Why Reinvent the Wheel?

The other day I received an email from a peer with the following inquiry,?

“I thoroughly enjoyed your bit last week about the backup plans. Short and to the point. Did you start with the idea and story to be short or did you start with a bigger idea and then pare it down? Either way, I would love to learn how you do this.”

I happily got on a video call with him and walked him through the process my team and I had used to identify concepts, define their component parts, and break down those parts into consumable pieces:

I also walked him through the electronic workbook I’d set up to capture ideas and track progress. This shared spreadsheet allowed any of us on the team to add new topics, suggest what might come next, etc.?

In a matter of 20 minutes, I’d shared my process from beginning to end, answering questions he had along the way. My hope in doing this was to shorten his learning curve and to save him time as he creates a system that works for him.

And, today, I received an email from him titled, “Thank You! Thank You! Thank You!” In the message he wrote,?

“Subject line says it all. I really appreciate you taking the time to unpack your plan to ‘eat an elephant’ using digestible bites in such an organized fashion. Super helpful.”

Now, I’m not sharing this to pat myself on the back or make myself sound so magnanimous. In fact, he’s got great experience in online course building and has promised to give me some feedback on the outline I’m creating for the course I’m preparing to launch.

And that, right there, is the point I’m trying to make...we each have people in our network who are already doing, or have done, something that we’re aspiring to do. So, why create an additional obstacle by telling ourselves that we must figure it out on our own? Why make it unnecessarily hard on ourselves? Why not tap into the wisdom of those who have gone before us?