02.08.08
Work Outside Your Comfort Zone
There’s a different world outside your comfort zone!
We all live our lives within limits that we have set up or that have been set up for us by accident or design. As long as we stay within these boundaries we feel confident and safe and it may take courage to step outside the boundary. But we should all extend our boundaries from time to time to make life more interesting.
Many years ago I took a job with a company with global interests as a Design Engineer. After a time my responsibilities grew and I was required to travel to the company’s headquarters in Switzerland to discuss design ideas. Having never left the UK before, I was apprehensive but I needn’t have worried. I survived and did all that was expected of me.
After that I was called upon time and again to undertake a variety of duties in various parts of the world, often at short notice. And not always confined to my specific field of design.
In other words I was often working outside my ‘comfort zone’ but the experience was rewarding. These particular boundaries of my comfort zone became, through repetition, the norm. In this case I really had no choice if I wanted to further my career; but it’s more difficult to break out of one’s comfort zone voluntarily.
We all have our comfort zones in the field of computing but there’s no real reason for it. Many people who surf regularly, post to forums and download music files tell me that building a website would be quite beyond them. People who already have a website tell me they’ll never understand HTML, or any other programming language, or CSS, or RSS or any other of the multitude of techniques, but it’s these that make building websites so exciting; the joy of breaking out of your comfort zone - and winning.
I’ve been messing about with websites as long as they’ve been around and I try anything that becomes available once I think it’s reasonably well developed. And if I have the time!
I believe that many folk are intimidated by names put on processes by Geeks. Terms such as MySQL, permissions, Cron jobs, CGI and many others can be intimidating but if tackled one at a time aren’t difficult to understand. If you’re unsure of a term just do a search for it on Google. Wikipedia is a great resource.
Using a process, say installing a script, may take some time for the first one. Then the second will be easier and after that it’s all downhill until you wonder what the problem was. The problem was fear; fear of failure. But we all have to make mistakes in order to succeed.
When tackling something new, like installing a script, look ahead to see any possible snags and keep copies of original files before modifying them, just in case you need to backtrack. Keep notes of progress and above all persevere.