The Stupidity Manifesto
LET’S STOP MAKING EACH OTHER FEEL STUPID. Instead, let’s…
- ENCOURAGE EVERYONE TO ASK QUESTIONS
- Lead by example: Be honest when we’re confused
- Value curiosity over knowledge
- Prioritise clarity over jargon
- Remember we all forget stuff
- Get excited about teaching and learning
- Acknowledge the broad range of knowledge in our industry, and avoid judging someone if their knowledge doesn’t match ours
- LET’S STOP MAKING EACH OTHER FEEL STUPID.
I appreciate this sentiment a great deal in general, but sometimes it is difficult to uphold when I have to regularly deal with “time vampires” who not only require that I explain the same thing to them over and over again beyond reason but who also show no willingness or ability to actually learn the thing that I am explaining to them; at some point I just run out of patience and start ignoring them to the extent that I am able.
The way I see it, explaining others also helps me understand it better. If its so basic (or too advanced) that I get nothing out of explaining, then I leave it to better suited people to help them instead. Being on these kindsa forums, its supposed to be enjoyable for both the teacher and the student. I don’t see any shame in dropping it as soon as it turns frustrating.
There’s a saying - if you want to learn something then teach it (even to a rubber duck ;-) ).
This may not apply to your situation, but I found that most of my problems like this were related to “general vs specific”.
Many people have difficulty generalizing from specific instructions so they need help every time something looks different to them. In an extreme case, found a person unable to choose a font in the header of a word processing document because the only thing they’d ever been shown was how to choose a font in the body of the document. It’s not even that they were particularly dense, it’s that they’d seen so much unexpected and unexplained variation in other areas that they started assuming that everything is an isolated task with a potentially distinct set of procedures. Now that I’ve switched from Windows to Linux, I’m getting a better understanding of how that happens, with many applications using different hotkeys, not implementing what I think are sensible “tab ordering”, etc.
Many people have difficulty going from the general to the specific without also seeing several specific examples in a variety of scenarios. That kind of thing normally requires more formalized training. If their only exposure to your knowledge is through ad-hoc help desk kinds of interactions, there will be no opportunity to put everything together.