1 Story from Experience
On my first day working a new job as a System Administrator, things were going well. I started to learn the System Architecture and Job Policies, started orienting myself getting all my admin accounts made for the various Admin Systems we had. Things felt familiar and I was getting a good handle on learning the ropes of everything.
Then towards the end of the day, after setting up my workstation, I tried to rename my computers hostname to signify it was mine. I did it fairly quickly because it was a common thing I knew how to do. What I didn’t realize was I actually logged in to the remote desktop to our Active Directory Server when I did it, renamed the hostname of the virtual server and immediately disabled everyone who tried to log into the computers.
Luckily, we were able to set it back and after allowing some time for propagation, people were able to log back in again. Needless to say, I was horrified. My First day wasn’t looking so great. Taking down a vital piece of equipment when I was specifically hired to make it run more smoothly. My Managers had a good laugh about it, not enough harm was done to really result in any real discipline. It’s almost as if it was always meant to happen so that I could have this story to tell.
“Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?” Thomas J. Watson - CEO IBM
2 Ideas from Me
If you aren’t failing at Life, you’re doing it wrong. Failure is a part of life and one of the biggest and fastest ways for us to learn things we need to learn. Take risks and action towards the life you want. You don’t want to finally get age 65 and realize that your biggest regret was working most of your life so that you could afford the last 20 years of your life.
Books are great. One person takes everything about one aspect of their lives, years and years of knowledge and easily condense it down into ~300 pages of pure wisdom. Blogs and Social Media can be educating, but books are like a Feast of information for the low usual cost of $9.99 and you’d still probably would get more out of it than a month’s Netflix Subscription.
3 Quotes from Others
“If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.” - Ken Robinson
“Giving up is the only sure way to fail.” - Gena Showalter
“Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” - Denis Waitley