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Superbadge Tips from my best friend! Read this before you start your first Trailhead Superbadge!

My best friends! Cousin and little brother.
I am thrilled to announce that my best friend / cousin has just started his own Trailblazer journey!  He took his first Superbadge challenge a few weeks ago, and I am excited to share his thoughts.  If you are thinking about starting your first Superbadge, this is a must read:
My cousin has garnered quite a reputation for himself in recent months. His groupies call him the Trailhead Baby. I'm not impressed. He keeps talking about his love for Trailhead. Ohana this, superbadge that, sheesh! I decided to do a little investigating and create my very own Trailhead account.

It wasn't so bad at the beginning. CRMs are actually pretty cool, Community Cloud is interesting, and I have a knack for analytics! Then I tried my first super badge: Reports and Dashboards Specialist.

What was I thinking?!? I had a great life: playing with dump trucks, picking on my little brother, and access to string cheese 24/7. Now I have this beautiful and uncontrollable addiction to Trailhead. I'm not sure what it is, but something about this new passion is beckoning me to greatness!

I learned how to import and export data, map fields, patch record Ids, create complex reports & dashboards, and manage security settings for a variety of users. But this did not come without a cost...

I spent weeks completing this challenge and had to restart multiple times in newplaygrounds
because I did something wrong or in the incorrect order. In order to help my toddling Trailhead peers, I would like to share a few pointers:

  1. Superbadges are like Trailhead modules on steroids. Modules give you a clean step-by-step list of instructions. If you follow them you can hardly fail. Superbadges on the other hand, require LOTS of thinking. They only give you basic steps and you can not complete them unless you plan and read between the lines.
  2. Before you attempt your first superbadge, you will need a notebook, a pen, a printed copy of the instructions and nerves of steel.
  3. Read the instructions, highlight important steps, and consider mapping out a step-by-step schedule for yourself. This will help you avoid completing steps in the wrong order, or creating your dashboards in lightning when they were supposed to be completed in classic.
  4. Treat every word of the instructions as if they are crucial to your success because they are. All of the info matters. If you disregard instructions to install the unmanaged package, it will come back to haunt you like a closet monster after you watched a scary movie.
  5. Make sure you consider object hierarchy when doing your data import/export operations.
  6. Listen to the Traihead Baby. He may be my kid cousin, but he is smart! I would die if he knew, but I visited his blog at least once a day when I was working on this superbadge. Here it is if you need help: https://trailheadbaby.blogspot.com/

Now that this silly superbadge is finally done, I'm going to make my dad get me a doughnut...yes, the chocolate kind with lots of sprinkles. And I'm gonna let the icing get all over my face before taking a nap.

I would say I'll never log in to Trailhead again, but I think we all know I won't be able to stay away for long.

Until next time.

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