Do you want to be the best?
If you’re into sports or any type of serious competition, you’ve probably heard the phrase:
If you want to be the best, you need to beat the best
The reason this is important is that we often don’t know what we are truly capable of until pushed to our limits. To get pushed to our limits we need to be challenged by something or someone that will cause us to stretch further and get outside of our comfort zone. By definition this isn’t a relaxed, comfortable situation. That’s how we get better. On the flip side it is said of teams that are up and down:
they play to the level of their competition
As SQL Server professionals it’s easy to play to the level of our competition (i.e., our current data environment). I don’t know how many times I’ve interviewed someone with 7+ years experience with SQL Server that considers themselves a senior person, when in fact they have just had the same one year experience, 7 times.
So while attending Are you a Linchpin? Career Management Lessons to Help You Become Indispensible, I posed the question to the panel: during the ebbs and flows of their careers, how do they keep challenging and pushing themselves?
Kevin (twitter | blog) restated the question succinctly this way:
- Year 1 – Focus on Reliability/Standardization
- Year 2 – Focus on Optimization
- Year 3 – Focus on Automation
- Year 4 – Focus on lolcats (ok so Kevin didn’t specifically say lolcats)
And the question is what to do year 4. First was a motivation discussion surrounding the concept of what you do today is a down payment on tomorrow
Then came a couple suggestions:
- Ask for additional problems within your company that need solving
- Review things you worked on before, the idea being that your better now than you were 3 years ago (referencing the example above), go back and improve those first scripts you created
So let’s change 1 word of the quote to make it applicable:
If you want to be the best, you need to beat the your best
While this is more applicable, this is a tough nut to crack, and I’m always interested in how people deal with this situation. Some people create extensive labs to be able to test a multitude scenarios, some people create projects on codeplex, while others might attempt to attain some uber-certification. The point is to continually challenge yourself and improve.
As part of this discussion, it’s important to understand how you learn. Personally, I learn best through discussion and just doing it. I don’t learn well from a class nor from a book. For me, classes are when I don’t even know where to begin and I use books mainly for reference. However I have known people that learn best by books, in fact I had a developer once that was able to sit by himself in the corner with a book and learn a new language in a week!
For me, this is why we have community. The discussion. Events like SQLPASS, SQLSaturday and local user groups along with tools like twitter and blogging can produce great discussions and out of those discussions can come creativity and ideas that challenge assumptions or opens your eyes to additional possibilities.
So how do you beat your best?