If I had to do it over.
Hi, everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com
It is interesting to take a look at where I am.
I want to say how far I've come.
Not in the sense that I was walking up some really difficult ladder.
I'm very fortunate to be where I am.
The thing is, it's not where I would have predicted.
It's not what I was thinking of when I was back in school,
and as a result,
knowing where I am today, what I do for a living today,
I would have chosen to do a couple
of things a little differently back in school, and I wanted to talk a little
bit about exactly what those things were and why.
But first, a little bit about how I got here
when I started
in high school,
I really didn't have a good sense for what it was I wanted to do for a career.
I've had some experience
playing with things.
Certainly no, I took a lot of things apart that didn't get put back together again.
I got a lot of encouragement
from a TV repair man who I've written about on my personal blog,
and the net result was that when I ended up applying to University,
I simply specified an interest in, quote, unquote electronics
with no real further clarification than that.
I kind of figured that whatever my future
held, it was probably related to electronics in some way.
Fortunately, this was early enough
in things that I want to say the entrance requirements
were lower, and I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way.
I simply mean that the demand
for getting into the College of Electrical Engineering, which is where I landed,
was lower, that they hadn't put up some
of the barriers that they put in in recent years.
Those barriers being you had to first go to the University,
perform to a certain level,
get certain grades, and then you could apply to the College
of Electrical Engineering before actually being allowed to go in now, in my case,
because I said electrical engineering on my application,
the University of Washington simply placed me there.
They put me in the College of Electrical Engineering, which was great.
So the first year or two,
not a lot going on taking the classes that were prerequisites.
But one of the classes that was a prerequisite
is a class that quite literally changed my life.
It's engineering. 141 Introduction to Fourtran Programming
it is something that I've written about
in a little bit more detail on my personal blog,
and it's one of those things where
it was a required class.
I had no expectations going in.
I had never touched a computer before going in.
So this would be like the end of 1975,
beginning of 1976, actually, apparently, in my freshman year,
it changed my life because
I loved it.
It was amazing.
In fact, the scenario that I've described
to people in the past is that I encountered programming.
I discovered that I was really good at it.
I discovered that I could help other people
taking the class at the same time, which is kind of like this really weird
40 year precursor to Ask Leo.
And
the big takeaway for me at the time was
not only did I love it was I was good at it, people would pay me to do it.
I mean, it's like the perfect storm of criteria for a career.
So after I graduated, I got myself a job at a small company in Seattle.
It was small and getting smaller.
As it turns out, they went from 25 employees.
There were three people in the software Department at the time.
They manufactured a small data entry
terminal based on an eight bit microprocessor.
There were three people in the software Department when I started,
I was the software Department when I left.
But what was really interesting about that company
is that because it was so small
and especially because it was getting
smaller, I ended up becoming kind of a Jack of all trades,
and I discovered that being a Jack of all trades was a real, real asset.
Not only was I writing software, I was debugging software.
I was documenting software.
I was testing software.
I was explaining software.
I ended up writing documentation
for the software because there wasn't anybody else to do it.
It was really educational and really got
me a lot of experience in a lot of different
venues, a lot of different arenas.
A few years later, when that company was clearly
on its downturn, I ended up applying to another company
that happened to be local to the Seattle area that I had heard of.
And in fact, that I had used software created by that, of course, was Microsoft.
In 1983, I joined Microsoft.
In fact, that was my introduction to
networking and the Internet, or what at that time was the Nascent Internet
that would end up defining again the rest a lot of the rest of my career.
My first email address, for example, was an Atmicrosoft dot com email.
I learned about a lot of different things.
Once again, being a Jack of all trades turned out to be a very
interesting, lucrative
handy characteristic to have.
I was not only writing software, although there were other people
around to do things like testing and documentation and so forth.
What really ended up happening is that I ended up leveraging a lot of communication
skills at that point because especially when you work for a large
company, especially a company that's growing at the rate Microsoft was.
In those days, you end up communicating with a lot of people.
I ended up writing a couple of magazine articles.
