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Value Proposition: How to learn the right stuff the right way and make yourself a linchpin
In the past week, I joined a group that does pro-bono consulting for non-profits. It only took a meeting for me to fall in love. Learning in a system that arguably discourages risk-taking (the university), it is incredibly refreshing to find a place in which I can experiment and for which those experiments matter.
Humans crave to uncover the unknown — hell, maybe even a little too much (re: Oedipus). But we rarely unleash this power in our own lives. The truth is that for most of my life, my version of “learning” has been reading books and listening to lectures. And these lessons have helped me. That said, I’ve noticed a problem with learning from books as I’ve done more stuff. You need something more than just books — you need a net of reality.
A net of reality is an experience or many experiences in which you placed yourself in a situation in which knowledge would be helpful but you didn’t have it. When you try to solve a worthwhile problem, this happens all the time. Sometimes, you don’t even know what you don’t know. You attempt to solve a problem. Maybe you solve it well or maybe you fail. Whatever the case, you exposed yourself to something new. A net of reality can be pretty simple: you are analyzing a company’s financials and you come across the acronym TAM. You…
