Do you accept the rules, the tried and true, or do you experiment and find your own way?
When we first learn to cook a particular dish, we stick to the recipe, referring to it often during the process. After we’ve done it a few times, we don’t even need to look at the recipe. We not only know the ingredients, but the steps as well.
But one day we don’t have all of the ingredients handy so we decide to get creative and do our own thing. And that’s when the fun begins.
The best successes often come from a combination of following the rules and making it up as you go, and working with Monarch is no different.
When learning new skills we all start with the fundamentals – the absolute basics – and then we add to our knowledge as is necessary, often in the pursuit of accomplishing a goal or a particular requirement.
When first introduced to Monarch, we need to understand its terms, basic elements and functionality.
- How do we extract data from a report file? Every part of the program seems to scream out for your attention.
- How do we know what’s important and what we can ignore, for now? We can feel confused and unsure of ourselves, as we make plenty of mistakes early on.
- Will we ever get good at this? Constantly referring to guides and online help, it can seem as though we’re plodding through our work very slowly and that we’ll never get to where we want to be.
Then, sooner than expected, we find that we’re able to build models without looking at the help every five minutes. On the whole, we’re no longer confused by the terminology and we can more easily focus on the mechanical steps rather than asking “What does that do?” As our confidence grows we begin seeking more difficult challenges.
I remember the point at which I was catching myself initially reviewing every document that crossed my desk not for its content but instead for how I could model it in Monarch. That was the beginning of the compulsion, I suppose.
As we continue to work with Monarch, we stop thinking about the process (“First I need to ….”) and just set about doing it. So now we’re pretty comfortable, which is good, but the increases in our new Monarch skills seem to slow down somewhat.
That’s when it’s time to shake up the recipe and substitute the main ingredient with whatever that happens to be handy.
In the next post, we’ll look at a concrete example that is the result of such experimentation, and how it helps you excel with Monarch.
