Kim Gaskill reflects on a day with no spark and helping a friend through repeated failures submitting to Alexa flash briefings. She explores what persistence and failure teach you when nothing seems to work.
It's a new day. I'm Kim Gaskill and this is the Daily Spark. Today I had no spark. None. Nada. Nothing. I'm laying there in bed watching the minutes tick away on the clock thinking, "Man, it's getting late. I got to get my flash briefing done." But I have nothing to talk about. Nothing is sparking me today. Even all my little animal friends out here in the open lot outside my window aren't giving me a spark. Nothing new that I see. I've been in the same room for 6 weeks and I'm thinking, did I lose my spark? Is there nothing that's gonna spark a thought in me today? And then I got a message. I got a message from a friend that I've been helping with the flash briefing for over a month now.. And it keeps getting denied and it keeps failing for something. We'll fix that problem, resubmit it, and then it fails for something else. We'll fix that, resubmit it, and it fails for something else. And it's been very frustrating. And several times my friend has wanted to just give up, throw her hands up, say, I'm done. It's not meant to be. I'm not gonna do it. Let's just forget it. And I wouldn't allow it. I kept pushing. To the point of being very annoying, but I wanted to see it through for her, for the people that will benefit from it, and for myself. And yesterday she realized— she made the comment to me that she realized how much she has learned through this process of all of these failures about flash briefings and about the process of submitting a flash briefing and about the technology behind the Alexa and these devices and these codes. And so it was interesting this morning when she said it's finally approved. Yay! I'm so excited, and I'll talk more about that next week. But it's very interesting to see the change in Both her and I, now that it's approved and looking back on all those failures, as we talked about yesterday, we learned so much through that. And that's like everything in life. If we look at the failure and don't look at the opportunity to learn something in that failure, we've missed something very important because all the failures that we have teach us something. We learn best by failing, even though it's not pleasant and we may not see it while we're in it. If we keep an open mind and we allow those lessons to come in, I can guarantee you we're gonna use that lesson that we learned somewhere down the road. So don't focus on the failures, keep an open mind, and I'll catch you again tomorrow for another Daily Spark.
