Know What You Don’t Know

The past several days I’ve been working on getting a new directory script I tripped upon up and running. The script is one of the better directory scripts I’ve run into (and I’ve played with tons of them) but I still had to learn how it worked to know what I could and couldn’t tweak and to customize it to my liking. I also ran into several issues that I had to go to the support forums and dig for answers to determine what was up and test and tune so to speak.

I know what I know — and whenever I work on a new script or application, I am made aware of how much I don’t know. I guess that has what has kept this fun for me — the whole playing with new things, coming across problems, facing them head on and resolving them. By doing so I am constantly learning something new. In the past 48 hours I learned all kinds of new details in regard to PHP, .htaccess files, MySQL databases and Apache servers. How exhilarating!

Unfortunately, I don’t run into many who approach learning new things as I do. Many tend to “tune out” the moment they run into something that they don’t quite understand why it isn’t working as they perceived it should. While others will trivialize the complexity of the issue by making comments that it’s easy “but I just don’t have time to tackle that right now.” That let’s me know they know what they don’t know — they just don’t want to admit it.

I tripped on a post today titled: Acknowledge What You Don’t Know

Give it a read and then…. don’t trivialize not knowing, don’t try to hide behind other excuses as to why you don’t know — just don’t know. And that’s A.O.K!

At your service,
Judith