Over the past few days a couple of emails have fallen into my in-box requesting help with website design and development projects. Their arrival got me thinking.
Every time it happens, I am surprised and delighted. Perhaps I shouldn’t be.
I have been involved in website design and development for fifteen years in one shape or another - learning languages, protocols, techniques, tricks, and all manner of other things that will one day be useless (I sometimes wonder how useful a lot of it is right now).
The end product of all this reading, monkeying, and headbanging is all the things we take for granted. If I threw you in the direction of my blog, and asked you to find out how to get in touch with me, how quickly could you do that?
You’d be amazed how much thought goes into the most trivial things. Take the body text you are reading now - if you’re reading it within my blog it is being rendered in a “Serif” typeface, and has quite a bit of space between the lines. This is all by design - while I could start pontificating about typeface design and use of white space, I would anticipate that you’re about as interested in that as me cutting my toenails.
Where am I going with this?
Ah yes. Surprise that anybody regards me as “good” at anything. I guess a lot of it stems from an innate belief that anybody can do anything if they put enough effort in. This view of the world forgets that some people will have spent an inordinate amount of time learning about something, or practicing an activity - whereas others will not.
Using “those who have” might be termed “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants” - Or if you’re using me, the change in altitude might better be described as “getting a leg up”.
What am I saying?
Perhaps I’m saying that we should give ourselves a little bit more credit sometimes. We are all good at different things, know about different things, and have experience of different things. That’s what makes us all so interesting.
Well…. I think so anyway.