Learn before you Earn

I know it is rubbish English, but in another way its not, You can't 'Learn' someone. It's something they have to do themselves.

During my working life I was lucky enough to work with many talented people. One of the attributes I cherished in younger talented people was the hunger to learn; not to blindly accept but to explore and discover and experience as well. This quality is necessarily associated, in my mind anyway, with long term vision and intellectual humility. Without the humility of some level of conscious incompetence, there is no room or motivation for new stuff - an unfortunate infinity pool of learning opportunity. To the arrogant, no sooner does a learning opportunity arise than it slips over the pool edge, not even really being noticed and never to be seen again. I can't remember meeting anyone who had spent time 'learning their trade', often lagging behind some of their peers in early career earnings as a result, who didn't end up ultimately profiting from that Learn before you Earn investment later in life.

In the absence of prior knowledge, a natural way for humans to learn is by trying and failing, and then reflecting why that was before retrying. My colleague and friend Mike uses the phrase Ready, Fire, Aim to describe this. I love this jumbled word collection which, though it sounds in the wrong order, actually paints a brilliant way of winkling out hidden unknowns by launching a part-formed hypothesis at the unforgiving real world, seeing what happens, and then re-aiming to fail less badly with the next effort. This evolutionary (Darwinian) approach turns out, ironically, to be revolutionary in rapid technology development. However, it can only work in an environment where the Impostor called Failure can be embraced as your slightly tiresome, always embarrassing, but ever-so-helpful friend. If you don't work in a no-blame culture organisation, don't worry, it's not your fault.

I remember an episode of Jesse Stone (Tom Selleck as a Private Investigator) where he is told "There is little education in the second kick of a mule". It went straight in 'The Book' alongside one of favourite ever 'hearings' - though I can no longer remember who said it - Experience is something you get just after you need it. Whoever it was that coined that nugget, it is brilliantly clever and so true. This is where Old Dudes rock! Learning from those who have tried, failed and reflected before you is proper leg-up education for far-sighted Young Dudes. The appropriate Old Dudes will get you closer, quicker; particularly if the Old Dude is on first name terms with the aforementioned mule.