Education

Michael Lewis (The Big Short, Moneyball) is a favorite author who can make anything interesting. His latest book The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds is no exception. One particular sentence reached out and has been tickling me all week:

“Education is knowing what to do when you don’t know.” The quote was about academic education but it applies to all learning, however, we might get it.

We all know folks who think their education ended when they graduated from school. They think they know all that they ever want or need to know and feel no need to learn anything else. I’ve even run into people who actively resist learning anything new. Fortunately, not too many of those.

We need to be learning all the time. The world is changing, we need to keep up. There are lots of different ways we can learn: Reading books, trade magazines, and journals, blogs such as this one, attending training workshops and classes, trade shows and plant visits are all good ways to learn. YouTube can be a massive time sink. I open it sometimes planning to watch a single video to get info on a single thing and surface hours later. Time sink doesn’t necessarily equate to time wasted. Most of what I am watching are technical videos on one thing or another and I always learn a lot.

A lot of it may seem useless at the moment. All I need to do is wait a while and it usually becomes useful. Once, in a thrift shop, I bought a book on well drilling and read it because it seemed interesting. A year later, my company needed to drill a water well. I didn’t know the answers, but I did at least know some of the questions.

Sometimes we find ourselves in a situation where in spite of the knowledge we have acquired, we still don’t know what is going on or what to do. That is where the knowledge is really useful. It gives us the tools to think and the resources to come up with ideas to discover what to do.

Knowledge is always useful. Never stop learning.