‘Embrace making mistakes’: Exceptional Women of the World featuring Deborah Kilpatrick, SourceKnowledge
Exceptional Women of the World is a podcast that highlights and celebrates the great achievements, lives and POV of amazing women throughout the world of advertising, marketing, digital, tech and creativity.
Deborah Kilpatrick. vice president and co-founder of SourceKnowledge
For Deborah Kilpatrick. vice president and co-founder of programmatic tech company SourceKnowledge, based in Montreal, making mistakes is par for the course — and not something to be feared. It’s not so much just the learning but rather the ability to recover and make faster and better decisions in the future.
“I personally think that perfectionism is overrated,” she says.
Enthusiasm is something that Kilpatrick places a great premium on and is inspired by as well — especially when it comes to taking a position and defending it with rigor. She also believes that we are in a time where she believes there is less enthusiasm, which can stanch strong opinions, especially publicly. But when she sees it — and hears it — it is fuel to make it more contagious.
At the top of her “must do” list is preparation — and she believes that there is nothing more important than being prepared, no matter the interaction. Also, by being prepared, it can allow for greater exploration and more robust debate. Well-traveled, with a year living in China to her credit, Kilpatrick believes that roaming outside of ones home can create an important level of empathy and is a “must experience.” Even in her home province of Quebec, she sees ample opportunity to build positive bridges between cultures.
The big “must learn” in Kilpatrick’s book is HTML programming — something that is often spoken about, especially with the digital economy. It’s not necessarily about learning deep coding, but rather to understand some of the basic tenets to be fluent in the industry.
A voracious reader (and still a print newspaper subscriber), Kilpatrick is convinced that digging into varied works, whether fiction or non-fiction, can spark important ideas that can apply to ones life or work and make seemingly unrelated connections happen.
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