Week 4 reading - chapters 9-12: Sparks

Image by Flickr user: Sadie Hernandez

What a wondrous idea of catching someone’s spark.  This is something I started doing this past week after being inspired by this book.  I have been working on a script to control Photoshop to write text on hundreds of images and now I’m going to try and see if the script can capture the file names in a folder to see if it can apply those names to a list I’m programming dynamically.  This is all written in JavaScript and one of my co-workers loves writing code, so earlier this week I asked if he wanted to help out with it.  Sure enough he lit up and was ready for the task.

Later on that day we had a meeting about upcoming multimedia online trainers we were to develop and the topic of development came up.  Normally my task was to do most of the work – video editing, audio recording/editing, GUI (graphical user interface) design, etc, but suddenly I thought about the sparks and offered my tasks to whoever wanted to do them or help out.  There was a whole room of sparks.  Programmers with no experience in video editing or storyboard writers that wanted to do 3D modeling jumped up asking to learn so they can enter into a new world.  I could see a new realm of possibility open up and I can imagine that my co-workers saw the same too.  I came from an office environment where you were only allowed to do your job title, but now I am working with others to exchange skills and ideas.  It’s like an RPG.  Sure I can’t become a red or blue mage in the office, but I can surely give the magical powers of 3D modeling and animation, and in return I get a stronger relationship with my co-workers and as a bonus I get to light some sparks!

So, what am I doing to pay-forward from my universe of possibility?  I am giving others at work a chance to do something exciting and something they love so that their lives may be enriched.  This book rocks!

“Sparks.” by Flickr user Sadie Hernandez used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.
Website Address: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sadiediane/4235516449/