I was listening to a pod cast by Michael Hyatt, who was celebrating his 100th podcast episode { congratulations }, and he said "I kind of believe if it ain’t broke, break it." I'm writing this week to say that I believe the same thing.
Often times, as programmers or someone in any profession, we tend to air to the side of caution when approaching the task of trying something new. After all, what we've done has worked good so far. Why change it? I certainly was a firm believer in this theory. I remember one time as a programmer in my earlier days I was asked what I thought about a certain up-and-coming technology. I said without thinking that I didn't care for it. That what I was doing was working just fine. In this instance, the up-and-coming technology was Linq. For those non-technical people, Linq provides a way for programmers to look through data directly in their own language, such as C# or Visual Basic. For programmers like me, it opened a whole new realm of possibilities. Now eventually I did learn to use Linq, which led me to it's more attractive kissing-cousin { maybe a bad analogy but it sounds good } the Lambda Expression. This new technology allowed me to select, filter, join and compare any collection of objects very easily and quickly. Something I would have never been able to do using my old methods.
So the outcome of this story is simple. I tried something different and it worked. Now maybe at first it didn't seem like a good choice, as I would have been able to knock out any task quickly with what I already had pre-written. But by learning something new, I allowed myself to expand in my knowledge and understanding of how certain things worked. By forcing myself to step out of my comfort zone, I was able to grow.
Working is not necessarily moving forward. If a clock is working, it's really just spinning in circles. Try something different. Break away from the path of 'working' and break stuff. You'll be glad you did... no matter what walk of life you're on.
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