A CASE OF BEGINNER'S LUCK?

Knowledge is great, experience is even greater, but sometimes if they are present in excessive quantities in the life of an individual, they quickly become weaknesses instead of strengths.

Strengths...

What can you do better than most? What are you so good at that you can do it in your sleep or at least with your eyes closed? What do you know so much about that makes you a walking encyclopedia on the subject?

We've been rightly taught for many years to get as much knowledge as we can in the profession we intend to practice, to devote our existence to becoming experts in our respective fields, and most of us have successfully followed that prescription.

We started out by studying the rudiments in secondary school; then, stepping up our knowledge consumption in the university. We spent many long days and nights immersing ourselves in books, articles, papers and videos, enduring countless hours of lectures, tests and examinations in between. All to become a professional!

When you calculate how many years you studied to become a professional in your field, it would be foolhardy for a elementary pupil to challenge you to a quiz in that same field. How?

It should be a walkover or a first round knockout at the very least.

Seriously, how can a primary school student know more about engineering than a practicing engineer?

As unlikely as it sounds, the beginner will always have the edge, and if he knows how to use it, he'll defeat the veteran every day of the week and twice on Sundays!

But what is this edge? What is the beginner's secret weapon? What kind of kryptonite could he possibly have tucked in his pocket on the day of the battle?

Simply put, it is his willingness to explore.?To be wrong when he needs to be, to fail when he has to and to be ignorant when he wants to.

Deploying these strengths in a battle of the minds against any seasoned professional is a guaranteed victory for him, because these outlined strengths are the greatest weaknesses of the experts.

The experts spend years of their lives learning how things should be, perfecting a formular that gives limited but guaranteed results for which they are celebrated. That's until a novice comes along, without the regimented thinking, without an appreciation for the rules of the game or the principles of the profession. The enthusiasm of the novice pushes him to ignore how things should be and to discover how things could be.

This is why many breakthrough innovations come from outsiders, learners who are passionate enough to live in the lab and who are excited enough to see every experiment as an exploration and not just an exercise to confirm a thousand-year old thesis.

The veteran has learnt so much that all he does is to confirm, concur or critique, but the learner just wants to conceive, to simultaneously bear fruit while learning instead of just storing volume upon volume of information in his head.

But the veteran was once a learner, he too made breakthroughs and discoveries at the beginning. But as soon as he succeeded, he wrote a curriculum on how to succeed and spent the rest of his life defending his formular, instead of discovering new ones.

Thus, he became the nemesis of those who sought to discover better ways of doing what he once did so well, and he couldn't even be of help to them if he wanted to, because his century-old curriculum is incapable of powering the ideas being birthed today.

He stopped running immediately he got ahead in the race, now he's way behind and can't catch up even if he picks up the pace... And now, he stares obsolescence in the face.

Last week someone asked me the same simple question a little boy had answered instantly.

But I couldn't afford to answer it instantly. After being called mathematician by my teacher and spending many years in the university learning and teaching mathematics,?it was only right that I sat down to interprete the question, derive the equation, solve the equation and produce the answer....Yawns!

After all that long process, I couldn't produce the answer, but the beginner boy who had no degree nor exposure was able to do so because he didn't inteprete it as a math problem, instead he saw it as simple reasoning.

So, why did I complicate matters? Because as a mathematician, I took my gaze off the problem, and focused on my math knowledge. Instead of understanding the problem and finding the best way to solve it, I immediately glorified what I knew and started applying age-old rules and principles that were simply unnecessary for such a simple question.

So, did the beginner not defeat the expert in the quiz?

Dear entrepreneur, don't be in a hurry to become an expert in your field. Stay hungry enough to keep on learning and foolish enough to unlearn all you've learnt and to relearn new things, before your industry is disrupted by beginners right before your eyes.

To your success,

Olayinka. A, Williams

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Copyright ? 2022 Olayinka A. Williams - All rights reserved.