40+FAB Blog

Knowledge is great, but it does the one who possesses it no good until they decide to use it. I was reminded of this truth again today as I decided to set aside some time to automate a task that would save me having to do it manually for the next 5 months.

I had been studying how to do this for some time and had all my facts together. After about half a day, I had prepared all the excel files in the right format for upload. I hit the upload button and to my horror, I got an error message. I went into trouble shooting mode for the next hour and did all I could to make it work, but it didn’t.

As I was giving up on it and muttering to my wife how I felt I had wasted half a day, I remembered what Thomas Edison said about learning 5000 ways of how not to do something. I got up from my desk and took a short break and came back to apply persistence. Within 15 minutes, all the files were uploaded and everything worked fine.

It was not enough for me to know about persistence, when the moment it was needed came, I had to apply it remembering the lesson and the example of another who used persistence to win.

Use what you’ve learnt because it will come to mind when you need it most.