When I was a senior in high school my dad taught Emergency Medicine to my science class. At the end of the school year we were all certified EMTs. One of the things he taught us is how to announce our abilities. If you come across an accident, you spot the person in charge and go to them and clearly say “I have Emergency Medical training!”
This lets them know that they have a resource available to them, and they have no other way of knowing.
This last Sunday someone on twitter put out a call to action to anyone who works in ecommerce. People from a wide variety of ecommerce companies, companies that are traditionally competitors, all joined a new Slack and built a website full of information to help brick and mortar stores move online in this time of economic struggle.
As is common on many Slack instances, there’s an introduction channel. You join and then the first thing you do is state who you are and what you do. I noticed someone join and then say this:
I can help with everything that touches an ecommerce site, from tech, processes, sales management, operations, warehouse management, etc. I have ran and or built, $2M, $30M and +$500M ecommerce sized operations in B2B and DTC.
I was struck that in almost any other context this would come across as terrible arrogant, but in this case it’s exactly what needed to be said. He didn’t say anything more than that, he simply got to work, and that’s awesome.
He did the equivalent of what my Dad taught us to do. When there’s a disaster, clearly announce what you’re good at, and get to work.
What are you good at?
