“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” ~ Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
This post actually has nothing to do with beginnings. Or endings for that matter. What it really has to do with is the rabbit hole that is the internet, and how I don’t think that such a bad thing.
It’s happened to all of us. We start by trying to find movies times for Saturday night, only to realize six hours later that we’ve learned three new recipes for chicken pot pie. We’ve all be victims. Hell, there’s even a game to be played if you think you’ve got a knack for this type of thing.
But what’s this got to do with my beloved Salesforce?, you might ask. Well, I’ve found the Salesforce version of the black hole (with it’s own twist, of course). It’s the Answers boards! To keep my technical skills sharp, I try to spend at least an hour or two a week (maybe while my husband is killing the victim-du-jour on the Xbox) answering questions. I’m no match for SteveMo (who just passed 20,000 answers), but I’m not half bad.
There are hundreds of questions to answer. And like life, there’s usually than one right answer. So there is this innate communal sharing of best practices. And then there are the trickier questions – these are the ones that I love. Because then I get to try building something out in my DE org, or researching in places that the original question asker may not know to look. And this is where the potential to find gold exists. Imagine you are an org that has never had a need to use Cases, but you want to answer a question on Case functionality anyway. You go digging for an answer and find out there are a whole slew of organizations using cases internally and wouldn’t that make so much sense at your company? Of course it would. Jackpot!
Some folks may think of internet black holes as time-wasters. But personally, I think they are great mental breaks that can enhance our brain power. And guess what? I’m not alone. So thanks for letting this post be a mini-break for you, and I hope you took a little something away today!
A force behind the force 