Do YOU read instruction manuals?

Last Saturday I sat down to enjoy my freshly-brewed cup of coffee, and a thought hit me like a lightning bolt - I am almost 40 and I only just recently started reading instruction manuals.

May be a pride thing:

"Instruction manuals? HA! That's for people who are too dumb to figure it out for themselves, I know I can play around with it to discover all the functionalities - that's half the fun!"

Or carelessness:

"This thing came with an instruction manual? Oops, I threw it out with the box."

Be it as it may, the years have passed, and brought with them the wisdom we expect.

I now read the manuals, and wish I started doing so sooner. My earlier justification for not reading manuals boiled down to:

"Life is too short to read manuals. Those things are boring and self-explanatory."

Years later my thoughts now look like this:

"Life is too short not to read manuals. We miss out on so much that we have already paid for if we do not at least skim through these boring (but informative) little pamphlets"

We can always figure things out with time, by pushing every button. But as devices have unquestionably become more intelligent, reading the manual may finally be more justifiable than ever.

May 2017: my coffeemaker died on me. After years of faithful service, I un-ceremoniously chucked it in the bin and proceeded to replace it with a younger, fresher one (see picture).

I admit a couple of weeks past before I mustered the willpower to read an instruction manual... for a coffeemaker. After all, I would like to consider myself tech-savvy enough to not have to study a document like this.

Glad I did.

Turns out it has a "strong brew" setting, which is engaged after I press the button with the cups on it for 3 seconds before turning the round brew button on.

No matter how much I used it and messed with it, I would have never found that out, had I not read the manual - I would have drank weak coffee for years, not knowing any better (the humanity!!!).

Too often I hear people say that they do not need any training on using G Suite. They have already mastered all that could possibly be useful for them. G Suite is a very user-friendly suite of tools, and they already figured it out - going any deeper would be a waste of their time...

Having taught TOK in classrooms for years, I am saddened when I run into this sort of mentality. This complacency in settling for what we know, and not wanting/willing to go further has got to be the single biggest obstacle to progress - both as individuals and as a species.

One of the cool things about working with Google is how fresh and dynamic the environment is. There is a constant, steadily accelerating stream of innovation that keeps us on our toes. Using web apps as software, we are on the bleeding edge, always on the latest and greatest (as opposed to working with the stale comfort that, say, MS Office 2008 offers). I never stop learning, not only because I have to (my line of work forces me to constantly geek out), but because it is SO satisfying to learn new stuff - I remember when I learned to do the "Import Range" function on Google Sheets I experienced an utter nerd-gasm.

Learning is fun!

If that alone is not enough to motivate you to learn, then try this:

Learning is profitable!

It is hard to imagine what we do not know is possible, but imagine what it could do for your team if you and everyone around you was all of a sudden much better at using G Suite (Google Apps). The things you could do! The time (and money) you would save! The awesome "oh-I-didn't-know-you-could-do-THAT!" moments you would have! The knowledge you would share and delight in!

I will leave you with this thought; do you want to look back a few years from now and think, "if only we had learned to use our technology correctly..."? It is never too late to dive in and bask in the knowledge of Google goodness :-)

Contact Cloud Lion. We work with US and Canadian customers and are Google certified to bring you the very best of G Suite training and change management strategies. Let's talk about what we can do for you and your team.

...Now, back to my "strong-brewed" coffee.

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PS. You can take the horse to the water, but you cannot make it drink. Some of you out there may simply not be ready to start reading manuals. You will continue to explore and be curious and love learning, but simply hate the manuals. That's OK. My two cents of practical advice: always play around with the settings. Look for these icons, and dive deep:

The gear / tractor wheel

The three Adidas stripes / the hamburger menu (more visible in mobile devices or older versions of Chrome).

The three dots / stoplight.

Now go break stuff!