A nugget of wisdom from a teacher
Being married to a teacher has some perks. One obviously is a long summer break, and we certainly benefited from that this year. Lucretia and I went to Germany, and she got a lot of stuff done around the house. She was finally able to spend a lot of time getting started on her five-year gardening plan.
Other perks include not having to be the one to know all the answers (in fact, I’m quite sure I will know none of the answers) when your child asks for help with the homework. We’ll see how that one will pan out.
One more advantage I have come to appreciate is this: just by talking to Lucretia about her day-to-day experiences of interacting with the kids, never having enough time to plan for lessons, and being sandwiched between politics of the administration, parents, and the colleagues, I am able to sometimes get some good nuggets of wisdom from her because she has a unique perspective as a teacher.
Here’s something she recently blurted out, describing the process she used to write a welcome letter to parents for the coming school year: “Beg, borrow, steal; Don’t reinvent the wheel.”
I immediately loved it because it rhymed! Obviously the wheel part is an old cliché, but I liked that she added the first part to emphasize that it’s OK to base your work on someone else’s work. The concept itself is not a new one, and maybe that’s why her quote feels even more appropriate.
Working as an IA in a design/tech agency, I sometimes feel the pressure to innovate. Do something nobody else has done. Be the first one to spot a trend. Or say that a trend jumped the shark. Come up with a clever acronym. Create a kick-ass work product that communicates the site structure and user flow in a way nobody else has thought of before… What? But seriously, a site map is a site map, and a wireframe does its job because people have learned how to read it. Of course I add tweaks here and there, constantly trying to improve incrementally, or customize for a certain type of client, etc. But the essence is the same, and that’s because it works. I didn’t come up with this stuff, and I sure won’t be too proud to steal a new idea from someone if it’s better.
Lucretia’s quote reminded me that it’s all about sharing and keeping an open mind. If you’re too eager to be the first one to do this or that, you might move on too quickly and miss out on a cool application of an existing tool. Or spend too much time, trying too hard, when an existing solution will do fine. Just relax… Let the few geniuses innovate. The rest of us can still get good work done by borrowin’ and stealin’ from them.
(After I posted I found this. Nice sharing…. Plus it has another catchy phrase appropriate for this post: Fake it ’til you make it!)