I ended up writing a lot of internal documentation.
I ended up managing people,
which was another skill that I ended up acquiring while I was there.
And it was again, a really good time that once again allowed me to exercise
a lot of different skills in a lot of different ways
that were more than just programming a computer.
So of course,
eventually I left Microsoft in 2001.
A couple of years later, I fell in with actually right away.
But I eventually started to ask Leo.
In 2003, what had happened was I fell in with a bunch of Internet
entrepreneurs, a bunch of people who were at the beginning of what the Internet
would turn into the Internet that we now know.
And they were basically one of the first groups of people to be actively
developing, designing
and building, not just online businesses but lifestyles
that revolved around having an online business.
And that's ultimately
what caused Ask Leo to be created. In the now 18 and a half years since then,
Ask Leo has grown, it's been around.
I've got thousands of articles written
on all sorts of different questions that have happened over that period of time.
What I said back then is still true today.
There is no shortage of computer questions.
There are no shortage of opportunities
for people who can communicate the answers to those questions to help people through
the difficulties that they have with technology.
So one of the realizations that I had some
years ago is that, yes, I was a software engineer.
I wrote software. I still play with technology.
I love doing it, but I have become a writer.
In fact,
if we go all the way back to my first days
at my first company, I'd always been a writer
in that first company.
I wrote a newsletter.
I wrote documentation because there was
nobody else to do it, and it was relatively good. At Microsoft.
I had written a couple of technical
articles that got published in a couple of Microsoft's magazines.
They had technical magazines at the time.
I wrote lots and lots of internal email.
Remember, email is writing
and that's something that I took to heart very early on.
I didn't think of it as my job.
I didn't think of it as being a writer.
I was a software engineer, but being a software engineer involved
a lot of writing to people because you don't develop software in a vacuum.
You deal with other people.
So where does that lead me to if I had to do it all over again,
if I could talk to my high school self
40-mumble years ago,
I would have taken more
writing classes.
I would have spent more time paid better attention
in English class.
I would have taken Latin
instead of Spanish.
As of quote, unquote foreign language.
My school did offer Latin
because Latin really does help
understand
written English.
I was a writer. I am a writer today,
and had I known that that would have been not only my destination but such a strong
component of everything that I was doing throughout my professional career,
I would have spent more time learning how to be a better writer from day one.
Now, one of the problems, of course, is that back in school,
I hated writing with passion,
which is odd when you think of how much I actually enjoy writing today.
It dawned on me again.
One of these revelations that happens
between then and now is that it wasn't writing, that I hated
it. It was writing about things
that I didn't know, things that I didn't understand,
and most importantly, things that I really didn't care about.
You know what school is like, right?
One of the ways they force you to prove
that, you know, something is to have you write about it.
Well, if it's something you don't care about and certainly something you don't
know about, but you're forced to write about it,
that's going to give you a very negative impression about writing as a technique.
Writing as a skill.
It's not the writing.
That was a problem for me.
It was the writing about the stuff I didn't care about.
Once I started writing about things that I
knew, things that I understood and things that I enjoyed writing about technology,
it came to me pretty naturally.
I still would have benefited from the skills had I learned them back in school.
But there it is. I didn't.
I had to make it up as I was going along
rather than coming at it with a strong set of skills out of school.
One of the other revelations,
and it's something that I actually try to get across.
And it's one of the reasons that I share
this story of my own is that we are all writers.
I don't care what you do for a living.
I don't care where you do it.
I don't care
what it is you think your job is.
Your job may be that absolutely don't get me wrong.
I'm not saying it's not your job, but you are a writer.
Whether you're writing emails, whether you're writing notes,
whether you are someone that publishes or not, that doesn't really matter.
What matters is that we now communicate through the written word
that can be email.
It can be texting.
It can be
posting on forums.
It can be anything that you currently see yourself typing or
on your mobile phone typing in or, however it is, you cause text to be entered.
You're a writer.
Why does that matter so much?
Well,
here's the thing,
as you might imagine, because people ask me questions
in written form.
