Help. So simple yet so many people don’t really know how to help themselves. The answers are right in front of them but they haven’t learned to look a little harder and instead fall back on having someone else do it for them.

Unfortunately all that does is create a dependency and they never actually learn to figure things out for themselves. Give a hobo food and he/she will eat for a day but teach a hobo to hunt, fish, or work like the rest of us and he/she will have something to eat every day.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love helping people. I get a great feeling of satisfaction from it, but there is a point when people are just using you. I don’t like to be used, makes me feel dirty. :twisted:

I think the most common problem I come across is failing to use the “Help” feature in whatever software is involved with the problem. People ask, “Hey, how do I do this?”. I know the answer, it’s a simple answer, but if I tell them, they will just ask me again another time.

Instead I ask them, “Did you look at the Help section?”. 95% of the time the answer is no and 80% (or more) of the time, they find the answer themselves using the Help section. Next time, don’t bother me until you have at least made an effort to figure it out yourself.

So step 1 to being a do-it-yourselfer is use the Help section/feature. For more complicated problems the Help section can and will likely fail you (doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try though). In instances such as those…stop…think…and use the wealth of knowledge at your fingertips (the internet).

A large majority of questions I get, I don’t actually know the answer to. I do, however, use the internet to my advantage and quite well. My first response to something I don’t know, Google It! 9 times out of 10 I can find the solution or answer to the problem or question within minutes (often times seconds) with a quick search on Google.com

This gets very tiring though. I am just relaying information (and learning something in the process) that I don’t really care about. So step 2 is go searching through the internet for a few minutes, read and dig for information.

Once you have done those two steps, you are almost there! The last step is the easiest. Gather and organize your information. It drives me crazy when someone comes to me for help with only half the story. It takes me longer to help/solve and agitates me.

So, three simple steps to taking a giant step towards smart (and becoming smarter by learning from your probems).

  • Step 1 - use the Help feature/section
  • Step 2 - research/search through the internet (Google it!)
  • Step 3 - gather information about the problem and organize it (helps everyone)

Nobody wants to be pinned as being stupid but only you can prevent forest fires…oops, I mean only you can prevent stupidity. ;-)