New skills & old

I'm clever. Lots of people say so, and have done all my life; it would be a mistake to assume they were always paying me a compliment, by the way.

So I've always viewed myself as 'clever' just as I've viewed myself as 'female' and 'brown-haired' - that last being less definitive as I 'mature' - without really thinking too much about what it means. Clever was just a label among a bunch of labels, and it was good or bad depending on who said it. Being brown-haired was the same. Some people like brown hair, but not a single picture book princess except Snow White ever had dark hair, and at the age of seven I worked out that was because of narrative necessity.

I looked it up in the dictionary today. In fact, 'clever' is not so much an attribute, as a skill or a practice: "mentally quick", "original", "bright", "nimble with hands or body".

You know that rush you get when you do something new for the first time? I hope you do. You only get it when you do something difficult, something you're not 100% sure you're going to pull it off... When you do, it feels great. It feels even better if you've tried several times and those attempts haven't worked.

It happened yesterday to me. That's' when I had the 'aha!' moment (also known as a Blinding Flash of the Obvious). I actually felt clever. I put a paypal button into a promotional email. [Did you just lose faith in my cleverness that I found this difficult? Or were you impressed too?]

Later, I showed a colleague how to do a couple of keyboard shortcuts. She was over-impressed, never having used them before or even known they existed. She also worried that she wasn't as quick at them as I was. Ah, perfectionism, that arch-enemy of development...

"Look, you don't think you're clever because you know the way to your kids' schools to pick them up do you?"

"No, of course not."

"That's because its something you've done a thousand times, which is why its easy and you don't have to think about it."

"Yeah..." Where are we going with this?

"Those keyboard shortcuts are like that for me. Someone showed them to me years ago, and I've used them nearly every day of my life since. If I had a dollar for every time I've used them, I'd never need to work again."

What old skill do you take for granted? What new skill could you acquire if you stuck with it through a few attempts?

This is post 3 of 100 Posts in 100 Days.