The title here is just a metaphor for documenting your path and making it accessible to others who will follow you.

In the course of getting this blog up and running, I encountered various problems with system administrative actions that would not respond. System re-installs, patching, etc. did not help. Various Google searches – and I am pretty good with Google – discovered several people who had similar or identical problems, but the discussion threads trailed off into nothingness. I finally found and fixed the problem, which had to do with a configuration setting.

And then, thinking of others who would travel the same path in the future, I updated one of the discussion threads I found through the Google search. (For those who are interested,  go here.)

How much time could you save others in your company by documenting and disseminating the answers to problems you have solved? Better yet, how much time will you save yourself in the future when you encounter the same problem, yet cannot quite remember the particulars of the solution?

This reminds me of one of the phrases I use in our project management class. “Lessons learned usually aren’t.” The point being that many people beat the dead horse about what went wrong, but never take the next steps to deconstruct the problem, define actions to fix it, and execute them.

Help somebody else. Help yourself. Write it down and make it available.

Thinking about this reminds me of the narrow-minded counterargument: “well, if I tell her, then she will know the answer, and then she will be ranked the same as me, and paid more, etc.” More on that later.