I was sitting at the bar at my favorite Nashville burger shop, laptop open, working away catching up on my day job. The waitress came back and asked
“Working on anything interesting?”
Caught in the middle of something, I replied overly sincerely:
“No~~~!”
She recoiled, looking like she’d just broken my heart.
I tried to recover, explaining what I was working on, just to make it clear I wasn’t snapping at her for asking and was open to chat.
“I’m writing educational software, but today they have me just adding tools for searching through videos. I’m literally adding filters for filters. Who cares about that?!”
But then something new happened in my brain. The speaking skills I’ve been studying these past 2 years kicked in and I saw something I hadn’t before.
I dove back in:
“If you think about it though… this will save each student 3 or 4 minutes of time. One at a time they wont care? But over the 50,000 students that will use this, that ads up to a huge extra amount learned. Smarter people and a stronger community.”
Her look of ‘oh sorry’ turned into a happy grin.
We had a much better conversation after that. She shared about her struggles in college with time, always desperate for more. It was a nice chat. I got to know a bit who she really is and what matters to her.
Then leaving for my truck I realized I was smiling too. This new level of speaking skills had let me realize something good about my work that I would have never noticed before.
These skills were making my world a more beautiful place.
