I’m experiencing one of those annoying technical problems with a brand new product: Microsoft Office 2007. Everything was working fine until, one day, I launched it and greeted me with a message telling me there’s something wrong with my MAPI. “Who the hell is MAPI anyway” I thought to myself. I suddenly felt my blood pressure rising at the thought that I’d have to add another item on my already insufferable “To Do” list. As if I didn’t have enough “to do” already. I wished that I’d taken more IT courses in University to know how to deal with these glitches myself instead of having to call a customer support line. I then thought to myself “why don’t I? How hard can it be anyway?” There are certainly thousands of reliable sources to teach myself the basics, and even find a solution. So instead of jotting down another item on my “to do” list, I decided to turn this incident into an opportunity for learning. I think we often forget that we’re by nature curious beings. I certainly was–my English teacher always called me Curious George (I still despise that mischievous little monkey for having the same name as me). When I look back to my career, I owe much of it to my curious nature. I’m an avid reader of history and technology, giving me a view of the past and the future. When there’s a new trend in my field of work, I learn about. This habit has opened doors I didn’t even know existed. I’m often dismayed at how ultra-specialized professionals have become to the expense of maintaining a solid general culture. More acute is the problem if working in more IT-oriented companies where your boss is an expert at doing her job but clueless as to the wider impact of the technology to society. We don’t care anymore about having an expansive knowledge of the environment that surrounds us so we wallow in our own little circles of information with one goal in mind: mastering it for the sake of salary. Although I’m not against such endeavours, I also think that we become more valuable contributors to society when we “upgrade” our opportunities to learn a piece of information at the boss’s behest, to trying to connect it with the greater scheme of things.
There was a time where scholars merited that title only when they were accomplished, walking encyclopaedias. Connecting the dots is one of our most advanced abilities as humans. You’d be surprised what image you get when you step back after connecting the dots. The more the dots, the greater the image. This I hope can serve you well when working in your current or future positions. Corporations are vast repositories of modeled data, but it’s up to us humans to transform that data into valuable information, intelligence, knowledge and finally wisdom. Who wouldn’t want to hire an employee with a super-brain?
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