Exploring what I know to learn something new

After reading an article tweeted by Tobbe Ryber I made an interesting connection...

Wouldn't a profile similar to what was described in the article be possible to create using Louise Perold's Test Planner from Let's Test?

So I quickly tried it ending up with the following columns:

Problem: What problems would I be able to solve for a company?
How: How do I act/what do I do to solve the problems I say I can solve?
Success: How would my work benefit the company? What will come of it?
Failure: How do I usually screw up / fail to meet expectations (incl my own)?
Data: What usually varies between companies I've worked for (how has that changed my success/usefulness)
Issues: What do I typically need from the company to function well?

When doing this I suddenly thought: Maybe the same approach could be useful when planning my CAST presentation? Or maybe when talking about the way forward with the product I test? Or maybe my travel to Madison? Or...

Well, I've just spent a moment thinking about this so it might be crap but I still find it interesting that something I learned specifically for testing seems to be useful in so many other contexts.

Thank you Louise for providing me with an interesting tool that seems to be useful in very many cases! (give me a day and the number of ways to use it will have grown substantially... I think .)

So how can I apply what Ilari, Huib, Jean-Paul, James, Johanna, Leo, Griffin, John, Steve, Zeger and Scott talked about in something else but testing? I'm inspired to figure that out next...

And how can you use what you learned in other ways than described/intended by the presenters? And what can you learn from doing that?

... Even more interesting: What, currently not test related, have you learned that could help you improve your testing?

Good luck exploring what you already know to learn something new!