Background, Background, Background
Who are you learning from?
There seems to be an interesting phenomenon that I am observing these days, especially on social media. Thought I “poke” the balloon here a bit.
“If you want to be a professional soccer player, who will you ask for guidance and advice?” Naturally, you will answer, “Ask a current professional soccer player.”
Why is that so?
“Because he/she has done it and ACHIEVE the results I want. It means that there is a good probability if I follow him or her feedback, that I can achieve the same outcome.”
So we all understand that we need to learn from people who has gained the achieved the results we are looking to achieve ourselves, because these folks have done it, know what they did in the process of achieving the results. We can seek to tap onto their experience and from there achieve the results we hanker for.
So for those who are researching on the courses to take or looking for mentors, did you take into account the background of the instructors before selecting the courses? I will leave you to answer the question by yourself. :)
Given the current landscape, learning technical skills is so much easier, especially with YouTube, LLMs such as Bard and ChatGPT, etc. One should question why are we still going for courses then if these technical knowledge imparted are the same everywhere and is ubiquitous on the internet?
The biggest difference between courses and self-learning is the instructor. By going to the course, we are relying very much on the instructor to share their experiences, best practices and curate the content for the participants, emphasising the important points and de-emphasise the less useful based on practice.
When we look for a course, we are spending time and money to learn, so why not make efficient use of these scarce resources, pick the brains of instructors who have done it? This is true for seeking a mentor as well. Has the mentor achieved what you’ll like to achieve?
How about when selecting the book you want to read? Have you researched the background of the author, will the author be able to write and share from a learned perspective or will it be just a random opinion being expressed?
The point I want to drive at is this, as we go along in our lifelong learning journey, it is high time we start looking at the background of the folks we are picking our brains from. We want to spend time to gain wisdom, and not theories or opinions, because wisdom is more likely to bring us to where we want to be. Thus the title of this issue.
Have you checked the background? :)
What are your thoughts on this? Any tips for selecting the right background to learn from?
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Now this is a good start but we soon run into the next, more difficult problem: how to assess the background? Even for people with domain expertise, it's tough to evaluate people's work. I see many top, top companies default to names of institutions you graduated from, names of companies you worked at, your corporate titles, and (less frequently but more useful) publications.
Who watches the Watchmen?
Completely agree. Technical skills should be learnt remotely. Many older adults struggle with that modality but we cannot pander to it. The more choice-less we make it, the more these adult learners will begin to rewire to adapt and survive.