island. We sat there dumbfounded. There was roughly an inch and a half of snow on the ground and yet everyone seemed to be in panic mode. My dad got out of the car and caught up to the police officer. My mom and I watched them talk for a bit and then the police officer call for someone. A couple of minutes later a small group of police officers were gathered around our car talking to my dad. They walked around looking at our car and then nodded to my dad. He got back in put the car in gear and a police officer directed him onto the shoulder where we proceeded to drive past the line of stopped cars, past the barrier the police had erected at the front of the line, and continued the 30 minute drive to Victoria with the whole highway to ourselves.
So what had happened? When my father approached the police officer and asked why the highway was closed he was told the inch and a half of snow made it too dangerous to drive on. Calmly my father told the officer that we were from Ontario and where we’re from they wouldn’t even send out the plows for this little snow. The officer called his superiors over, hence the discussion I had seen. My dad showed them his Quebec birth certificate and his current Ontario driver’s license as proof. He then showed them that our rental car was equipped with all season radials, something common nowadays but not so common in 1984. My dad always insisted on rental cards with all season radials. Convinced that the road conditions were not an obstacle for my dad, the police officers let us proceed. We drove to Victoria without a problem and had a great visit with my grandmother and uncle.
Here’s what I’ve learned.
This may seem strange to you but this story actually taught me a great business lesson. You see, in business, you don’t have to know everything in order to be considered an expert. You only need to know more than the person asking the question. My dad is a good driver, but no more so than most of the other drivers I see on the road every day, and by no means would I call him an expert driver. But to those police officers on Vancouver Island who were not used to driving on snow-covered roads, my father was just that. His credentials put him in a class of driver much higher than those officers were in, and in doing so earned him their respect and acknowledgement, and bestowed a confidence in them that we would be ok driving on their snow covered highway.
So many people in life are shackled by self-doubt. Maybe you have a great business idea but never follow through with it. You fear that because you’re not an expert, nobody will want to hear your idea. Or maybe you have a love and passion for something, a hobby perhaps, something that you could potentially turn into a great business. But you think nobody knows who I am, so why would anybody care?
You don’t need to be an expert to succeed. There are plenty of people out there with less knowledge than you that would be thrilled to learn from you. Yes, there are going to be people with better skills and qualifications, but they may not be giving back they way you can.
I recently read of a lawyer who liked to cross-stitch at the end of his busy day. It relaxed him. He was embarrassed of his pastime and kept it a secret. His aunt came to visit one day and noticed the lovely cross-stitch pieces he had in his home. She mentioned that she had trouble doing a certain stitch and no matter how many times she looked at the instruction book she couldn’t get it. He revealed his passion to her and offered to send her a video of him doing the stitch so that she could watch it over and over to get it right. He posted the video to YouTube for his aunt and to his surprise, he started getting comments from strangers saying they also had problems with that stitch and thanking him for teaching the proper method. The comments were asking if he had any other training videos? He decided to post a few more and they were all met with raving reviews. To make a long story short, after a time he quit his lawyer job and now cross stitches full time. He has a website where he sells courses and products and now earns his living doing something he loves. He admits he’s not an expert. He’s constantly learning and striving to master techniques that are currently beyond his skill level. But to his clients he is an expert, and they thank him for it.
So what’s your idea? Your passion? Do you have a skill or a hobby that others may be interested in? You may not consider yourself an expert but that’s no reason not to share your knowledge. There are people out there longing for what you can show them.
So pursue your passion and let others decide if you’re an expert.
I’m Mark Des Cotes and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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