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Sometimes the best tech is a pencil, a notebook, and your brain.

We’re living in a time that has us thinking “everything should just be easy”. Exchanging information now happens in real time; you can video chat with a friend to receive their opinion on an outfit instantly, or edit some group work as your team members watch from an hour’s drive away. Doing our banking or ordering a pizza can be done without getting out of bed. Compared to a century ago, we are super-powered androids. All of these abilities that give us seemingly endless productivity are the reason that now, more than ever, we need to take a step back and appreciate everything that we can’t do.

We’re still unable to read each other’s minds. Even once we have the technology, who knows if we could even understand what we’d just read. In 2019, we still need to sit down, talk, plan, and revise, revise, revise. However, this is also a situation in which a blessing in disguise reveals itself. While there are obviously exceptions, most clients are fully aware that they are working with fallible human beings. Feedback is one of the greatest learning tools that we have. We perfect our skills of picking up on nuances of speech and other expressions. As we continue to collaborate, we know that in these particular instances, our “mind-reading” is a little more finely tuned.

All of this said, failure is still strong and rampant. Sometimes wires just get crossed and communication shorts out. Yet, if I could go back and tell my younger, squirrelly intern self what I know today, I’d say that every time another revision is requested, it is simply a chance to update a skill presenting itself. Whether you’re building on your writing, your listening, or even just taking a deep breath and trying again — growth is happening, and that’s so, so great. For now, these opportunities don’t come with a pop-up that let’s this growth occur in the background or sometime more convenient; so until we have the technology, let’s take some time to sit back and appreciate all that hard work that we do.