Tag: lessons learned

Before my son was born, I wondered how long it would take before I asked a truly stupid question.

Other friends had told me their stories about asking that first dumb question. One friend confessed that they called the pediatrician’s emergency line the first night home from the hospital because their child was crying. “Yeah, they’ll do that,” the pediatrician chuckled, and hung up. Another told me that they misinterpreted the doctor’s instructions before leaving the hospital. They called the pediatrician the day after they got home, reporting back that they child had pooped three times when the doctor had told them to make sure their newborn pooped once. “We meant at least once, not only once!” the pediatrician laughed. Every new parent, it seemed, asked something stupid.

I was a new dad who’d never changed a diaper before. The only thing I knew for certain was that I knew nothing. I knew I was going to ask something dumb — eventually, at least. 

It took me 45 seconds.

Ben was born, and the doctors called me over to a little scale where they were weighing Ben. I looked down at his tiny feet. They were black.

I hadn’t remembered reading anything about black feet in any of the parenting books.

So I asked them: Are his feet supposed to be black? Is that normal?

That’s when they held up a piece of paper with his tiny footprint on it. They’d pressed his feet in black ink to make the footprint.

It was the first of what would be many, many stupid questions.

But getting that first one out of the way really did help! With a baby, new stuff happens all the time, and I quickly became unafraid to ask, even when I knew the answer was going to be something obvious. I didn’t have to preface questions with, “I know this might be a dumb question, but….” I just asked.

I constantly remind myself: There’s so much I don’t know, and there’s no reason to pretend like I know everything.

Even when it feels like it might be a stupid question, I now just ask.

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That photo at top is of me the night we got home from the hospital. I’d changed about five diapers at that point. I didn’t have my technique down, but hey, I got better.

We sometimes need to make a change with the work we do. The question is: How big a change do you need to make?

Sometimes, you just need to make a shift. The change is small — you’re refocusing on something new, but it’s within the normal scope of what you’d do already.

Sometimes, you need to pivot. You’re making a big change — taking your skills and applying them to something outside your current orbit. The skills and the work might look similar, but you’re doing it in a different space.

And sometimes, you need to sunset things. You’ve done the work, you’ve learned the skills, but you’re ready for something brand new. You’re ready to shut down what you’re doing and move into a brand new field.

For my work, for instance, a shift would be changing my focus from working with newsrooms to working exclusively with non-profits. A pivot would be moving from newsletter consulting to building an agency to help newsletters grow. And to sunset would mean shutting down Inbox Collective to focus on something new.

None of these match where I’m at right now, but maybe they will be in the future. When it comes time to make a change, the big question remains: Shift, pivot, or sunset?

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That’s a photo of a sunset, taken by Dawid Zawiła for Unsplash.

I’m lucky to have a job where I learn new things every day.

Every new client brings me questions I haven’t had to answer before. Every new project introduces challenges I’ve never dealt with before. Every new year brings opportunities I’ve never had before.

And that’s just what happens at work. When I come home, being a new dad means I learn all sorts of new stuff every day — sometimes, a few new things a day. (Sometimes, that new stuff involves learning ways to not get peed on.)

You try, you do, you screw up, you learn. I’m not going to say I get smarter every day — I’m still working on that part! — but every new experience is a learning experience. You just have to be willing to see it that way.

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That photo of a bookshelf comes via Jason Leung and Unsplash.