"I'm embarrassed to say," I said, "that I've never done that before.
But," I quickly added, "give me a minute. I'll figure it out."
It doesn't matter too much what "that" was. As an editor, I am always
coming upon things, technical and otherwise, that I have never done.
Different projects have different requirements, and short of spending
days just trying things, you will not necessarily encounter everything
in the projects you do. But I digress.
So, I made this confession, feeling, for just a moment, unqualified at
my edit station. And then I Googled my question, and called a fellow
editor, and within moments, I had not only learned the "that," I had
also repeated it ten times and taken a screen shot of it for future
reference. In the course of fifteen minutes, I had taken something I was
embarrassed not to know, and turned it into something brand new for my
bag of tricks. All because I was brave enough to say I didn't know,
quick enough to look up a solution, and humble enough to ask for help.
Sometimes, the key is not how long you've been doing something, or how
much you know. Sometimes it's how you handle what you DON'T know that
is the true test.
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