HomeThe more you know...
...the more you realize you don’t know.
Stop learning when you are dead.
I’ve found that as I grow older I am starting to have an aversion to learning. Why? I’m not sure. I guess learning is hard, and I get tired easier than I used to. Or perhaps it’s because I have learned a lot of things over the past 50 years that haven’t been terribly useful for me. So maybe I am more selective now about what I am prepared to learn. If I can’t use it immediately I tend to bookmark it and move on. This concerns me. Learning isn’t always a linear process. It’s not always as simple as:
- Learn new thing
- Implement new thing
- ???
- Profit!
Sometimes you benefit (at an unexpected moment in an unrelated situation) from some random thing you have learned in the distant past. You can’t really “only learn what you need to know”, because it’s difficult to know what you will need to know in the future. It bothers me when I feel myself avoiding learning something new. I feel like it’s an active step towards the grave. I’m not ready to go there yet.
Learning is a treadmill without an off button.
Another frustrating thing about learning is that you can’t win. There is no stopping point you can reach where you can suddenly feel that you have reached the final level. It’s worse than that. The more you learn, the more you realize there is to learn. In some ways I was dumber for having done each of my tertiary degrees. Not because I hadn’t learned anything, but rather because a big part of what I learned each time was how much more there was to learn.
My estimation of how much knowledge remained to be learned before I could ‘master’ my field.
So, that really sucks. You’re on a treadmill, and the countdown timer is going in the wrong direction. But don’t worry. Even if you know everything there is to know, it’s still not enough.
Knowledge is not everything.
It’s one thing to know stuff. It’s another thing to put it to a useful purpose. For this you need experience.
Data => Information => Knowledge => Wisdom
My assumption is that you get from knowledge to wisdom via experience and practice. Probably by making lots of screw-ups.
When you’re starting out you don’t know much, and you know you don’t know much. You’re ok. Useless, but generally ok. Everyone (including you) knows how little you know, and allowances are made. Checks and balances are implemented. When you know a lot you’re generally also ok. Useful and ok, which is nice. The danger zone is in between these two stages. You think you know quite a bit, but don’t realize how much more there is to learn. You’re confident, but you don’t see the traps. You know just enough to convince everyone (including yourself) you know what you are doing. You are dangerous. Hopefully you (and the people around you) get through this period.
Keep learning until you realize that you will never be able to learn enough, and you’ll never be as good as you think you need to be. For fuck’s sake, don’t see this as a failure. Paradoxically, at this point you will actually start to be really useful. And then keep doing what got you to this point. Keep learning.