I see a broad spectrum of writing ability.
And to be honest,
there are people
asking me questions
who couldn't write their way out of a paper bag.
They have no way.
They don't have the skills to make what it is.
They're thinking what it is.
They're saying what it is.
They want to ask
coherent.
It's really unfortunate. Now, I do have to have a little aside.
Here.
One of the skills that I've developed over the years is that I get a lot of questions
from overseas, from people for whom English is not their native tongue.
I understand that.
And honestly, it's actually
not that difficult to tell when somebody is in that situation.
It's very interesting and maybe a discussion for another day.
But it's not that difficult to tell when I
see something that's written to see whether it's actually someone
who is writing English because it's their second language or not their native
tongue, or someone for whom English is their
primary language, and they just can't write worth of darn.
The difference
is stunning in many cases.
And the ESL people, the English is second language people.
I cut a lot of slack. I do.
I have a tremendous amount of patience for that because ultimately,
one of the little factoids about me is
that English is technically my second language.
I only spoke Dutch until I was three because that's what was spoken at home.
Once I
turned three, the neighbor lady taught me English.
I went to school in the United States, so I learned American English throughout,
which is why I speak English like a native.
But the fact is, it's my second language.
Now, the folks that I have a lot of frustration about are the folks
who should be able to speak English as their first language
and can't write worth a darn.
That's really frustrating.
And of course, it's frustrating for me because I'm trying to interpret
the questions, and that makes it really difficult for me.
And on days where I have less patience
than others, that's one of the criteria that I might use to skip a question.
It's not fair.
I will grant you that because I don't know, of course,
how people arrive at that lack of skill, that lack of writing ability.
But here's the thing.
It matters.
It is not fair, but you are being judged by the way you write.
There was a vocabulary product several years ago.
I just remember the ads for it and their tagline.
Their sales line was to say, people judge you by the words you use.
It's true.
It's not fair.
I'm not going to say it's fair in any way,
shape or form, but it's also out of your control.
What is in your control is your ability to communicate and communicate.
Well, what is in your control is to write clear, written English.
Even English
is not fair.
But the fact is,
and I think a lot of people outside of the United States,
outside of the Englishspeaking world understand this is that a tremendous
amount of information on the Internet is in English.
A tremendous amount of the resources
available on the Internet like ascalio are in English.
You are communicating to them and reading their information in English.
I get it.
I'm not going to say it should be.
It shouldn't be in your native tongue.
But the fact is, it is what it is, and that just strengthens the argument
that you really want to be able to read and write English proficiently
and clearly so that you are more able
to express yourself or ask your questions in a way that will be understood.
I know, even as a writer today, even as someone who does this now
for a living, I think I've got relatively decent skills.
I still wish they were better.
I still wish that I had spent more time in school
understanding and writing and learning how to be a better and clearer writer.
If you're in a situation
where you can learn from my experience.
Please
do that.
Sign up for the extra English class and pay attention.
Know that writing about stuff you don't
care about, it's part of the price you pay.
I guess.
Write about something else.
Find excuses to write about things you do care about.
I think you'll find you're having a lot more fun.
I know that's exactly what happened to me.
It doesn't have to be technology for you.
It could be whatever it is.
But the bottom line is every time you write,
be it a paper, an article, a blog post or an email.
Remember, it's a skill that the better you develop that skill,
the more influence you'll have,
the better you'll be understood, the more confident you will feel
about how you communicate with others around you,
the better you'll be judged.
I hope this has been helpful. My experience,
like I said, it took me 40 plus years to get here, right doesn't have to for you.
You can
take these lessons and hopefully
improve on your written skills.
For updates to this article, which has been around for a while.
This isn't you.
This is the first time I'm recording this kind of a video on it.
The article has been around for a while.
For updates for related links for comments, and all that stuff, I'm on
askleo.com.21960. I'd love to hear what you have to say about this.
This is so incredibly important in my opinion.
Until then, I'm Leo Notenboom, this is askleo.com