There is a saying I quite like from Finnish that I haven't heard elsewhere, which translates as, "too busy running alongside the bike, to get on and ride". I heard it again today when I asked why the company I was talking to hadn't done anything about an issue they are having. As it was a friendly conversation, he actually said how embarrassing it is, before he used the phrase.
Just too busy to make it easier.
Not a bad saying.
It comes in many forms of course, like one little one for myself is that I have never found the time to learn how to touch type. I have tried a couple times in my life, but I can type poorly pretty quickly, so I never slowed down to practice enough. Now, after probably ten million words typed on this blockchain, imagine the time I could have saved.
30 minutes a day practicing for two to three months.
And there are many other things of course, where instead of taking the time to learn what I would consistently needed, I would consistently do it the inefficient way instead. It is like carrying rocks one by one, rather than fixing the wheelbarrow with a flat tyre.
In this case, I fixed the wheelbarrow.
But you get my point.
We likely all have things we can think of that we should have learned, but didn't because we didn't want to spend the time upfront, so ended up paying a lot more down the track. But while it isn't possible to learn everything, if it is a skill we need often, shouldn't we own it?
I was joking with the employment coach the other day after mistakenly being sent to her who looks after people with vocational skills instead of the coach who looks after knowledge-worker skills, that I wish I could do the work of a plumber or an electrician. Not because I want to do that work - but I have paid so much for that work to be done in the last five years, I could have saved a lot of money.
But I think why a lot of us don't learn, is because learning is inconvenient. The people who say they "love to learn" would probably love it far, far less if what they were learning was unusable and had no value. Most who love to learn, like what they get out of learning, not the learning process itself. If they loved just learning, then it wouldn't matter at all what they learned.
But it does.
We tend to learn what we want to learn, or have to learn, which means we get something out of it. But more than this, it makes the learning convenient, because we are conditioned to do more of what we enjoy, and forced to do what we must. There is little choice there. However, when we are able to put off what we should learn, but don't want to go through the learning process, we often do put it off.
And sometimes it is like we are running alongside the bike, because whatever we are doing right now takes the focus and resources, so we don't have the time to do what would make it easier. It is a bit like people don't want to learn about how to manage stress, until they are stressed. But when they are stressed, they are not in the right condition to actually learn about it, because that just creates another pressure. It is a catch-22 situation for most people.
Learn about how to deal with stress, when there is very little stress.
My daughter asked me today about intelligence and if it is possible to get smarter. Rather than getting into the complexities of the question, I kept it simple and said, it doesn't matter how smart you are, it matters how you use the intelligence you have. I told her some stories to highlight this in different contexts, like the guy I went to school with who was incredibly intelligent and aced absolutely everything at school, without studying - but ended up doing nothing with his life. Or the other friend who was one of the world's best guitarists, but ended up doing nothing (became a drug addict) with his life.
Some people are born gifted. But gifts can be thrown away.
However, I also know some people who were of normal intelligence, and of normal musical talent, who used their resources well and did do some very impressive things in their lives. But in order to do so, they all had to learn what they didn't want to learn, in order to empower themselves to learn more of what they did want, and compound it against all the other aspects.
The client today said that one of the challenges he faces in his work is that every project feels like a ground-up build, where every decision has to be made each time. There is no standardisation, which means that the lessons learned from the past are less effectively applied in the future. He said that many of the people don't want structure, templates and frameworks, because they want their freedom to make all of the decisions.
It is the wrong way to look at it for the particular kind of work.
Because those templates and frameworks provide freedom to what one wants, with what one wants to work, if used well. A relatively repetitive project could have a template that covers 80% of the decisions in 20% of the time than making a new decision each project for the same thing. That means that the remaining 80% of the time can be used innovating 20% of the project - which ultimately is where the more enjoyable, interesting, and impactful decisions will be made.
This resonated with him and he will carry it forward.
But it also got me thinking about all of the things that I should have learned a long time ago, but didn't, constantly using the excuse that it is too late, and I no longer have the time to do it. Which means, I am not free to do it. It is convenient to put things off. But at a point, they are forever out of reach.
Stop. Get on the bike. Ride.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
