Yes, I admit it. I seem to have some sort of natural ability when it comes to getting around computers. Not that I’m a genius or something, I just don’t find it particularly difficult to learn how to handle new programs, fix unexpected issues or find a missing file. Now, I realize that many people are not like this, but lately, I’ve noticed that there seems to be two general ways of handling your computer.

When I do something on the computer, be it in Photoshop or on the net, many people ask me: “how on earth did you do that?”. And then I’ll say, “well, I don’t remember quite, something like this, or this”, and then I show them, and they usually say somthing like “what?”. My point here is not that they are unintelligent, just that they have another way of dealing with things. I don’t remember every detailed step in how to do something. I just play around with it until I find a solution, in an intuitive way.

I believe this is a bit like the difference between having learned a language as your mother tongue and having learned it in school. I can’t explain the grammatics of why a sentence sounds right or wrong, it just does. If I want to do a math problem, I might be fortunate enough to remember a general solution for this kind of problem, but it would be impossible for me to memorize the exact solution to every problem in the world.

So what I’m saying is this: if you seem to be having troubles learning new things on your computer, try to do it more intuitively. That just means, try to be a bit creative, don’t freak out if you don’t have total control of what you’re doing, and don’t be too afraid to make mistakes, within reason, of course. When I think about it, that last part might apply to other things as well. However, mistakes on the computer are often much more easy to fix then other errors. I do admit that I often miss that restart button when my life seems to crash.

Just one last tip; if you start deleting your windows folder you might have gone too far.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 at 7:20 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.