You Can’t Take It With You

I had a conversation with a well-known entrepreneur in my city. He has created a chain of cafés (completely different from my field) but we talked a lot (in fact, he talked, I questioned and listened) and I learned a great deal.<p>At the end of the conversation, he said "it has been a long time since I talked that much". WHAT? It meant that I was probably one of the few lucky who had learned from his experience. I always thought that entrepreneur were sharing their knowledge to everyone once they were big enough.<p>I hope that he will write about this someday but for the moment, I'll just write it myself in a document and try to find a way to share it.

Quick poll: When you were in school, especially college, were the best teachers young or old?<p>There are young teachers with talent, but in my opinion, the most outstanding lecturers were older and had a depth and variety of experience that the young ones couldn't match. Older teachers have the fabled 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to account for, as well as a diversity of experience and the time necessary to assemble some perspective on all of it.<p>So here's a big +1 for hiring adjunct professors from outside the usual pool of fresh young faces. Let the young people work, and the old people teach.

Better to take it one step further. Find people like this, interview them, put the videos online and let everybody share in their wisdom.

He probably has a point about preserving your knowledge but I find his fascination with this 'Fortune 100 lawyer' a little odd. Those are the guys that battle out stuff like Microsoft/SCO vs. IBM or the hypothetical "MPEG-LA patent trolls Google for WebM", right?

Because non-tech knowledge, being harder to reverse-engineer, is harder to pass down. The main point seems kind of like Asimov's Foundation, keep from falling back too many generations by leaving key checkpoint materials while cutting out some of the initially necessary but essentially unworking steps that we just go through to reach a solution (assumption -&#62; oh this would be no that can't be -&#62; ok reduction ad absurdum -&#62; next possibility).

I came to a similiar conclusion a few weeks ago and have just finished setting up a system to try and record anything interesting I learn or find out in life in text and/or video form. I can't wait to get it rolling. Merely being able to read digests of what I've read or learn before should, I hope, bring most of the ideas back. Is there a name for this sort of recording?

There's an entire field devoted to this: Knowledge Management (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_management" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_management</a>).

I doubt the lawyer would risk his career by giving away his strategy/tactics.

<i>If you don’t teach it or write it down, the accumulated knowledge of your career is gone.</i> Yeah. Keep your knowledge in a working memory. Keep your tools sharp. We learn by doing and so on..<p>Add to this that in an IT field things are changing so fast, that you need a constant daily learning to stay in a shape.

<i>I worry we may be heading for a future in which only a few people plot their own itinerary through no-land, while everyone else books a package tour.</i><p>That's been the case for the majority of human history. It's mostly the case now. Most non-religious, progressive thinking people, don't actually think through most issues for themselves. They believe in institutions - academia, NPR, etc. Most people believe what they do about nutrition for instance, not from reading studies themselves, but through accredited officials (PHD's) as interpreted by the NYTimes.