Learn to Fly Because You Can’t Outrun the Bear

This is part 1 of a series of 5 articles all going back 25 years ago to my first year as a consultant and the experiences and lessons that stay with me to this day.

You never know when your early life experiences will come back and reverberate as powerful lessons learned later in your career.

They say there’s no such thing as a dumb question. There’s a parable I love that goes like this: Question: How do you put an elephant into a refrigerator? Nine of of Ten people will reflexively start telling you their theory. The correct answer is yet another question: “WHY do you WANT to put an elephant into a refrigerator?” Some people might consider that a dumb question, while others will consider it an enlightened question. That parable rings constantly in my ears decades later.

As a teen in the late 70‘s I started my career in aerospace manufacturing as a machinist and quality control manager. I learned how to run a shop floor, and with a newfound skill and interest in computer software, eventually wrote some shop floor control programs.

In 1994, I took a leap of faith and started on a journey to a career in technology.

Meet the Bear

In 1994, I reinvented myself as a thirty-something manufacturing software consultant, with no college degree, working for a very small reseller of manufacturing software. I only worked for them for a year but got a lifetime of lessons learned.

My boss was a classic type A. I was not. After just a couple weeks on the job, he told me a customer down the street needed some help. It was a startup biotech company. I barely knew the software we were selling. I made aircraft and missile parts. I could barely spell biotech.

I protested, telling him I was not prepared to go to such a company.

In a moment reminiscent of the 1970’s TV Show “Kung Fu” starring David Carradine as an orphan raised by monks, he wisely gave me one of my first lessons: (Grasshopper…) “…you don’t have to know everything; you only have to know more than they do…”

This was a corollary to the old joke about the 2 guys in the woods. They see a bear running toward them. One guy starts taking his hiking boots off and putting his tennis shoes on. The other guy says, “you can’t outrun a bear!”. The first guy says: “I don’t have to; I just have to run faster than you!”

With that tiny morsel of moral support, I went there with sweaty palms, and met the client. She started explaining the problem. I silently heaved a huge sigh of relief. It had nothing to do with biotech or our manufacturing software. It was a simple database report. I spent 5 minutes resolving it. She thought I was a genius. Little did she know, like Neo in the movie “The Matrix”, I had dodged my first bullet as a consultant.

Hey, I thought, that tennis shoe trick actually works.

Lesson Learned: You don’t have to know everything, you just need to know more than they do.