I picked up my mail at the office the other day and discovered I had won the "gigabyte" award. I must’ve missed the office meeting where they handed out the certificate, but clearly, my technical skills had been unveiled to the rest of the office. I went in for mail and walked out 3 hours later, having diagnosed several viruses and fixed several other small issues for folks on their laptops.
All the requests start the same way: "I hear you’re, like, the super tech person…" They just go downhill from there:
"And then you clicked on what?"
"Why did you click that?"
"NO, let’s not click that again…"
"Please stop clicking that. Yes, I see it keeps popping up."
"MOVE."
You put the same person in front of a blog dashboard or a Flickr page and all of a sudden, it’s like the mouse is a foreign object. Click? What’s a click?
I’m not a technical super hero. I figured it all out bit by bit, in the same way. By clicking on things and seeing what happens. Granted, I’ve been at it a while. But if you’re afraid to explore or to play, then there’s no moving forward.
So how do you overcome the fear of the click and move into the playworld, where exploring and clicking around is fun? Where it’s okay to explore, to succeed and to fail, and to generally discover that nearly anything is possible, if you eventually click on the right stuff?
