Sometimes, we don’t need much to solve a complex project.
A very small piece of knowledge is what can unleash your engineering creativity (I call that key foundational knowledge)
We often think that the result we get should be proportional to the work we do, but that’s just not true… the world is nonlinear, remember… which means that sometimes a very small action (the right action of course) can help you to generate hundred or thousand times the result.
This has another name, it’s called nonlinear growth
On the short term, you don’t necessarily see it, but on the long term, you immediately see the people who invested time into seriously learning new things in comparison to those who just spend their time forgetting what they are doing to think only about what they’ll do during the week-end.
This has to do with the learning curve.
When we start learning something, it is always difficult, and then after some time, it become easy… but the skill we acquired contribute to make also our other skills better and you knowledge compound.
Life and the result of our actions is nonlinear
Life is like a nonlinear function, if you want it to converge towards something meaningful, you have to reduce the error at every increment.
Not sure if it makes sense for you…
What I mean is that all the actions you do compound, the good ones, but also the bad ones. If every day you do great things that orient you towards becoming better, that’s exactly what will happen after a certain period of time… and when the time is passed, you will find yourself so good at doing it that you won’t even realize it.
Here’s a funny story related to when I started to speak Chinese few years before…
When I started to speak chinese and I started to talk with chinese people, the first phrase they were telling me was: « you speak very good chinese »
…and then I saw them making some kind of effort to speak slowly (I didn’t realised that at that time of course)
At that time, I was proud, I thought « Hey, I am not so bad after all… maybe I can do something here»
But after some time, I realised that what they were really saying was in fact
« This foreign guy can talk a few words, let’s praise him first to make him happy and then let’s talk slowly so he will understand » (that was the thinking behind the words)
Now that I am 96% fluent, things changed totally:
When I start to speak, chinese people NEVER say I am good in chinese, because it sounds so obvious for them that it would be stupid to say that…so they start immediately to speak to me as if I actually WAS chinese.
But after becoming fluent, I didn’t feel much of a change… but others could see and feel it immediately.
That’s why you don’t need to say that you are good when you are REALLY good at something…
And that’s exactly what happens when you really have a strong skill in something… people will trust you immediately because of your skill and you will get more opportunities everywhere because of it.
–Cyprien “Growth is nonlinear” Rusu
PS: I told you I was fluent at 96% because I always keep some margin for improvement ;-)
