Opportunity is only a Sharpie Marker Away

It’s been my experience that if you are prepared to look, opportunities are everywhere. But they rarely look like doors. In fact, they usually look a lot like a wall.

When I was a technical writer, the first wall I came across was a process that required everyone to write the content for things twice – once for books and once for help systems. Being a basically lazy person, this seemed like a big waste of time – but I was told repeatedly there was no way around it and nothing I could do. So I took a page out of Harold and his Purple Crayon and stopped looking at the wall as an impediment, and started looking at it as a canvas. I grabbed a virtual sharpie marker and drew a door on that wall by coming up with a way to write the content differently so it could be used in multiple locations. Then, since content management was still unheard of at that time, I taught myself how to do scripts and OLE in Word to single source the document in multiple formats – then showed the rest of the company how to do it. I created a week-long workshop and convinced upper management to send me on a road trip around the company to deliver it to all of the writers. This in turn led to conference talks, a management position, and a patent.

In other words, I walked right through the door I drew by defining what I wanted and where I wanted to go with it then making it happen. I refused to accept the wall that was presented to me as a wall. If you want to be successful, you need to carry a big sharpie marker so you can draw your own doors on those walls and then walk through them.