I just need to read this ebook before I get started. I'm waiting until next month for the webinar before I launch. I need to take this online course before I do it. Enough is enough!

It's procrastination through education

I had a laugh this morning over coffee, bacon and eggs with the talented Angus Nelson. Angus and I were gabbing away, when we both fell into the trap of recommending educational resources to help us achieve something for our businesses. Even when we had what we needed to get it done.

Illustration from Flickr by Kars Alfrink

It was hilarious because I just wrote a post about the fact that we need to stop learning and start doing. I'm not poo-pooing education specifically, I'm saying that we distract ourselves from doing the work by telling ourselves we have to learn more before we can get started.

Angus was laughing too because he just covered this topic on his podcast, Up In Your Business. In it, he said learning can be like breathing. If we spend too much time inhaling, we will eventually pass out. I love that!

Act on your knowledge. Act on what you already know.

It's fine to seek answers and to improve ourselves with new information. Just don't let the quest for more info become a distraction from getting the job done, when you already know you have what you need.

I was recently a guest on Angus' show. You can listen to that episode below. If you like it, I encourage you to subscribe to Up In Your Business in iTunes. 

If you have ever played Dungeons and Dragons, you know how annoying the process is of creating a new character. You have to roll the dice countless times in order to determine the level of your player's characteristics. 

I used to play D&D all of the time when I was a kid. My first computer was a TRS-80, the one by Tandy from Radio Shack with the cassette tape recorder for a disk drive. I've never considered myself a programmer, but I know enough HTML and CSS to be dangerous (hardly). 

One day, a million years ago, I was flipping through PC Magazine and discovered a simple script in BASIC to randomly draw numbers. Bingo! I created a program my friends and I could use to help us generate new characters for D&D on the fly. We just fired up the program, entered the character's name, hit the return key, and presto. The new character would instantly print out from my tiny POS-style printer. We could get right back to playing. 

Now, a million years later, I encourage both of my kids to code. Code.org is a great starting point for all children. If you are a parent or you have kids in your life, you must check it out. 

Programming is a basic literacy in the digital age

Two years ago, I bought my kids a MakeyMakey. It's a wonderful piece of hardware that plugs into your USB port. You attach alligator clips to inanimate objects like Playdoh or bananas to create remotes. These remotes replace what the keyboard would otherwise do. Here's Sam playing his banana piano. 

Banana jamming #makeymakey

A video posted by Dave Delaney (@davedelaney) on Apr 5, 2014 at 11:23am PDT

Last Summer Sam attended a camp to learn Scratch, which is a free programming language from MIT designed for kids. They programmed their own Pong-style games and used MakeyMakey as the controllers. It was awesome. 

This year we will be getting a Raspberry Pi, which is a tiny, inexpensive computer that can be used to learn programming through cool, little projects. It's time to take my kid's coding skills to the next level. I can't wait to get geeky and to start playing with the device. Teaching them is bringing out the kid in me. 

Programming is a basic literacy in the digital age. Are you teaching your kids to code?